Even as my personal world changed irrevocably by my absorption of every essence in my soul I took stock of my situation.
I has absorbed a plethora of essences but I knew for a fact that there were still some I was missing. The first two that came to mind were the essences of perfection and all knowledge. They were both of the high-end essences that permanently altered the very nature of the existences of those who imbibed them. Another one that came to mind was essence of the resource vault, which would have given me copies of every item in existence.
Fortunately for me, as powerful as they were I didn’t really need them.
I had drunk other high-end essences such as the essence of hyper-competence and the essence of the tree of knowledge.
Those two essences were on a level not far from the ones I was missing, while being not quite as broken as the ones that remained beyond my grasp. As far as the essence of the resource vault went I had still acquired a vast, effectively endless amount of treasure just from the other essences themselves.
I also knew how to make the essences that I was missing, but hell… Even that would be a journey that I knew was beyond me at the moment. Not even the conceptual power of the essence of the crafter could help me there. Fortunately, I had all of eternity to go ahead and attempt to gain the power I’d need to become mighty enough to create those three essences.
I was also in no rush. I had become an unbelievably powerful being and I didn’t need to acquire any more power than what I had, even though I knew that acquiring more power would be fun. Especially since as I was taking stock of my situation I was doing something else at the very same time.
My mind was split into innumerable streams of consciousness at the moment, each of which was doing an important task. Some of them were exploring my inventory, fully assessing the various items the essences I had absorbed that were given directly to me.
Some of my trains of thought did something else important; one had formed a clone and used it to scout the planet by using the Speed Force and thus giving me access to a full, true mini-map of the world.
One of the weirdest aspects of exploring the world was the fact that it was while I was doing that that the full weight of something dawned on me; I no longer needed to work. I knew that on a logical level, but in exploring the world I saw the vast amount of resources I possessed here.
In addition to a lot of biomes, more than one of every kind present on Earth itself, I had a lot of raw resources. There were mines filled with precious gems and valuable metals, entire unoccupied cityscapes, and countless factories that could be commanded to produce virtually anything I could ever really want.
If I wanted money but didn’t want to steal it, I could easily use an essence like the essence of wealth, or I could actually earn money by doing something like having a factory here produce golden watches which I could go and sell to pawnshops in town.
And all of that was assuming that I continued to pretend to have earthly needs and making such a show of that deception that I actually visited restaurants to eat in! If not… I didn’t even need to do that.
I also had the means to create and outfit entire armies. If I wanted to, I could turn my factories to the production of robotic soldiers and weapons fit for them.
I could add to that by turning on some of the darker and more potent resources available to me which were located in the depths of the palace in which my main body was currently standing, such as the forge which could produce relic-level weaponry and create “Super-Gods” beings so powerful they could challenge divinities themselves.
If I felt like being a conqueror… All I needed to do was flip a few switches and I’d be able to create my own legions. What an incredible power to wield so effortlessly. All it took for me to conquer the Earth of my birth would be my desire. Hmm…
Stranger things awaited me within the depths of my vast palace. In a rare few cases even living beings awaited me, such as Almalexia, one of the three deities worshiped by the Dunmer of Tamriel from partway through the first era to part way through the third era after they were transformed from being Chimer and into the Dunmer by Azura, the Daedric Prince of dawn and dusk.
I had become the reincarnation of Almalexia’s husband; Lord Indoril Nerevar, due to one of the essences I had imbibed. The pseudo-divinity herself was here in her maximally powerful state though her mind was no longer fractured as it was during the video-game in which she was a major character. I knew that when the time came for the two of us to meet the power of the essence of the elven progenitor would be incredibly handy!
I didn’t need to have drunken the perfected essences to get to the level I was at. I was good enough without them, especially while I actively adjusted to my current level of power. I had access to the every power from multiple series and franchises, such as Dungeons and Dragons, One Piece, and Diablo, and that was an incredible amount of power while not being even a fragment of a percent of my total power!
That said, another very important thing that I was doing at the moment was filling out Choose Your Own Adventures. I was actively making use of the essence of all CYOAs and steadily exploring the archive that I had access to in my head thanks to my mental connection to the omniversal internet. That was important for a number of reasons.
The first reason was that I was able to do spectacularly fun Choose Your Own Adventures such as “Power Creator Xenon” which was fun simply because it gave me the ability to get traditional superpowers without making them myself through my skill creation superpower.
