Plagues, Parasites, and Pain

One of the first domains I had ever gained influence over was the domain of diseases. I had mostly used it to heal people, though minutes ago I did use it to gain control over the body I was currently inhabiting. That said, today I planned to begin to use this domain to its true, destructive potential. And that made me grin.

I was currently in the body of an orc. The world I was in was akin to a mixture of traits from Htrae and from Mercy. This world had almost no magic to speak of, a trait that it shared with Htrae, and was inhabited by a plethora of sapient species all of which worked together in nations that were mostly pluralistic democracies, just like Mercy. The orc I was currently possessing lived in a community that was mostly made up of orcs. They weren't going to be the victims of my actions today. I liked orcs. No, I had plans that I would set in motion but not here.

I lifted the body I was possessing out of bed and began the process of searching for clothes for the man to put on. At the moment he was naked and his muscular body, in all of its orcish ruggedness, was exposed to me. I didn't mind the view, but I had a role to play. And I suppose I ought to work on my acting skills, and to do that I needed to play a part. For now, anyway.

The orc's bedroom was a small space that was mostly occupied by furniture. The orc himself wasn't a fan of that, but everyone had flaws and one of his was that he struggled with spatial reasoning, so he had organized his bedroom haphazardly. It wasn't that big of a deal, even though the orc himself began each day minorly annoyed by it.

I spent a few minutes lazily searching through various dressers before finding a suitable outfit. For the time being I wasn't sure how aware I'd leave the orc of my presence when I was done with him. I may even decide to kill him, but I doubt I would do that. I was inclined to leave him alive, though in a rather... indisposed state so that if I wanted too I could return to this body and repossess it while being assured of its relative safety. Having a vessel that I could utilize would be handy in the future if I decided to continue to mess with this world.

I dressed the orc in simple, yet comfortable pants, a loose-fitting shirt, and a jacket. It was quite cold outside for the orc and if he was going to get sick it'd be at my hands, not at the hands of the elements. I also put on plain but serviceable shoes that'd effectively do the job of keeping the orc's feet warm and safe from cuts or any other sort of harm that might befall them.

As I moved to leave the orc's home I began to think about the state of my cults elsewhere.

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I had cultivated a number of cults throughout the universe but my mind turned immediately to one cult in particular: the Order of the Heated Blade. This cult was a fanatical cult of evil extraplanar entities who worshiped me as a twisted god of pain and flames. In thinking about them I began to note any and all notifications I received thanks to them. There were quite a lot of them, which caught me off guard.

The cult had grown immeasurably since their defeat at the hands of Morehammer, shortly after he killed Ava and before he and I clashed for the first time. I could see its membership, and upon taking a brief second to study it I noticed that the cult's overwhelming majority of members were pain-bringers, followed by devils, and then the last tenth or so of members were demons.

While thinking about them I spoke, mentally, to one of the domains I had a bit of influence over: the domain of faith.

"In thinking about the Order of the Heated Blade I see that the cult has grown quite explosively. Why is that?" I asked, curiously. I heard and read a response almost immediately after asking my question.

"The popularity of the Order of the Heated Blade is due to the nature of its members. Pain-Bringers are naturally pious and thus easily flock to your worship, devils like order and hierarchies and having a master to serve who allows them to continue to inflict pain and light fires is appealing to them, and demons, though chaotic and individualistic, appreciate serving a powerful creature of pain and flames." Said the domain. I mentally nodded as I heard its message.

The cult was growing at an explosive pace. Its adherents in the strange realm known as Zenith, the home of pain-bringers, numbered in the tens of thousands, its adherents in the devilish homeland of Infernius numbered in the thousands, and in the demonic homeland of the Heart of Darkness numbered in the hundreds.

Some mortal adherents of this faith also existed, but they were scattered throughout the dimensional and were an incredibly tiny percentage of the total adherents of the faith, totaling less than three hundred people in total across over half a dozen worlds. In every case of mortal adherents of the faith they were led by a pain-bringer who was an especially zealous member of the faith. These groups were of interest to me as in three of the seven cases were mortals in mortal worlds worshipped me they existed on worlds in solar systems I had yet to visit.

The Order of the Heated Blade had become an intriguing resource for me, one I could use in a variety of ways. I was unsurprised to see that relatively few demons flocked to this faith, but its popularity among pain-bringers and devils gave me a fascinating new tool with which I could more easily exert influence over Infernius, at least once I delve into the true reaches of the realm, deep underground, and without my direct influence I had acquired a significant amount of cultural influence over the dimension of Zenith even though I had never visited there before.

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While I was lost in my thoughts I began to move. I took a deep breath and then forced myself to move at the speed of light once more. All around me the world slowly came to a near-standstill. As it did I began to smile and chuckle, knowing that if I gained mastery over this power I'd gain a potent weapon that I could easily use to impressively annihilate even entire armies of lesser foes.

