Chapter 215

Luke just stared blankly at System. “What does that mean?” he finally asked after the apparition remained silent.

“In the short term, the entity imprisoned in the God Machine will consume all life on Aros in order to regain its lost divinity. After that, it will chase after the fleeing gods, leaving behind a world devoid of humans, animals, or monsters.”

“Oh. So, that’s bad. Why is this happening?”

“It is one part the system itself being overloaded with the excess divinity poured in after the aberration managed to bring Zixin to Aros to be devoured by the God Machine. In one part, it is my fault for stressing an already weakened system further making changes on your behalf.”

Luke grimaced. Of course the system was collapsing because of all the shit they’d done. It had functioned just fine for thousands of years, and not twenty minutes after he arrived, it had all gone to hell. But really, it was all Hestoc’s fault. If it had just been Luke, he’d have updated his status to have what he needed to bring his family back, something that was well within the abilities of the God Machine to provide.

Then again, without Hestoc, he couldn’t get Zea back. But on the other, other hand, he wasn’t going to be getting anyone back if the trapped god inside broke free and killed everyone and everything on the planet with so much as a single point of XP. That was basically everything except the plants, and maybe not even some of those.

“Okay, first thing’s first. We can siphon off some of the excess divinity, right? Just bump my level up, and I’ll have a whole bunch of it,” Luke said. “No, wait. Two stages. First, give me [XP Cycle], but modify it to fire continually, every second. Or faster, if you think I’ll need it. Then just dump tons of XP into me. I don’t have a level cap, right?”

“That is correct,” System said. “Your proposed solution will only slow down the prisoner’s escape. It has already breached confinement and will still free itself completely in time.”

“Right. Uh… Okay. But this gives us time to come up with a better solution?” Luke asked.

“It does. I am not able to calculate how much time, however.”

“Anything’s better than nothing. Let’s do it.”

“I have modified [XP Cycle] per your directions and added it to your status. It is now activating fourteen times per second, and I am prepared to decrease the cycle delay further if necessary. Beginning XP dump and muting your notifications for the next three seconds.”

It hit Luke like a Zixin on steroids. Even without a hurricane of dings, Luke could feel a huge chunk of divine essence pour into him. It recognized itself, bonded with the divinity he was already holding, and it was hungry for more. An instant later, it started to break apart and flow out, only to be replaced with different chunks of divinity at the same time.

“Decreasing cycle time,” System said, and the divinity flowed through him faster.

Luke checked his status, just to see the numbers.

[Name: Luke Bennet]
[Level: 1000]
[XP:1346888597254]
[AP: 499276]

“Oh God, that’s way too much. I can feel it eating away at me. Tell me this was enough to stabilize things.”

“For the time being.”

“So how do we fix this all the way?” Luke asked. “Who can stuff this god back in its prison?”

“No one,” System answered. “The gods can’t approach the God Machine itself without their own divinity being consumed, and no one else has the ability to do it.”

“There has to be some way,” Luke insisted.

“I assure you, there is not.”

“What about the demons?” Luke asked. “They’re immune to all this system stuff, right?”

“It would be more apt to describe them as invisible to the system, though I do not quite understand the principles behind how it works. Part of that invisibility makes it impossible for me to interact with them.”

“Okay, well, I can interact with them. Can you just look through me? Like, I’ve got half a million AP here. If I pumped my perception up to a thousand, could you see through me and use the demons somehow?”

“I… I do not know. I am sorry, Luke Bennet. None of this was my intention in bringing you here.”

Luke pulled up short at that. “Careful there. You almost sounded human.”

“Yes, almost.”

There was a bitterness in System’s voice. Whatever he’d done had changed him, and Luke couldn’t tell if that was a good thing or not. Maybe System was having some sort of identity crisis now, but if so, he needed to put a pin in that until they’d figured out how to resolve the current issue.

“Okay, well, it’s not going to hurt anything to try it, right? Uh, but first, give me any and every skill there is to help with spotting things, processing information, interpreting what I’m seeing, shit like that. This would be a bad time to go comatose just from looking at the God Machine with 1000 perception.”

“Are you sure about this?” System asked. “This is the path to becoming a god.”

“It is?” Luke’s eyebrows shot up as he considered that. “It’s like… only step one though, right? I can do this and still go back to normal using the command console after.”

“If your idea works,” System agreed. “Otherwise there will be no God Machine to make changes at.”

“Fuuuuuuck. Uh, what about refining my bloodline to the maximum? The only reason I needed to be here at this space was because I didn’t have the purity my great great grandfather or whoever it was had, right? But we could change that here.”

