Yeah? Well I’ll have you know that I’m a raging hypocrite. It’s fine, I’ll run all of the tests I can think before showing her this is impossible, and once I do, then we can let the matter drop.
But to do that, he was going to need some help which meant finding a great spirit to assist him as he passed through the gate to Thera’s family home, happy to grab the first one he could find who’d be willing to lend a hand, even if the one he got left him a little less so when it was Abrus he ran into and would be requesting assistance to see if the tests Ben had in mind would kill that great spirit’s daughter.
“Oh, Abrus, hey,” Ben still said, trying to put on his best smile and hoping he’d be declined so he could find someone else, with the spirit smiling back.
“Ben, lovely to see you. No Thera with you today?”
“Ah, no. She’s watching Mora while I’m trying to get a little test done on her behalf. I just needed to find a free great spirit to help me out, if you know any that are currently available and might be willing?”
“If it’s for my daughter then you have me, of course. What do you need?”
Great.
“To capture some demons,” Ben explained, pushing the sarcastic thought from his head. “Living and preferably somewhat unharmed, I need to check the results of some mind alterations on them.”
“And Thera’s the one requesting this?”
“She is.”
“I believe the question behind it was somewhat implied.”
“... There’s a mind skill she’s hoping I can help her get, which I’m worried about the consequences of her getting, so I’m trying to test if it’s going to be safe first, though I have low hopes.”
“Mmh, I see. Then I suppose we shouldn’t keep her waiting.”
“Seriously, that’s it?”
“What else is there to say? My daughter is an adult and I believe you have her best interests at heart. If there’s a skill she wants then she can get it, and if you think it’s too dangerous then you can stop her, but first we should at least see if it’s really as dangerous as you’re afraid.”
“... Okay then, yeah, let’s go. Although really, the first thing we’ll be doing is checking if it’s even possible. Odds seem slim, so I’d keep my expectations in check.”
When they got to the untamed lands and flew deeper into its depths, it wasn’t long until Abrus came back with a demon by the neck, the beast struggling and thrashing in his hand until Ben brought the totality of his mind to its highest speed, examining everything the demon was for all its worth, to a level of detail that left it perfectly replicated within his thoughts.
Which just leaves the first step, seeing if I can force the acquisition of alien thought structure.
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What had been done to himself had been the side effect of a reward meant for the Galwaxians, not for a human, but he believed he could guess at the processes. When the spell of Galwax had been cast on him, it had been meant to strengthen the minds of his people, making them smarter as both a reward for experiencing the entire archive as it had been meant to be, as well as to make them smarter to try and decipher the ancient spell hidden in its depths and while Ben didn’t think he’d be able to replicate it in the same way, that didn’t mean he didn’t have any options.
Connecting to the demon while his mental symbiosis was in play, Ben created the structure of a life spirit’s thought patterns within his larger mindscape and looking at how they differed from the demon’s in his grasp, tried to force one on the other and in his horror, felt it work.
But poorly. He heard the notification go off in the demon’s head in a way that the beast itself hadn’t been able to, the trauma of the event destroying its brain in a way that left its body with only a few seconds of residual life. When he brought a part of himself back down to real time, it was already dead in Abrus’s hands as the great spirit looked at it.
“There’s a chance I might want to retract the idea that my daughter is an adult who can do what she wants,” the great spirit said, dropping the body and shaking off the few drops of blood that had come out of the creature’s orifices from the trauma of the death. “Is that enough, or do you need more?”
“Unfortunately, more,” Ben groaned. “Because as poorly as that went, it also actually worked before doing that killed it. First try too, I don’t usually get that lucky, which means there’s room to refine and see if there’s any hypothetical situation where it can be done safely.”
Slim room, yet potential nonetheless that needed to be explored as Abrus ran off, grabbing him more and more demons to test through, with Ben having a particular threshold he wanted to reach before he’d accept it as worthwhile.
Thera specifically wanted it to help with her magics and even if her mind was on awakening her life, that meant the best choice would be able to imprint a combination of life, soul, and death spirit mental structures and if he was already going that far, there was no reason not to include both earth and dark too for the help they’d give, but even that hadn’t really been what she’d requested. When she’d asked him for help, she’d requested the mental structures of the great spirits of the world.
A group that held beings who possessed magics of nine of the ten affinities and so many more of the newly birthed combined affinity spirits, Ben wouldn’t deny that such a thing would be helpful to any mage but the danger it would include would spike significantly too. He himself had been warned off of connecting to any great spirits for the longest time, his first attempt at such a thing only happening because of his need to escape the demon world he’d been trapped on, he couldn’t even say if it was possible to make something on such a scale safe. Odds were just as good that, if it were at all possible, he’d be forced to stop on doing some combination of the regular spirits instead.
Which would still be plenty enough for anyone else, but-
Shit.
Still just attempting to transplant the mental structure of a single life spirit, he finally felt it work, the change clicking into place and, while not harmless to the demon, didn’t outright kill it. More testing still and he was on the right track to minimize the harm as much as possible as more of the beasts were gone through, still leaving it in need of a round or two with a healer but in good enough condition to try to escape, even with a migraine eating at its thoughts.
“You’re getting better,” Abrus commented as he killed the latest demon in his hands while Ben rubbed at his head.
“Yeah, transplanting the thought structure isn’t damaging the original mode of thought as far as I can tell which means from there it’s solely a strain issue which might be something that can be compensated with by having a good healer on hand which just leaves me with a handful of more things to look at if you’d be willing to grab me another?”
With a nod, Abrus went looking for more, having other spirits on the search on his behalf while Ben sat down next to the growing pile of corpses, wondering if that was right. There was no level of experimentation he could do beforehand that would make him comfortable to do such a thing to Thera but there was no denying that he’d occasionally put himself into harm's way for power, what right did he have to object when by all accounts it seemed like it would work?
Of course, learning to deal with the feeling of your mind having changed takes some getting used to. Even if we do it, there’s no guarantee about how much it would lower the odds for her awakening her magics… although I’d bet it would make leveling her dark a fair bit easier since she’s not at the ninth level of that one yet, which by itself would be a good payoff. Okay, finish up the rest of your experimenting and then you can talk to her, only a little more to go.
He still needed to see if it would be possible to transplant the totality of the spirits’ mental structure before trying the same with the world’s great spirits but soon enough he’d see just how far any of his efforts could go.