Wish upon the Stars chapter 1127 (Patreon)

I spent the rest of the day considering my options and making preparations, eventually settling on my next course of action about the time I headed to sleep. When I woke up in the morning, after stockpiling my scrolls, I was ready for step one of my master plan. Which was…finish condensing my template.

Since my next template would need an empty spot to take up, which meant that I needed to complete the current one. Not to mention that now that I’d measured my Domain, I could finally attempt to expand it and see exactly how effective my new completed template would be.

So, down I went into my Domain to meet with the demons about my final push and unlocking my next template.

This one, I was a little worried about. It was a long time coming, having taken more effort than the previous by several folds, and now that I knew more about Mythcrafting, I wanted to try to do this one with more…intention. I had my goals for this bloodline solidification, and I wanted to try to funnel as much of the changes in the direction I needed them, rather than just letting them follow their own charted path like the Life Nova template had.

Of course, I couldn’t just decide that. While I knew Mythcrafting existed, I didn’t know how it was done, or what I was doing myself, or even really what result I wanted. I knew what I’d like to happen and what might happen, and I had to work backwards from there.

And to do that, I needed help. So I called together my best and brightest. Dantalion, Beelzebub Piece of Mind, my ministers, and I sat them all down with one specific goal.

“I want to make this place bigger,” I informed them directly. “With the Life Nova bloodline establishment, I got not just regeneration enhancement, but a three times boost to Vitality. That’s probably on the table again, only instead of Vitality it’ll be Might or something.”

“What about an Impact boost?” Owen (as I’d taken to calling Overlay) asked excitedly. “Considering how important Impact is, a multiplier for that could be game changing.”

I grimaced. “It could,” I allowed. “But I think it’s TOO game changing. There’s no chance at all that we’re getting a three times Impact modifier. Or even a two times. You have to remember that Mythcrafting might be something new, but it still follows the rules of reality. Recursion MATTERS, and Impact is too notorious as a difficult to raise stat.”

Oz nodded. “He’s right. We’d get MAYBE a twenty percent boost out of that. Not enough to count as even another rank. The fact that the Dean went out of his way to comment on the cosmic flame attribute tells us that it's rare and powerful, and if we want to get the most out of it we need to make sure it’s aimed where it needs to go. The cosmic flame creates worlds, that was the point of the vision that we got, and a blueprint for the function we want from it.”

“The issue isn’t the concern that it won’t do what we want,” I clarified to the others. “It’s that it’ll do too much. Life Nova was fine, we got what we needed from that. It was an open ended pick to achieve a long term result and that worked. But the cosmic flame is special. I picked it with a vision, and now that I know there’s a way to try to curve that vision more in the direction I wanted, that’s what we’re here to do. I’m sure that the cosmic flame template is bound to have positive results on expanding the limits of my Domain either way, I just want to make sure that we don’t waste some of those results on some nonsense secondary boost we don’t care about.”

We all glanced at the Nine Phoenix Reincarnation Art, who sat thoughtfully sipping a cup of tea he’d gotten from Cooking. At our glances, he took one more sip and sighed, placing the cup down. “If you’re asking me to come up with a plan to try to shape the next upgrade, it would take me months of trial and error.”

“It would take YOU months,” I said bluntly. “That’s why all of us are here. Wisdom of Solomon, the Pillar of Goetia itself, Angelic Bond. We have so many resources to draw from in order to crunch the numbers here. And more than that, I have a theory. One that Azazel agrees with.”

Oz nodded. “We think the key is the Domain itself,” he said excitedly. “The Domain is a manifestation of the story of an Ascendant. It’s the concrete realization of the path we’ve taken to get here. Mythcrafting, Worldforce, it all makes perfect sense, but the Domain is almost an afterthought based on what we know. But we don’t think that’s true. We think that its impact is minimized when they’re teaching people at this rank because the Domain is not usually condensed until later.”

“It can’t be a coincidence that Worldforce is a physical manifestation of a legend that features heavily in the creation of a realm,” I clarified. “If the Worldforce can effect the world, than the world should be able to affect the Worldforce. And since Mythcrafting is just an earlier form of Worldforce…”

“So, what are we supposed to do with that?” Sam asked thoughtfully. “Because if accomplishing any task was as easy as redecorating your Domain, everyone would do it. Maybe Mythcrafting is symbolic and making changes here would be useful, but how do we know what changes to make?”

I pointed to Wisdom of Solomon. “Same way as always. Trial and error. In order to get the best bang for our buck, we need the demons to incarnate. Wisdom of Solomon, Piece of Mind, Beelzebub, Angelic Bond, Dantalion. Five demons at once, with the Pillar of Goetia and the Seal helping me bear the load. Wisdom can crunch the numbers, Piece helps me distribute the task, Beel gives me other bodies to work through, Dan gives me feedback, and Angelic Bond lets me bring in Callie for help, and her Adeherent Flame is the closest to this cosmic flame attribute that we’ve seen.”

