Chapter 291: Junior Divinity (Patreon)

Mila

Junior Divinity (C-Empyrean)

A junior already half a step through the door to divinity

Effects:

Exceptionally increase the power of divine category skills

Increase control over faith energy

Skill slots:

6

May not learn skills of the following categories:

NA

Stat bonuses per level:

Strength: 5,184

Agility: 5,184

Endurance: 5,184

Toughness: 5,184

Vitality: 5,184

Perception: 5,184

Magic: 5,184

Spirit: 5,184

Soul: 5,184

Aura: 5,184

Attunement: 5,184

Luck: 5,184

Requirements:

4 peak grade divine role category Law Pupae, has control over faith energy, has the Trickster’s Heavenly Guise (D-Mythic) skill, has a race with maximum stats equivalent to or above the maximum stats of a divine grade race, has maximized all stats while at D rank

Junior Divinity was not a class Mila had planned for, only learning about its existence when she was going to rank up to C rank, and it changed her original plan of gaining a class based around stealth, altering the build she was aiming for.

Divine category skills—like Mila’s new Healer, Reaper, Tactician, and Courtesan skills—were skills normally only found on the most favored of those with divine classes, and almost never at the highest grade allowed for a rank.

Requiring a mastered skill of a grade lower, the corresponding divine role Law, and then the equivalent of divine power to create, they were incredibly rare as a result. More important, however, they were also incredibly powerful, effectively weaker versions of the unique benefits gods received from their own divinity.

Gods who advanced using faith energy gained various boosts from the energy they accumulated, the main one working a lot like Aalam’s Territory combined with his ever constant boost from his Emperor uniqueness, but their other boosts mostly depended on the divine role or roles they’d awakened after their ascension. The role of the Healer, for example, in addition to making it easier to gather and control faith energy, boosted healing skills and life element abilities, increased passive regeneration, and made those around the god calmer. The role of the Reaper, on the other hand, boosted offensive skills and death element abilities, made the wounds inflicted by the god more difficult to heal, and caused the god to emanate an aura which would cause fear in all living beings.

Mila, with her boosted Healer, Reaper, Tactician, and Courtesan skills—which she’d used Aalam’s energy to help awaken—could make use of a little energy to take on the benefits of the corresponding divine roles—of which she could have up to three active at a time—and they were quite a bit more useful than normal active enhancement skills, not really having any downsides at all while ever so slightly boosting her control over faith energy, just like Junior Divinity’s second class effect.

And Mila’s main abilities were all based around faith energy.

Trickster’s Heavenly Guise, on top of being an amazing disguise skill harder to see through than even a skill like Polymorph—albeit without the ability to drastically change her mass— increased the amount of faith energy she could store in her soul as well as making it much easier to infuse faith energy into her active skills.

But it was her final skill held by her Junior Divinity class, Faith Energy Manipulation, which was probably the most useful of the new skills Mila had gained at C rank.

Like its name implied, the skill worked pretty much exactly the same as Aalam’s Natural Energy Manipulation skill, only for faith energy, and it had taken her just as much effort to form it, first awakening a Mythic grade version, mastering that, and then raising its grade through repeated practice. It passively increased her control over faith energy, and it was this control which allowed Mila to do some rather amazing things.

Given contracts were based on faith energy and Mila’s expertise with them, she could now use her Ascended Angel’s Release skill, combined with her Shadow Empress uniqueness, to break contracts she entered into in such a way where the other party, for all related magical effects, would perceive the cause of the break to be a violation on their end and not hers, causing them to face the contract’s punishment while Mila received no negative effects whatsoever.

This, combined with her Skinwalker Queen uniqueness’s ability to form a facade over her own soul using the soul of someone who died in her presence—a facade which kept the used soul’s soul signature, accumulated karmic merit and sin, and even the soul’s karmic bonds, including those based on existing contracts—then enabled her to do things like break a contract with an A rank to weaken him, kill that A rank, and then use the contracts he had with other A ranks to weaken them as well, so she could kill them in turn.

And it wasn’t only Mila’s contract skills which gained a boost.

Blessing skills and curse skills were based on faith energy and, on top of her Karmic Eyes skill’s charm effects, Mila’s divine role skills also produced powerful blessings and curses. Healer, for example, allowed Mila to use her energy to simulate the power of a high grade healing skill, albeit requiring far more control on Mila’s part and actual medical knowledge, which counted as a blessing. Reaper added death energy to her attacks in the form of a deadly curse. And Courtesan’s extra charm effects, which could be combined with Karmic Eyes, would count as a blessing or a curse depending on her intent.

Probably the abilities most affected by Mila’s added control over faith energy, however, were associated with skills from her fourth class.

Soul Master (C-Empyrean)

Master of manipulating the souls and minds of others

Effects:

Increase soul resonance

Skill slots:

6

May not learn skills of the following categories:

Martial

Crafting

Stat bonuses per level:

Strength: 3,456

Agility: 3,456

Endurance: 3,456

Toughness: 3,456

Vitality: 3,456

Perception: 3,456

Magic: 3,456

Spirit: 3,456

Soul: 34,560

Aura: 0

Attunement: 0

Luck: 0

Requirements:

3 peak grade resonance category Law Pupae, has the Telepathy (D-Mythic) skill, has the Omniglot Reader (Mythic) racial ability, has control over faith energy, has successfully and seamlessly permanently altered the souls or consciousness of at least eight cultivators

Soul Master, like Junior Divinity, was also not a class Mila had planned for, but, unlike Junior Divinity, she was the first to ever qualify for it according to the System, and she’d been rewarded with quite a bit of nascent energy as a result, which had allowed her to waste far less time maximizing her stats.

