For a lesser being, particularly a mortal, to gaze upon even a facsimile of the real face of a god of beauty, even one below the power of a Cosmic God was a truly life-changing and soul-altering event. Doing this brought a lesser, easily touched and warped mind, into contact with a conceptual being partially embracing one of the things it was a concept of in the first place and that was rarely advisable for such weak creatures.  

The nuns who found themselves in the presence of the truest and purest form of divinity, one whose ancestors created the very beings who'd someday create the multiverse which housed the universe that Antonio was born in were in the presence of a being truly and utterly beyond their comprehension. They had gazed at something that was beautiful enough to reflect the tiniest portion of Antonio's true beauty, and they were changed by it.

To gaze upon a being who was both the Anael and the Grand Adonis, even if such a being hadn't also been a Living God, while he was channeling even a sliver of the divine radiance he embodied was the sort of act that changed even the most stoic soul. The sisters within the nunnery were not the most stoic souls. They were far from weak-willed, life as a nun solidified one's willpower, but they did not possess the sort of solid wills and immutable souls needed for someone to gaze at a creature like Antonio without being affected by the transcendent allure he radiated.   

The minds of the sisters were touched, both by the absolute joy of the Anael and the by the pure, unmitigated splendor it embodied. That had the effect of filling them with the purest sort of joy imaginable, one that made any joy they had felt in even their most blissful moments feel like they had been experiencing utter sorrow instead. It was the sort of joy that made them rethink their lives until now. 

They rethought their lives in an instant, and a fraction of a second later they devoted themselves to the strange entity in front of them who was even now finishing phasing through the wall so he could greet them properly. As the nuns in the room devoted themselves to him, their minds filling with a bit of knowledge about the fact that the being before them was a divinity much like the god they had previously worshiped, the potent god became aware of their fealty and his serene smile grew wider still.  

As the loyalties of the nuns shifted from Felmoco to me I heard the voice of my unconscious mind almost giggle with glee. It was an odd sound, but given the context, I didn't mind it. It felt good to begin to steal from a lazy, unworthy divinity that had acquired power and grown fat from it. Plus by beginning my hidden war here I wasn't just taking any normal worshipers from him, I was taking truly devout and pious worshipers of his and gaining their service. 

For lesser deities, even Supreme Celestial level Cosmic Gods, worship was one of the more powerful power sources that we could draw strength from. And like domains, how much power we drew from any worshiper depended on more than one factor. As a being who was a Supreme Celestial level Cosmic God, in addition to the other things I happened to be, the power I gained from worship was calculated with the same sort of formula as any other Cosmic God of my level of might. I wasn't just stealing from Felmoco, I was also adding to myself which was the real reason why I was doing this, now that I had a firmer understanding of how divinities worked. 

Due to the piety of the nuns I had just brought over to my side I was gaining worshipers whose entire lives around prayer and devotion. That meant that I was gaining worshipers who believed zealously and whole-heartedly in my divinity. I didn't speak and instead filled the minds of the nuns with just a bit of knowledge concerning my existence, even as I floated over to the closest nun, a young Thai woman whose perpetual vows had been sworn only last year. 

It only took me a fraction of a second to reach a place where I stood over the nun who was still on her knees even as she watched me approach. When I was close enough to reach out and touch her, I did just that. I extended a single one of my fingers and lightly tapped her forehead before activating a power I possessed due to my Anael nature; "Bestow Immortality". 

As I activated my power my finger began to radiantly glow, filling with an incredible amount of life energy to transfer to the young nun. She began to smile as serenely as I was when she felt the warm and soothing glow of the energy surging into my fingertip. Her fellow sisters watched, awestruck, as I turned her into the very first of my servants to be affected by my Anael powers rather than my more corruptive or directly empowering powers. 

I hadn't come to the nunnery to corrupt it, only to make it be devoted to a divinity who was actually deserving of the piety of the place's inhabitants. I wasn't going to be wicked to the undeserving, as that wouldn't be very balanced of me. I would see to it that the righteous were rewarded, and the wicked were punished, and that my own goals aligned with those basic principles. Though, I didn't see a fate such as becoming one of my vampires as a punishment, so that wasn't necessarily off the table. Aside from that, for now, I only wanted to see to it that the righteous women of this place were given a reward, in this life, that befit their behavior. 

This place's inhabitants were devoted to piety and to prayer and a fate that befitted their devotion was the ability to continue to pray forever, so I'd give them such an ability. 

The light of my power surged out of me and into the head of the woman I was touching. As it did she exhaled and sighed. The resulting sound was melodically beautiful. And meanwhile, my mind was not just here but was also considering an infinitude of other things simultaneously.