“That is correct, but again, with no God Machine, the system itself will collapse. At that point, you will just be a mortal holding far, far too much divine essence for there to be any chance of the prisoner not noticing you.”

“Well, yeah, but according to you, there was no chance of that anyway.”

“That… is true,” System said. “Very well. I am altering your status to purify your bloodline to its maximum potential. Prepare for imminent skill dump. This will take some time to process.”

“Not too much?” Luke asked. “We don’t need this trapped god escaping while I stand here drooling and staring at nothing.”

“Unless something drastically changes, we should be able to complete this alteration with plenty of time to spare,” System said.

Luke took a deep breath and slowly let it out through his nose. This shit he was doing was so far above his pay grade that he had no idea if he was making smart choices or just grabbing at the first half-assed idea that came to mind. Not for the first time, he missed Zea, the real Zea, not that cheap trauma-dig Zixin had shown him. She wouldn’t have known what to do either, not in a situation like this, but at least they’d have been in it together.

“Okay, do it,” Luke told System.

His last thought was that it felt like someone had strung his brain up like a punching bag and then called his buddies over to take turns beating on it.

* * *

When Luke regained consciousness again, there was a single system notification in front of him. He glanced at it briefly, puzzled by the fact that he could see into the notification, see the inner working of the system behind it. If he’d wanted to, he could trace it backwards to its origin.

[You have merged 7425 skills into a single skill. You have gained the Omniscience skill.]

“Seven thousand… That’s a lot,” Luke said, stunned.

“Forgive me, I took some liberties. In order to provide the most powerful skill for what you are attempting to accomplish, I needed to include other skills that weren’t strictly useful for sensory processing but were still part of the prerequisites. You’ll find that many, many of those skills fell into the crafting category.”

Now that Luke thought about it, he realized System was exactly correct. He could look around at the God Machine now and not be overwhelmed. Instead, he saw everything and he knew it. He knew what it was. He knew how it was made. He knew how much it cost, and where to find it. He knew what it was used for and why it worked the way it did.

And that took away a lot of the overwhelming nature of the God Machine. It was still beautiful, still a masterwork collaboration of half a dozen gods, but now Luke understood it. And just by looking around, he could see where it was starting to break. Divine essence leaked out of panels like they were old rusty pipes that had burst a rivet. The complex circuitry embedded into the floor in hundreds of layers was popping and snapping as connections failed.

They couldn’t fix this, not with a prisoner already inside. If the prison had been empty, repairs would have been possible, but it was far past that point. It was no wonder System had despaired of finding a solution. All Luke had done was relieve some of the pressure by taking what was to any mortal a huge chunk of XP, but which was a relatively small portion of the entirety of the God Machine.

If they couldn’t set it back to the way it had been before, then the only way forward was to make something new. And he had the perfect material in mind. A prison to hold divine essence was best constructed out of something that was its very anathema: demonic essence. All Luke needed to do was collect it and forge it into something that would function as a patch. It wouldn’t be a permanent solution, not as crude as he was planning, but it would give them months at minimum to fix things for real.

“Alright, I need some magic,” Luke said, but even as the words left his mouth, he found he already knew it. Those skills had been rolled into [Omniscience] as well. It was a simple act to teleport himself five miles straight up. The world spread out beneath him, or at least vast portions of one half of it did, and with 1000 perception, he could see so many people struggling, fighting for their lives against demons or monsters or their fellow humans.

With a thought, Luke spent some of his half a million AP to increase his stamina to 1000 as well. This was going to be exhausting work, and he didn’t want to stop for breaks because of pesky annoyances like needing to sleep every few weeks. Hopefully, one or more of the skills that had been rolled into [Omniscience] would help with the mental fatigue. He’d seen enough of them on other people, things like [Iron Will] or [Mental Fortitude].

Once he thought about it, Luke knew he was right. There were actually seventy-two different skills that would aid him in keeping his mind on task in one way or another, though there were also another forty-five skills that could help but hadn’t been prerequisites for [Omniscience]. Luke did not take them, not with him already skirting the line of becoming a god. He was no more immune to the God Machine than the real gods of the Pantheon, and if he crossed that threshold, it would devour his divinity and leave him a mortal, just like it had done to Zixin.

Luke began casting the spells that would tear the demons away from their rampages, their slaughters, and their feasts. Hundreds of them appeared on the plains below him, and the dragons living in the mountains reared up in sudden alarm. Their fear, while understandable, wasn’t justified. Luke’s theory about being able to use the system to interact with demons as long as he was the one doing it had been correct.

Besides, he was about to start harvesting them anyway. One way or another, those demons weren’t long for this world.