Chapter 285: Preparation for Divine Roles (Patreon)

Aalam

Natural Energy Manipulation, however, was only one of the skills from Aalam’s third class, and, while it had the incredibly useful passive effect of increasing his control over natural energy, his other skills were equally impressive.

His Soul Emperor skill, for example, had already helped him gather a lot of faith energy.

In most respects, it was pretty much the same as the Soul King skill he’d had as a D rank. It gave his followers between one and three boons, each boon based on one of his racial abilities; the bonds it created were of about the same power; and the energy transfer and telepathy distances were about the same as well, albeit increased greatly from his higher rank and Soul stat.

There were, however, three key differences.

First, it increased the amount of Territory he could lord over by an utterly ridiculous amount, to the point the bottleneck for Aalam and Territory was not the skill but the power of his soul, Aalam’s current stats enabling him to control thousands of universes the size of the Heavenly Soul Universe if he could manage to conquer them.

Second, Soul Emperor allowed for 20,736 times more servants. Granted, a majority of these servants would be based on a weaker type of connection, each only able to gain the first boon the skill granted based on his Heavenly Spark Pure Soul racial ability. But one in every 1,728 would gain the second boon as well, the one based on his Nascent/Primal Energy Constructor racial ability, and one in every 35,831,808 would gain all three boons, the same as Mila and Isaiah. With all the various boosts he had to the skill given it was noble category, he could have up to 247,669,456,896 servants in total, 6,912 at the highest level, and this was ridiculous.

Third, it made energy transfer from his servants to him remarkably easier, and under his control, allowing him to gather pretty much all the faith energy beneficial to him which his servants naturally emitted.

Faith energy, as a transformed form of natural energy altered by the bodies and consciousnesses of beings with souls, had different fundamental properties based on the nature of the soul which created it, and all beings with souls naturally created faith energy all the time. Even a single cultivator, however, depending on the state of their body and their thoughts at the time, would create different subvarieties of faith energy from minute to minute, while most types of faith energy were useless even to gods.

For cultivators and monsters without the skills and abilities of someone like Mila, the only type of faith energy which was useful was the type which gave faith energy its name, natural energy transformed through thoughts of faith, specifically faith in a specific person. His mother’s husband, for example, had been a general who spent his entire life fighting against the undead, gaining win after win. The soldiers under him had faith he’d lead them to victory and, over his lifetime, the resulting faith energy slowly transformed his soul until he naturally advanced from A rank to divinity. Perival, one of the Prime Material’s three merchant gods, had been an excellent A rank merchant, accumulating more and more wealth, everyone who knew him developing faith he’d always succeed in business, and, over time, this faith allowed him to advance.

Bellessia’s husband had advanced with the divine role of The Warrior, a combination of the water element based divine role of The Tactician and the earth element based divine role of The Guardian, while Perival had advanced with the darkness element based divine role of The Merchant, and, as a result, they had very different divine powers after their ascensions.

Aalam, as the leader of a force numbering in the tens of trillions, accumulated quite a bit more faith energy every day than even most A ranks, a majority leading him toward the divine roles of The King, The Crafter, and The Scientist, the first purely lightning based while the latter two were combinations of multiple single element divine roles. But, just like most A ranks, less than 1% of the relevant faith energy his followers generated made it to his soul to help it transform.

With his Soul Emperor skill, however, he could absorb 100% of the relevant faith energy generated by his servants, so, even while there was almost no noticeable effect of the faith energy he’d already accumulated, the skill was laying a solid foundation for him gaining a divine role in the future.

Ruler’s Domain, Aalam’s first invented skill, worked the same as always, effectively giving Aalam two domain skills in one, a larger sensory domain and a smaller domain which increased the defensive energy around his body, strengthened the Laws of his allies while suppressing the Laws of his enemies, and turned everything within its range into Aalam’s own Territory. At Empyrean grade, with enough of a boost to bring it to two levels past the Divine grade as it was a noble category skill, the radius of both domains was absolutely massive. The radius of the sensory domain was roughly 12.743 million kilometers, his aura stat multiplied by a factor of thirteen sixths, meaning the domain was large enough to fit over 334 sun-sized stars, and the domain creating his own Territory, while significantly smaller, was larger than most planets, allowing him to conquer almost any world in existence not ruled by an A rank or god just by landing on it.

