ProbablyATurnip

CH1090 (Patreon)

Published:

2026-06-09 12:20:59

Edited:

2026-07-21 16:09:41

Imported:

2026-06

Content

The failsafe Ben had created didn’t activate. More accurately, it couldn’t. What Ben had built beneath his god’s church was in essence a gate, one that was meant to connect to a far deeper layer of reality than something like the world’s network would ever touch, and while he hadn’t been able to test it at the time, so fresh off of someone else opening a gate to hell on the world, when he looked back at how he’d designed it compared to how he’d grown since, he was still certain it should have worked. There was nothing wrong with the design itself, meaning the issue came from elsewhere, Ben already having a guess as to what.

If the key wasn’t connecting, sending the signal it needed to join the two spaces, then that meant that the issue was likely a matter of where he currently was. That, despite all he’d prepared, the unknown factor of trying to reach the mortal plane from hell instead of the reverse created an extra level of challenge that he couldn’t overcome, trapping him in there.

Trapping me for now, he told himself, refusing to be a defeatist about it. I can access mana, which means I have tools to work with. First things first, I just need to make sure I don’t risk running out while I’m busy trying to keep myself alive.

Since Ben had been fractured with his rings, that meant he still had all of them and their contents to work with, letting him pull out and shape the pounds of rainbow mana crystal each one of him would have access to, making bands of the stuff around his arms and filling them with souls to start absorbing mana as well. If he was going to be there for long, then he needed all the power he could get as he began overfilling his soul in preparation for everything that was to come.

Even with all he’d been through, the infinite hells were strange to him. His mind was split across all of those bodies, yet still undeniably linked, and his soul was the same. Each one didn’t have its own mana pool, they were all pulling from the same source, and yet, each individual Ben was able to stretch his soul out to its normal limits, the action bringing with it swaths of information as they explored the void around them.

With results that couldn’t help but capture his interest. All around him were souls; it didn’t seem like there were any other outsiders to be found down there, but they didn’t all share the same space. Other souls, farther from him were also fractured beyond his range, letting him experience reality beyond his limits as well once he took over their unusable minds with his own, the omnipotence he normally felt when stretching out his soul now all the greater for the seemingly endless span he could cover. He didn’t have all of hell in his range; he had no way to tell just how large it truly was, but in that moment, Ben was existing at a scale incomparable to anything else in reality as he knew it.

Stranger still were the places his soul crossed over itself, experiencing the same segments of hell multiple times and increasing the depth of his alien sense, showing it was possible to enter what should have been different fragments without any issue. It all felt unnatural, and yet, in the time he’d been there, Ben was beginning to understand it.

Compared to learning how to think in more than three spatial dimensions, this really isn’t much, he told himself. Hell, there’s probably a few good ways to exploit this effect too, but for now, I’m still sore, so I need to figure out how to get out of here.

As he overfilled his soul, Ben used the mana to change the church he was dropped in, each instance of it being remade into an air-tight container to free him from the cramped confines of his actualization and let him float within a larger vessel, the void he was trapped in lacking anything to provide a meaningful source of gravity.

A fact all the more depressing, given he would have liked nothing more than to be able to walk and pace as he went over his options, finding them to be few. If going up from hell was substantially different from going down, then trapped as he was, all he could do was experiment until he broke through, either making a new tool that would connect to the gate he already had ready and waiting above, or else something that would punch a hole through what divided those planes itself.

Which should be possible, and, well, it’s not like I don’t have time.

He could make air, food, and water with his mana, since he’s already made more souls to steal from and had others already with him sentenced to the same fate, he would have no issue stealing mana to sustain every instance of himself, and since he didn’t need sleep, he had all the time he could want to work on a way out. Really, the only limiting factor in the long run would be his body atrophying under the lack of gravity, but that would be at the very least weeks away before he’d start suffering any major complications from such a thing, and perhaps even longer, given all the changes that had happened to his body since arriving in that world.

