Sell you a Bridge chapter 285

June 14th 2016 The Street of Gods 12:00 AM EDT

The temple of Dagon was surprisingly homey. Sure, it was huge, but it was  somehow still down to earth. The walls were made of rough stone, all a  warm brown color that gave the feeling of earth and growing things. The  floors were comfortable black carpets, and at random spots crystals  stuck out of the walls, glowing a soft white that filled the hallways  with a dim glow without seeming to actually emanate from anywhere in  particular.

The man who met us at the entrance, Avery, was  a friendly old hippy in a roughspun brown robe, with long grey hair  intertwined with what looked like ivy and wildflowers, and a braided  beard that surrounded a welcoming, caring smile as he greeted us and  ushered us inside. He gave Eddie a warm hug, and then gave one to  Sindella as well, welcoming them both back and enthusiastically  recounting their visits before as he led the group into a receiving room  where he offered us all herbal tea served in handmade clay mugs and  sweetened with honey.

After the meeting he led us all to  our own rooms, small but comfortable square spaces with a single  comfortable cot set on one side, wishing us all goodnight and informing  us we were welcome to join him for breakfast. Once he left the girls  headed to sleep and I retreated into the Outer Body state, to finally  begin my training. Once again, I found myself standing in an endless  black expanse inside my own mind.

I sat down, closing my  eyes even in here as I let myself decompress. I needed a minute to  relax, to recover mentally. I had access to my full power in here at all  times, but the events of the past few hours had been stressful and  emotionally draining, so I decided to let myself calm down before I  started the obviously difficult task of forming a domain.

Domain  expansion. It was an...interesting concept. I hadn't considered it  before really. Why would I? Gojo hadn't even needed to use it in front  of me, and the idea of claiming a section of the world for myself was  kind of nuts without the context. Thinking about it though, it did make  sense. The world was made up of so many concepts, but some were more  important or powerful than others. The universe as a whole had different  amounts of each type of power in it, especially in different places.

My  concept, lies and falsehoods, existed everywhere, but it wasn't  supreme. It was just part of the world as a whole. A single thread in  the tapestry of life and magic and power. Domain expansion was something  different. It was creating a pocket of the world that belonged to you.  Not a place without any other concepts, but one where yours stands above  all others. It would enable someone to do things with their concept  they couldn't normally, because the other concepts in the world would be  working against them.

You could use the concept of heat  to light a fire, but the fire would eventually go out, because other  concepts worked against it. Inside a domain though, fire wouldn't be  hampered by anything else, only enhanced. Wood would cause it to burn  faster, but wouldn't be consumed, oxygen would act as fuel, but never  run out. Those were inexact examples, because they were physical, but  conceptual power was such an inexact thing that I struggled to actively  describe it. I just had to do the best I could. As long as it made sense  to me it was fine anyway.

In some ways, my current state  was actually ideal for forming a domain, because due to the recent  change from my ascension to godhood, several things about me were  technically untrue. I'd become the very lies that I told, and those were  factors that could play into what I could do, but it didn't change the  fact that I was missing one very important factor of Domain Expansion. I  didn't know what the fuck I wanted it to DO.

Domains were  important and personal things, and they had to be relevant to who you  were as a person. I wasn't sure how I knew that, but I did, in the same  way that I knew that a rose was red or a sunflower yellow. It was  just...obvious. I needed to make my power exert itself in a way that  complimented my fighting style and my very essence. The issue with that  was my power being so fucking generic.

Not in its essence  really, but in its execution. I just...changed shit. That wasn't unique  or special. It was powerful sure, but there was no real way to make that  more potent other than just doing it better, and that was the wrong  direction to go, I could feel it. Just trying to create a field where I  could warp reality better wouldn't work, and would in fact be  counterintuitive to my goals. So I needed to create a path that would  work for me, something that made sense with my combat style and the  abilities I had.

I began to think back over who I was. I  was a shadow, first and foremost. Edgy or not, I was something hard to  see, something that avoided detection. I was invisible, and intangible,  and empty as the void itself. I was a lie, in so many ways, so much of  the time. I focused on that aspect of myself, because it was important.  That had always been a factor of what I could do. When I was seemingly  there I really wasn't and when I wasn't there, I seemed to be. Deception  was baked into every cell of me.

But how could that be  something unique, something powerful? I reached out with my concept, and  instead of trying to lie to the world, I tried to make the world a lie.  It was an odd experience. There was very little theoretical difference  between what I was doing and what I usually did, but the practical was  worlds apart. It just FELT different, and I felt like that was good,  like it was the right path.

