Chapter 344: Karmic Trickster

Aalam

“I am a magnificent bastard, manipulating the world around me while keeping to a strict set of personal rules.”

Aalam’s wife began speaking the words of her fifth oath on an A rank planet in one of the universes he had taken from the Collector, the two of them the only living beings in the entire universe.

“I am a classy cat-burgler, taking from those I judge evil to enrich myself via guile and artifice but never from those I deem moral.

“And I am an unenthusiastic executive, someone who doesn’t like to lead but will take charge whenever I feel I am the best suited to the job.”

Mila smiled slightly as she looked up at the planet’s violet sky.

“The unifying features of these three oaths are how I can’t help but want to change the world around me, how I always default to operating via social manipulation, and how I live by my own set of morals.”

Mila turned her eyes back to the world’s blue ocean, smiling to herself.

“I am someone whose power set revolves around twisting karmic bonds to my own desires. And I have that power set for a reason.

“It’s not because my teacher put me on the path when I was young, not because my husband helped empower me in other areas, enabling me to focus my energy on what would normally be utility skills. And it’s not because it’s the type of power I’m naturally good at.

“No, my path to power is built around manipulating karma and faith because it is the path I chose.

“My natural inclination is toward deceit and trickery as first reactions.

“Everyone close to me believes the divine role most suited for me is the divine role of the Trickster for a reason.

“And the limits I put on my power are all about requiring anyone I target to first make a choice so I can weigh their morality.

“I am a karmic trickster, a goddess who manipulates people into choices and then plans their fall or enables their rise depending on the result.”

A good chunk of the primal energy Mila had collected inside her soul began to transform, a chunk quite a bit larger than Aalam would expect for a normal oath, and Mila’s fifth oath quickly finished forming, both of them taking a look with the local version of the System that Aalam had already long taken control of.

Oath of the Karmic Trickster

You are a god who weighs the morals of those around you, manipulating them into choices and giving rewards and punishments based on the results

Benefits:

Increase the effectiveness of the Luck stat by 500%

Greatly increase control over all forms of energy

Exceptionally decrease the influences of soul defenses against your powers for anyone who makes a choice you’ve manipulated them into within the range of your senses

Limitations:

Punishing those you deem moral or rewarding those you deem sinful after your karmic tests will temporarily shackle your soul, the worse the deviation the worse the shackles and the longer they will last

“Awesome, Mila.” Aalam ran up and hugged his wife before throwing her into the air and then caught her as she allowed herself to fall back down. “Just awesome!”

He could feel how a weight had been lifted from her shoulders through their bond, and it felt good.

“Thank you. Thank you.” Mila bowed twice toward an imaginary audience when he put her back down. “I would like to thank my master for playing the role of trickster mentor for me to emulate. I would like to thank my husband for forcing me to support him at the start of our journey and then his unconditional support later. And, most important, I would like to thank myself for being amazing, and not at all prideful.”

Aalam whistled loudly and used several of his Laws to emulate the sound of cheering.

Then Mila moved forward and kissed him before putting her hands on his arms and moving back a step. “Now, do you want to see the treasure?”

“Hell, yes.” Aalam nodded quickly.

He’d deliberately not asked Mila anything after she’d used her powers to look through the Collector’s memories. Then he’d turned his sensory domain off since coming to the planet containing the most valuable pieces of the god’s hoard. And it was all so he could see the new resources he had to work with in person with his own eyes.

Flying a couple hundred kilometers away, Mila led him to a large cylindrical building, four kilometers tall with a fourteen kilometer diameter, the only structure on the entire A rank planet, and then they flew to the center of the building’s roof.

There Mila entered several codes into thirty seven different security arrays, using a perfect copy of the Collector’s own energy every time, and a small hole opened up, only about four meters in diameter, and they dropped down into it, Aalam immediately able to take in the building’s inside as they fell to the floor as the ceiling closed, landing on a large bed where Mila told him the Collector would usually sleep.

The bed was fascinating, incredibly comfortable and created using God and A rank materials to make it practically indestructible, but it was the least interesting thing in the entire giant room that took up the entire space of the building.