When the world was nearly completely still, I began to move. I walked forward until I was in front of the bedroom door that led in and out of the room where my victim laid his head to rest every night. I opened it, stepped through it, and then closed it behind me. All of this happened silently, and as I did it I opted to enter a state of incorporeality, so as to lessen the chances that I would cause massive destruction while speeding around the world. My body, or rather that of the orc, didn't appear to change but I knew that the instant I wanted to become incorporeal I had become incorporeal.

In order to test my incorporeality I decided to run at the wall at the end of the room I was now located in. I found myself in a small living room, connected to the world outside of the house, a small kitchen, and another bedroom. I was still as I studied the house for a split second, or rather what felt like a second, and then I charged forward, dashing for a few steps until I entered and then phased through the wall that separated me from the outside world.

I felt nothing as I phased through the wall, and once I was on the other side my eyes instantly adjusted to the darkness of the wee hours of the morning. I was now free to explore the world and to alter it however I saw fit. And I already had a plan in mind.

My surroundings were those of a small town. To the left of the orc's house was a tiny school, and to the right of the orc's house were other homes. In front of the house, there was a small road made of concrete. I sensed dozens of sleeping families and today I would not be bothering them. I wouldn't be corrupting them either. Instead, I was targeting another community or rather other communities.

To reach them I stepped onto the road in front of me and I began to move. I dashed out of the town and nearly instantaneously onto a rural highway that connected the unimportant community with the grander world it existed in. Each time my feet "touched" the ground beneath me I was shot forward, dashing in the direction I was facing and so I got to see more of the world I was visiting.

I ran over a shoddily maintained asphalt road. The road was hard on the feet of the orc I was possessed, but I would heal the orc whenever I ceased possessing him. Once I left the town the highway I was running on led me out into an incredibly vast plain where sporadic farms popped up and attempted to exert control over the fertile soil of the area. Human, dwarf, orc, and other rarer species numbered among the farmers who occupied the vast plain I was speeding through.

Seeing the vast patch of farmlands reminded me of my humble origins as a god of agriculture. It reminded me of when I was a god who was content to not even rule over a single island. That feels like a lifetime ago.

I would think about that all while traveling to the town closest to the one inhabited by orcs, and it would remain on my mind even while I made it all the way to the water reservoir that was made up of many distinct pools atop a large structure that served the town. The town which was itself inhabited by over 17,000 people.

When I snapped out of my moment of introspection I found myself looming over an outdoor entryway into a calm, clean body of water. I admired it for a moment, well aware of the fact that under different circumstances I might well have been tempted to make it a temporary home.

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[Agriculture/Famine Subdomain Passive Powers:

Abundance manipulation: Your once active ability has become a passive one. This grants you the ability to become a deity of abundance if you so choose. You can also use this power more subtly if you wish and cause it to affect lands and bolster crop growth and quality if you desire. This power also enhances your degree of control over reproduction, making it easier for those whose fertility you enhance to have multiple births per pregnancy. Utilizing this power on food causes it to be more filled with your influence.

This is also a strengthened version of the power, and with it you can increase the quantity of a harvest as much as you want rather than just duplicating a crop up to one hundred and fifty times.

Botany and Fauna Intuition: Your powers over knowledge, nature, animals, and agriculture have fused into this. This is the definition of a passive power and all it does is increase your awareness of plants and animals and how to take care of them. This is an enhanced form of agriculture intuition, which would be specifically about plants used by farmers.

Cooking mastery: You gain deific levels of cooking competence, and the food you cook causes those who eat it to feel your presence and they fall significantly closer to becoming totally influenced by you. The food you cook can also boost those who eat it or can inflict grievous harm on them, as you wish.

Famine Causation: At will you can curse a land and render it unsuitable for crop growth. This is a subtle power and it doesn't cause the afflicted land to become obviously unfit for crop growth unless you want it to. This is an excellent power for punishing those who refuse to acknowledge or obey you.

Food Augmentation: This power allows you to boost the nutritional value of food as well as strengthen those who eat it.

Food Wasting: You can reduce the nutritional value of food, reducing its ability to provide nutrients, energy, and health to those who eat it. This power works on all foods, and if you wish can ignore other aspects of food which means that eating food affected by it still causes someone to begin to feel your influence.

Harvest Manipulation: You can induce the harvest, or prevent it from occurring for any crop you wish. This means you can choose whether or not a crop will ripen or even age.

Infertility Inducement and Manipulation: Famines are associated with infertility in the minds of mortals across various universes. As befits this trend, gods of famine can induce and manipulate infertility even amongst humanoids or dragons.

Agriculture/Famine Subdomain Active Power:

Waste Inducement: Once per day you can affect an area over two hundred kilometers wide with an incurable condition that renders it completely unsuitable for any sort of plant or animal life. This poisons the air, and irradiates the ground. Life in this area will begin to die slowly and painfully unless it leaves. If living creatures in this area leave the area they will survive but will be infertility unless they ask you for atonement.

