I felt an array of emotions seeping into me. Awe, reverence, and love, were coming into me from an unlikely source: the undead I had empowered. I felt a far more diverse array of emotions from the living. The living were inadvertently transmitting fear, joy, hate, sorrow, anger, and other, harder to precisely identify emotions into me.

The emotions were incredibly intense. Each emotion that wracked my divine form gave me a greater appreciation for the wide array of emotions non-deities, but especially living mortals, routinely endured.

Throughout most of my life I had felt general contentment. I am a G.o.d afterall. And more than that, I am as far as I can tell a sort of supreme being. I could resurrect the dead and grant immortality to any creature I wanted too. I hadn"t faced much in the form of real challenges, and even at the weakest I had ever been I probably could have used my infinite magical energy to escape from most circ.u.mstances. That was not the case for mortals.

Mortals routinely faced major problems. In this world, and many others, they had to endure wars being waged on them by other mortals, slavery, famine, and all sorts of other complex and often life-threatening situations. It was a lot for creatures as weak as they were. It was almost endearing to try and picture them surviving such scenarios without feeling immense and moving emotions.

It wasn"t always easy for me to remember their struggles, but in moments like this I was fully cognizant of the world mortals lived in. It was a dangerous, unpredictable, and often indifferent one.

I almost felt bad that my presence was definitely going to throw it further into chaos because I had only just begun to move and the chaos the world was engulfed in was increasing. I still had so many things I needed to do. Things I was just beginning to do.

________________________________________________

Torus" distribution of land was split nearly perfectly between its eastern and western hemispheres. The continent of Iredale and the continent of Mysteria were located within the western hemisphere. The continent of Humana and the continent of Anterior were located within the eastern hemisphere.

Iredale was the strange continent that lacked a large empire and was governed by separate, occasionally conflicting kingdoms. Mysteria, the furthest west continent in the world, was the home of the Ansari empire.

Unsurprisingly the continent of Humana housed the human race and the Reconquista empire. It was also the continent closest to Iredale, though still separated by an incredibly vast ocean. The landma.s.s at the eastern edge of the world, Anterior, housed the coalition of monstrous races.

The northernmost and southernmost sections of the world were polar icecaps. These strange regions were inhabited, but my mental exploration of that area quickly led me to learn that these areas were not settled by creatures like humans and elves, but violent and powerful races like frost giants, white dragons, and other creatures such as evolved animals and even a few types of abominations.

Armed with the knowledge I gained after quickly retreating into myself. I closed my eyes and allowed my not-so-mini-map to become the thing I focused on. I began to look at the world through the usage of a few filters.

A consequence of gaining the first tier of influence over the star domain was a power that caused the range of my detection-based-powers to grown in size explosively. It was such a large growth that when I closed my eyes the not-so-mini-map that appeared before me covered the entire planet and gave me accurate information in real-time.

The first filter I applied to the real-time display of the world in front of me was one that singled out people who believed I was an actual deity. I was positively delighted to watch the majority of the world"s population to suddenly be vibrantly highlighted and for their rough outlines to turn a bright red.

It didn"t matter if one was an animal, abomination, humanoid, extraplanar, undead, or other kinds of beings, more than half of the global population was highlighted. My rampant displays of power, coupled with the system, and my own handcrafted messages was evidently sufficiently persuasive to convince the people of Torus that I was what I said I was.

The next filter I applied was one that targeted slave-owners specifically. I was disappointed when I saw that there were several million such people who were still highlighted. I deselected the first filter so I could be sure that I saw everyone who was targeted, and the number exploded upwards which further increased my frustration and threatened to foul up my mood.

I studied the parts of the map with the most dots. I was annoyed and a bit surprised to see that there were different concentrations of colored outlines. The single biggest ma.s.s of them was located on Humana, the uncreatively named continent home to the majority of Torus"s humans.

"Should I... punish Reconquista?" I wondered. There was a part of me that wanted too, and that wanted to use my powers to shatter the empire. I had enough power that I could easily leave Espana, the capital city, in ruins without any a.s.sistance but I knew that such a move would result in chaos and shift the balance of power and I wasn"t sure what the consequences of that would be if I acted impulsively. I decided to show caution after a few seconds and not attack, yet.

Though I wasn"t sure of the specifics, I could tell from studying the map that the human empire had a legal system that was accepting of slavery. And I did not intend to allow that to continue. I huffed in irritation and opted to turn my attention elsewhere for now, else I ran the risk of moving preemptively and I wasn"t about to do that. Not yet.

I studied the other empires for a few moments and quickly came to a heartening conclusion. It seemed that only Reconquista had a legal system that enabled slavery.

