Raul was enjoying the attentions of the trio of succubi even as the powers within his soul that he had acquired minutes ago finished settling within him. And as they finished settling within him, they immediately began to react to each other, to his domains, and to the raw potential within his soul, and caused him to unconsciously activate one of the greater powers he had attained by mastering the sin of sloth.
Raul watched as the very universe around him began to slow. He gazed around himself, mildly surprised and curious as time slowed and slowed, before eventually coming to a complete halt. As even the very universe failed to resist the potent power of an overlord of sloth, and yet that was only the beginning. A second later the overlord's eyes began to glow, beginning to shine with an otherworldly amber light. And that was before he received the first part of a massive notification.
[Alert: Transcendence
You have reached a critical mass of power, such that you were able to do what you couldn't do as Il'Noth'Rey; transcend. By acquiring the fourth, mythical rank of all greater megapowers, by acquiring power over the domains of power and divinity, and by possessing an eldritch soul, you have fulfilled the conditions you needed to fulfill to transcend beyond even the constraints placed on you by your type of godhood.
The time has come for you to step onto the bottom rung of the ladder climbed on by the truly powerful. You will be stepping beyond the limitations that even you dreamed existed for the mighty and becoming something vastly powerful. The time has come for you to design your true form, and take your place outside of everything.]
The system's alert caused my head to begin to spin as I took in the vast implications of what the system was saying, but even as I took a second to contemplate the impossible weight of the revelation I had just received, things kept occurring. The next thing I knew, against my will, I found myself floating in an empty, endlessly blue void as if I was floating in the sky above a world like Earth.
I gazed in every direction around myself and realized, coldly due to both my powers over knowledge and my eldritch nature, that I was exhibiting one of the powers that Those Who Name The Void, the same beings who once abducted and drained Nocturne of her powers, possessed. They, like me in this very moment, existed in dimensions that did not exist, outside of reality itself. They were creatures who were simultaneously real and unreal, eldritch entities unlike those who obeyed the dictates set forth by deities and other so-called "Lords of reality". And yet even as I realized all of that, and took in the weight of the revelations I was receiving, the text boxes in my mind's eye began to change.
[You are currently witnessing the activation of a pair of your new abilities: "Omnilock" and "Cosmic Otherness". These two abilities are incredibly potent, and they are abilities you were destined to achieve during your past life but never had the personal power to attain. Despite your status as 'The Eldest' you never attained the fourth rank of the greater megapowers you once possessed, until now, in your current life. As such, the powers you would have once attained are becoming yours.
"Omnilock" means that you exist outside of reality itself, namely that you exist in the strange void you are in right now. It is an ability possessed by, as you already know thanks to Nocturne, the shadowy entities known as Those Who Name The Void. It is a potent power that grants, among other things, true immunity to any sort of attack on your form in the universes, multiverses, pleniverses, or even omniverse. What is needed to actually harm you now would be nothing short of a personal attack on you in here, your personal dimension.
"Cosmic Otherness" is the power to be completely distinct from everything else in existence. It is also a power possessed by Those Who Name The Void. Every single one of those strange beings, yourself included, is totally unique in motives, strategies, form, and various other ways. "Cosmic Otherness" could be said to be a part of "Omnilock" but the two are fully distinct powers.]
As I read through the notifications I actually got to see them shifting and changing before my very eyes. And I saw the system itself distort and seemingly become corrupted for a moment, which made me chuckle but I didn't hesitate to fix it utilizing my powers, restoring it an instant after it first became distorted.
[You also possess other powers that are, in their own ways, just as incredible as "Omnilock" and "Cosmic Otherness". The most potent one, in a direct and simple sense, is "Absolute Immortality". With it, you join the ranks of a rare few, creatures such as Joy, Glory, Those Who Name The Void, and a few others, as a being that may well be nearly invincible. You also have the "Freedom" power, which frees you from... well, everything, really. You are freed from things such as negative emotions, fate, the powers of other beings, and other, more esoteric things.
Your physical forms, the ones that are still in reality, are changing as well. They are now boosted in a number of ways. The first way that they are boosted is that they are no longer things of flesh and blood, to the limited extent that they were before, but are now purely thought-forms capable of exercising your will across reality. The second is that they benefit from "Absolute Condition", which means that they are truly capable of things such as infinite strength, infinite speed, and other infinite, absolute, and even meta abilities, pertaining to your domains. They also benefit from you being affected by "Absolute Growth" which is perpetually boosting you, ambiently.]
