Chaotic Craftsman Worships The Cube-CH1027
<ELDRITCH MIND LEVEL INCREASED>
In his mindscape, Ben gasped, feeling the final pieces of his fractured psyche fall back into place.
For what felt like months, he’d been rebuilding his mind from the fragments that remained, trying to make himself whole after dividing into something more akin to what he was before his third tier awakening; millions upon millions of individual minds, all linked to one being.
But that link had been tenuous, and those minds had been scrambled, made worse for all of the memories he held. He’d been in the minds of most of the planet by that point, having peered into at least a portion of their memories, and all of those he’d gotten to experience through his eyes, becoming his memories as well. And not just from them either; he’d done it for all of the life he’d encountered, from the smallest insect to the grandest forest, all of it together becoming part of the entity known as Ben.
It had meant becoming millions of different people, most of them themselves mad as a result of the collections of memories they held without rhyme or reason, while the parts that had enough sense slowly went out and accumulated more, growing into a greater whole as stray fragments were collected, the collectors themselves were eventually consumed, reunifying into his proper self.
And that’s not even the worst part, he thought as he looked into the distance, the one thing he hadn’t had to reabsorb by virtue of the fact that it had never been him. The outsider, and just what it had done to his mind.
As with every being he connected to, that one had imprinted on him but, as expected, it had yielded the greatest effect. While he hadn’t gotten to explore the beast yet, too focused on fixing himself, Ben could tell that a sense for space, unlike even what the great space spirit held, had been incorporated into his alien sense, along with something else. A mind that could think in more than three dimensions.
This feels like… six. This outsider was a thing meant to live in six-dimensional space.
He briefly wondered at how it was even possible for that particular mental change to imprint on him before getting his answer just as fast, or at least his best guess at one. Souls were essentially a multiversal constant, at least as far as anything that could be called life went, and if Quilith was to be believed, life could arise in realities far stranger than just those with a few extra spatial dimensions, meaning that souls, while acting as records for a lived experience, did that independently of the reality they were in. Ben, as someone who thought with his soul, had to have been experiencing it model a mind that wanted to exist in six-dimensional space, merging it into the three-dimensional monstrosity he’d composed from all the life he’d touched into something new and unfathomable.
Eldritch really is growing to fit more and more each day, he thought as he examined himself, feeling the new structure incorporate with not only the rest of the changes, but specifically those changes that had come with child of chaos on a deeper level. With this… I’d need to see more examples, but combine the change in structure with two new levels to my mind and I might be able to leave some gods either insane or crippled if I exposed them to it. Myriad could probably handle it, so could some of the mind gods I’ve examined, but it would still be an unpleasant experience.
It did make his mind a bit more potent of a weapon though, a benefit to be had at the very least, even if he was left trying to unravel his new mode of thought, sticking with familiar mental patterns at first while he slowly explored the rest, with that being a priority, even if he was taking his time. His goal in all of that had failed, obviously so, with deep connection still trapped in its current form, but while he’d gained two levels to eldritch mind, a new task had come to him. Deciphering the thoughts of the beast that had snuck into that reality.
He was able to pull the totality of its mental structure into his mindscape at least but deciphering the thought patterns of a creature like that was like nothing he’d ever done before, basically entirely divorced from his regular mind reading for just how alien the mind was. Since he’d now adapted to it, reading its thoughts likely wouldn’t hurt him too much, and it was the only example of a creature of the chaos he could access. Without knowing what it might have lived through, he could at least let himself hope that there’d be something semi-useful in its head, and with that goal he began, letting the time slip by.
“Damn it.”
From his perspective, fully adapting to his new mental structure had taken weeks before he was comfortably thinking using higher-dimensional thought patterns, and from there, weeks longer to comb through the outsider’s memories.
There was no avoiding that though; ancient didn’t properly convey just how old it was. A thing, a person, that had been born with its home reality, making up the totality of all it had known until it had learned to perceive and interact with its spatial limits, after billions of years it had escaped to the chaos beyond, finding more than it had ever known before, but also pain. While not perfect, having nothing to compare against, Ben could roughly tell; the form he’d fought the creature in was not the one birthed by its universe, its shape warped and twisted by the chaos it had gone into, managing to adapt instead of die in the billions of more years that had followed, occasionally coming across more of the monsters within that primordial sea and perceiving them with its strange spatial sense, letting Ben construct models of thousands more such things before it had finally ended up trapped in that reality’s hell.
And as interesting as that all was, experiencing not only other outsiders, but also its original universe and all of the realities it had passed in its travels, there was nothing else of note. He’d hoped that there were discoveries to be made, and while he’d certainly be able to pore over some of the things he’d taken from the other’s mind for months and years to come, none of it was immediately useful. He found no secrets to the wider multiverse; he hadn’t even found anything between the walls of reality that might have been a community of some sort. Only an infinite void and the predators and prey it held.
Yet, that wasn’t what left him to curse. It was a disappointment to be sure, but at the same time, not entirely unexpected. No, the issue was that by reading its mind, Ben had come to know the thing he’d killed, no longer ignorant to what drove its actions.
The outsider was a person, there was no denying that. It wouldn’t have been bound to the system if it wasn’t, yet as it had thrashed about, destroying the world around it in its escape from hell, Ben hadn’t looked further. He’d seen a monster that’s mere existence was a threat to the planet, and while there was no denying the damage it could do, he hadn’t tried to understand the reason for that damage; the fear that had been driving it. 𝘧𝑟𝑒𝑒𝘸𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝓁.𝘤𝘰𝓂
When it had escaped its old reality, the first thing it had encountered was pain, and that had marked its existence in the chaos. It had found pain when it had tried to force its way into a different reality, found pain when it had encountered other outsiders, and found pain when it had trapped itself in the infinite hells.
Worse, with that pain was ignorance. In the reality it had been born to, it was entirely alone. From the other outsiders it had faced to the trapped souls of hell, and finally, the level of reality he and the rest of the world lived in, it had never once considered that it might be around other thinking beings. How could it? Its existence was marked by solitude and suffering, what room had there been for it to consider anything else?
It’s not like the forbidden gods, he groaned to himself, the knowledge meaning that he couldn’t use its semi-divine soul to train his skills on. It hadn’t meant to cause any of the harm it had. Fuck, what the hell do I do about this now?