The other reason was because of the weird abilities that I could get through CYOAs without having to wait until my next jump. That second reason was surely why some of them were locked to me at the moment, which annoyed me but was something I could tolerate after all of the power I had already acquired.
Nevertheless, not every useful CYOA was locked to me. There was one CYOA in particular that was useful that wasn’t gone was the “Goddess of Mankind” CYOA which had one very special power in it that was something that had been beyond the level of “Skill Creator” to make; a power known in that document as “Godfucker”.
The name was amusing but the actual power itself was utterly fantastic when fused with some of my powers and essences. “Godfucker” was a perfect compliment to the essence of the non-believer, whose sole drawback I was immune to thanks to my replication of Thanos’ powers, as it made me a natural enemy and conqueror of other gods since with it if I killed even a god they wouldn’t have been able to resist being absorbed by me and being dragged to my afterlife.
That had the added effects of allowing me to exert incredible influence over them, forcibly take their domains and power, and do other fun stuff.
“Godfucker” made it clearer than ever that one of my domains ought to have been the domain of war, which covered all violent conflict on any scale even one on one violence or assasinations, especially when coupled with death which was innately one of my domains. I immediately made war one of my domains, which granted me cosmic knowledge of it, but the second that I gained that cosmic knowledge I also gained cosmic knowledge of my other innate domains such as music and the afterlife.
I was immediately and intimately aware of every death, every afterlife, and every war that had already occurred in the world of my birth. Wars that historians didn’t know, deaths that went unobserved by any other lifeforms, and every instance of music, filled a newly generated portion of my mind-palace.
That portion was filled with an immense amount of knowledge, far vaster than any other part of my mind-palace and yet not overwhelming to me since I was a god.
Ben smiled at me as he realized that I was gaining this knowledge. He watched as my cosmic awareness began to take root in my mind and as I gained an ability that the verse containing the Forgotten Realms and Eberron called “Domain-Sense”.
“Cosmic awareness is a fun one, isn’t it?” He asked, a dark grin on his face as he spoke. I sensed him getting ready to reveal something even as I gained an intimate awareness of every death that had occurred up to this point in history, an uncountable number of endings.
“Since you’re gaining cosmic awareness there is one thing I ought to tell you. Your particular level of cosmic awareness isn’t cosmic awareness of the omniverse, it’s of the pleniverse you’re in.” He revealed, and both of those words caused new entries to appear in my mental glossary. I didn’t need to tap on them though, I already knew what they meant. Ben’s smile widened as he sensed me reacting to what was on my mind.
“You don’t have access to the true omniverse. Not for now, anyway. I have created this pleniverse, which is large even by pleniversal standards, so that you can take this time to grow in power.” Ben told me, speaking as though he were protecting me. To be fair, I suspected that that was a truth though not the full truth.
It was entirely possible he was also protecting himself by doing this, and even the me of before wouldn’t have been foolish enough to think that he was entirely altruistic.
He had seemingly infinite cosmic power, even power beyond me, and I knew that for sure thanks to the effects of the essence of the tree of knowledge. But he also wasn’t the only omnipotent being in existence.
The mighty essence known as the essence of the tree of knowledge granted me the closest thing possible to omniscience without granting me true omniscience. Though the omniscience I possessed was a strange form of pseudo-omniscience that demanded that I focus on something to bring it to the forefront of my mind.
I really liked it, and in a sense almost preferred it to true omniscience since it granted me most of the benefits of actual omniscience without making things boring for me.
“In time I will open you up to the omniverse. Though when I do… Your greed made you a fun, special entity from the moment you imbibed those essences. Your ability to brew essences will surely make you into something special, since essence brewing means that you can share your vast powers with others freely.” Ben began, even as my draconic pets watched the two of us talk.
“You have a number of means to share your powers, though the majority of them give you control over those you share your powers with. Essences on the other hand… Well, essences give those you share them with the potential to have real power of their own, free from your influence.” Ben said, coolly.
“Essence brewing is an artistic gift. Not every omnipotent being is on the same level of power with it, or frankly even on the same level of omnipotence in general. If you become a skilled enough essence brewer you may well gain the attention of other entities like me.” Ben informed me, though he began to smile as he did that.
That also suggested that he was a crafter-focused omnipotent being, or at least that he was skilled enough to produce hundreds of essences… Unless, of course, he hadn’t been the one to make them.
Though as I wondered that important question I discovered that even the tree of knowledge had soft limits. My mind didn’t immediately fill with knowledge concerning the answer and thus the nature of Ben, which was unsurprising but still a bit disappointing.