It occurred to me that I  hadn't lasted very long in my downtime, but I wasn't throwing away an  epiphany for the sake of a break I could always take later. It was  important to chase this revelation while I could, and try to learn as  much from my moment of clarity as possible. I was sure that these sorts  of periods of growth were far from common.

So I tried to  distill the nature of my powers, of myself, down to one aspect.  Misdirection and trickery was obvious, but there had to be other  elements I could draw inspiration from. Then I considered my most used  abilities. Aside from my armor, which wasn't really more than a weapon,  I'd always enjoyed mobility and multiplication. Creating copies and  avoiding conflict until I could land a decisive strike.

I  closed my eyes, reaching out to the world around me and telling it a  lie. When I opened them, I saw...me. Multiple versions of me, standing  there with me. I glanced around at them in consternation. They were  illusions. Not particularly impressive, even if they were nearly  seamless. I needed more. I attacked one of them, and as expected, my  blow passed right through it, but I wasn't completely helpless on my  next step. I focused on the lie of the illusion, and made it just that  little bit more convincing as I pushed it to attack me back.

I  spun and intercepted the attack, grinning ear to ear as the attack  legitimately caused an impact. That wasn't some knockoff like my clones.  It was me. Another me. It could only work for a moment, but I could do  it more than once. Within my domain there could be a second me, ready to  attack at any time from an angle my enemy would have previously  considered to be impossible.

Falling back a step, I  considered my new trick. It was powerful, especially since I was pretty  sure I could muster almost any attack from a copy without actually using  any energy, which was huge. But that wasn't enough. A domain was a game  changer, it was my own personal world. I needed more than just the  ability to make fiction truth, my epiphany from earlier was that my  combat style was pure deception. Truth was lie, and lie was truth. That  balance is what made it more than just a conjuration or a convincing  trick.

I pushed the copy to attack me again, changing the  lie to make it real as it did so, but instead of blocking, I reached out  with my power again. As I lied to the world to tell it the copy was  really me, I lied to it again to tell it I was an illusion. I grinned in  triumph as the attack passed right through me, unable to do any damage  at all to a simple image that had no physical form.

This  wasn't intangibility like I had as a ghost, though it was similar in  some ways. Some people could attack the intangible. No, for just a  second, I made myself a lie. A pure fiction that couldn't be touched. No  one I'd heard of had developed a method of attacking an illusion. Even  if they could, what the hell was the point of creating something like  that? Illusions were just false images made by magic, hurting them  accomplished nothing.

I could feel  in my bones that this was the right direction. This was my power at its  purest. This was my domain. But it wasn't done yet. This was the path I  needed, but it wasn't the finished product. I knew HOW I wanted my  domain to work, but I still needed to make the domain itself. A  technique wasn't a world. I extended my power, letting the lie seep into  the world around me, and created a dozen images of me. Then I conjured  up an enemy I could go all out against. Darkseid.

I  fought Darkseid with my copies and got crushed. Then I did it again.  And again. And again. Gojo had been right, he had a LOT of conceptual  weight. I wasn't like Gojo, who had honed my concept and domain to the  point where that aura would part around it like water around a stone,  but trying to create my domain in that environment helped me immensely.  It was like resistance training, and I knew if I could manage to create  my domain in here like this, it would be infinitely more stable.

I  spent hours repeating the fight. Darkseid killed me dozens of times,  hundreds. No matter what I did I couldn't beat him, even as a god I  wasn't a match for that bastard, and it made me even more awed at Gojo's  power to see that, and even more determined to follow this path like he  did. I tried a dozen different methods, changing the number of copies,  the distribution, the timing, I tried a dozen different strategies to  beat him, but every time I came up short. The only real benefit was that  between Darkseid's pressure and my unlimited energy and resources, I  had more than enough time to get it right.

Finally,  it clicked. Some ineffable, indefinable change in the sphere of my  influence that let it become a true domain, something that was always  there inside me to be expanded rather than something I did. I could feel  the change almost instantly. The copies were me and I was them. I  wasn't just switching places or manifesting attacks, I was a dozen  illusions at the same time, both real and unreal. I was everywhere and  nowhere.

I dismissed Darkseid's  image, still unable to beat him, though I'd gotten much closer. Once I  was in the empty void alone I banished my copies before reaching into  myself for my real domain for the first time. I grinned widely as I said  the words outside I'd been feeling in my soul. "Domain Expansion:  Schrodinger's Subterfuge." And suddenly, the world belonged to me.