47 different resources and artifacts were floating on transparent platforms throughout the room, all incredibly high end, and all incredibly rare.

There was an A rank Chaos Dragon with fully maxed out stats, each scale and tooth pure black from absorbing all light and emitting none back, frozen in time right before its death from old age, the counterpart to the A rank Order Dragon Mila had traded for him back when they were E ranks. There was a Runic Dragon of the same rank and in the same position right before death, the runic inscriptions on its light blue scales amazing to see. And there was the death energy covered sword a long deceased undead elder god had used to strike the final blow that killed the Radiant Behemoth.

The first two Aalam was pretty sure he could make use of during his own racial advancement to A rank, but he’d expected them, already having taken them into account, so they were less interesting than the sword and other resources in the room.

There was a living elemental storm trapped in a crystal orb, useless for him but the perfect resource to create a God rank aura weapon for anyone practicing the Stormlord Rebirth cultivation technique. There was the preserved body of an A rank Soul Emperor, which would probably be useful. And there was even the preserved corpse of his master’s daughter, the second phoenix goddess of the Prime Material, her fiery-feathered body filled with holes from where multiple attacks had hit her.

Then there were over a dozen unique artifacts, a watch designed to keep perfect time anywhere in any universe over trillions of years, a spatial storage device holding a demiplane larger than most small size universes that Aalam was definitely going to put in his Personal Storage soulstructure, and, coolest of all given the unique runes involved in its creation, runes he wanted to study, a God rank pair of shears that would automatically remove the coat of any creature to get within ten meters of them, be that the outer layer of skin from a human or all the scales of a dragon.

The marvels went on and on.

Up in the upper south west corner, however, there was one preserved corpse that would make a massive difference to the power of the United Federation of Planets.

Human and unhealthily skinny, with pale skin and white hair, the body looked like a mortal slightly past the age of a hundred, and, unlike most of the preserved A rank corpses in the room, the body of Xara Valin, the Yin Yang Sage, ancestor of all humans from Earth, held no soul.

That soul instead was within Aalam’s Concentrated Soulbound Afterlife soulstructure, and it was time to revive her.

Bringing her preserved corpse into the Spirit Smith’s demiplane he carried around with him, he left the building and teleported to the other side of the planet with Mila, and there he took out a special machine he’d created after learning where the sage’s corpse could be found, one that looked kind of like a bacta tank from Star Wars, a large glass cylindrical container big enough to hold a human containing a special green liquid, and got to work.

He brought out Nana Xara’s preserved body and teleported it inside, the machine giving the body enough nutrients to survive a few extra minutes even with all its organs almost completely shut down. And then, after getting the woman’s consent, he transferred Nana Xara’s soul from his afterlife and into her body.

Not having much time, he then surrounded the machine with his aura, restraining all outside Laws even on the A rank planet, and started to feed Nana Xara a few dead gods’ worth of primal energy along with enough pure refined nascent energy to completely maximize all of her stats.

Meanwhile, Mila performed the most important action for enabling Nana Xara’s revival. She modified the woman’s karma so that, to Nana Xara’s soul, it looked like both Mila and Diana had already advanced to God rank, allowing Nana Xara to meet the requirements for her class advancement.

A couple minutes later, when her soul was almost ready to leave her body again, Aalam watched as Nana Xara infused her entire soul with her Law energy, easily transforming its nature with her six True Law level Laws, and the United Federation of Planets gained its first god.

Flesh created from the liquid in the tank added to the mass of her body, white hair fell out to be replaced by curly red-brown locks, and the cataracts in her eyes faded as she returned to how she must have looked in her twenties while all the green liquid in the machine disappeared.

Then the tank opened and Xara Valin, the Yin Yang Sage, Goddess of Plagues and Drama, walked out, covered by the same clothing she’d been wearing at the time of her death—a beige sweater, black pants, and a forest green vest. And she was rubbing her hands together, a look of glee on her face.

“Alright. I’m alive. So it’s time for a party. How about the two of you finally have that wedding you’ve been delaying?”