As a fairly large city, it made a certain amount of sense that Redsville possessed an interesting downtown. The so-called "Perfect Vehicle" that I was in took the scenic route to give my allies and me a chance to admire our surroundings. 

I didn't mind having the chance to actually observe my surroundings using my incredible senses. My brain was now so potent that even my raw senses were incredibly keen and sensitive to the world around me.

I could hear the distant conversations some people were having in the backroom of a far-off restaurant as easily as I could listen to shouted catcalls from men in construction uniforms as they saw the women in the car with me. I could smell the perfumed scent of women heading to work in nearby law firms. I could taste the scents in the air around the car, from expertly cooked Japanese food to homemade sandwiches students brought to school from home. 

Another aspect of all of this was that my senses were continually sharpening. In defiance of physics, everything from my ability to physically touch and manipulate distant objects to my ability to hear conversations over a mile away were perpetually in a state of refinement and expansion, which was rather exciting to me. 

This was not my only ability of interest at the moment. As my companions and I sat in the car which I counted among the most prized possessions I owned, I mused on the nature of some of my newer powers.

I was an ultra-being in ways beyond my status as a living god. Thanks to my time scouring the internet and my desires to become the strongest being I could have become as strong as possible I was now a being beyond classification. 

I possessed everything from the powers of a sanguinarch's sanguinarch, the closest thing to a god that vampires could have, to the mighty powers of a living hyperion, a fictional and quasi-omnipotent being invented by someone on Reddit. And that was before mentioning the mighty paragon aberrants or pinnacle powers I possessed! If I wanted, I could easily go back in time and alter the fates of anyone I chose, from Joan of Arc to Amelia Earhart. The biggest thing controlling me was my own imagination. 

As the car drove down the streets of downtown Redsville I allowed my mind to wander and touch the minds of the inhabitants of the area. Downtown Redsville was filled with businesses and it was about 8:30 in the morning so it was a good time of the day for me to do what I planned to do to test my potent new powers.

Sanguinarchs were unbelievably powerful eldritch beings who were able to absorb and manipulate essence, in much the same way their creations, vampires, could absorb and, in some cases, manipulate blood. Essence was itself a sort of energy generated by the interactions of things with the omniverse and each other. It could be found in blood, in souls, in intimacy, in promises made between organizations and individuals alike, and even in dominions, the potent territories ruled over by sanguinarchs themselves. That said, as a living god who was also a sanguinarch I was as far from a mundane sanguinarch as a sanguinarch was from an ant. 

My mind, itself as powerful and capable of influencing reality as any lesser divinity was if they tried their very hardest, touched the minds of the thousands of people in a radius of a few miles around me. As it did I subtly felt and copied all of their memories with ease, which itself felt pleasant and enjoyable for me. 

I absorbed all of the memories of everyone from a one-year-old in a nursery to multiple local CEOs as they ate breakfast. All in all, I absorbed entire centuries worth of memories, skills, and knowledge over the course of a few seconds. I was able to do this with ease by using some of my more potent powers such as "Worldmind", but what I did next I did through my powers as a sanguinarch. 

I was able to immediately process and fully absorb the memories I had taken into myself which granted me a litany of skills and a considerable amount of knowledge. In targeting thousands of people at once I had gained an awareness of tens of thousands of things. I instantly gained the skills needed to be a world-class teacher, and the knowledge I'd need if I was a mundane criminal who needed to dispose of a body. I also gained memories that were disturbing, such as memories of both being a criminal who bribed cops and other law enforcement officials, as well as being a bribed cop or law enforcement official who knew who was doing the bribing. 

With this knowledge and my powers, I could have easily done something like use "Presence", one of my powers that I possessed as a living god, to overtly possess the criminals and corrupt cops and get them all to confess, but as a creature who wasn't wholly good or wholly bad, I had an idea that I found more fun than that. Instead of being a stick in the mud, I decided to punish the creatures who sought to escape accountability in a more creative way. 

Sanguinarchs possessed at least one, of three, focuses. These focuses were an attempt to classify how a sanguinarch primarily used their essence, be it the "Savage" focus which was a reflection of sanguinarchs who used their essence to strengthen themselves on a purely physical level, or the "Cultured" focus which was for charismatic sanguinarchs who enjoyed charm and intellect, or, for the control freaks, the "Dominating" focus which allowed a sanguinarch to permanently mentally dominate mortals, angels, demons, devils, and if the sanguinarch in question was strong enough, even gods. 

