Birds chirp outside my window. I can hear big and small critters chittering on my front lawn. I closed my eyes and willed the half-opened blinds closed. With a thought, darkness gathered around the house, and the local wildlife was gently urged away from the house.

What finally wakes me is a soft sigh, and the slowly growing awareness of the pool of stickiness that’s gathered beneath and around me, on the bed. It seems my wives and I actually killed the bed, or at the very least we’d done enough damage to short out the spells and enchantments that would have cleaned up the mess we’d made.

Things that were sexy and fun the night before, now just feel gross and a little uncomfortable now. Especially with the sprawl of people that were lying on top of me, and each other. Seriously, it’s a good thing I have beyond superhuman durability and strength, or I would have probably suffocated…Considering the activities that had been taking place on a nearly non-stop basis for the last 100 years. It needn’t be said that the beyond superhuman stamina had also been saving my bacon, in ways big and small.

I groaned lightly, careful not to wake up Jack, Kal, Hong Mirae, Kian, Yuval, or Ellison. Then I cast a quick cantrip to repair and clean up the bed. It took a little extra time to do so without creating fluctuations of magic, or altered space-time, that would wake up my wives. Once that was done, I fell back to sleep…And I didn’t wake up until about two…maybe three weeks later.

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Anywho, so I managed to pull through and digest all those multiverses and eldritch monsters. That was basically never really in doubt, though I will admit to a few moments of wondering if I might die, and maybe even a few moments of wondering if that would really be such a bad thing, considering how excruciatingly painful the process of breaking down all that matter, energy, and cosmic law had been.

In total, it’s been a little over 1000 years since the destruction of the DSO. It took me 200 years to fully put myself back together. All that material and energy had created a feedback loop where every time I fully processed some of the stuff I’d consumed, I’d expand.

So, I kept expanding at a rate that basically undid all my effort to pull myself back together. Imagine trying to mop up an ever-expanding spill. Fortunately, I did eventually manage to get a handle on the rapid growth of my true-body, but after that, it took me another 300 years to fully recover from all the agonizing mental and physical trauma of blowing myself up and then going through a crazy growth spurt.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Another 300 years were then dedicated to mastering myself. I essentially had to go through physical therapy for the nigh-omnipotent, where I had to relearn how to do certain things, while also learning how “not” to do certain other things that I’d apparently been doing all along.

My rapid growth had pushed my power to a range that was flatly beyond what I knew how to handle. Where before I could alter reality by thinking too hard, now if I thought at all, the world would break beneath my will. I actually ended up destroying a couple of thankfully empty multiverses that way.

900 years might seem like a long recovery time, but honestly, it was only this “short” because I’m the Empty-Archivist, and my near-endless pool of knowledge aided my learning process. Otherwise, it could have taken me potentially millions of years to bounce back.

One might wonder why my recovery was so exaggerated, considering that I and my wives had estimated that it’d be safe to go along with the plan of using me as a living payload for the Division’s nothingness bomb. Part of it was that we’d done similar under slightly riskier circumstances and I’d bounced back from that.

The other reason was that no matter how many of the DSO’s grunts we killed there seemed to be an endless number of reality-altering, music-obsessed, monsters waiting in the wings. What’s more, the DSO had actually seriously begun to put real effort into the Empty-Society, and while we’d yet to eat any heavy losses it had been only a matter of time till we lost someone we couldn’t afford to lose. If I could get us that victory with little to no risks, there was no reason not to do it.

We’d figured it’d be worth the risk, and I’d be fine, and I “was” fine so we were right. The only thing was that it took me way more time than anyone had expected for me to get back to being fine. Normally, I could bounce back from most injuries pretty quickly, but here I was punching so high above my league, it was only natural that there’d be a price. We just sort of hoped the price wouldn’t be too steep.

Now that I was past the hump, and mostly recovered, I could say the price was worth it, though I probably would think twice before doing the same thing. The final 100 years were spent passing along the benefits of my growth and wrapping up my recovery. The existence of the dual-cultivation techniques my wives and I used meant that they could gain greatly from my ordeal, and the excess materials and energy could be passed to the Empty-Society via item drops in the newest expansions of the Empty-Dream, and direct payments of those same items to the core staff of the Empty-Society.

Thus my life has been non-stop sex and non-stop programming for the last century, and honestly, I’m not sure if that’s better than being a…Nah, I can’t even complete that joke. I actually kind of like reality-scripting, and my wives were all pretty damn good in the sack. Sure the past few decades had been a little stressful, but living as a mass of barely sapient nothingness, and suffering endless pain, suffering both my pain and the pain of my victims, could go kick rocks in comparison.