182 A God Of Change (1/2)
I found myself facing Geoffrey and my fungoid children. I had a neutral expression on my face, and after a moment of introspective thinking reverted my face back to a smile. I gazed at the creatures in front of me, and did my best to appear happy. Not that it was necessary to try particularly hard to deceive them, through ”Absolute empathy” I knew they believed me whole-heartedly.
They were all simple-minded creatures, which made them handy for me and my purposes. I wasn't unhappy that they were unintelligent, in a sense they reminded me of ”training wheels”, objects that humans put on bikes to help children become able to use them effectively before they have the coordination needed to take them off and steer and use bikes properly. By using them intelligently I'd become better at pretending to be a god of goodness and law, and thus be able to fool more intelligent people more easily in the future. And I planned to fool this entire world.
After a while, they recovered from their awe at my false revelations and opted to begin to work on their fields. Geoffrey quietly accepted my gift, and as I watched him supervise the work done by the creatures I watched him begin to relax. The fungal folks knew what they were doing and were able to effectively help him in simple tasks without any instructions aside from him telling them what things he needed done. It was nice to see that they were that intelligent, at least.
While I watched them I began to focus on my own powers. Specifically, my elemental abilities, all of which were second-tier thanks to the fact that I was an elemental overlord. The moment I had become an elemental overlord I essentially received a free upgrade to my elemental powers, but I hadn't really focused on the powers themselves aside from the ones I had gained power over specifically due to the fact that I was an elemental overlord. Now I was truly correcting that.
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[Earth subdomain passive powers:
Absorption: You can absorb things like sand, metals, crystals, and even the very earth itself. Doing so allows you to heal yourself, empower your attacks, or even store things and then expel them elsewhere.
Adaptation: You can alter living creatures so that they can survive in any earthly environment.
Auras: You gain auras of earth, crystals, and metals. These auras cause their respective things to form spontaneously around you, and to make you harder to approach.
Crystallization: You can transform something, or someone, into crystals. Crystals are homogeneous solid substances that have a natural geometrically regular form with symmetrically arranged plane faces. If you want this effect to kill them, it can and will, but if you want them to be made into statues or even into living creatures composed of crystals that could work too.
Crystal form: You can take on a crystal form. An example of this is that this form allows you to make a diamond-form for yourself, diamonds being considered highly valuable to humans and to other sapient species who value artwork and crystals.
Destruction: This synergistic power takes from the domain of destruction and mixes it with the earth subdomain. Allows you to break earth, metal, and other earthen things without fail unless they are divinely protected. This also allows your destruction powers to work on entities comprised of the earth, such as different types of earth elementals. Using destruction powers on them kills them.
Earth embodiment: Grant yourself a form made entirely of earth. Useful for creating personas.
Earth healing: You can heal things that are made up of earth or things like metal, crystals, sand, and other earthen things without fail.
Erosion: This power mixes destruction, water, chaos, time, air, and earth to allow you to manipulate the processes of both erosion and weathering. This allows you to erode things and cause them to break apart more easily.
Exoskeleton: You can form exoskeletons from the earthen things you can manipulate.
Metal generation: You can generate metals, both in ore-form or pre-extracted such as generating copper instead of generating sulfide ore.
Metal manipulation: You can alter and transform metals however you wish. You can also transform living creatures made of flesh, skin, and bone, into loyal and metallic construct-like entities that serve you however you wish.
Metal form: You can gift yourself a metallic form at will. This allows you to give yourself a body made of gold or titanium if you ever want one.
Solidification: You can solidify unsolid things and even creatures. This means that you can make incorporeal creatures corporeal, and also that you can solidify gases, plasmas, and liquids.]
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As I finished reading through the entry on earth I felt... more solid than ever. Reading through it took a few minutes, but in doing so I gained a much better understanding of my powers over the earth itself and I felt more appreciative of them than I ever had. They were nicely diverse, and with them I could do a number of things.
If I wanted too I could effectively create forcefields by solidifying oxygen and other gases, forming impenetrable walls that could stop bullets and even tanks. I could create sinkholes by skillfully eroding certain areas until they weren't able to support buildings, statues, or even people. I could also petrify people and turn them into statues made of gold or diamonds.
As I thought about that, I quietly tried to alter my own form. I envision my arm becoming a solid object, one made of brilliant gold. And before my very eyes, it did. I watched as my sun-kissed skin became a gleaming metallic object that felt more solid than I had ever felt before. I grinned, wide-eyed, as this power overtook my limb, and I felt delighted that it did so.
With my current powers, I could create golems made of things like diamonds and use them to serve my creations or to act as enforcers of my will. These new powers afforded me considerable creativity in doing any sort of creation, and I positively loved that.
I reverted my arm back to its usual, fleshed-out state and chuckled as I did so. I continued to watch the work done by my servants for a little while, before finally allowing my mind to wander. It took me perhaps an hour to come up with the next phase of my scheme. And when I did I finally left the farm, as the sun was starting a slow descent back below the horizon.
As I left the farm of my first Htraeian servant I reached into my mind and learned more about the other elemental powers at my disposal. All of them brought different kinds of smiles to my face.
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