Jason continued his cycle of dying repeatedly to perform his tasks, while getting spa in increasingly powerful divine essence lakes for months on end after each mission.
Some missions took more than thousands of years while some were one chance missions, ie, he only got one chance to complete, dying meant failure.
All the few thousand tasks in the starting were geared towards soul tempering and strengthening so he got tasks like the first one. At the end of this period he got a divine soul cultivation technique especially tailored for him in one of the tasks.
And by then he developed his own basic martial arts and weapons techniques. So, he started getting tasks of retrieving special memory crystals which held various sword techniques, martial arts, other weapons techniques, basics of spell casting, basics of various forces & energies and how they react & interact with each other etc.
Just like that a couple million tasks were completed and he was strong enough to vaporize a mountain with single punch. And then he started learning about performing basic magic using Divine Energy instead of cosmic energy like normal cultivators do.
It took him years to be able to perform basic spells like creating fireballs, summoning water from atmosphere to create water balls, making local wind float in certain direction, raising pillars of stone from ground up etc.
He worked diligently and also worked on strengthening his body with divine energy which increased his strength by a few hundred times while channeling the energy into the body.
All this time he remembered why he was doing what he was doing and also his life before all this.
By the time he finished more than half of the tasks, he got to learn spells involving Divine Essence. Uptil now he learned how to use Divine Energy.
Divine essence is highly concentrated divine energy fused with a god himself making it unique to ever god. Hence it's also called a god's divinity.
Hence, Jason was floating around in a treasure trove uptil now. Especially since the essence is pure and without any lingering will of any other god, in this case Minerva's.
He slowly learned how to subvert laws & forces of nature far more easily with Divine Essence than with Divine Energy.
He started to realize the difference between the two and what each of them mean to a god.
He learned each God has a unique divine energy core within them. This core acts as an engine that has various artificial laws & forces inside it that form an equilibrium by always producing more divine energy than is required to function.
Gods cultivate this energy and turn it into essence which increases their power.
Only Minerva has a Divine Essence core that generates Divine Essence like Energy core generates divine energy.
And so he continued his missions which were getting more and more painful and difficult exponentially.
His billionth task tested all that he painstakingly learned until now but he didn't get any rewards. He got just a key which once held turned into golden motes and entered his body and he felt it anchored something to his soul.
He didn't get a chance to think much because scenery around him changed suddenly.
And so he found himself in front of an altar on top which floated that golden ball which he recognized as a lump of eternal essence that Minerva left for him. He realized the key earlier tethered this ball to his soul.
So he checked his last task.
Task (1,000,000,001/1,000,000,001) : Bind this Eternal Essence to your soul & make it part of yourself without getting your soul ripped to shreds.
Jason's soul and meatsuit of a body now is on the level of peak Demigod level. So he was pretty confident about the last task, but this? he felt the essence in front of him was an infinite source of eternal essence, just putting a hand on this thing would probably vaporize his hand.
Now he is supposed to take it into his soul and conquer it?
Taking a long round cactus which is 6 inch in diameter and 12 inch long in his ass would be far more easier compared to this.
Well he couldn't quit now could he?
This is the last hurdle between being a slave of fate and master of his own destiny, so he steeled his resolve and got closer to it.
"Here goes nothing"
He used his soul to exert his will upon the essence, it moved towards his soul & he wrapped his soul around it and just as he did it felt soul searing pain so hard, all the pain he felt up to this point in trial was nothing compared to it.
He tried to hold on and extract some essence from that thing. After he successfully extracted some he used it to assuage some pain in his soul. He started extracting more & more essence and came to a point where just as he was getting wounds, he was fixing them.
He got numb to the pain by now & it's a testament to his will that he held on when most simple gods would have fainted. Then, He started extracting more & more essence to refine his soul.
But the wounds produced were also getting more & more serious to the point that most of his soul was getting destroyed in a single wound inflicted by the ball & he used essence extracted to recreate missing part with eternal divine essence.
And just like that his soul tempering continued for three whole days, and during one of these cycle he put the essence ball inside his soul by reforming his soul around it after it was wounded.
The essence ball was now located just below the center point of his soul & his soul was strong enough to handle the essence without being blasted apart.
So, now his soul was of early God stage. (Stages of Godhood: God -> Greater God -> Eternal God)
But he knew he had one last thing to do despite being inside his soul and being bound to him, the Eternal Divine essence is still a foreign prosthetic in his body.
So he started the process of making every part of this foreign object his.
He sent wisps of his will inside it and his will interacted with the essence. He began the process of making every iota of essence, an extension of his divinity. He was almost finished when he discovered a relatively tiny part of essence held by a small wisp of will.
"To complete complete this trial, survive this outburst of energy."
He felt a huge amount of essence energy about to be released inside his soul which was wrapped around that foreign will. But before he could snub it inside the ball using all that essence that had his will, it escaped from top.
He felt soul searing pain & knew that his soul will be obliterated in a few milliseconds if he didn't stop this essence.
So he extracted as much essence he could handle, Essence that held his will and essence that had the will of the trial were set to collide in the center point of his soul.
Jason knew his soul would be obliterated once the collision happen, so he got the idea of forming a Divine Energy core inside soul that'll be able to use this explosion.
So, he formed a thin barrier of essence around the extracted essence and foreign essence, He continued to add more essence to the barrier making it thick.
And just as collision was about to happen, he created the artificial forces and laws based on his own understanding inside the barrier and accelerated his essence to make the collision more explosive.
The explosion happened and he used every bit of his strength to reach an equilibrium point inside his barrier. He guided the creation of new concepts, laws and forces that happened inside the barrier.
A raging white ball that shone like a sun was formed inside the barrier, and the newly formed core grew more and more intense and he tried his best to make this core part of him. The core kept growing in size, reaching the barrier placed by him & obliterating it.
The core made contact with his soul and it started eating his soul. Jason again felt same soul searing pain and began the process of healing and recreating part of his missing soul by using his essence inside the golden ball or Eternal Divine Seed as he named it.
After a few hours, the core was stabilized and he could feel it was now fully part of himself.
He felt it was beyond something he could ever imagine to accomplish. It was perfection, Unique, and powerful beyond comparison.
The core was in idle state, so he decided to test out the new engine. He sent out a few wisps of Eternal Divine essence and the core started working. It starting producing Large amounts of Diving Essence and Divine energy even after the Eternal Divine essence was used.
Yes, his core was producing Divine Essence and Divine Energy at the same time, & the way it was part of him now - as he got stronger, his core would also get stronger.
He made all the Divine Energy produced stay inside the core and be used up to create more essence.
Once he checked he was alright, he checked his tasks which were all were completed, so clicked on finish the trial.
He again found himself in that same weird space place but he realized he was in his soul form now.
"Congratulations my child" - he heard a voice behind him and just as he turned around he found a Heavenly beauty standing 5 meters away from him.
It was none other than Minerva.