God's investigations-S

"I FUCKED IT UP!"

When one of the hounds i sent to the first floor encountered one of the protagonists, more specifically Nayuta, i thought that it would be a good idea to try to make contact through it. After all even if im not able to communicate personally until they reach the eighth floor it should be possible to do so if i use a servant as a puppet, or so i thought.

Turns out that the wretched hound is just too scary to communicate properly, and what's worse, it can't even talk correctly. Honestly, I should have seen this coming but it still makes me angry.

I would slap myself in the face but I cant move at all. Well there is a way to slap myself but it is through blood magic so i dont know if that counts.

In the same way i can create monsters i can also create a variety of constructs to control with no real limit to it so making an arm made of flesh, blood or bones to hit myself would be easy but...using my godly powers for something like that feels somewhat wrong and stupid.

"well there is no point in crying over spilled milk, I should focus my efforts somewhere else"

Yes, there are more important matters right now. My servants would ensure the protagonist's survival from the shadows so I don't need to be so vigilant. Right now my priorities lay elsewhere, more exactly, outside of the Blasphemous Capital.

Normally all floors have a limited area which is surrounded by a thick fog wall. This is not always the case as there are floors that have physical barriers like walls or giant cliffs, or others where there simply is no limit and the area is infinitely procedurally generated. The Blasphemous Capital belongs to the first group, meaning it is completely surrounded by fog which is impossible to traverse...by humans.

I have been thinking for a while that it is possible for my servants to traverse the fog and arrive at the world outside of the playable area. The reason I think this is because if in the game you try to pass through the fog a cinematic will eventually play where the protagonists get lost and after a long time they die of hunger. It is the fastest achievable end in the game but the reason for it is because the protagonists are humans, and according to the setting of the game no human being can traverse the fog. Moreover many of the floors have maps outside of them, they are simply not reachable. Most of these inaccessible areas exist because we had to cut content already made and it was easier to put it beyond the players reach instead of deleting it. Still, we made use of these areas by showing the players images of some of these and using them as lore important locations, and these unused areas also exist on the 60th floor.

"Now that I'm thinking about it, couldn't I just use my authority to check if those areas exist? After all this is my floor"

After getting used to being a god i dont really need to use the winged eyes to see my own floor, i still need them to see outside of it though. I can feel everything inside the capital so if i just try to expand that ability outside of the fog walls i should be able to see these unused areas...lets give it a try.

If this was like one of those fantasy novels, I would say something like "I'm feeling the mana around me" but there is no such thing in the tower. If you want to get stronger as a mortal there is no such thing as absorbing mana. You need to kill higher beings than you and steal their life force and hopefully obtain some of their abilities. Alternatively you can rely on artifacts to strengthen yourself, use scrolls to learn physical techniques, read grimoires to learn magic or obtain powers from the gods by doing them favors. As a god the only way to do so is by dominating areas and floors. Some gods are naturally more powerful like i, some become stronger by occupying floors not claimed by any god or by raiding floors dominated by other gods. Even taking a small amount of area inside the tower grants extra power which is why this is important.

I concentrated and as i stated before there is no such thing as mana, but i could feel something more, if i have to describe it, i would so as the fabric of reality. Most gods reside in outer planes that are connected to their floors, which is why they need to be able to feel and manipulate reality in order to see and manage their floors and servants. Now that I'm using it myself it feels like threads and my own authority is what allows me to manipulate these threads and use them to see. By expanding my authority along the threads it didn't take long before my awareness reached inside the fog but there was resistance. My advances were trying to be blocked by something, luckily it wasn't that strong, the resistance I felt when I opened the gates to the lower floors inhabited by gods was much greater.

After passing through the fog there was another problem, i encountered a wall, not figuratively but an actual physical wall which i couldnt pass through, the fabric of reality passed through the wall but my authority couldnt which was a problem.

"Could this be the walls of the tower?"

The color was deep black and the texture was exactly the same as the one used on the tower so it seemed plausible. There are two possibilities. One, the unused areas don't exist and there's nothing beyond the fog other than the tower itself which wouldn't make much sense since there are plenty of floors where the fog simply doesn't exist and are literally infinite, and there are mentions of the unused areas in the game. Which leads me to the second possibility, outside the tower walls lies another world.