Even as I read the notification I felt the effects of the powers that I was attaining, and others that the system had not yet named. My personal power was both increasing and becoming quite weird, as I gained the old eldritch-domain powers I was promised by the system, in addition to the potent powers I was just gaining now. As I mused on that the text within the text boxes began to change again.
[The void you are currently within is the extra-omniversal space your true form exists within. As of this moment your true form is shapeless, and the void you truly exist within is an endless space filled with nothing, but both of these things can be changed by you. You can also change your true form at any moment you wish, and your void can be decorated in any way you wish for it to be. The void is your truest sanctum, your true home, where you reside in all of your glory and majesty.
You can construct an at least tempory body for yourself with ease. Simply imagine one.]
I "closed my eyes" as it were and imagined a body composed of starstuff that towered over everything else in creation. A body so unfathomably tall that only its head were visible to anyone who would have been anywhere in the vast expanse. I felt the body begin to form, and yet the face itself, the only "visible" part of the body was a blank, featureless head. I needed to change that.
I quickly "chiseled" a face for myself that made use of stellar bodies in place of conventional features. My eyes were made up of two truly massive stars, and my mouth was a black hole. The rest of my "face" was made up of stardust swirling in loosely recognizable patterns. To gaze at my face would be to see some of the most beautiful things I could imagine, stellar bodies of truly incredible power, ones that were both beautiful and truly powerful. It was a perfect metaphor for the sort of being I was becoming, one that possessed unstoppable power and inspiring beauty.
For a moment I pondered whether or not to decorate my void, but after a few moments, I opted to leave it as it was for now. The only thing I did was want to turn off the light present within it, as at the moment it was intensely bright. The light present in the void vanished in accordance with my will, which was quite pleasant. It went from being as bright as a clear day at noon to being only as bright as the time of day when the sun has just dipped below the horizon, so there was no light, thanks to the lack of stars. In my void, I was all alone, and in the dark, and yet I could see an infinite distance in every direction, thanks to my own perfect vision.
All that existed in my sanctum was myself, and that was weirdly peaceful. I knew that with a thought I could create objects, life, whole worlds if I wanted to, and yet I didn't want to. I liked the loneliness of the void. I liked the serenity of it. And so, content with things the way that they were, I was still. I was satisfied, for the first time in my life.
For a while, I was content to simply exist. For an unknown amount of time, perhaps only a nanosecond, or perhaps a century, it didn't truly matter, I was alone in my void. I allowed this, content to be alone with my thoughts. And the truth was that time wasn't passing outside. At least not in the universe of my birth. My power over the sin of sloth had allowed me to shut it down, to lock the entire universe in a sort of stasis that was so intense that they wouldn't even realize they were locked in it if they ever left it. But eventually, after perhaps a few seconds, or perhaps even a few centuries, I'd only know if I wanted to know and I didn't particularly care for that knowledge, I began to move again.
The system was still whispering to me. It had never stopped. It told me how to modify my void, how to modify my true form, and of powers that were truly incredible. One of which I activated while within the void itself and in doing so one thing did change. A swirling projection of the universe itself began to appear in front of me, fully frozen in the "air" in front of my face, just as the actual universe itself was frozen by the stasis my powers had put it in.
I gazed at the projection, awed by its majesty. At the moment it was "zoomed out" as it were, and showed me the entirety of the universe, but I knew that with as little as the mental equivalent of a flick of the wrist I could zoom in on any part of the universe aside from the strongholds of ascendants who were superior to myself in power, which wasn't the case for any single ascendant in this universe.
If I wanted to I could zoom in so intensely that I could see the quantum foam underlining reality. And as a god of physics... I could manipulate the quantum foam underlining reality at will, using omnikinesis, one of the new powers I had obtained during this particular evolution I was undergoing.
But the true majesty of the evolution I was undergoing was that the synergy between my ability to gaze at the entire universe was mixing with my power over the knowledge domain. My mind was actively expanding and filling with knowledge of everything occurring in the universe of my birth at the moment that I froze time using sloth's truest power. And I didn't just have the power to freeze one universe... I could freeze all of the ones my forces had any presence in, and look at them in the exact same way I was looking at the one of my birth, which would grant me a sort of pseudo-omniscience in no less than five universes.
Unrestrained by my old limits, tired of limitations, I activated my full power and caused swirling projections of the five other universes where my forces were setting up fortresses to appear before me, surrounding the frozen projection of the universe of my birth. As soon as they did I mentally reached out and froze them as surely as I froze the universe of my birth, my powers no longer limited in the same way as they once were. All five of the swirling projections froze, and in gazing at each of them my mind filled and expanded like never before.
Now I was awake. Now I was alive. The omniverse would never be the same.