“What about the rest of us?” asked Owen. “You didn’t call us here to watch.”

“That’s exactly why I called you here,” I said bluntly. “I don’t know what I don’t know. Wisdom will let us brute force the problem, but who knows what form that takes. I need you on standby and ready to react to whatever the hell we’re supposed to be doing here. Nine Phoenix, I need one thing from you before we start though. I need to know exactly what you remember about what happened in here when the Life Nova bloodline condensed. I was a bit preoccupied at the time.”

We went over the details, Dantalion helping as best he could with recollection. It took quite a bit of study and backtracking to figure out the likely path the energy had taken in here. Then it was time to begin our trial and error. Incarnating the five demons, I headed out to the throne room to grasp the Pillar of Goetia, triggering its boosting ability on Wisdom of Solomon for best results.

It was like a whole new world. I was glad I had thought to arrange for redundancies, because the sheer amount of information I could process with Wisdom at A-rank and backed by the pillar was beyond anything I could have used by myself. Twelve copies of me manifested, twelve new minds slotting into place, each of them manifesting Dantalion as strongly as possible, and we began the process of testing.

Outside, my body, or at least a parallel with help from Callie through Angelic Bond, began the process of funneling the cosmic phoenix fire through us. Using the vision we’d had as a guide, and the processing power of Wisdom as for calculation, we began to trace possible outcomes.

That was when we hit the first snag. I didn’t have a method of controlling which outcomes we would get the most use out of. Luckily I’d summoned more than just the few demons I’d needed. Limbo stepped in, one of my parallels incarnating him directly like I would have, and using his powers we began to cull timelines that weren’t useful. There were a LOT of them.

One by one, we pared them back, cutting away at the unnecessary bloat. I started giving orders, sending demons like Brad to certain places. Destroy a piece of landscape, carve a channel and have Agares fill in another, we reshaped the very plains of Gehenna to prepare and focus the energy in exactly the way we needed it. Finally, we reached  the last stages. “Alright people, let’s do this!” I called as we all headed outside. “Is everyone ready?”

Angelic Bond manifested in all his power, preparing to direct the strength that was incoming in just the way we needed. His wings spread as he soared up over Gehenna. Finally, I sent a thought to the parallel controlling my body and he pushed that last little bit over the edge.

In the sky above us, and explosion of world creating fire erupted in reverse, like a big bag happening backwards, collecting into a fucking PILLAR of creation fire that plummeted towards Gehenna. It was one of many possible internal manifestations, and one we needed to manage very carefully.

As it struck, Angelic Bond flexed his power, and through it, my wife’s. As the fire hit, it poured through him into her vault and then back out the other side, its essential nature changing subtly in ways we’d only managed to get right because of brute forcing repetition with the Pillar’s processing.

As it came back out, it hit the palace and rolled down the walls, sticking in an unusual way that I recognized from Belial’s corruption mechanism as it streaked along the whole domain like an endless tide, following the prepared routes and slamming into the walls of the Domain itself, bound to the specific formation we’d needed by the change in nature.

The flames hit the walls of my Domain, the very edges of my soul, and I dropped to my knees with a groan as I felt something within me shake and tremble. My Domain began to expand, slowly, painfully. Like a stretch that goes too far but doesn’t stop. I felt like I was being torn apart, but I ignored it, gritting my teeth and focusing.

This was the only way it worked. Through thousands of iterations and potential failures, this was the one that gave the result I wanted. No modifier, just pure expansion, the complete integration of this power into the bedrock of my Domain itself, preparing the way for my to continue to expand indefinitely. This template would do one thing and do it well. This. Exactly what I was experiencing now.

It went on for what felt like hours, and by the time it ended, I was curled up on the ground panting, but I was alive. It was done, safely and carefully (for me) and I sent the others to check the results.

Thirty three miles. A ten percent increase. Naturally, it wouldn’t be that simple every time, but I could continue to expand it slowly by practicing the Body Refining Technique. It was a unique advantage no one else had, and one that I had envisioned a thousand times as I worked tirelessly to get here.

Lying there on my back inside my Domain, head pounding from the effort and soul burning from the strain, I threw my head back and started to laugh hysterically. This was the kind of shit I lived for. I just hoped that learning what I was actually DOING wouldn’t take all the fun out of my crazy experiments. Either way, today had been a big step. Tomorrow would be another, as I figured out how the hell to get the credits I needed for the next step in this insane plan.