Even as I waited for my companions to cross the portal I ruminated on the nature of my new divine power. With it I gained a whole new layer of power, an entirely new way to alter existence.
My newest power, this "rejection" ability was beyond a doubt the single greatest power I had in my extensive arsenal. This power was the best reason I had to pursue the second tier of influence over every domain and subdomain that I could, even more so than my desire to reach the second tier of godhood.
I could only imagine how terrifyingly powerful this ability would become if I gained the second tier of influence over death. Would I be able to reject the death's of anyone I didn't want to die? Even now, with enough power over life to reject notifications related to it I could see how bafflingly powerful this was.
Life-based domain notifications alerted me to the moment of conception of new life, to the moment someone was born, as well as moments when they made life. Creation domain notifications covered an incredible breadth of things, and even agricultural notifications were startingly diverse. They covered not just the stages of the life-cycles of crops but also the births and deaths of animals that farmers across the universe used, as well as the sensations of hunger and thirst.
This newfound power motivated me to act decisively and quickly. I had the power to gain the second tier of influence over a few more domains and subdomains swiftly. I began by reaching out across the universe with my mind and targeting a single community with a combination of powerful abilities.
While I did that, I also harnessed my innate nature as a deity of earth and reached out and touched the canyon with another part of my mind. Doing so gave me great power over the canyon, total power over it in fact. And that power was power I fully intended to use to begin to build a real base of operations in this distant world. While I was scheming and gaining greater power over a few domains and subdomains, I began to enter the canyon itself and descend down a path that would lead me into the depths of the canyon, hundreds of meters below my current elevation.
Thousands of light-years away from the planet the dreadful god's potent mind was currently occupying and experimenting in, there was a small community of humans who lived in the world of Salifinos. This was a war-torn world where the god was effectively a god of apocalypses and death, and it was a world in the solar system of his birth.
It was a tiny settlement near one of the world's oceans. The settlement's population was comically tiny, less than forty five people in total. None of that mattered to the god who was about to permanently turn their lives upside down. They had the misfortune of being a tiny settlement, which normally would spare them from the god's wrath but at the moment made them an easy target that fit the perimeters of what he had been tasked with doing.
The god's first blow against the community awoke the sleepy town. It was late night in the part of the world where the community was located, and the overwhelming majority of its residents had been fast asleep when the god blasted the town with two potent abilities at once. The first power he used was his ability to blast minds. The second was his ability to inflict pain. By mixing the two, and especially by mixing them and aiming them at targets who had been asleep prior to the attack, he created a truly devastating attack that caused each of the town's residents incredible pain.
As one the town awoke, reeling from the agonizing power of the god. As a consequence of this he himself had just gained considerable power, his distant eyes flashing an eerie blue as a notification filled his vision. And he wasn't done either. The town was the perfect location for him to utilize another of his powers, which was also a power that he could use to gain further power in the exact same vein as he had gained greater power over pain just now.
The god silently transmitted a notification to the people of the town, demanding that they allow him to use his powers to change their appearance on them. If not, he promised to subject them to pain unending, and he was telling them the truth. The god tended towards honesty when it came to pain.
To their credit a few of the simple townspeople refused him. To his credit he was indeed honest about his threat. He immediately used some of his new powers on them, causing them to feel pain so intense that they couldn't think about anything else for a few moments.
He also stoked the hatred that their fellow townspeople felt, by utilizing his powers over emotions generally and hatred specifically. He kept causing those who were brave enough to reject him to experience agonizing pain beyond what they imagined possible for over a full minute. When the minute ended he repeated his question. This time they didn't refuse him. That was a smart choice.
The god utilized his powers over biology and alteration to begin to reshape and remake the human villagers. He wanted to do it all at once, which was why he wanted until he had all of the permission he needed to act. The transformation he inflicted on the mortals was initially going to be a lazy one, perhaps nothing more than the addition of a single finger to their hands but after he had to do a bit of work to be able to mutate and transform the mortals he decided that he should put a bit of effort into transforming them.
The god's powers washed over the mortals immediately. Mere seconds after the last of them acquiesced to the god's commands they began to transform. Prior to his interest in them they had been normal humans, ones whose mutations were simple things like eye colors. As his powers washed over them their mutations were dramatically and permanently altered.
Althos was transforming the humans into something that was clearly inhuman. The first and most dramatic aspect of their mutations and alterations was the sudden, collective, theft of their lungs. Their lungs were taken from them and replaced by gills. The rest of their bodies followed a similar and terrifying pattern of their features that were most suitable for life on land being taken from them and replaced with features that were suitable for life underwater. In a matter of moments they went from being ordinary humans to being creatures suited for life underwater, all while being above-water.
That said, the god had a plan for that as well. Even as their mutations overtook them and transformed them into humanoid, human-shaped fish-creatures, the ocean beside their village abruptly increased in size and overtook the village, flooding into houses, shops, barns, and more. And in doing so it saved lives by giving the newly transformed residents water to breathe. That said, Althos wasn't really done with Salifinos.
He momentarily turned his awareness towards a kingdom of elves that existed on the war-torn world. Without any hesitation he plunged the entire nation into darkness, spawning and spreading it throughout the entire nation. And in an act of quiet maliciousness he informed his abominal servants of what he had done, all while blessing them with dark vision and cursing the elven defenders of the kingdom and stealing away their ability to see in the dark.
The truth was that the god had plans for the world of Salifinos. He hadn't acted on them just yet, and for now he was more focused on completing his war against Agustino, defeating Technos, and avenging Ava, but he had legitimate plans for each of the worlds in the solar system of his birth. And Salifinos was the world he was the most interested in. Which was why it was the world where he had gained three total tiers of influence over some of the domains and subdomains he was highly intrigued by.
After he finished reading through the notification he had received in the wake of earning greater power over the biology domain he quietly inflicted maddening nightmares on a dwarven king who was locked in a war with a gug the god was fond of. He also infected the high-general of the king's forces with an extremely contagious and slow-acting disease that would inevitably kill the general, after he infected dozens of soldiers with it.
During the time I had spent toying with lifeforms on Salifinos I was busy in the quiet and uninspiring world I had come too in astral form. I had fun remodelling the canyon before me while freely using my powers over earth.
As an earth deity I could command the earth, stone, and soil, quite easily. They moved as I willed them, and felt delighted to be ordered by an elemental overlord and by a god, and even more so by a creature that was both. My absolute empathy power was so incredibly potent now that I could sense the feelings of nature and the elements, and they were all delighted that a god was now freely wandering the world.
The earth itself was especially delighted that I was utilizing my powers over it, since I wasn't here in my physical body. I felt the planet delight in my commands and I chuckled as I stepped deeper and deeper into the canyon, each step leading me closer and closer to the location of a future base of Althonians.
It took me a few minutes of wandering to find a place I found suitable for transformation into my newest base. I smiled and began an impressive display of power in the form of transforming the cave I had settled on as a place to create a base and a new civilization. My powers washed over the cave I had selected and swiftly began to irrevocably transform it into a new home for Althonites.