Ben surely knew what I was thinking but he didn’t volunteer the information, only smiling rather cryptically at me and chuckling when he noticed that I noticed that he wasn’t sharing the origin of the essences.
If I wanted my answers… I’d need to make the essences that could give me what I sought myself, and add their power to my own.
For the moment I turned my mind away from those dark matters and I focused on the domains I possessed. I had a number of open slots to select domains, and I had the ability to be absolutely broken if I wanted to be…
I possessed a sort of… ultimate power, known as “Free Climbing” that allowed me to manipulate parameters. With it just about anything that had a hard number could be manipulated and multiplied by up to a thousand times the original number.
For example… I could take the essence of bazaar elder god-king’s eleven domains and actually grant myself eleven thousand domains. “Free Climbing” was absolutely busted, and that was what I loved about it.
With “Free Climbing” and my particular jumpchain if I hadn’t already had infinite choice points to purchase things with then I could have easily granted myself one million choice points per jump. It was a wonderfully broken ability, for me, even if I knew that wasn’t quite how it worked for other jumpers.
As I mused on that, my two dragons rose up and walked over to me. They smiled, wordlessly, and wrapped themselves around me, gorgeous looks on their lovely faces all the while. I could tell that they were enthralled by me, but not by my humanity. They were attracted to the power I possessed, both as a draconic being and as something… far more primal than that.
They were attracted to me, not by the power of lewd essences or even the power of my pheromones, but due to the nature of my existence. I was a being of such vast eldritch, multi-faceted power that creatures who valued power would struggle to not be attracted to me.
I would be very attractive to creatures like orcs and demons, but less so to humans who could value things other than power, though I knew that my power was only one facet of what made me attractive to complex beings like humans, elves, and many other humanoids.
I turned to Ben and began to speak. As I did there was a smile on my face.
“We should… walk deeper into the palace. I saw it just now, with the Speed Force, but I want to lay my eyes on The Throne. It looked so pretty as I zipped by it.” I told the man, while I rose my hand and activated one of the powers afforded to me by the essence of the primordial god. With it I silently created three stones on the floor around me and began to make them swirl around me by using The Force.
I willed the rocks around me to float into the air and silently circle me like some sort of earthen shield. This was a fun way to silently train my powers over The Force and take advantage of the passive training boosts I had acquired as a result of my choices with regard to the generic first jump.
I did that to train my connection to that mighty cosmic force. Even as incredible as I was, it would take me training the powers I had that needed to be trained before I could truly gain even greater power. I could sense my power with the cosmic force flowing through me strengthening every passing second that I kept the tiny stones orbiting me.
“Oh, so you’re excited? You want to meet your wife?” Ben asked me, teasingly. I chuckled and ignored the sudden senses of envy flowing off of the dragons.
At the same time as I turned to face the omnipotent being who was clearly enjoying all of this I created language and speaking skills using the power of “Skill Creation” and shared them with the dragons so that they could speak. Annoyingly, they also knew what Ben and I were saying since we spoke in a universal tongue any sapient creature could understand.
“Master!” The taller of the two powerfully proclaimed the second she got her voice. I chuckled at her sudden outburst.
“You have a wife?! That you haven’t met?!” She asked, her voice quite powerful and loud due to the nature of her enormous body and the power she casually radiated. The smaller of the two dragons wasn’t about to let me off either as she began to speak the second her sister was done speaking.
“Has she at least offered you tribute?!” The smaller, but not weaker, dragon asked. I glared at Ben and watched the man chuckle even as I felt some of my domain slots begin to fill themselves in automatically.
One of the slots was filled in by a power of the essence of the elven progenitor. It didn’t offer me divinity over elves, though I happened to know that that was in fact a domain, but rather power over nature. I felt my mind buzz as the portion of my mind-palace devoted to my domain-sense power began to expand yet again.
Ben, the dragons, and I began to walk deeper into the vast palace. We only had one more real stop along the way… The vault where Almalexia was currently located. That vault happened to be situated just past the throne room, which was itself situated just beyond the door in the distance. Along the way I began to tell the dragons that I was the reincarnation of Almalexia’s husband, not actually her husband.
At the very same time I began to gain his memories, which itself felt pleasant… but odd. Everything from his earliest days as a minor son of Boethiah, Daedric prince of deceit, conspiracy, treachery, and sedition, to his death due to wounds he got during the battle of Red Mountain.