Increased soul resonance, while only a single effect, allowed for Mila’s energy to more easily match the energy of others, and, while not sounding that impressive, it was incredibly overpowered.

With increased soul resonance, Mila could bypass a soul’s natural aura defense with her own energy so long as the other entity was weaker than her, not having to rely on just her control over faith energy, and she could also more easily fake the energy of others, such as those she killed and took the identities of.

Most interesting of all, however, she could also increase her soul’s resonance with the faith energy of a universe, enabling her to more easily absorb faith energy to form her own divine roles in the future and, more important, making it easier to learn divine role Laws, of which Mila now had twelve.

Phantasmic Doppelgängers allowed Mila to make illusory clones which, while not material, copied half the strength of her aura and could use all of her skills through using energy she stored inside them, and, at C rank and Empyrean grade, it could make a total of twelve clones—not much better than at previous ranks—but those clones could travel anywhere Mila’s bonds with them could reach, i.e. pretty much anywhere within two or three galaxy clusters, which very much was. Illusion Domain, like its name implied, allowed Mila to make a domain around herself where she could make all kinds of illusions, from ones created with energy to fool external senses to ones created by manipulating the mental forges of those weaker than her within range. And Soul Sight at Empyrean grade was a skill which would normally only allow her to more easily sense souls directly, but, when combined with her control over faith energy, increased soul resonance, Third Eye Queen uniqueness, and Aalam’s Emperor’s Eyes of Analysis and Ruler’s Domain skills, let her see the internal workings of souls as well.

The main skills of Mila’s Soul Master class, however, were Telepathy, Memory Distortion, and Soul Disruption.

Telepathy, along with her Omniglot Reader racial ability, allowed Mila to read minds. Memory distortion enabled her to change memories. And Soul Disruption allowed her to more easily bypass the soul defenses of others, either subtly to make the previous two skills easier or not subtly at all to disrupt an opponent’s energy flow in battle.

All three skills had rather ridiculous requirements no one else in the Heavenly Soul Universe could match, not even her direct apprentice, and the amount of help they’d been so far with information gathering was immense.

The final pieces of Mila’s C rank power then were her uniquenesses and her core.

As Mila had advanced her control over faith energy, she’d naturally managed to raise her Shadow Princess uniqueness to Shadow Empress, raising the Aura stat effectiveness gain from 100% to 300% and changing the boost she gained to the karmic aspect of faith energy to a twice as powerful boost to all faith energy manipulation instead. And, with quite a few powerful resources, she’d managed to raise Third Eye Princess, Skinwalker Princess, and Soul Slot Princess each by one level as well to Third Eye Queen, Skinwalker Queen, and Soul Slot Queen. So, now her Perception, Vitality, and Soul stats all gained 200% to their effectiveness from her uniquenesses instead of 100%, and the additional benefits brought about by the three uniquenesses were stronger as well.

Due to Third Eye Queen, her mental forges’s connections with the outside world were better, boosting her eye-based skills even further, increasing the extrasensory abilities she gained from her Laws, and making her divine role Laws in particular easier to practice due to the special senses each of her now twelve such Laws gave her, most of which were very useful. Due to Skinwalker Queen, her disguises were even stronger when she took on the identity of someone who died within the range of her aura. And, due to Soul Slot Queen, she had four extra skills in her Otherverse Emperor’s Consort class instead of three.

Then, finally, she’d also awakened to, with Aalam’s help, the most common three uniqueness lines in the Heavenly Soul Universe, namely the warrior, mage, and psychic uniqueness lines, specifically Warrior Queen, Mage Queen, and Psychic Queen. Together these three uniquenesses raised her Endurance, Magic, and Spirit stats’ effectiveness by 200% while also remarkably increasing the normal flow rate of her qi, mana, and psyforce and remarkably increasing their burst potential and ability to break down impurities, effectively more than doubling the effects of her Primal Heart racial ability.

Most important to Mila’s power, however, was her core.

Heavenly Spark Divine Shadow Core (incomplete): Increase the quality of all energy by half a rank, raise affinity with all Laws by 500%, and increase resonance with the divine roles of a universe, allowing for the storage of external divine power.

Like with Aalam’s core, hers was also incomplete, Mila waiting for all her new divine role Laws to catch up to The Healer, The Reaper, The Tactician, and The Courtesan—and for Aalam to complete his twelve extra cores so his energy could help her—to make the twelve extra cores she had planned, but, even without the extra energy quality, affinity, and resonance those extra cores could provide, her incomplete core was still the second best among those in the United Federation of Planets, the ability to absorb external divine power especially useful as it could enable her to take over the lives of those truly trusted in divine forces.

Finally, there was Mila’s one oath, the Oath of the Magnificent Bastard. 

Oath of the Magnificent Bastard

You are not a good person, but you are incredibly competent and you live by a code not to betray those on your side

Benefits:

Exceptionally increase the power of disguise and soul category skills

Remarkably increase control over qi, mana, and psyforce

Should you successfully execute a plan without any true betrayal and without breaking any of your personal rules of conduct, there is a high chance of entering into a state of sudden enlightenment

Limitations:

Betraying those you care about or those you’ve given your word to using your real identity will shackle your soul, the greater the betrayal the worse the shackles and the longer they will last

Due to her oath, she was still, after almost a week, in a state of sudden enlightenment even as she was helping Isaiah defend the Heavenly Soul Universe, performing targeted assassinations, and saving the Alchemist of the Deep Woods from the detrimental effects of the woman’s own oaths, and, while the effects of sudden enlightenment on her Laws had been less than she’d expected, her soul injury from having her Ren Kimball clone killed was unexpectedly almost already a fourth of the way healed, and, if anything, that was better, her injury likely the reason for the enlightenment’s lower effect on her Laws in the first place.