And, more than any potential time limit, he now had manpower like never before. Every body he had was connected and could be controlled in a way that others who shared his fate could never replicate, meaning he had well over a million selves to act with, building and enchanting until he made his way out. He’d need to pull practically endless quantities of mana into himself from every soul he could reach for all of the materializing he’d need to do, but so what? Overfilling his soul had long since become a fact of life; the pain it brought was something to be ignored, and with nothing else to do, he got started, forming and testing theories to see if any would stick.

Mmh, okay. Not good.

It had only been an hour since he’d started in earnest, but that was an hour where every option he had come up with had been explored. Tens of millions of designs made and tested in that time across every instance of himself, be they subtle modifications of the key meant to link to his gateway to grander projects of making a gate down below to open a different path, yet so far, all of them failed.

He had weeks before he’d need to start worrying about how it was going to affect his health, of course, likely far longer in reality, yet no amount of time would fix a fundamental difference in how going up that layer of reality might be against going down. There was a chance it would require constant, dedicated research, building tools and straining his senses to learn all he could. Above, gates were a well-researched topic by mortals and gods alike. He understood how they interacted with the mortal plane. In hell, it was entirely unstudied. He’d be working from scratch, trying to model that lower level of the universe.

But if I have to do that, at least one of me can pursue some different options.

Research didn’t always yield results from focusing on the problem, after all. Discoveries were just as often made by looking at a different topic and exploring the findings to be had in a different area, so with that, while most Bens continued on, two of them used their mana to move the churches they were confined in through the void, piloting them towards each other until eventually, they met.

Touching with a light clink, both Bens merged one with the other with their mana and, with a mind full of curiosity, opened a hole between the newly conjoined buildings to see the other him. Not a clone, like he so often worked through, but instead his actual body across from him, accessible only due to the strange nature of that lower realm.

Both moved together at once, meeting in the middle with their souls already overlapped, and both reached out their hands, touching the other to see what happened.

“Nothing,” they said in one disappointed voice. “Hmm, was kind of hoping that we’d re-merge into one guy, but… well, nothing bad happened either, so at least these instances of myself didn’t die brutally.”

And even if he failed, it wasn’t like there weren’t other things he could still test, leaving him to poke and prod at himself for a bit before trying something else. One retracted his soul while the other tried to take him over, eyes widening as he did.

Now this at least is interesting. Just not immediately useful.

Taking himself over was a bit hard to define, given they were all still linked, but Ben had done something he hadn’t needed to bother with since before he had gained deep connection. He was touching his copy, and through that, his soul settled into it in a way it hadn’t ever before when there was ever any distance between him and the flesh he connected to, letting him expand his soul out of the other body as if it were the source of it.

He hadn’t transferred his soul over to it though; he was still confined to his original flesh, or as much as he could call it that in its current state. If he pulled away, the soul would slip back into its original source, but the fact that such a use of soulcraft made the center of his soul a different vessel immediately sparked his imagination, as different applications of how that might be used came to the front of his mind.

Assuming it also works up above. If it can only be done down here, then that’s a bit of a dead end if I ever escape, but… I’ve connected to others I’ve touched in the mortal realm since getting soulcraft without finding I could do this, but I haven’t connected to one of my clones or anything without a soul while touching them, in which case…

He pulled a clone from his ring and took its hand, forming a connection with it and feeling the same thing take place. The center of where his outstretched soul sat moved to it instead and left a grin to spread across his face.

“Interesting. The nature of my skill might be treating all of the instances of myself the same way it does any homunculus since, as weird as it is, we still technically have one linked soul, so up above, I might be able to still shift the position of my soul slightly, and with a decent enough space mage, I could think of a lot of different ways I could use that, but none that actually help with the current situation. Okay, next attempt then.”

One he felt had promise. The fact that two different instances of himself could be together meant that more could as well, and with that, other Bens stopped their experiments as well, joining the first two to see if a result found far earlier would scale.

Crossing souls increased the depth of alien sense, a skill that gave him a weaker version of the senses of the creatures he connected to, and even at its ninth level, it still didn’t match the power that the originals held, which still wasn’t much of a loss for him. What it lacked in power, it made up for in depth, with all of the senses the world over creating a general awareness around him that, when combined with soulcraft, made for an extraordinary power. If crossing souls continued to increase the depth of that skill though, then it would create new options he hadn’t had before, with each other Ben he met proving the trend would continue.

