After ignoring yet another Nyx facepalm, I continue my work… and not even a few minutes later I’m done. Having the intellect of a literal god is really handy sometimes!

“Thinking faster doesn’t actually make you smart though.”

And she’s right.

“I know I am.”

She is.

…

Now I just need her to do her part in this venture. And the most convenient part of having her be my personal angel of envy?

Thought transfer. I didn’t know it was called that until I mentioned it to Eris, and of course it already has a name.

Anyway, that’s not important right now! I’m busily transmitting Nyx my idea for how the gadget will look…

“…This is just a GravPro. Isn’t it? It looks like a GravPro, but without the… everything, really. It’s just the frame. No lenses, mind interface nodes… nothing.”

“It doesn’t need anything more; I just need a physical device to trigger the program’s initial subroutines. The Record will do all the heavy lifting.”

She nods sagely. “So the lazy route, yeah, I get it. Every inventor’s done it at some point. We haven’t seen any issues with latency with the u-comms, so it’s unlikely we will here…”

***

And we haven’t either, at least not that I’m aware of. Seems to be working in more than one way too, since none of the others have bothered me in quite some time.

…

How long has it been?

…

…

I don’t even know. The years don’t seem to mean much of anything anymore, outside of… I don’t even know what. Nothing, maybe.

Although my children are getting older, both visibly and mentally.

Zofia – my daughter with Izzy – turned twelve last week apparently. Well, not that I’d know what a twelve-year-old indra is supposed to look like. My wife finally relented and let me gift her an ascendant contract for it, although all I did was find her a natural group of lesser spirits and let her do the rest. It wasn’t difficult, all she had to do was bribe one with some mana and poof, System Assistant acquired.

She has ash-related Skills, to nobody’s surprise.

Her brother Joy meanwhile is due for a birthday in another month and change… the real difference being that he was born as a literal fox monster.

…And a fae.

…

I shouldn’t be surprised, to be fair. He still doesn’t have a humanoid form of any kind, also unsurprising considering he isn’t an ascendant either. Which is strange… as I understand it, most monster races are literally born with a light version of a System already, at least enough that they have inborn Skills and Traits and so forth and just progress along those lines.

Maybe he inherited that from me, Livvie, or both, considering neither of us is a normal monster in that sense.

Maybe because we’re gods, I don’t know. We’ll see what happens when he gets his own System though, since he’s been envious of his sister’s talents for most of his life.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

…

He can speak though, at least well enough. Nobody argued when I suggested that I should give him a language Skill, despite not having a System to fully make use of it. I’m not really sure how that works but it did so I’m not going to complain.

And Hope… well.

Hope is Hope, and it’s growing stronger by the day. I’m not sure whether Izzy has been joking the handful of times she’s asked if I understand what exactly I’ve created here, but after several evolutions in the span of a dozen years it’s strong enough to face any of the dungeon bosses on my plane, despite it being a heaven.

Well, except Izzy herself. My wife doesn’t hold back much anymore, but if someone is delving her dungeon they already know they’re going to be facing one of the more brutal goddesses. The only reason she hasn’t butchered or desiccated every single challenger to nothing is the dungeon respawn system I helped Vulcan and Nyx develop years ago, and also probably for the best that she’s never offered to give exhibition matches in Arty’s arena, she’d literally destroy them.

And the arena. Splinters, sawdust, and bone fragments all around I’m sure, and the rest leaving my home in the splash radius.

…

Years ago, I’d suggested my second first wife look for another partner as well… originally I’d meant her to try something with Artemis to see if we could get the compulsion to apply to her and possibly between her and I by proxy, so I could give my fox wife what I’d given her by that same compulsion, but they never were that compatible.

No, instead she had the misfortune to fall for a sickly human woman in the castle town. And wouldn’t you know it, she neither wanted to be healed via miracle nor to be a god - she didn’t want any of the hassles it entailed from our stories of it. So of course, Izzy mourned when she died. And of course I comforted her, even if it was performative.

Not all of my emotions are real, after all. Most of them still aren’t, not for lack of trying.

I’m not sure how I maintained so many relationships before, in my past life, my past self. They’re all so much work.

Worth it, yes. But still work.

“Mother.”

“Hm? What is it, Hope?”

I glance at the white-skinned behemoth squatting on its haunches to my side. The old fountain in the castle town’s main square has survived centuries, mostly due to my having cast permanence on it all that time ago, and it’s remained one of my usual haunts when I’m not absentmindedly watching the ever-shifting stars from the castle parapets or terrorizing overconfident mortals in my throne room.

“I brought you a gift, Mother,” my ‘child’ reverberates, very faintly rattling the stones upon which I’m sitting.

And that’s when it produces a lump of rotten flesh from its dimensional storage and holds it out toward me.

‘Delightful’.

A quick appraisal shows something a bit different though.

…

Where the hells did she even manage to find the heart of a divine tomb guardian, and how did she manage to preserve it!? I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of one of them outside of a dungeon, and if this had been from a dungeon it would have turned to sand by now!

“Was… this from a naturally occurring monster?”

“Hm? I don’t know, Mother. It was in the broken place, with all the dead things and dead people, and live people that I make dead, and thin walls and smart dead people who talk like live people. A lot of strong things are there too! Mostly by the surface but some below too, this was part of a strong thing I killed, it tasted bad but I ate the whole thing because Fox Mother said I have to eat what I kill or it’s uhhh dis… dis… disaffected? Distributed? Uh… dis-something.”

I can’t help but feel this is familiar.

(Yeah, how’s it feel, buddy?)

Oh hush.

“Disrespectful, maybe?”

The stage four greater horror’s eyes light up with recognition. “Yes, Mother! That!”

“Good.”

…

“I thought you might want this thing though, I think there’s a soul in it.”

Apropos of nothing, my child’s long tongue slides out to wipe across the withered meat.

“Yeah, that tastes like it has a soul in it.”

“Huh.”

I resist the urge to shrug, and instead take the fleshy blob from it. Who knows, maybe I can… well. Experiment on it or something?

Maybe put it in a human or something?

I feel the inbound telepathic browbeating before it hits and scramble to head it off.

Yes, Izzy. I know. I’m not actually going to do it, and I mean that.

Good. You’d better not, she answers in her natural, grating voice in the back of my head.

I’m not really sure why she does that for emphasis, but that’s fine. At least she’s embraced her true form more over the past years, although she still prefers to mimic her old mortal appearance.

As much as I do, to be fair. Most of my time is spent looking like a vaguely reptilian indra, just as I did in the distant past.

Dropping Hope’s gift absentmindedly into my own dimensional storage, I hold out my hand like I usually do. And as it usually does, my child leans its head affectionately into it.

My monstrous offspring likes to be petted almost as much as that immortal fluffy orange bastard… not that I would know, he still won’t let me touch him unless I’m mind controlling him. Which I’m not allowed to do on penalty of angry wife, so the closest I get is hissing from a vague facsimile of a hiding place.

On the bright side, I have the consolation of knowing that I’m the only one from which Hope seeks affection. Ironic considering I’m not capable of giving genuine affection to anyone but Izzy.

As the alabaster horror collapses in a controlled heap at my feet, I suddenly feel a tingle…

From a bond I’d long since forgotten.

…

Master.

My old, former master. The damned horned rabbit himself.