Mila

“So,” Mila asked her teacher as she sat down in an abandoned mansion in Russia and began drinking heavily from a dead oligarch’s booze collection, “Are you going to tell me the story?”

“Ughhh.” Nana Xara sounded almost as depressed as Mila felt. “I don’t really want to, but it would be extremely wrong of me not to at this point.

“First, though, I want to say I am sorry. I didn’t know my enemies would affect you so directly.”

“Don’t apologize for that.” Mila waved her hand, sadly quite sober as her high Vitality, Endurance, and Toughness made getting drunk on normal liquor nearly impossible, while most magical varieties couldn’t work on someone with multiple mental forges. “Aalam and Diana wouldn’t have existed without that bitch doing what she did. And I would never have expected an immortal goddess to stoop so low as to murder her own children, so I doubt you did either.”

“Yeah.” Nana Xara audibly sighed. “That entire family is just evil.”

Mila didn’t say anything, but one of her minds started thinking it would probably be a bad idea for Aalam to hear what Nana Xara had just said. Then, however, she realized he had almost certainly already had the same thought and her depression grew a bit worse.

“I should probably start near the beginning.” Nana Xara sounded contemplative. “As you already know, I underwent a successful apocalypse style integration like Earth’s, albeit with nowhere near as impressive a result, and our planet’s new ruler was far more talented than me at the time.

“What I didn’t say, however, was that when our planet’s protection period ended we were invaded. Almost everyone was wiped out, including our leader, and I and several other talents were taken by a D rank force, brainwashed to become obedient slaves, and sold off.

“I was lucky. The sage line of classes is rare, and just my class alone showed I had talent for invention and out of the box thinking, so my brainwashing wasn’t as intensive. Everyone I knew and loved, however, well, their ends weren’t the best.”

Nana Xara paused for a second before continuing. “I was sold to a B rank force where the leader was trying to design a new cultivation technique, and I became one of his guinea pigs. Thankfully, the design for his technique was actually good, the man heavily inspired by a fragmented version of Yin Yang Cosmology, so my foundation as I rose up through F, E, and D ranks was solid, especially as all six of my Laws continued to rise. But, for me, that was not a good time.

“Throughout my several hundred years there, I warmed the bed of nine different men; I was physically tortured and abused on the regular so the force’s healers could practice on me; and psychologically, well, I was messed up enough to think that was the type of life I deserved.

“After I reached D rank, that force was destroyed by another B rank force and I was sold off again, this time to one of the largest human empires in the universe, the Farakal Empire. And there I was given to one of the empire’s princes, an extreme talent who was half my age yet already 50 levels higher.

“I became that sadistic monster’s personal slave and, while I was treated better—given the magic variant of Yin Yang Cosmology, taught by actually good teachers, and fed resources to better improve my stats, racial abilities, and the grade of my race during my next two rank ups—in most ways my life was worse. My new master liked to give me to his friends to play with. He was psychologically abusive, tricking my then ignorant self into thinking I was in love with him despite him being incredibly cruel. And, as a plague master, he often tested his creations on me, making me so sick I could only be saved by the force’s A rank healer.

“Over the next 16,782 years, I had five children, all with different men, and I wasn’t allowed to raise any of them, all of them handed off to their fathers’ families instead. But then, when we were both B ranks, I got pregnant with the prince’s own child, and I was able to watch her grow.

“Your direct ancestor from your mother’s side, she inherited her father’s third eye uniqueness and she followed the path of a four elements pugilist, but she was a bit too talented, and she made a lot of enemies in the empire as a result, eventually even killing her own father.

“She was forced to flee, and she wanted me to go with her, but I was too messed up by that point, even attacking her when she tried to rescue me.”

Nana Xara chuckled slightly, still sounding sad. “I was then handed off to a different prince of the empire, an older B rank, and, if everything was normal, I probably would have ended my life as a B rank slave.

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“Thankfully, however, the Farakal Empire had made a lot of enemies and hoarded a lot of treasure, so that B rank prince was in fact a disguised A rank planning on robbing them blind, a yin yang trickster by the name of Cai Zhi-Sheng, who’d already killed the prince years before and taken his place.”

Mila could almost see Nana Xara start to smile sadly. “Zhi-Sheng wasn’t an abusive asshole, and he took pity on me. Over the next several thousand years, as he slowly worked to learn even more of the secrets of the Farakal Empire, he taught me more about magic, cultivation, and how to interact with the System than everyone else in my life up to that point combined. But what was more important was how he taught me I had a choice in things.

