Mindlessly, I made my way directly towards where I had seen the pillar of smoke during the day, trudging up and down each rise, wading through the tall grass, ignoring everything that I could even the once calming vastness of the night sky.

Even the fresh air, cold beyond comfortable levels, which had helped buoyed my spirits the previous day, was a shallow shadow of the help it had been yesterday. There were no flocks of birds, so majestic and free, flying at night, yet I knew they wouldn’t be able to draw me in with dreams of freedom and hope. Those stars which filled the endless skies, and normally reminded me of Whirling Cloud and Silver Moon, withheld their true brilliance from me.

Instead, each step I took, crushing the long grass beneath my feet, was filled with pure drudgery. A task to be done, yet I cared not for it, but it was done just because. And the cold winter air held no bite for me, being just there and not intruding upon what was important: that which was going on within my mind.

My mind warred about two topics.

No.

My thoughts and fears and worries danced between so many topics I was sure I wouldn’t be able to keep track; even if I had wanted to.

To further distract myself away from the distractions, I started cataloguing my distractions.

My Brother.

My ascession.

Traits.

The goddess.

Whirling Cloud.

Exalted Pine.

Fastidious House.

The Heartlands.

My troops left behind at Outer Heart.

This was all too heavy for me. I was just a normal bloke from Earth who, due to a misadventure of troublesome sprites, was killed. And then brought back to life again. And then learnt he was a slave. Who survived slavehood and was reconnected to his family. Including his father, who fled rather than be with me and my brother, his beloved sons. At the same time as losing his father, he lost his beloved brother in some unknown manner. He was the only one with whom I could be more of myself than with anyone else. At the same time, I discovered I was no mere mortal, but on the path to becoming as-an-of-yet-unknown-god.

Distracting myself from my distractions by using them as distractions wasn’t helping.

The silence of the night and the rustling of grass as I strode through it, trampling the grass beneath his feet, was finally getting to me. At least during the day I could’ve distracted himself by listening to birds chattering, or watching the world. But here, at night, only the stars held interest. Yet they dared not shine themselves upon me, leaving me alone in the darkness. More than ever in his life in this he wanted escape, maybe even oblivion, with music or videos or stories to distract and numb himself from the world. Booze, drugs, sex, anything would work, would help.

Out here, though, there was nothing.

Nothing but his thoughts and himself.

And his system…

His system, the one thing which was with him so often that he often forgot about it. Desiring an escape, he brought it up.

Name: People’s Defender

Concept: Troubled Sovereign of Various Dominions (Displayed: Patriarch of the Fastidious House)

Traits:

‎ Soldier of Death: 5M-0 (Displayed: Soldier)

‎ Intrusive Inquisitiveness: 4M-5 (Displayed: Seeker)

‎ Demi-God of Death: 6M-9 (Displayed: Divine Blessing: 5M-0)

‎ Mana Capable: 2M-1

‎ Calm Meditation in Chaos: 1M-3

‎ Successor to the Leadership of the Fastidious House: 3M-0

‎ (3 unused trait slots)

Hidden Traits:

‎ School of Hard Knock's Toughness: 5M-9

‎ Death Hunteth its Victims, Unbidden and Unannounced: 3M-7

‎ Adaptative Understanding of Domain: 2M-9

System Traits:

‎ Detailed Analysis: 1M-2 (Displayed: Standard Analysis)

‎ Standard System Communication: 0M-0

‎ (1 unused slot—access /store/ for further System Trait Applications)

His feet stopped moving, unbidden by him. It had been a few months since he last checked his status page, that was true, but he hadn’t expected things to have changed so much. Maybe the discovery that he was going to be a god had shaken him up more than expected, as three traits had changed their names; including the previously annoying named Sneaky-Beaky Lookie and Scoutie. Not that he wasn’t sure the new name was better. It seemed like it would cover similar situations, if he could make them his victims in some manner. Or maybe it was flavour text and it would work the same way as it had before.

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But, personally, I very much doubted that.

Especially as it somehow had decreased in Mastery rating, something I’ve never heard of happening without being impacted upon by external administrators. Further more Adaptative Understanding of Domain increased rapidly for a trait I only gained yesterday.

Countless hours of training went into increasing my now-renamed Scion of the Fastidious House to make it reach 3M-0, and Adaptative Understanding of Domain had almost reached its level within a single day.

Maybe some of my issues were related to my new concept. It did claim I was troubled. But did that concept really have as much control over me as it seemed like? If so, how did Father change his, and did he have any control over it?

Whatever truth I could discover within my mental ramblings, it was clear from the system that my Brother had died. Maybe this was why no one questioned if Father was still alive, because the system said so. I even though I believed I needed to confirm that my Brother had fallen, I knew he had.

What troubled me, beyond that, was I needed to claim from him, the key to all of the holdings for Fastidious House. He’d mentioned it as a joke, after we departed, that if anything would happen to him, I needed to take it from him and use it to claim my true birthright.

At the time, I had laughed along with him.

