Aalam

  The pain from his soul regrowing hadn’t been enjoyable, but taking a vacation very much had been.

  Aalam’s main body had focused on crafting, trying to trigger his Oath of the True Crafter’s sudden enlightenment effect, which had been fun. He’d figured out how to boost the efficiency of Steel Swamp Sorin’s favored energy reactor design by 4.36%, he’d finalized the creation of the last two Divine grade skills for his Afterlife Ruler class, and he’d finished the upgrade of his wife’s Twin Dragons of the Future Divine Queen to A rank, a project that had been extra satisfying as he’d worked directly with Mila. At the same time, most of the rest of his clones had started wandering the elemental universes, trying to trigger his Oath of the True Scientist’s sudden enlightenment effect, and that had been amazing as well.

  He’d figured out why there were no known elemental gods. First, faith in others was not really a thing in most elemental societies as they usually directly worshiped their elements, cutting off the faith path to divinity. And, second, elementals were generally extremely connected to their universes, so raising the Luck stat, which represented resistance to any universe’s effects, was not something they generally did, no society he found ever at all prioritizing it enough to get their powerhouses to remotely the required value, even for those who met the Law requirements for the Law path to divinity.

  It was also just really cool to see how elemental universes functioned as they broke so many of the rules he’d taken as gospel during his youth, something that had been great for raising his Laws, all but his Law of Tranquility having reached the high grade Law Dragon level, just two levels away from the True Law level required for divinity.

  Meanwhile, his final clone had toured the Twelve Element Spirit Universe together with one of Mila’s clones, pretending to be normal human cultivators and limiting their own senses down to the G rank level to enhance the experience.

  Mila’s other clones, on the other hand, at least those not taking on the roles of gods they’d killed in the Prime Material, had used their Elemental Law Form racial ability to transform themselves into replacements for babies who’d tragically died in the Twelve Element Spirit Universe, sealing their own memories and talent levels while living with artificial soulstructures until they eventually awoke upon reaching E rank.

  And Aalam found the lives of these clones especially interesting.

  Without her memories and without the teachings of her grandfather, all eight clones still showed themselves to be extremely intelligent and resourceful, but the way they expressed their intelligence and ingenuity was quite a bit different than Mila herself. Three became far more interested in the hard sciences than the social sciences Mila was especially good at, two of them directly inspired by his own example, each becoming sone kind of researcher, while three of the other five went into altruistic roles. One was inspired by her mother and became a middle-school teacher, one was inspired by the hospital team who’d saved her grandfather during her childhood and become a doctor, and the third became fed up with the way her local town’s government was run and became its mayor.

  Of the remaining two, one became a lawyer, not the help the little guy kind but the high-powered help the rich become richer kind, while the other became a merchant, starting up a company that would have likely grown to dominate the economy of an entire planet had Mila not abandoned the identity after reawakening her own memories, and both of them, having grown up in rather unloving in unhealthy family environments, were ruthless and manipulative.

  Beyond the differences resulting from their upbringings, however, Aalam liked how they were all intrinsically the same. All, as expected, were excellent at reading social situations, and all also had his wife’s trait of treating those who were good to them well while those who were bad to them horribly, it seemingly an innate part of Mila’s personality to put a lot of weight on social bonds, be they good or bad. And, to Mila’s surprise, her tendency toward social manipulation was also far more innate than expected, all her clones constantly manipulating their family, friends, and enemies alike. They just weren’t anywhere near as good at it as Mila at their equivalent ages.

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  Then, after his third round of sudden enlightenment ended, Aalam stopped what his various clones were doing and brought them back to merge with his main body, his minds less focused on his new discoveries and more focused on his wife, on their time together, on how she was handling the aftermath of learning the true level of her grandfather’s involvement with the worst aspects of her early life. And he had a breakthrough.

