“Mhm…” Jack moaned softly in her sleep.

“Shhh…It’s fine. I’m here,” I said. Also half-asleep. Soothingly running my hands through her hair because she’d been doing the same for me all this time.

Unsurprisingly, randomly consuming strange eldritch entities from outside the veil of space and time, results in weird effects on one’s body, spirit, and mind. Go figure. The downside was me spending the next ten years basically dying as I struggled to keep myself together in all senses of the word. I didn’t just eat the Burning-Man, I ate everything that it had touched, and all the dark and forgotten realms it was associated with, and/or connected to. The high levels of anomalous energy from the Burning-Man ran havoc on everything that made me who, and what, I am. There were countless instances where I almost experienced a terminal cessation of being.

One of the upsides of that whole ordeal was that I learned that Jack took the whole “sickness and health” clause of our marriage pretty damn seriously. Jacqueline Calloway definitely saved my life, because even if I can’t remember much because of the fugue states and near-constant delirium, I’m pretty sure there were months, if not entire years, where I was basically just melting, and she kept me from slipping down the drain through sheer force of will.

I honestly don’t know how she managed it, and I’ll remind you that at this point in time, I’m more nigh-omniscient than I’ve ever been before. Through hard and soft means, Jack kept me from shuffling off the mortal coil and I’m not sure there’s any way that I’ll ever be able to make it up to her.

Speaking of hard and soft...despite the fact that I was dying the whole time, we had a crazy amount of sex during our ten-year seclusion. Like an almost excessive amount of sex. Part of it was that in my occasional moments of lucidity, the mortal peril I’d just come through, and my extreme feelings of gratitude towards Jack, seemed to turn into extreme levels of horniness. Part of it was the fact that Jack’s main tool for helping me digest the excess energies that I was channelling from the space between the world was dual cultivation.

Hell, I’m pretty sure there were times where I wasn’t entirely lucid and we kept fucking because if she didn’t drain away some of my excess energy, I’d evaporate...I mean literally evaporate like water or dry ice. Just poof and gone. It’s cool...I gave consent during my lucid periods and well like I said, I was going to die otherwise. Outside of my Idle-Clicker system and dual-cultivation, other cultivation exercises and energy channelling methods wouldn’t really work with me.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Now, I’d come through the other end of the ordeal and I was alive. So it was my turn to take care of Jack, because she’d worn herself down taking care of me. Thankfully, she wasn’t in as bad a condition as I was. And without sounding like a damned ingrate, I was better equipped to take care of her. She was more normal, and easier to handle, being ostensibly more human than I was. And thanks to all my stories, especially my [Tale of the Healer], [Tale of the Alchemist], and [Tale of the Cultivator], I knew exactly what I needed to do, to nurse her back to health.

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A couple more months passed, and then once Jack and I were both up and on our feet, we still sort of just stayed inside in our territory within the sect, because we were exhausted. We still had time on the seclusion period we’d requested, so there was no rush to get back to work. So, in the end, we decided to just take these easy. We continued having a whole bunch of sex because we were celebrating our continued survival and it helped us consolidate the gains that we’d managed to pull out of that whole nightmare.

I’d sort of expected us to eventually slow down and cool off now that we were no longer “fucking for survival”, but surprisingly, things stayed pretty high-energy in the bedroom department. Though it was thankfully, no longer, desperately so. Jack and I entered this weird second honeymoon stage, then when we finally mellowed out, we were still very into each other, which I liked. I liked knowing that the person I was head-over-heels for was head-over-heels for me.

Eventually, real life did finally need to creep back in. We called up our friends in Five-Fire City to let them know that we were out of seclusion. We sent the necessary affidavits to the sect. Then we got back to work. Life carried on, and I was pleased to find that not too much had changed.

The only odd part was the sect deciding to promote Jack and I to Senior-Elders, aka just Elders, but I guess that makes sense, we ‘had’ been working with them for almost a year before everything went down. We’d proven we could be trusted somewhat. Also, Jack and I were both Nascent-Immortals now. So it probably would have been weird for us to still be Junior-Elders, right?