The other empires had slave-owners as well, but it was nowhere near the number of slaveowners that Reconquista had. What was more telling though was that Reconquista"s slaveowners varied in alignment and cla.s.s, but in other empires slave-owners were uniformly wealthy and invariably had evil alignments. I personally felt that slave-owning should have stained one"s soul enough for them to be marked as evil no matter what, but it seems that the laws that govern alignment disagreed with me and I didn"t yet have the power to change or challenge them.

I could tell at a glance that some individual kingdoms, including a few in Iredale, were likely to practice slavery but also that none of them had singularly enormous populations of slaves. Seeing the ones in Iredale was intriguing to me because it gave me targets on which to unleash the legions at my command.

Iredalian kingdoms were not united into a single cohesive force. That lack of unity was something that I could exploit and use to turn the continent into my playground. And I fully intended to do so. Iredale"s lack of unity would make it an easy target for me.

It was at this point that I deactivated the filter I had used to see the world"s slaveowners. I immediately activated another filter, one that identified my worshipers. I was delighted to see creatures in every part of the world light up, not to mention that members of every species were included among those who lit up. This was positively delightful news.

It was genuinely exciting for me to see that I now had a good number of humanoid worshipers. Dwarves, elves, humans, orcs, minotaurs, and other, wilder types of humanoids were worshipping me. As were fey, who all over the world were marked by the filter I had chosen. Knowing that made me want to go ahead and create a fey court so that I could gain greater powers, but I knew I had other things I needed to do so for now I focused.

________________________________________________

I spent the next four hours making connections. I did this without leaving my tower, as I didn"t feel like leaving my home.

The primary people I fixated on were abominations. All over the world, there were abominations. They were present in and around each continent, in almost every kingdom, and were all too ready to serve me.

With but a single mental tendril I could reach out and corrupt countless abominations. In doing so I snuck into their minds and whispered to them, and they accepted me as their master. I never failed to reward them, and after the first few groups of abominations I encountered I learned that most of them really did enjoy violence.

I was fond of reaching out to gugs, because I knew what they were. Gugs were giants who were fixated on the dreamlands and enjoyed simple violence. They could be found throughout the world and numbered in the tens of thousands. They and the deep ones were the most populous types of abominations that I could find in Torus.

They were not difficult to make worshipers out of. All I had to do was create cows and other simple, large creatures in their camps and tell them that worshipping me will give them dreams of their homeland, the dreamlands and they entered my service en-ma.s.se.

I reached out to deep ones, eerie hybrids of fish and humanoids who dwelled either in alien cities built in the shallow parts of the ocean"s of the world or in small coastal settlements. They were simple creatures and filling their oceans with fish and the land near their oceanic homes with gold was enough to secure their worship and their worship.

Night-gaunts were the rarest kind of abominations on Torus. Less than a hundred of them existed in this world, but the second I reached out to them I"d experience the strange rush of their hearts becoming mine. They exuded only obedience and happiness as if they were happy to have a master to serve.

The only one of them to transmit a prayer to me would send me one that was simple, polite and asked for food. I obliged the thing and felt its delight as it moved to where I conjured the food and began to greedily eat.

Other abominations existed as well. Some of them had bizarrely descriptive names like "Flying polyps". A few of the varied abominations had real names, but even those names were largely nonsensical, like "Shoggoths".

Curiously, some species-names contained direct references to other beings. I had to a.s.sume that these were the names of great old ones, or outer G.o.ds. "Fire vampires of Fthaggua" and "Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath" were two examples of those types of abominations.

I had to operate under the a.s.sumption that those creatures, and a few others with weirder names were once servitors of their partial namesakes. That would explain the ease with which they began to worship me.

Of all of the a.s.sorted types of abominations in the world there were two that were especially interesting to me by the time I had reached out to all of the eerie monstrosities in the world. The Mi-gos and the wendigos.

The Mi-gos were fungal monstrosities that were especially intelligent but not especially common on Torus. They were creatures that superficially resembled gigantic wasps with bulbous and faintly glowing heads even though the fungi domain informed me that they were among its "friends". They considered themselves scientists and offered their services to me freely, seemingly excited to have a place in what they called an "Outer G.o.d"s retinue".

They had a number of colonies throughout the world, and whenever I mentally spoke to one of their colonial leaders they excitedly chattered with me in youthful sounding mental voices about the technology at their command. They spoke about things like weapons that could fire lightning, something called "brain cylinders", and even technology that allowed them to terraform their colonies.

Wendigos were rare because they were undead abominations. They were vaguely humanlike undead creatures with a few features from stags, like horns and stag-skulls for heads, as well as fur. They had become my worshipers before I reached out to abominations, and their prayers were pleas for me to give them permission to consume humans.

________________________________________________

By the time I was done interacting with Torus" abominations I was curious to learn the state of my worshipers throughout the world. I checked the section of religion menu ent.i.tled "Families, sects, cults, and churches" with a curious and thoughtful gaze. I learned a lot from appraising this menu again.