Mila
Mila and Aalam moved to his crafting hall, a large geodesic marble and glass dome, flying up to the roof where they sat and looked out over the planet’s new sun setting over the horizon.
Then, before Mila could say anything, Aalam started first, his face looking concerned. “How are you doing, Mila?”
“I’m—” Mila considered lying for a second, but then decided against it, taking a deep breath. “I’m kind of falling apart.”
“Why?” Aalam looked a bit surprised and, not for the first time, Mila was annoyed he didn’t have a readable aura, as for some reason he was again blocking her ability to read his emotions through their bond.
“Well, first, without Diana, I feel like I’m actually in charge, and I don’t like that.
“Coming up with plans, be they economic or criminal, that’s fun. Tricking people, stealing things, I’m good at those. But leading people, being someone they can put their trust in, Diana’s always been way better at that than me.
“There is a reason I’ve mostly been behind the scenes.
“Second, I lost my best friend, and that put into stark perspective how I don’t have many of those. Other than you, Isaiah’s probably the person I’m closest to on the entire planet, and I’ve had to be there for him, so the only people who’ve been there for me are Irena and Nana Xara.
“I still don’t feel fully comfortable with Irena, and she’s also been busy. Meanwhile, while Nana Xara undoubtedly doesn’t deserve any blame, I can’t help but feel a bit pissed off at her anyway, so I haven’t been able to get any help from her.
“Finally, third, while I’ve been hiding it, I’m really, really scared.
“Diana was killed by a curse due to some plan completely outside of my control or knowledge base, and there was absolutely nothing I could do, which just highlights how weak I am. Then Nana Xara told me her life story and I learned about her husband, who had the same path and first uniqueness line as me.
“Nana Xara always told me gods would hunt me down if my uniqueness was revealed, but I hadn’t realized our ancestor, just by his existence, had all the godly factions work together to wipe him out.
“Just by existing, every god in the universe is going to want to kill me.”
Mila felt tears start to enter into her eyes as her body trembled slightly, but then Aalam grabbed her hands and held them tight, which should have been comforting. Instead, however, Mila felt herself start to break down even more as she looked down through the glass into the lab. “You should probably just abandon me.”
Through her sensory domain, she saw Aalam continue to stare at her face, seemingly thinking. Then he let go of her left hand and reached up to push her chin up with his right so she was looking at him again. “And what advantage would I get from that?”
“What?” Mila felt confused, and she did nothing to stop it from showing on her face.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but everyone from Earth is descended from Nana Xara. In that case, what percentage are descended from her husband?”
Mila had already asked Nana Xara this question, and the answer had been different from what she’d had her grandmother share with Joma, as it wasn’t everyone from Earth. Instead, the answer had been most East Asians and everyone of Native American or Pacific Islander descent, which could potentially cause problems.
To Aalam, however, she gave the true answer.
“In that case, I could also awaken to a shadow line uniqueness, as could Diana, and probably over half the population of Earth. So why wouldn’t the gods kill us too?”
Mila just stared at him, feeling quite a bit better but also mildly pissed off. “Why do you always have to use logic, Aalam?”
This time it was Aalam’s turn to look confused. “Because it’s logical?”
“You couldn’t just say you wouldn’t let anything happen to me because it’s me?”
“Would you believe me if I did?”
Mila thought about it for a second. “From someone else, no. From you, yes.”
“And that’s because I don’t lie. But I’m not 100% sure I wouldn’t abandon you if I wasn’t in the same boat.”
Mila just sighed, not having gotten what she wanted from the conversation, but probably what she needed. “Sometimes I wish you weren’t so honest all the time.”
Then she shook her head. “How are you doing?”
Aalam smiled, though it did seem a bit forced. “Actually, pretty good, everything considered. I’m able to sleep without nightmares at least once every three nights and that’s been nice.
“I think it has to do with having a target for revenge and the realization that the universe is so absolutely messed up that even a terrible person like me can probably make things better.
“But it hasn’t fully sunk in yet that I won’t be able to see Diana for at least several thousand years, nor that her relationship with Isaiah is almost certain to fall apart due to what the difference in their effective ages will be once she’s reborn, so things will get worse. For now though, I’m okay.”
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Mila thought about touching on the idea Aalam still thought he was a terrible person, but decided it wasn’t something anyone other than he himself could change his opinion on, so she instead asked the only really important question for the near future. “No thoughts of suicide?”
Aalam shook his head. “None.”
“Good then.” Mila took the hand Aalam was still holding back and got down to business. “So, we know what we need to do to reincarnate Diana. Has anything changed for you? Or should I start telling you what Nana Xara and I have come up with?”
“I awakened to the Soul King uniqueness when absorbing Diana’s power, so my effective Soul stat is now a lot higher.”
Mila took a second to process that. For most, awakening to such a uniqueness would just be a nice added benefit, the Soul stat by itself not that useful, instead a limiting factor of how high other stats could go, but that was different for her and Aalam as the Soul stat was directly responsible for the power of contract skills, including one of Aalam’s core skills, Soul Prince.
Not even counting how a higher Soul stat effectiveness would increase his other stats due to Minor Soul Lord Battle Armor and its future advancements, just the increase to Soul Prince would allow Mila to drastically alter her plans as its power directly affected how large Aalam’s Territory could be, and, more important, how far away the planets in his Territory could be from each other.
“Anything else?”
“My Nascent Energy Constructor racial ability can now convert primal energy to nascent energy with a horrible conversion rate.”
