21 Of Gods and Demons...and inmortals too.

Had you ever thought of how ignorant you may be? You could, but before knowing what you are ignorant about, you will never now how ignorant you are. A sage mortal once said "Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance", Akin had just read it moments ago. And now besides relief and pleasure, Akin was feeling incredible ignorant, ignorant and amazed.

Forty thousands human souls worth of information, even if it was just enough for him to barely classify as literate in the upper realms, it was more than dozens or even hundreds of life worth of information on the lower realms.Just taking into account that a single person, akin to one Soul Coin, could produce a dozens books over his life or that the most exquisites theories were worth less than two dozens Soul Coins normally, the five thousands Soul Coins Akin spend in knowledge from the mortal realms turned him into a walking data center of one of those realm.

Some peope could think it was truly a waste to spend 'money' purchasing knowledge from the mortal worlds but as Biba said, he could gain insight from it, and in fact he didn't even assimilated all of the knowledge he had obtained and already had some insights in better ways of using the spiritual energy, the soul power, how refining his body and so on.

Philosophy, Biology, Mathematics,Physics, Logic,Economy, Teology, Strategy, Literature, Fitness, Combat Arts, Crafting and more filled Akin with a mysterious pride and showed that even when mortals were weak overall, they developed lots of interesting things.

Mortal Realms were those were death, despite lifespan, was a fact for every being living in there, as that where he came from. In the majority of those realms spiritual energy didn't exist making some of the Law in them, different to those realms of mid and upper tier. Mortal Realms were also the one in which gods and demons spread their influence the most.

Above mortal realms were the Middle Realms, in those realms spiritual energy existed in any of his manifestation and beings had the possibility of breaking through the shackles of mortality, gaining divinity and ascending. And above the Middle Realms, were the Upper Realms, also known as Divine Realms, anything existing there could be regarded as a legend in the lower realms.

Currently Akin was in Purgatory, the second of the nine layers of Hell which was an Upper Realm, but for some reason Purgatory itself was a Mid Tier Plane. The place were he spend the past year of his life was the first layer of Hell which was named the same as the realm. All of this seemed like common sense, even when almost noone knew about it, and costed almost nothing to Akin.

Another thing that seemed as common sense, and for some reason almost noone knew about it in Purgatory were the paths to power. In fact in any of the Upper Realms this was the basic of the basics, and everyone had understanding of it, but Purgatory had some special conditions.

There were many classifications, but if you were to generalize then there were three main paths to power, one was to ascend and become a god, the other was to cultivate and achieve inmortality and the last was to devour and become a demon. The classifications were alike and the main difference between each other was the way every of them obtained power or better said, the way in which every of them followed their path to power.

Gods had the stricter path as they were born from faith and faith was related or deposited over specific actions. Gods needed follower to gather faith and those follower gave they faith in exchange for something, material or not, and sometimes by just the hope of obtaining that something. As such once a 'god',or someone wanting to become one, set its path it needed to follow it until godhood, as the slight desviation would made everything for naught and he would need to start another path. In general gods were the combined and multiplied power of their believers and its own, which granted immeasurable power but over specific aspects.

Inmortals were those who 'cultivated', be it, their energy, soul, mind, heart, body or so on. Unlike gods, inmortals relied only on themselves to break through the shackles of mortality, theiy cultivated according to their chosen path and followed it to higher heights obtaining power which could rivalized anything below and above heavens. The only downside of cultivation is that depended on mindset and your 'heart' and the slighty change could put a ending to your path. Akin himself was a soul cultivator, as Ashtarte, but she also achieved godhood in some point.

And finally there were Demons, the path was named after the first race who followed the path. The demon path was one of liberties and bearing the cost of them. Different to the other two paths the demon path was about stir up your emotions and embed them in your power, meaning your power would grew along side your emotions and viceversa. This was the main path in Hell, and maybe a path he would had to follow as he was in Hell now. The problem with this path were the 'emotions' which could easily go out of control, this alone gained a lot of enemy for the followers of this path, with the small addition of the original demons feeding themselves of other being souls.

No path was good or evil as it depend on who was the one following the path, but some were easy to identify with such cualities. As mortals would often founnd 'good' gods over 'evil' gods, and 'evil' demons over 'god' demons, gods were seen as positive and demons as negative, and in fact, because of the path, demons was more unrestrained than gods so it was common to take them for evil. And as for inmortals, they could be god or evil, or even both, as it was the same as their 'heart' and it was in correspondency with their chosen path.

As someone following the inmortal path, Akin needed cultivation techniques, thankfully he was gifted with one, a high level one. Still he needed a energy cultivation technique,and as for bodily cultivation the blessings were more than enough, in fact a great portion of it abandoned his Soul Realm by itself and fused with his body, it seemed as if certain level of soul power was required, but it was never intended for the soul but for the body.

The energy cultivation manual he chose was called Star Child, he was just able to bought the first three layers and it cost him five thousand Soul Coins. The reason he chose this manual was because it was akin to his soul cultivation manual and he trusted he could gain insights in each one from the other. Beside it wasn't an affinity based technique, or a very limited one, as you could form the 'stars' the technique required from diffrent elements.

He also bought lot of books with a 'basic' in their cover as "The basics of Soul Power", "Introduction to Soul", "What a Spirit is", "A soul is not a Spirit" and more books that if not for the fact he had read them he would never thought they existed. There was also the map, if it could be called like that as it only showed the outline of the kingdoms, empires, and areas around but without any especific information.

Among the things Akin bought there were also a lot of low level techniques to use with his soul power or spiritual power. There were some as "Fireball", "Fireblast", "Fire Storm" , "Shadow Bolt", "Shadow Bind" and "Soul Chackles", some of these were classics and because of that cheap enough for him to purchase them.

About destiny he had to content himself with the understanding recopiled by mortals as anything related to destiny was expensive enough as for him maybe having to bring a deity to exchange over if he really wanted something. Still, even when mortal knowledge didn't touch the essential of destiny the understanding mortals had of it was enough for him to form a vague idea of how destiny worked, or he thought so.

Moans, pantings and a rhytmically beating filled the room as Akin and Biba were enjoying themselves, as for how do they came to this, even they weren't sure but one thing lead to another and soon they ended like this, anyways it wasn't out of Biba's line of work or her desires.

One portion of Akin mind was looking through the newly adquired knowledge, as even if it was there he still needed to review it, the other, and bigger part, was fully inmersed in the nearly paradise in front of him. Beyond the huge pleasure,this also allowed him to release a big part of the stress he accumulated over the past year and half.

Looking into her eyes, enjoying her melting expression and sweet voice he was still wondering, "Was this destiny too?".