More than just the increase in size, however, the power of Ruler’s Domain’s two subdomains had also increased. The sensory domain gave Aalam far more information than before, which, combined with his Emperor’s Eyes of Analysis skill and Third Eye Emperor uniqueness was far, far too overwhelming, so Aalam had trained himself to not pay attention to most of it. Meanwhile, the Territory-based domain further increased Aalam’s control over all natural energy within it, effectively providing a roughly 50% boost to his Natural Energy Manipulation skill when it was active.

And, as Ruler’s Domain was the skill merged into Aalam’s cultivation technique, both domains had become passive, always active around him by default while using up far less energy.

Thirteen Life Legion then was the most essential of Aalam’s invented skills, allowing him to split off any subset of his mental forges, core containers, and mana wells along with part of his soul to form clones. Normally, he’d use the skill to form twelve clones, each with a single instance of each soulstructure all aligned to the same element, leaving his main body with his remaining soulstructures which were aligned to a mix of all twelve elements, but he could mix and match at will as forming new clones or merging existing ones took just a matter of seconds.

Arguably the skill’s most useful effect, however, was how each clone would have a different soul signature based on which soulstructures were used to form it, allowing Aalam’s clones to travel around the universe without fear even without Stealth or Polymorph, this aspect especially useful when Mila used the skill.

Thirteen Life Legion wasn’t actually that complicated, something he’d come up with back when he was a G rank, but it did require having thirteen of all three main types of soulstructures, all of the same size, as well as effective Soul and Vitality stats higher than most B ranks—not to mention twelve single element clone skills to merge—so no one else in the Prime Material had ever formed it, allowing Aalam to gain quite a bit of nascent energy upon its invention, just like with his three other invented skills.

Heavenly Spark Wings of the Emperor, on the other hand, was not counted as an invented skill even though no one else in the Prime Material, at least to Aalam’s knowledge, had ever met its prerequisites. This was either because someone had done experiments involving talents with Law balanced races and some very advanced dao guides to raise C ranks no one had ever heard of or, more likely, because the System didn’t give rewards for advancing a known skill, such as Aalam’s D rank Twelve Element Wings of the King, along with advancing a class.

Whatever the case, Heavenly Spark Wings of the Emperor was still one of Aalam’s most defining skills as a C rank. A noble category wing skill, it gained a boost from being both a noble category skill—from Aalam’s Emperor uniqueness, class, and Emperor’s Command racial ability—as well as from being a wing skill from his Law Wings Emperor uniqueness, adding up to a 22 level boost as Law Wings Emperor added 8 levels by itself, raising the skill to ten levels beyond the Divine grade. Given the difference between a Divine grade skill and the final level of skills, Supreme, was 24 levels, the skill was still far short of matching skills of the highest grade, but, as Aalam’s most boosted skill, it was not at all lacking in power.

When activated, Heavenly Spark Wings of the Emperor gave Aalam a pair of bat-like energy wings which grew out of his back, and these wings provided three main effects. First, they boosted the power of all his noble category skills other than themselves by four levels further, greatly raising his combat power and even his crafting abilities as his two main sensing skills, Ruler’s Domain and Emperor’s Eyes of Analysis, were both of the noble category as well. Second, they acted as a berserking skill so long as Aalam was within his own Territory, i.e. at any time, roughly equivalent to Isaiah’s Dragon Knight skill. And, third, they made it seriously easier for Aalam to merge multiple Laws into his skills, probably their most useful benefit.

In addition, due to the effects of his Law Wings Emperor uniqueness, the wings acted as a Law focus for all Laws, giving Aalam—in a way completely separate from Law affinities or the Attunement stat—a much better ability to sense all Laws of any universe, like he was always on a planet of one rank higher.

Then, finally, the last skill of his Otherverse Emperor class was Emperor’s Physique.

This was a passive noble category skill which increased the amount of natural energy his body could store and, while this didn’t sound too impressive, it alone boosted Aalam’s combat power by about 25% as it enabled him to use natural energy at will without the fear of running out.

Even more important, however, as the defining skill of an Otherverse Emperor, it greatly reduced the strain universes other than his own would put on him as an outsider.

This hadn’t had much effect yet, as the Prime Material was his home universe, which didn’t fight against him, and the Heavenly Soul Universe was his own Territory, effectively making it an extension of the Prime Material—also, as a C rank, there wasn’t much strain to begin with—but, if he started attempting to conquer other universes in the future, it would be of tremendous help.