Agriculture/Famine Synergistic Power:

Disease and Symptom Addition: You can add infertility or hyperfertility to diseases you inflict on people or use them as symptoms even without diseases. You can also affect the digestive systems of creatures and affect their ability to process food.]

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I peered into the reservoir and smiled. This body of water was untainted and I intended to change that. In doing so I would be able to infect an entire community with a devastating disease that would no doubt soon spread beyond this single community.

I was positioned precariously at the edge of a walkway. In front of me was a ladder that led into the body of water this community relied on for a plethora of things, from washing their clothes and other cleaning tasks to cooking and drinking. At the moment it was pristine, unsoiled and clear. I leaped from the walkway and landed in one of the many interconnected pools of water, each of which stored thousands of gallons of water and I closed my eyes.

Upon closing my eyes I wasn't greeted by the usual not-so-mini-map but rather by a notification that listed various diseases that I could call upon in this situation. Over the course of my life I had healed quintillions of creatures and whenever I healed a creature any diseases it was suffering from were added to my repertoire of controllable diseases that I could spread at will. That meant that I had a potent arsenal that I could utilize as I wished, one that I tended not to use but was going to begin to use at least in an experimental context.

As an incorporeal being, I was momentarily residing within the pool without disturbing any of the water within it. Even my entrance into the water didn't disturb the pool in any real physical way. And from within the pool, I began to enact a scheme which was quite foul. It wasn't unlike a scheme I once used to force a slave-owning family to cease their practice of slavery: I would use diseases to get my way. It didn't take me long to decide that rather than choosing a single disease to infect this pool with, I could choose multiple diseases. And so I did. Countless sicknesses with which to infect an entire community and to turn it into a playground for pandemics.

I silently began to generate countless pathogens from within myself, all of which oozed out of me and settled into the pool. The pathogens were effortlessly resistant to water and they began to spread out of me, though they wouldn't spread out until after I slowed myself down.

The next few "minutes", or at least what felt like minutes, would be filled with me going from pool to pool, potently filling them with all manner of nasty diseases. I didn't choose the most vicious diseases I had at my disposal, but I did choose some of the nastier ones. Ones that caused the infected to be riddled with sores, or to be covered in bloody rashes. The diseases weren't even particularly dangerous, but they were quite spectacular. Those who were afflicted with them would learn of their misfortune quite quickly.

I quietly modified the horde of pathogens I was creating to infect those they came into contact with with especially aggressive variants of the diseases they caused, ones that would go to work within hours of infecting various lifeforms. Normally the diseases I had chosen had somewhat lengthy incubation periods, but that wouldn't do well for my needs at the moment. I wanted to be flashy and I wanted the diseases I infected this town with to be ones that let them know that they were sick. In time I would alert them to my presence.

That said, for a moment my mind turned elsewhere. It turned to the possibilities given to me by one of the powers I had earned earlier when I acquired the second tier of influence over the subdomain of agriculture. The ability to induce infertility was an incredibly potent power, one which meant that I could take my time and I could more easily take control of entire planets or species. And conversely, the ability to induce fertility was a potent tool that I could use to help increase the numbers of half-demons and half-devils.

But I wasn't done with this test world. Not by a long shot. I wanted to go ahead and increase the number of parasite and vermin-based powers at my disposal, and to do that I needed to create life. As I allowed myself to slow down I opened a portal to a distant and small community on the other side of the world right over me, just outside of the pool. The world began to slowly move around me, and the pool I was in began to momentarily darken as the countless pathogens which surrounded me began to spread throughout it in such a great number that for the briefest instant they were plainly visible to the naked eye.

I closed my eyes and willed myself upwards. I was still incorporeal so my movement didn't disturb my surroundings, and after a "second" I went through the portal directly overhead. On the other side of the portal, I found myself standing atop a hill overlooking a small, sleepy town. I silently rose my hand and began to create a swarm of minions who would enact my will: a respectable horde of mosquitos.

Time did begin to pass as I created an enormous horde of swarming insects, all of which were intelligent and loyal to me and me alone. The sleepy town began to slowly awaken as I created the swarming, irritating, parasitic army of minions that would serve me.

At first the mosquitoes I created were simple albeit intelligent creatures. They buzzed and swarmed around me, shrouding me in a cloak of biting insects who'd harass anyone I commanded them too. Creating them was an easy task, one that took me just a few moments each. In a matter of minutes, I had an army consisting of hundreds of mosquitoes that buzzed around me and were eagerly awaiting their first task. One which I gave them all with a single utterance.

"Evolve." I commanded the insects, demanding that they cease being the simple vermin I had created them as and that they become something stronger, more ferocious, and more intelligent. The second after I spoke the insects began to glow and they began to radiate the silvery light I was known for. My smile transformed into a smirk even as the insects began to grow significantly larger.

"Arise my minions. And with you, I shall become an even greater god than I currently am." I remarked, feeling the power of the army of monstrous parasites I had created swell in response to my words. This terrifying legion would serve me well, and grant me greater power over a subdomain I was born possessing the power to influence: the subdomain of vermin and parasites.