That success made the rest of them finish up the last of their experiments to join them as well as their numbers grew, from hundreds to thousands to ten thousands as the churches each one sailed were reshaped, going back to be more akin to the coffins he'd first actualized to make sure more and more Bens could cross over in range, creating a point within the mass of soul overlap that would experience the greatest possible benefit of that strengthening effect.

A hundred stacked easily beat what the holders of any of the original senses Ben had made his own would feel in the majority of cases, and a thousand beat what everyone would. Ten thousand and he imagined that the way he was perceiving reality in the overlap to be at least the level of a contender for any sense skill, and at one hundred thousand, he imagined it was enough to beat the way any god in their prime could observe reality.

At a million, comparison was no longer possible. Even in that lightless void, he could see that realm in a way that had to be verging on the quantum aspects of that reality, and when it came to the soul senses he’d developed himself, as well as those he’d claimed aspects of from connecting to the soul mages, the soul spirits, Mora, and even the gods, and it let him see a previously hidden world of depth within his own soul that forced him to not only materialize new ones for him to explore, but also left him to control and drag over other prisoners of that plane to examine, too wrapped in their own suffering to notice him.

But even at a million, there were more Bens still to come as another hundred thousand joined; then two, then three, and kept coming until every Ben was in the same space, shoulder to shoulder, head to foot, stacked on top of one another as tightly as they could to ensure that at the center of it all, every Ben could cross over with every other to at least some extent, leaving them to revel in the sense of observation it left.

In that realm, he had been split exactly 1,864,592 times, and as their alien senses combined and merged, building on each other in a way that no mortal or god had ever experienced before, Ben felt unstoppable. If the fourth tier were possible to achieve in that reality then what he was experiencing had to be within its middle levels as he let himself delay in his revenge against the gods who trapped him to materialize, looking at everything he could make. The particles that made up the particles that made up ordinary matter were plain before him, and the way mana could change an atom to make a magic material was laid clear. Materialization was built upon the knowledge one held, and now Ben understood matter and souls in a way nothing else in the universe would. He took it all in, growing as much as he could from the experience before he ended.

He’d spent entire minutes in research and rapture, but minutes to him would be an eternity to others and, once he’d gotten all he could, that let him plot his escape.

After all, for every sense he held, he possessed far stranger ones too that existed under the umbrella of his alien sense. The way reality was perceived by the space spirits and their great one, Ogilt; holders of high space affinities who’d managed to get access to ‘space sense’ and other, similar skills, and a few others found in the world with some manner to sense the fabric that made it up. Thanks to them, he was feeling the fabric of reality in a way that not even the great spirit or gods that ruled over it could, but there was one more in the mix who gave him what he really needed.

Dewdrop, the lazy scrungle in his home that had decided it preferred pethood to the thought of being a person as soon as it had encountered the concept, was a being that had felt the walls and the limits of its reality and smashed through them with what seemed like willpower alone, yet even it hadn’t been able to escape the hells it had been trapped in, the fractured nature of it disorienting even an outsider, but Ben had grown far beyond the strangest member of his family. The same senses that had let it smash through its universe, he was currently experiencing at at least the fourth tier, and with them and the space senses native to that universe in tandem, he did the only thing he thought had a chance. Every instance of him held their necklace, the key out of hell, and ran their mana through it, while only the few in the center of it all, feeling their overlapping understanding of reality at that point, were able to do otherwise.

Each of them at the core of the swarm pulled back their arms and, as one, punched, feeling space as they did it and seeing the way it moved before they did it again. Smoother, more accurately, getting a sense of how their bodies would interact with it before doing it again and again and again until, shocking him even when he aimed for that very result, he felt his fist strike something.

Just like Dewdrop had billions of years ago, Ben had touched reality and, succeeding there, kept going, continuing to strike, harder and harder and harder, feeling his knuckles bleed against the void itself until, suddenly, he no longer needed to. Small cracks appeared at the impact point, and that was enough. The hole made, his key sent its signal through, activating the gate waiting on the other side as space itself crumbled before him, letting Ben step through.