Looking back at it now, the impressive view of Fastidious House rising out of the grasslands distracted me when he made the joke. There had been some part of him which had been distracted and reserved. Maybe it hadn’t really been a joke, but I took it that way because I believed in his sanctity of rule.

Without that key, Fastidious House would fall to whomever claimed the key. And I was sure, from my limited learnings about the political situation and how society worked, that there must’ve been a plan to overthrow Fastidious House and merge it with another House. Or there could’ve been a faction within Fastidious House which desired power and was willing to claim it from my Brother.

Which meant I had something more important than finding my Brother’s body.

Sorry, Brother, I wanted to bring you back with me so that you could lie with your forefathers. Not that there were any forefathers in our family’s crypt. Father, the progenitor of our house, is alive. And you, dear Brother, I would need to leave you behind in these grasslands forever. For by the time I could go and find your body, I was sure it would either be scattered over the grasslands, or be but bones.

Something came back to me.

No.

They hadn’t, had they? The smoke from the pyre lazily reaching up into the sky. They had burnt my Brother’s body out far from Fastidious House. Not because they were being respectful, but because they didn’t want him. By burning him out there, they were removing all trace of him from the House. As for some reason, it was the ash of flesh and the funeral pyre that this civilisation held in dearest respect. They discarded the skeletons in vast pits, along with the uncared for and hastily disposed Three Tier bodies.

Not only had they killed my Brother but even after death, they disrespected him. I felt myself chuckle and my lips curl up in a half-smile. Now there was another reason for me to hunt those whom hunted him; to not only discover whom killed him, why, and to visit death upon them, but also to revisit their disrespect of theirs upon my Brother to them.

I also needed to reclaim the key they stole from my Brother, and use it to make myself the new patriarch of the House.

With that I stacked up: Intrusive Inquisitiveness; Demi-God of Death; Successor to the Leadership of the Fastidious House; Death Hunteth its Victims, Unbidden and Unannouced; and Adaptative Understanding of Domain.

Not knowing how I knew, I rushed towards Fastidious House at a far faster run than I had ever believed was possible. Even though my world seemed to shrink to the narrow band of grassland ahead of me, I was still aware of things I knew I shouldn’t’ve been. Like the corpse of a rodent, slowly being devoured by insects. Or one of those nocturnal birds tearing flesh from a strange hairy dog-pig animal.

My body didn’t seem to be tire or weaken as I continued my chase of those whom would not only deprive me of my Brother but also my rightful place as the leader of Fastidious House.

More than anything on this run, I realised that I should’ve been grieving. Instead, my mind was clear, focused, and holding no distractions. Maybe this was Calm Meditation in Chaos, but the effects I felt impacted me far beyond the measly 1M-3 score of the trait.

My Brother, the one whom I was closest to in this world, had been assassinated and instead of grieving, I was focused upon hunting down those who killed him. Not just for vengeance, but for the sake of my rulership and for the key which they held.

What happened to the troubled mind I had before I had made the decision? I was excited and eager for this hunt. There were no distracted feelings, no grief, overwhelming me or attempting to pull me away from the mission I had set for myself.

The solitary moon rose, as it often did, late at night, briefly appearing in the sky before falling behind the mountains. A sliver of light lit the sky from the upcoming dawn. Instead of continuing up and over a rise, I diverted myself around its side. In the distance, in the pale pre-morning light, I saw the stark dark grey walls which surrounded Fastidious House rise from the grasslands. You could see it as the stamping of authority of people upon these plains.

But I didn’t see it that way.

I saw it as mankind’s feeble attempt to claim what they thought was theirs. But even the sprawling mass of Fastidious House, the settlement around its outside, and the Tier Three settlement outside the wall, they couldn’t even attempt to even come close to the awe-inspiring majesty, grandeur, and expansiveness of the grasslands they tried to claim.

As I overlooked this band of stark grey walls, a hollow feeling filled my chest. This must’ve been the rise on which my brother had made the troubled joke. When he joked about the key, he had played with what I thought had been his wedding band. So that narrow band of dull metal was the key.

I couldn’t see any signs of the group who had assassinated my brother in the grasslands leading to the House. Not that I expected to see any, as all my senses told me I had overtaken them throughout the night.

Although I had been up all night constantly running and not having anything to eat or drink, my body only held the slightest amount of fatigue. If anything, my body felt the familiar feeling of being keyed up, ready and waiting for the battle to be joined. Here, on this steep downwards slope, where the beast’s clawed footing would be most as risk of slipping would be a perfect ambush site. It would also be the perfect place to hide.

It didn’t feel right to ambush them.

This wasn’t a battle as they knew it. This was an execution.

I wanted them to know me, see me, and then die.

Previously when I climbed the to top of this rise, I struggled, as did my Brother. But we persevered as he claimed the view was worth it. And it had been. This time my feet easily found purchase on the steep slope. In the early morning light, as the sun peaked just over the grassy plains, I stood at the top of the rise, alone, easily visible for miles.

All the while waiting patiently for my Brother’s killers to find their way to their death.