216 Learning And Power Creation (1/2)
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[Alert: Transference of Power
The actions of the deity Althos have resulted in the reactivation of Gamma - 0329, the dungeon-master of this city. The dungeon master has retrieved the dungeon-core and is making his way back aboveground. His intentions are clear: he plans to give the core, and power over the city, to Althos.]
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I grinned when I read through the notification. It meant that I had won, or rather earned at least a significant victory. One of the things I needed to do to learn about the history of Infernius was take over three dungeons, and with this, I had basically taken over the first of the city-dungeons and thus earned the first notch on my belt.
I took a moment to admire the city, relaxing for the first time since I had arrived here. The city, even covered in ash was quite pretty. It was also quite quiet and a not small part of me wondered how I'd be able to permanently rid the streets of ash. I had the ability to manipulate ash, but even I was unsure of how to prevent further ash from falling on the city.
I could easily gather all of the ash into a single massive sphere and then deposit it outside of the city, but I had no ability to create barriers that would actually keep out all future ash. It was annoying. But for now, I stayed patient. And I began to think about something. Life.
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One of the things I well and truly wanted to lord over was life. I had always had an affinity for life in its myriad forms and this affected me as a deity in various ways.
The first way that it affected me was my particular brand of relative nonviolence. I had a strange attitude towards violence: I wasn't fond of it. I was willing to commit acts of violence, in exchange for acquiring more power, if it meant freeing slaves, to see how my powers affected lifeforms, and if I needed too to protect my own servants, but I tended to not commit acts of violence randomly. This was because of the value I placed on life.
I suspected that some of my more unusual abilities were due to my general fondness for life. One of the biggest ones I suspected this was the case for was my ”False Resurrection” power, an extremely handy resurrection ability I possessed that allowed me to bring the dead back to life but with a subtle alteration: they come back changed. People I resurrected in this fashion were brought back to life but they returned to life as evil creatures.
This was a potent power of mine that I had already used to significant effect in the past. After thinking about it for a moment, I closed my eyes and created a number of powerful resurrection-based abilities.
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[New Power(s) Creation:
Changed Resurrection: You can modify someone's total alignment when resurrecting them. This means that you can do more than just change their good or evil, or lawful or chaotic alignment you can now change both.
Virtuous Resurrection: You can infuse someone with a shard of holy energy when you resurrect them. This energy makes them loyal to you and alters their souls so as to be suitable for a religious class.
Ordered Resurrection: This power twists a soul by infusing it with order energy. When someone is resurrected in this manner they become lawful worshipers of yours who acknowledge you as the ultimate law-giver. This power, at your current level of influence, cannot turn chaotic extraplanar entities lawful.
Spontaneous Resurrection: This power infuses a soul with chaotic energy as it is resurrected. This resurrection transforms those who are resurrected by it into chaotic worshipers of yours. This power, at your current level of influence, cannot turn lawful extraplanar entities chaotic.
Maddening Resurrection: This power brings someone back from the dead, but at the cost of their sanity. They become insane cultists of yours, fit to be used as fodder for transformation into abominations, or for other plots and schemes.
Fungal Resurrection: With this power you can resurrect people by infusing them with your parasitic spores. This comes with the other effects of infecting someone with parasitic spores.
Loving Resurrection: By using this you can resurrect someone and upon returning to life they fall in love intensely with you.
Ambient Soul Detection: You can detect the souls of deceased extraplanar entities. This allows you to target extraplanar entities and resurrect them more easily.]
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I now possessed far more resurrection based abilities than I had previously. And I intended to use that power. While I waited for the robotic dungeon master of the city to appear with my prize I closed my eyes, felt my not-so-mini-map fill my vision, and activated ”Ambient Soul Detection”. I was going to bring this city back to life as soon as I was the dungeon master.
From behind closed eyes I focused on my immediate surroundings and grinned as I began to detect the souls left behind by the devils who once lived here. This was a devilish city after all, and any corpses left behind by the devils had long rotted away but their souls hadn't. I silently took mental notes on the sorts of devilish sorts I detected.
Unsurprisingly a wide variety of devils once occupied the city. I could detect every kind of devil from the lowliest soul-orbs, creatures so weak they might as well not have been creatures at all, to a particularly powerful trio of devils, one of who was a vizier devil, and two of whom were blitzkrieg devils. I had a basic awareness of the infernal hierarchy, the social structure that governed devilish society and I knew that vizier and blitzkrieg devils were especially powerful and high-ranking devils.
The city had an equal population of lesser and intermediate devils and a small population of greater devils who in all likelihood served as an upper class. I didn't sense any souls of the strange ”true-devils”, a ranking that apparently existed between the so-called infernal hierarchy and the most powerful devils of all: arch-devils. In all honesty, I was a bit disappointed to not sense of them, I would have liked to resurrect such a powerful or at least unique creature.