The game tells the player that each floor is a world of its own but that only makes sense for some of them which are big enough to enter the category of world at least from a lore perspective, for example the 12th floor which is home to the first god the player would normally have any form of semi-direct interaction with, the god of winter. His stage is big with multiple areas of great size but is not delimitated by the fog walls even though there is mention of them in the floor, instead it is limited inside ice mountains which surround the entire floor. If you consider the terrain outside of these mountains then it certainly could be classified as a world. But there is also the other side of the coin, for example the first floor or my own floor, which are just cities, the blasphemous capital may be big and takes much more time to traverse than the 12th floor because of how intrincate and confusing it is but is not big enough to even be called a small country. Since there isn't another world outside of the fog like I initially thought, that means that the floors which aren't as big as worlds must be connected to other worlds, probably like they are being isolated from said world, and I am certainly not a stranger to said concept.

The game never tells the player the purpose or origin of the tower, which was intentional as the programmers, including me, couldn't agree on one, so instead we had multiple NPC's give different takes on the matter, one of them being that the tower is nothing but a place of residence for the gods that took their domains in their respective worlds and isolated themselves inside the tower to reside and gain power from conflict against other gods in some sort of competition. This theory doesn't say anything about the origin of the tower but is the only one that says that the floors are isolated areas of a world or in some, an entire or even multiple worlds, so for now that's the most plausible option, even though it leaves the question of why are there floors without gods.

"This means that if a god can isolate themselves inside the tower they can probably also get out of it."

If what I said is correct, it should be possible to get through the tower walls once some of the chains that restrict my movement and powers are removed. There also lies the question of if Seerack isolated himself or if he was isolated by other gods because the ones responsible for the god of blood imprisonment are other gods that reside or resided in the tower. Seerackt was probably imprisoned long before being in the tower since the residents of the capital founded it above him after finding him by accident, so it wasn't until the capital was turned into a nest of monsters that these gods or some other ones isolated the place and Seerackt alongside it.

"It doesn't really matter, but it does make me curious..."

For now, I have no option other than to wait, but one day I will break through those walls.

With that said, I started doing the only thing that I could do right now, creating monsters. At the moment I can only create beasts and impious blasphemers, but once the chains are removed I should be able to create more powerful monsters. In the game every chain that you break makes the 60th floor more dangerous and new monsters appear. Some of these are the vampiric knights, nobles and giants which are some of the only intelligent creatures on the floor. There also appear multiple bosses, like Human Hydra, The eight ghoul dragons, The Vampiric King Cruentus, among some others.

"Well those guys will be things for the future, for now I'll just keep making beasts."

A day passed and I had made another small army of blood beasts. I sent them to the 30th floor without expecting much since the god there and its servants have been able to take them head on, mainly because of the buffs the monoith gives to his own monsters which is hard for me to do in the realm of other god.

I wasn't expecting anything interesting to happen today but suddenly I felt something weird. I felt as if someone was calling me and it stung inside my head. When I followed the source of such feeling using my authority, I found quite an incredible sight.

"Is she...making a crimson sword?"

I saw Nayuta sharpening a rusted sword with blood which was...unbelievable. The crimson sword is one of the first artifacts you can get by crafting them if you are lucky enough to find a glass vial and a whetstone. By filling the glass vial with blood you get a blood vial which can then be used on a whetstone to make a blood-soaked whetstone. With that item you can sharpen any rusted weapon to make a crimson weapon, and the only rusted weapon that can be found on the first floor is a rusted sword, however she was using a piece of rubble as a whetstone.

The game interface doesn't tell the player the amount of damage a weapon does but that data obviously exists inside the game. A rusted sword offers merely 15+ extra damage. But a crimson sword gives 40+ extra damage plus a 25% chance of inflicting the status aliment known as [Bleed] on unarmored opponents. It is a really good weapon for the first floor, especially in the hands of Nayuta. Every character that can be recruited into the party, including the four protagonists have a strengthening method in which they are naturally more proficient. Haruto is the more proficient at absorbing life force, Sophia is the one that can obtain more powers from the gods, Touji has a much higher magic proficiency which makes his magic much stronger than if any of the other three used it and lastly Nayuta is the more proficient at using artifacts, this means that she unlike the rest has no limit on the amount of artifacts that she can equip other than the amount of body parts she has and the artifacts in question become stronger in her hands, which in the case of the crimson sword gives her a 2+ extra damage and a 5% extra probability of inflicting [Bleed]

In the game a message would appear saying that a god has blessed your creation and the player would receive the crimson sword but it doesn't work like that now. Obviously a message would not appear and the process is not automatic. I have to bless the weapon. Doing so isn't hard. I just poured both my authority and my god power inside of it and it immediately reacted, emitting a bright red light before finally turning into the crimson sword.

Since the only reason that i was able to see Nayuta was because of the calling i received from her trying to create the crimson sword, even if it was probably just by accident, the moment i blessed the weapon and it transforned into the artifact i lost all connection and i couldn't see her anymore. I hadn't expected something like this to happen today but it was certainly entertaining