The following notification appeared.

Congratulations! You have taken all the pain that Xoris could inflict on you! Xoris has been put into a dungeon inside your mind from where he cannot influence anything about you, unless you want him to.

I suddenly came back to myself. Ian’s face became clear and I could blink my eyes and I could feel the chains all about me. There was an extreme sense of exhaustion all about me, but I knew that I had won. I reckoned that although I had fallen unconscious, it was after the last minute of the level 10 pain had passed.

“I-I,” I said, not knowing what to speak. All the time my tongue had felt like a granite slab I had wanted to speak to my wives and Ian, but now I could barely think of what to speak. “Thank you!” I said to the five of them, “Thank you!”

“Is he gone?” Ian asked. I nodded vigorously. Ian made way and my wives kissed me on the face so many times that I had to tell them to stop.

“You might like to remove these from me,” I said to Rozy. She had forgotten to remove her chains from my body.

“Sorry!” she said.

“The chains look bigger than what you could create before,” I said.

“Well, I levelled up,” Rozy said, even as she unwrapped the chain and then shrunk them until they had disappeared entirely and were replaced by her normal hands.

“How did you all know that I was in the heavens?” I asked the five of them, sitting up on the cold floor of the castle hall.

“The Well to Everywhere,” Lia replied. “It couldn’t bring us to the heavens, but it brought us to the giant bamboo using which we came here.”

For a moment I just looked at the faces of my wives and Ian. I couldn’t express how happy I was to see them all. And then I noticed a figure standing in front of the main door from the corner of my eye.

It was the sorcerer Mintuk.

He was staring at us, with a face that was confused and horrified at the same time. And then he spoke.

“Father?”

I laughed.

“Your father is locked in a dungeon inside my mind,” I told him, “you can address me as King Rabbi from now on.”

A smirk came over Mintuk’s face. He raised his hand. I knew he was going to throw one of his nasty spells. I did not want his spells to hit my wives or Ian. I was positioned such that I was in between Mintuk and my wives and Ian. I immediately activated the Monsterification spell.

The size of the hall seemed to shrink as I became a giant rabbit. Mintuk’s spell hit me causing the fur on my side to come out, leaving a pink bald patch. Mintuk took a step backwards, knowing that his nasty spells were not very useful on me owing to my size.

He looked around desperately and his eyes fell on the ice device and season control device that were lying at a corner some metres away from him. He let out a laugh, ran and picked up the season control device. He looked up at me, placing his hand at the base of the season control device. The season control device became as though it were made of gas and began to merge with his hand.

“You see,” Mintuk said, “I spent the night performing a successful ritual which has now given me the ability to merge things with myself very much like you. And it doesn’t take as long as you either.”

In mere seconds the season control device had merged with his hand. And now Mintuk lifted his hand, grinning with malice. I was well aware that Mintuk could freeze all of us by putting us in a temperature of -100 degree Celsius. I couldn’t allow him to do that. I leapt to him and struck him with my paw such that with a shriek Mintuk went flying out of the main door of the castle and landed outside.

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I thought he had broken a few bones, but he got to his feet quickly enough. He stared angrily at me, but something seemed to have distracted him and he turned towards the gate of the castle grounds. His eyes went wide. At that moment a new notification appeared in my vision.

The Alliance of the Gods has come! It’s time for you to either defeat them and win the castle and win Godhood or be wiped out from existence by them. Good luck!

Darn it! I rushed to the main door and closed it.

“What happened?” Ian asked.

I deactivated my Monsterification spell and turned into a human.

“The Alliance of the Gods is coming because we took over the castle from the barbaric gods,” I said, and I couldn’t hide the fear in my voice. “They are going to kill us all!” This was going to be worse than Xoris enslaving me for life. Even though we had put up a lot of defences yesterday I did not think for a second that those defences would ever be able to deal with the gods.

“So there is nothing we can do?” Lia said.

“I… I don’t think there is,” I said.

“Then at least we can be happy that we are together in the moment of death,” Slia said, smiling rather painfully because of the cuts on her cheek.

“She’s right,” Rozy said, “we are together and that’s all that matters.”

The sound of explosions came from the outside of the castle. I reckoned the lightning and ice clones that I had created were being wiped out by the gods.

“But we don’t have to die,” Dani said. “I would like to live with you all.” She turned to Ian. “Can’t you create a quest to defeat the gods?”

Ian chuckled.

“I can create a quest sure,” he said, “but even though I can control the overall outline of a quest, there are limitations that I must face. And I do not think that I can right now create a quest to defeat the gods that you can actually win.”

Wait a minute, I thought. I had been forgetting something!

“Wait, I think we can free the barbaric gods who are currently in the dungeon and request them to ask the Alliance not to kill us,” I said aloud. Whether this would work I did not know. But Dani was right. I would be happier living with my wives than dying with them.

The five of us rushed to the dungeons even as the explosions outside got louder. Small quakes began to rock the castle and I wondered if the gods had attacked the roof of the dome and it was beginning to fall down.

Reaching the dungeons, we quickly freed the three gods and the warriors.

The one-eyed god looked at me with a smirk.

“So you are freeing us now since the Alliance has come?” he said with sarcasm. “You have realised you cannot win against the Alliance?”

“I never wanted to fight the Alliance,” I said. “I had been forced to obey the orders of a sorcerer who wanted to fight against the Alliance and take over your castle. His son is still outside, fighting with the gods.”

“And who are these?” the three-eyed god asked, gesturing at Ian and the wives. “Did you invite them here to witness the epic battle with the Alliance?”

The barbaric gods did not trust us at all. It was understandable as I had myself put them in the dungeons before when I was being controlled by Xoris.

I recalled that I still had the lightning device merged with myself. I deactivated the merging spell, such that the lightning device came out of my hand in the gaseous form and took shape on the floor.

“That belongs to us,” the one-eyed god said.

“Yes,” I said, “and if you do not believe our innocence, then you can kill us with it.”

There was silence for a while. The one-eyed god and the three-eyed god were looking intently at the lightning device as though considering using the device on us. The blind god was frowning hard. I didn’t really care what happened next. I had done all there was to do. Now, things were up to fate. As humans, we controlled our own fate to an extent, however I considered that this was fate’s chance to reward or punish us.

“I believe you,” the blind god said, so that his brothers looked at him confusedly.

“Are you sure?” they asked him.

“His voice speaks of innocence,” the blind god said. “And yesterday, I recall that when he was speaking, his behaviour was very different. He would pause after every sentence, as though waiting for someone to tell him what he should speak next.”

“I was speaking whatever the sorcerer was ordering me to,” I said, “the sorcerer was within me, and if I disobeyed him in any way he would inflict unbearable pain on me. The sorcerer is still inside me, however, he is locked in a mental dungeon now from which he cannot influence me in any way. These four ladies are my wives, and this man is a king and a good friend. Without them I would be still under the influence of the sorcerer. They came all the way from earth to save me.”

Just then there was a massive explosion, and it could only have been the sound of the main door of the castle being reduced to bits. My wives were afraid at this. But the blind god smiled reassuringly.

“Do not worry, we believe you and no harm shall come to you.”