The multifaceted and endless mind of a Living God was capable of many things that would baffle a human being. One such thing that they, or rather I, as a Living God, was capable of as far as my mind went was true mental multitasking. Not the sort of mental multitasking that allowed me to split my focus between two things, but the sort of mental multitasking that gave me the cognitive room to look at things from endless points of view without negatively affecting my effectiveness at anything I was doing. And that was important to me. 

I didn't want to do things aimlessly or for no reason. I wanted my actions to have a purpose and for my movements to advance my goals. At the moment, my primary purpose was to walk towards true omnipotence, the sort of omnipotence that eluded even me. I had not yet attained true perfection, nor was I capable of effortlessly creating anything on the scale of pleniverses, and even I had a number of limitations that were imposed on me, though they affected and limited me far less than they could limit anyone else. Nevertheless, I couldn't just grant myself true omnipotence, I had to earn it via the acquisition of the remaining nine modes of transcendence. 

There were a total of twelve modes, each of which was different from the others in both name and meaning. I possessed three, and each of them had effects on me, some of which were easy for me to understand and others of which provided much more difficult for even me to grasp. My three current modes of transcendence were "The Outsider", "The Inheritor", and "The Architect".

The activation of my ability to bestow biological immortality was an event that involved numerous domains of mine. Due to that, I gave myself more power by using that ability, which only made me excited to use it again and again on the rest of the women in the nunnery.

The power I had created for myself nestled itself deep within me. It felt good inside of me, like a delicious and filling meal. As I adjusted to the strangeness of feeling the power within me, I nodded at the meek nun who was kneeling before me. She was waiting to hear my voice and for me to command her. 

"Arise Anong." I proclaimed, calmly. The woman smiled at me and did as I commanded, gazing at me all the while. As she arose I momentarily considered making her into a thrall, a servant of mine who was granted an enhanced physique, immortality, and whose essence was strengthened for the purpose of making it easier to make Redsville into part of my domain as a sanguinarch. While the idea tempted me for a second I quickly found myself rejecting it. Even though my vampires wouldn't need to feed on blood to generate essence for me, I still didn't feel comfortable getting nuns to have sex, despite the fact that I had no real desire for my nuns to be virgins or to swear oaths of celibacy.  

I considered such oaths to be purposeless. There was no real value to someone being a virgin, unless they assigned value to their virginity for reasons I could only fathom due to my deific mind. I swiftly filled the minds of the nuns with the knowledge that the oaths they would swear to me were not the same as the oaths they swore to Felmoco. They would not be asked to forsake what Felmoco had asked them to forsake, such as pleasure. While doing that I also spoke to Anong. 

"Anong, would you please go and gather your other sisters? I would see to it that all of you were shown a divinity deserving of your faith and your worship." I asked the petite nun. She nodded at me and turned to go and gather her sister. As she did I saw a certain amount of pep in her step that I knew she lacked prior to meeting me. And again I turned my mind to the topic of the modes of transcendence.

"The Outsider" was the most strange of the modes that I currently possessed. It dyed my soul and my powers themselves in an alien and otherworldly light and supposedly caused eldritch monstrosities to feel an affinity for me to the extent that any that I encountered would worship me similar to how they currently worshiped eldritch beings of lesser might than I possessed. To date, I had not encountered any such beings, but thanks to Rebeza's memories I'd had known that they existed even without my "Worldmind" powered nigh-omniscience. Creatures that would inspire madness if a mortal man so much as stared at them would one day call me their lord if I ever encountered them...

"The Outsider" tethered me to horror, nothingness, contradiction, destruction, chaos, aliens, the unknown, the unknowable, the uncaring, and amorality. It was an auspicious thing to be tethered to from birth, and I could tell that even without my toggleable form of semi-omniscience.

"The Inheritor" was also a weird method of transcendence. It signified that I had a sort of inborn connection to things like death, legacies, and inheritances, and supposedly meant that the whole reason I could come into existence in the first place was due to the deaths of other beings. Specifically the death of the other Living Gods. It was a mode of transcendence that was unique to me, and it tethered me to endings, memories, histories, rebirth, and renewal.

"The Architect" was one of the more direct, and arguably one of the simpler modes of transcendence. It tied me to creation, birth, life, structure, order, destiny, and other such things. With it, I was a creator, an upholder, someone whom reality felt it could rely on. It was also vastly powerful, and would one day allow me to do truly incredible things, provided I was willing to work at it and towards mastering it. 

There were nine remaining modes of transcendence. When I last attempted to use my "Worldmind" empowered nigh-omniscience on the nine other modes that were not yet mine to control I learned their names and little more than that.

Within the depths of another dimension, the ethereal home of Felmoco, the souls of his deceased followers, and his angelic servitors, one such being was utilizing their potent powers to watch the world of their birth. The strange being, a divine construct powered by holy energy, was a metallic orb that floated freely due to its fuel source freeing it from the constraints of gravity. 

