Planets fizzled away, stars dispersed, I found myself cussing up a storm, as I dodged some extremely lethal tunes about being a fierce “boss-lady”. Then I retaliated with cold bolts of weaponized nihilism. Deciding to stop holding back since the universe we were in was already pretty much totaled, thanks to the asshat attacking me.

Around decade five of my patrol through the Empty-Society’s territory, I found myself in a pitched battle against a hypermassive, Mandelbrot fractal, octopus made of marching band music. That marching band Octopus actually almost got me. Tearing jagged holes in my nothingness with an especially spirited salvo of pop song-y beats.

For some reason, “my” spells and abilities just weren’t cutting it with this guy. I should have had back-up, but I suspect the bastard had already killed most of our people who were supposed to be in that region of our territory. I ended up having to resort to one of the more perilous forms of wave-form collapse attack.

Basically, self-destructing, but in a way that made things real trippy and messy in exactly the kind of way, a data-manipulator like myself could exploit. My body went boom, then consciousness snapped open and absorbed the destroyed probabilities locked within my body. Those probabilities were used to take over all the nothingness within the part of the void we were fighting in. Reality flip-flopped again, and my wave-form collapsed undid itself, leaving me as an especially raw, harder to control, but much “taller” version of myself.

I used my new height to pull the Marching Band Octopus into myself. My freshly fortified nothingness did much better at withstanding the entities' highly destructive marching-pop. I swallowed the marching octopus up just as it switched to playing funeral dirges to try and push me into a death state. Which honestly was kind of stupid, of the creature. I was primarily made of nothingness. It would have been better off playing something positively charged than trying to will me dead with those kinds of dark tunes.

To be fair, that funeral dirge “did” make the marching octopus pretty spicy to swallow. My best guess is that it was just spamming one of its strongest attacks to try and make me spit it out. To be bad for it, I had no intention of spitting the entity out. Or rather, the moment the entity was inside me, it was already basically in my stomach. I turned my rich stores of nothingness and negative-energy into teeth and grinders. Then I basically suffocated the marching band octopus to death, while nothingness tore it apart…I’ve never heard them scream like that before, but then again, they usually died faster.

This was the point where I decided I should probably go into seclusion to breakthrough. I already had a couple multiverses worth of material that I’d prepared to aid the process. So, I just needed to take some time to properly cultivate and bolster my strength. I’d been procrastinating because thus far, I hadn’t run into anything that I couldn’t handle that wasn’t one of the DSO’s senior generation, and suddenly nearly getting killed freaked me out a little.

Since my true-form was that of a system, I didn’t really need to consciously focus on cultivating. I was basically automation personified, after all. So, after informing my wives, allies, subordinates, and the folks in the division, of my plans, I turned my attention to a certain little world that I’d grown fond of visiting.

*************************************************************************************************************

They say that the world of Nine-Clover was formed by a nine-leafed Clover, that was dropped from on high by some unfathomable being of the heavens. The fact that this particular bit of local mythology was more true than not, was all that one needed to know, to get a gist of what kind of world Nine-Clover was.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

There was indeed a piece of some kind of fresh and green herb resting at the heart of this planet. The hyperdimensional energy that emanated from the clover at the center of Nine-Clover did indeed suggest an origin in the higher planes of existence. I was 90 to 95-percent certain that this particular myth was more or less accurate. The energy that the clover existed would have almost certainly created an area of increased gravity that would have caused stellar debris to gather around it, and that same energy likely hastened the development of life on this planet.

Nine-Clover was indeed still a world in the midst of its age of myths and legends. A world where the impossible still happened with enough commonness that you never quite knew what was going to happen, and because the world was still young, that unpredictability didn’t have the same ominous portents it would have in older worlds.

I think that’s why I liked this world so much, its primordial chaos was a lot simpler than the chaos that could be found amongst the heavens and the stars. There were definitely factions vying for power down here, yes…but they were basically almost kiddie factions compared to the eons-old groups that were running around scheming against each other in the heavens. It’s like the difference between your highschool’s student council and the actual political cesspit in pretty much any national capital.

*************************************************************************************************************

I’ve kept one of my perfect clones living in the Nine-Clover world for a little under 300 million years. It’s a bit hard to tell the exact time, because the flow of time between universes in a multiverse wasn’t always consistent. So uh, don’t worry about the timing on that, or think about the fact that we’ve only been off Sigfrid for 5 million years, too much, I guess. That’s just sort of how things happened with that particular universe.

` This was especially so, since I’m pretty sure, we had to put that universe on pause and then adjust and readjust its internal time flow. We had to mess with Nine-Clover’s time because eldritch materials from the higher-planes tended to be pretty destructive for universes of the material world, and there was a whole lot of fiddly reality-alteration that we’d needed to do, to keep the Nine-Clover universe from going poof.

Anyway, my clone’s been living in Nine-Clover for a while, and after wandering around a bit, it, I, have settled down on a mountain top in the middle of nowhere, on one of the planet’s three moons, because I liked the world but I didn’t necessarily want, or need, to get mixed up in its people’s affairs.

My clone was pretty much what you’d expect of a clone. It looked just like me, but toned down because average height for an immortal of my level was pretty freaking huge, and average-looking for an immortal of my level could either melt faces off, break minds, or trigger the birth of cults. So, now I was just a sorta tall dude, who was decent looking. Dark eyes. Dark hair. Dark skin. Serious face.

Actually, my clone’s hair did have some gray and white mixed in, following the trend that older cultivators both here and back home used to follow. Technically that was less of a trend and more of a result of their attempts to fend off the reaper being imperfect, but it felt like an appropriate visual cue for me to adopt so that anyone I ran into knew that I wasn’t actually as young as my face would suggest.

Also, I’d like to say that the loose martial robes that I was wearing were a bit more old-fashioned than I’d usually dress, but actually, this was literally just something I’d pulled out of my actual closet. It was actually an old Forest and Life and Death uniform, that I'd been using as loungewear, rather than something I’d put on for the express purpose of fitting in. In the immortal realms, fashion was kind of all over the place.

People dressed according to their mood, comfort, and familiarity, so you might see people in sleek, hi-tech, space-suit-looking businesswear sitting next to folks in loincloths and fur hides. Which I guess makes sense, because there were folks from all sorts of worlds, in all sorts of historical points in the immortal realm, and for the most part, our impeccable bodies made pretty much anything look good.