“He used to play this game with me, ‘A, B, or something completely different’, where he would give me a choice between two options and subtly guide me into not choosing either of them but instead doing what I thought best. It took a while, but he slowly helped me undo my brainwashing, and he never tried to take advantage of me in any way, even as I started to worship him.

“Looking back and knowing him as I came to later, he’d seen my level of talent and probably liked the idea of having an A rank subordinate. Knowing him, he especially liked the idea of having someone who’d follow his every word. He was arrogant like that.” Nana Xara chuckled slightly. “But he was also probably bored. Over forty million years old by that time and having been introduced to the universe through an apocalypse style integration like me, he’d lost everyone he’d ever loved, and he was likely looking for a connection. So he raised me into someone who could be his friend, not his subordinate—a lot like you and Isaiah.

“When he finally did rob the Farakal Empire blind, getting his revenge on their leadership for destroying his home world, and causing the empire’s downfall in the process, he took me away. And, unlike with my daughter, I followed him.

“Over the next hundred thousand years, we traveled together, just experiencing the universe, and then, with the resources he’d stolen, I reached A rank and our partnership became a bit more equal. We lived pretty quietly for A ranks. Though Zhi-Sheng did like to stick his nose into things wherever we went, he always did so in ways where no one knew how powerful he was while using various identities, so we weren’t famous at all.

“After about a million years we got married, both just deciding it was time, and then we settled down and made a force of our own in an out of the way galaxy cluster, even managing to have two boys of our own.

“Things were good. And, over the next few dozen million years, I grew more powerful, eventually quietly becoming one of the most powerful A ranks in the universe.

“But then my daughter with my former master, who’d risen to A rank as well, got in trouble with an elven empire and Zhi-Sheng and I moved to rescue her.

“Unknowingly, we foiled the plan of one of the elven gods, and the way we did so exposed that Zhi-Sheng had the Shadow King uniqueness, something neither of us had known was bad.

“While I was spending time with my daughter and her family at her force’s base, five gods from five different factions arrived at my home and killed my husband, my two boys, and almost all my descendants. They had wanted to kill everyone, but they missed a group of about a dozen of our most talented youngsters adventuring on one of our smaller planets as one of them, a great-grandson of mine, had been born with a shadow line uniqueness as well.

“Just to be on the safe side, the five gods then also came to my daughter’s force, but this time things didn’t go as well for them. While my daughter died, she managed to take one of the subordinates of the Divine Child down with her, and I personally slew the elven god who’d started everything along with the only independent god in the group. This left just two gods, one the husband of Bellessia, a member of the human ancestors faction, and the other a subordinate of the Lady of Laws, Carina the Wise, the only one of the five still alive. And they fled.

“I took my daughter’s descendants and went back home, finding the group of children, and then I hid everyone on several unintegrated life worlds.

“After this, not really caring about myself, I went a bit crazy, releasing plagues of destruction which almost completely annihilated the forces under the five gods. But killing everyone related to my family’s murderers didn’t make me feel better, and I feared for the lives of my remaining descendants, so, without any better options, I sold myself to the System so we would all be safe.

“I became a protector of our universe, a role possible for powerful A ranks under the System’s rules, and I killed thirteen invading gods during my remaining years. In my most famous battle, a large one with multiple gods on each side, I killed five gods from other universes with a powerful plague, but I ‘accidentally’—and I very much do not mean that word—killed Bellessia’s husband as well, not being in time to give him an antidote like the several other gods from our universe I’d infected at the same time.”

Nana Xara paused for a second. “You then know the rest. I grew old, didn’t want to die, and made one last gamble, bringing the greatest talents from my remaining descendants, along with those of the forces who’d fallen under the control of the invading gods I’d killed, to Earth. And then I allowed them to breed for about a hundred thousand years before your generation.”

Mila took another swig of alcohol. Compared to Nana Xara’s early life, hers was a trip through paradise, and that was kind of scary. Just like how beauty without power could turn into a curse, it seemed talent without power could do the same, and as E ranks their level of power was very, very low.

She’d done her research. The Primordial Humans were the descendants of the Primordial Sovereign, one of the three leaders of the human ancestor faction, and together they made up the most powerful family in the universe. The Primordial Sovereign alone was one of the five most powerful gods, able to fight against the Lady of Laws or the Divine Child, and he had six divine children, thirteen other divine descendants, and over half the largest human empires shared his bloodline.

This was Aalam’s enemy and, if Mila’s uniqueness was revealed, which was almost certain to happen in the next few years, their enemies would instead grow to all gods in the universe.

Mila was terrified. And she was sad. And she really, really wished it was possible for her to get drunk.