I possessed all three focuses, and as a way to practice and flex my potent powers as a sanguinarch, I opted to utilize one of the focuses in question.

At the very moment that the mischievous young god decided to practice and flex some of his self-given power, a pair of the criminals who he was going to target were seated across from each other. Rachel Rosenblatt and Montgomery Hives were two well-known CEOs who were long-time residents of Redsville and they sat on opposite sides of an ornate desk in Rachel's office. 

Both of the CEOs were white, and one, Montgomery, was an enterprising and immoral young man, while the other, Rachel, was a confident, and hedonistic older woman. At the very moment that Antonio had opted to target the two of them, among other criminals, they clinked two coffee mugs together to celebrate their latest scheme to come to fruition, a successful scheme to acquire a controlling interest in a local newspaper. 

"Finally, those fuckers at the Redsville Regional won't be able to just talk shit." Complained Montgomery, with a bright smile on his face. Before Rachel could respond, the two of them froze in place as their minds were touched, corrupted, and twisted, by the distant deity who was listening to their conversation. 

Antonio wasn't going to do anything as overt as turning them into mindless puppets of his, nor would he want to do something so boorish. No, what he had in mind for the creatures was something wholly more subtle and more suitable to schemers such as the pair of corporate fat cats who had gained vast amounts of wealth off of the labor of others. He intended to make them into his fanatical servants, servants who retained their vast influence and criminal know-how and who'd be in places of power, to better serve him and enact his machinations.

Antonio's mind touched and warped the minds of the pair of CEOs with finesse, filling them and other criminals throughout the downtown area with an overwhelming amount of knowledge related to his existence and the nature of his being as a living god and sanguinarch. He even made them experience bliss and soul-warping pleasure due to knowing who he was to cement his power over them.

They, and dozens of other criminals, swore themselves to him instinctually, eager to know and serve the entity their souls yearned to touch and to worship. In a single attosecond Antonio, with the potent powers of a sanguinarch, was able to acquire dozens of worshipers who'd do anything he asked without hesitation, and who did not worship him as a moralistic god but who worshiped him as the master of existence. 

The potent powers of a dominating sanguinarch were such that even their proudest victims were turned into servile, sycophantic servants and worshipers of their masters, even when their masters weren't originally gods. For a creature such as Antonio who was a divinity before he was a sanguinarch, and who was quickly acquiring a taste for being worshiped, the newfound feelings of devotion that he was feeling were quite pleasant.

I chuckled, mysteriously, as I felt my powers of domination seep into and corrupt some of the first humans I had decided to make my servants. In utilizing my potent domination abilities I was able to effortlessly acquire fanatical servants who'd joyfully do anything I asked of them, from behaving as saints and helping the homeless, to brutally murdering anyone I deemed an enemy of mine, from a corrupt cop to their own parents so long as it was what I wanted them to do. 

In the possibly fictional setting where sanguinarchs originated the "Dominating" sanguinarchs were among the most feared members of their kind but they had weaknesses. For them, corrupting and enslaving other "Ascendants" was an exceptionally difficult task, one that cost veritable fortunes as far as essence went, and they lacked the ability to dominate someone unless they were within the same planet as them. I lacked those weaknesses, though at the moment I could only dominate beings who were in the same galaxy as me. 

That was, in and of itself a much vaster power than human beings realized since I knew now that there were multiple other alien civilizations active at this very moment throughout the galaxy. The closest active, intelligent alien civilization was located several thousand light-years away but for a creature like myself such distances meant little. 

It was while I was beginning to make strategies concerning how to optimize the usage of some of these new abilities that we began to see the city hall in the distance. The surprisingly pretty building was filled with exactly the sorts of people that I intended to make into servants and worshipers of mine. I knew that doing so would speed up my acquisition of further power and influence in the area. I could, of course, use my existing powers to take over the city in a more spectacular way than I was planning, but the slow and steady acquisition of influence was more to my liking than dramatic and showy shows of force. 

When the car finally reached the sidewalk right in front of the city hall it slowed to a stop and the doors slid open, allowing Imani, Titania, and I to get out of it and begin to walk towards the modern building that was filled with so much potential. As I got out of the car I began to smile, knowing that I was mere minutes from acquiring the sort of soft power that I was excited to wield. Meanwhile, my two companions watched me curiously. They were eager to see how I went about gaining worshipers when left to my own devices.