  Without much effort, his Law Dragon of Tranquility advanced to high grade, and his Heavenly Spark Pure Soul racial ability finally advanced to Divine grade, visible to him through the pseudo-System he’d set up in their main universe.

  Heavenly Spark Pure Soul (Divine): Increase the effectiveness of the Soul and Attunement stats by 300% and raise affinity with all Laws by 500%.

  Unlike at previous grades, the requirements for advancing Heavenly Spark Pure Soul to Empyrean and then Divine grade were 36 low grade Law Dragons and 36 high grade Law Dragons respectively, not middle grade Law Dragons like would match the previous pattern. And the reason for this was simple. Law Dragon level was the last before reaching the Law requirements to become a god, and advancement at that point was far, far more difficult.

  Reaching the peak grade Law Scarab level in Laws wasn’t uncommon for C ranks, a few dozen reaching that level every generation in the Prime Material, but it was pretty much unheard of for B ranks to raise even a single Law to the middle grade Law Dragon level, it happening maybe once every dozen billion years.

  Gods were ridiculously rare even in a universe as big as the Prime Material, only about four appearing every billion years, and this was because the basic requirements, a high Luck stat and a True Law level Law or an obscene amount of faith energy combined with a soul able to absorb it, were extremely rare.

  “Are you ready to hunt some Wascally Gods?” Mila, with all her clones not taking the roles of deities having combined together as well, teleported next to him along with his master, who’s face showed confusion.

  So, as the good apprentice he was, he felt the need to explain. “The whole God Season plan is named after a Earth cartoon skit about a hunter with a lisp, a rabbit, and sometimes a duck. It’s really not that funny unless you immediately get the reference.”

  Then he turned to his wife and continued the fun. “Fire.”

  Mila smiled at his daffy duck impression, which was actually pretty good given his ability to change his voice at will with his polymorph skill, and then Aalam brought both his master and wife into the God ranked subspace storage artifact he held in his Personal Storage soulstructure, the God rank artifact responsible for containing and hiding the Spirit Smith’s demiplane, complete with giant dragon corpse and all.

  With the artifact’s aura completely blocked by his soulstructure, and his own ability to travel through even C rank portals thanks to the skill he’d learned from the Spirit Smith’s inheritance—or even weaker portals by transferring most of his soul into the artifact and letting a weakened clone do the traveling—he could bring almost anyone almost anywhere in the multiverse, so it wasn’t difficult to bypass the gods invading his former universes to make it to the Prime Material.

  And, having studied the System for thousands of years, and already having many examples of people bypassing the System’s identity check ability—hundreds of examples each from just his wife and master alone—he was able to use his polymorph skill, his Law Dragons of Bonds and Severing, and the identity of a random treasure hunter who’d died at the hands of others in one of his former universes a few hundred years before the gods started to invade to enter into the Prime Material without the System flagging him at all.

  From there, it was easy to travel to a medium size universe owned by the Primordial Humans faction of gods, one that wasn’t at all important to anyone, and thus one where the System’s powers of detection were weak, and make it to an out of the way area of empty space in the middle of nowhere, where they had parked his master’s former divine subspace residence.

  Then, when they arrived, and the subspace, with an internal dimension covered in a forest of fiery trees—i.e. trees with living flames for leaves—blocked them from any observation, Aalam let his wife and master out, and they began to prepare.

  Aalam started to create God ranked diseases that would specifically target the most common cultivator races using only the Laws his master specialized in, focusing primarily on the ones meant for those of the messenger race, with his master helping enhance them with her own more powerful Laws and his wife helping to make them more difficult to sense. Then he worked on several hidden runic array traps while his master fully activated the divine residence, boosting its defense and containment capabilities.

  By the time they were done, Aalam had almost no fear any god who entered would be able to leave again, at least as long as they were no more than a fourth as powerful as the God of War.

  Shadow of the Soul King Book 2. And, as a result, chapters 48 through 99 will be deleted in one week to meet Amazon's guidelines for publishing to Kindle Unlimited.