The being hovered in the middle of what amounted to a bedroom as its eye projected what the alien being was seeing. Had anyone been in the room to gaze upon the thing they'd have been able to see a bird's eye view of the city of Redsville. The creature, an angel of sight and scrying, was patiently looking for the source of some strange readings that seemed to have come from somewhere in the city. The inquisitive scout was determined to find the cause of various strange events which seemed to have begun just a day ago.

The modes of transcendence that remained beyond me were named "Mythic", "Dark Enlightenment", "Living Image", "The Secret", "Godhood", "Abstract", "Royalty", "The One", and "Almighty Sciences". I knew a bit beyond the names of each, but only a fragmented piece of knowledge or a bit of trivia about them.

"Mythic" Living Gods were the ones who were best able to increase the number of other Living Gods either through the transformation of others into members of my species or through mundane methods such as breeding with less mighty beings. There were such similarities between the "Living Image" and "Dark Enlightenment" modes that whether or not their Living Gods were one or the other from birth often depended on their innate tendencies as far as moral views went. Darker, more sadistic Living Gods who were either "Living Image" or "Dark Enlightenment" Living Gods tended to be "Dark Enlightment" while kinder, more benevolent Living Gods were more often than not "Living Image" deities.

"The Secret" Living Gods were often extreme masters of two of the stranger abilities granted by living godhood; "Anomaly", and "Alchemical Arbiter". They were such masters of those abilities that meaning, secrets, and knowledge were often central parts of what it meant to worship them. 

"Godhood", the mode of transcendence that I was currently the most interested in, bestowed those who wielded it with powers over gods themselves, as well as greatly bolstered one's own godhood. It was a mode of transcendence that made divinity a part of someone's domain, and I hoped to learn if engaging with other deities was a part of what it took for someone to acquire it. 

"Abstract" Living Gods were capable of becoming truly and purely conceptual beings, tethered in real and unyielding ways to the things that their subjects associated them with. As an example, an "Abstract" Living God associated with space could dictate how far objects were from one another just by speaking or even thinking about the distance between two things. This ability didn't even involve the usage of any other powers, it was just an extension of their nature as Living Gods! Due to that fact it was impossible for anything but another Living God to counter their conceptual abilities. 

"Royalty" Living Gods were once the leaders of an ancient and long destroyed civilization of Living Gods where every citizen possessed some degree of Living God ancestry. Their very nature caused them to constantly be given chances to prove their superiority over other beings, and when I attempted to learn how such a civilization could fall even Worldmind wasn't able to give me information.

In the just over twenty-five hours since I first acquired my particular brand of nigh-omniscience, I was rapidly noticing that the only areas it regularly failed to grant me more knowledge was whenever I was attempting to learn about Living Gods. That made sense but it was also quite annoying and on more than one occasion I silently vowed to one day uncover every secret of my ancestors. 

Some deities had the ability to come to life spontaneously and from nothing, coming into existence fully grown and possessing their full suite of abilities. This was incredibly rare among lesser divinities, the term used to describe Felmoco's kind of divinity, but among Living Gods, this sort of spontaneous birth was normally an indicator that someone was a "The One" kind of Living God. And yet... I wasn't a "The One" kind of Living God. How strange. 

"Almighty Sciences" kinds of Living Gods were potent beings who had dictated the very limits of sciences, both mundane and dark, during an epoch in the unfathomable past of the omniverse's history. They had crafted technology so advanced that it was beyond quite literally anything in operation throughout the omniverse today. If I wanted to add such technology to my arsenal then I'd need to acquire the "Almighty Sciences" mode of transcendence. 

In addition to their necessity as part of the process by which I empowered the master spark within me, and thus moved closer to true omnipotence, each mode of transcendence gave me something new. If I wanted the ability to create other Living Gods I'd need to acquire the "Mythic" mode. If I wanted to attain true omniscience I'd likely need the "Almighty Sciences" mode and the omniverse warping technology they created. But more than anything else I needed to stay focused on my first goal: the acquisition of the "Godhood" mode and thus the ability to truly establish my own pantheon of subordinate gods.

That motivation fresher than ever in the back of my mind propelled me as I bestowed my gift upon the scattered inhabitants of the abbey. By the time only five minutes had passed no less than seven nuns had abandoned their former vows and were in the middle of contemplating new vows to swear to me.

Meanwhile, I was free to continue roaming the rest of the nunnery, in search of more nuns to take Felmoco. My face remained an otherworldly picture of masculine beauty as I ethereally floated closer and closer to where some more of the sisters had been gathered by Anong, the Thai nun who had been the first to receive my blessing of eternal life. She had gathered several of her sisters and was patiently waiting for me while I floated into and through the walls that separated the two of us.