Mila frowned, a bit annoyed Aalam now had a second half grade higher racial ability. “Less helpful, as we have other uses for primal energy, but noted.
“What about Diana’s still existing Territory and bonds? How is that working?”
“I managed to implant a G rank version of the Underlord skill into Diana’s temporary G rank class, allowing her to maintain her lord and servant bonds, as well as her Territory. Then I used my Soul Prince skill to subsidize the effects her previously more powerful skill would have allowed for.”
Mila and Nana Xara had guessed as much, as they’d quickly noticed the effects, which had been very, very useful for hiding the fact Diana was dead. “Good thinking, Aalam. That saved us from a huge panic.
“Anything else?”
“Finally,”—Aalam took a deep breath—“I think the right path for Diana is to start having her accumulate faith energy before she is reborn.”
This confused Mila a bit. Faith energy was something gods competed for, but she wasn’t exactly sure what it was as the Steel Swamp Blessed Land’s archives had nothing on it and even Nana Xara barely had any information. All Mila knew was that all gods wanted it and that it was fundamentally different than things like Territory and karmic merit, though it was at least somewhat linked to both. “Why?”
“From the information about monsters in Steel Swamp Sorin’s legacy, it should unlock the ideal race line for her once she comes back.”
“Okay.” Several of Mila’s minds got to work considering how to go about accumulating faith energy for Diana while her main mind continued talking with Aalam. “Noted.”
“So, what do you and Nana Xara want to change from our old plans?”
“Not too much, actually, at least when it comes to goals. But, while we’ve always focused on secrecy before, now it’s become a necessity as your mother will soon learn how you died, which will then reveal to her, and possibly every other god in the universe, that we have cultivators with shadow line uniquenesses.
“Your master has also dropped her support to us—though she did give us all the pills we would need before D rank, including the completed pill for your D rank race advancement—and we can expect everything Krysta and Henrietta know about us to be revealed in the near future.
“There will be a lot of problems for me, such as having to make fake identities for everyone for the C rank universal tournament and speeding up the timelines of rescuing the Earthlings turned into monsters, but you don’t need to concern yourself with that side of things too much. The main thing you have to be aware of is that we are absolutely not going to try and do anything to take revenge until we are at least B rank.”
“Okay.” Aalam nodded, likely having expected most of what she’d said. “That works well with my oath.”
Mila paused for a second. “Oath?”
“Mila don’t—” Nana Xara began as Aalam seemed unsure of what to say, but then she stopped herself in the middle. “Actually, for you, learning early would probably be a good thing. Tell Aalam he can explain.”
“Nana Xara says you can explain.”
“Phew.” Looking relieved, Aalam nodded. “You know how there was something I couldn’t tell you about B rank which my teacher helped me with?”
Mila nodded.
“Well, like D rank is about opening acupoints and C rank is about forming cores, B rank is about oaths.
“They are empowerments to a cultivator which give about as much power as a class, but they also come with limitations. My teacher, for example, can’t not be an honorable business woman or she’ll gain a degree of soul shackles.
“The most important thing for you, however, is that the more true an oath is to the core of a cultivator, the more powerful it is. And that means you have to know yourself.”
Mila just stared at him for a few seconds, processing that the magic system of the universe, which up to this point seemed to mostly conform to the laws of physics, now seemed to grow a lot more metaphysical. Then, however, she thought about it a bit more and realized that, if a cultivator’s power was all mostly stored in her soul, it would make sense that metaphysical methods of improving the health of a soul, such as a cultivator coming to know herself, would improve power.
“So, you already have one of these oaths?”
“Yeah.” Aalam shared with her part of his status screen she’d never seen before.
Oath of the Villain’s Clean Vengeance
You are not a good person, but you will hold back and wait so your acts of vengeance won’t harm the lives of innocents when you want to kill
Benefits:
Increase the speed of mastering skills by 100%
Increase the effectiveness of the Attunement stat by 150%
When training for revenge, the above two benefits are multiplied by a factor of 6
Should you complete an act of vengeance without harming innocents, there is a high chance of entering into a state of sudden enlightenment
Limitations:
Untargeted mass slaughter in the name of revenge will shackle your soul, the greater the slaughter the worse the shackles and the longer they will last
No wonder Aalam had been able to merge Ruler’s Domain so fast. He’d had a cheat increasing his speed of mastering skills by 600% on top of the already high 200% increase from his second class. That was a nine times increase in total! And it seemed his Attunement stat was also ridiculously high by this point, which would greatly speed up his mastery of Laws.
“That’s not fair. I want one of those.”
“Then first figure out more about yourself.” Aalam smiled at the obvious discomfort she showed as soon as he said those words, which Mila found annoying. “That’s the important thing for B rank. And it is a very, very bad idea to try and aim for a specific oath.
“Again, the more true an oath is the better, whatever that truth may be.”
Mila felt herself start to panic. Truth was not her strong suit, and she actively avoided introspection like the plague whenever she could help it. Hell, it had taken dying and eventually being reborn as a succubus for her to introspect much at all.
Sure, she’d come to realize some things about herself, like what she valued and some things she wanted in life, but she had a galaxy cluster sized load of baggage she hadn’t dealt with, such as the fact she’d barely said two words to her grandfather outside of a work context since she’d thrown him off that balcony all those years ago, and she’d been planning to never even try to clean house.
“Oh crap. I’m going to have to go to therapy, won’t I?”