"Uoooh! It's really coming together now!" Issei smiled.

"Yeah, we really outdid ourselves with the planning, but is this really structurally sound?" Ed inquired, "I'm no professional, but is this really how people usually make a blueprint for a house?"

"Don't you worry~!" I patted him on the back to quell his anxieties, "I'll be sure to build your house out of the finest materials, and with mine and Issei's masterful experience in tinkering, we can assure you that your house is gonna be quality gold!"

"Hrm..." He still sounded a bit worried, so he turned to the nearby Aru who was busy playing with Cene, "Hey, mind if I borrow your omniscience real quick?"

"Sigh, I'll spare everyone the trouble and just tell you outright." She rolled her Eyes before returning to her play, "It'll be fine, so have some faith in your friends and stop worrying so much."

"See? If Aru says so, then the house is as good as done already!" Issei laughed.

"I wouldn't be too sure..." Cecily said as she handed us some refreshments for the hard planning we did, "She also said there's no way for Lune to revive, and yet here he is. Seriously, I'm surprised you're not questioning any of this, dear."

"What's there to question? As far as I'm concerned, I fell asleep and woke up three years later." I shrugged, "Honestly, I just wanna focus on earning Cene's respect. What's done is done."

"Exactly, quite the wise words from the man that bested the Gods." Aru praised.

"Hm?" Cecily noticed a discrepancy here, "Did you meet any other Gods apart from Auros?"

"No?" I cocked my head a bit.

"So then why did Aru say "Gods", as in the plural form?" She glared at the tiny Goddess before giving up, "See, this is why I don't trust her anymore. Aru, I'm letting you stay here for Cene's sake for now, but you're on thin ice."

"Oh shiver me timbers, woman." Aru snarkily replied, "If it wasn't for me, then none of you would have even survived that trek up the mountain, so zag it and gimme some juice."

"Potty mouthed girls don't deserve juice." Cecily smugly replied before walking away, "Cene on the other hand does."

"Hrm..." She groaned.

"I'll shawe some with you, Awoo." Cene gently caressed her hair.

My boy's either a master in the art of flirting or one of those dense MCs you'd usually find in your favorite fiction novels. In any case, I really dislike how both of my kids have a fixation on people older than them. I already had enough troubles with Nelly constantly swooning over Meil, but now that my son is interested in one of the Four Gods, then that's gonna be doubly hard to talk him out of. Eh, I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. I say let the kid be a kid while he can, and besides, it might score me some extra brownie points with him.

"Well boys, shall we head out then?" I turned to Ed and Issei as I took a swig of my orange juice, "Actually wait, I'm gonna go brush my teeth first."

"After orange juice?" They looked at me, horrified, "Dude, hardcore..."

Don't I know it... But anyways, after finishing up everything on our end and packing up the house plan, we walked on over to the town hall to find someone to help us get this house actually legalized. Entering the place, we were greeted by a long line of people all with various issues of their own they wanted to address.

"I'd like to get my transport wagon registered?" A young man sheepishly asked the older lady at the booth.

"Um, yes, hello." Another man at the booth next to that one asked his own question, "I'd like to ask about this letter that came in the mail addressed to me..."

"Ma'am, I've been waiting for you to call my number for two hours now!" An irritable older woman shouted for the workers' attention.

"Geez, this place is hectic." Issei chuckled before walking towards the line for "Land Ownership".

"Hey now, you skipped a step." I stopped him, "You first need to grab a number from that guy over there. If you're next in line but don't have a number, they'll just send you back."

"Yeah, speaking from experience, that's the worst feeling ever..." Ed slouched as he grabbed our number, "Oh, 47! Not that bad. What's the current number?"

"Um, let's see..." I peeked from the side of the line, "110?"

"Huh? Did you get the wrong line?" Issei asked, "How is our number smaller than that one?"

"Uuuu..." Ed and I quietly sobbed, "The system goes to 255 before resetting to 1 again, meaning..."

"We've got 192 numbers ahead of us!?" Issei gasped.

"Yeah..."

That's the damned town hall for you. Always so annoying to have to deal with all the paperwork whenever you got an idea in mind. This actually brings back some troubling memories of my days as Sol. The old hags here used to remember my face with how often I'd have to submit each and every individual patent for approval. Issei, of course, never actually accompanied me, so he's not at all familiar with the system, it seems. Shame too, because if there's anything worse than waiting in line for your number to be called, it's having to wait in line for your number to be called AND you're alone.

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"We got it approved!" The three of us rushed to deliver the good news to everyone in the house.

"Huh? That quickly?" Anna commented, "Is it that easy to get a plot of land approved?"

"When you've got enough money and promise to gather all the materials and manpower yourself, yeah." I proudly boasted, "Realistically, this process from start to finish can take over a year if you don't know what you're doing, especially if you're planning on building somewhere in the middle of town, but since we want the house to neighbor ours out here in the free fields, the construction won't bother anyone."

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"That's so unsafe, though." Sigmund scoffed, "Damned Cardinians, they only care about quantity over quality...!"

"Well, it also helped that I used Adam's name to leverage their decision." Ed whipped out an embroidered Grys handkerchief that Adam swears is rare to attain, even though most of us have them, "We maybe could've been fine without it, but I wanted to make sure."

"This is kind of exciting, making a house from scratch!" Anna looked giddy as she nonchalantly asked, "So, when are we starting?"

"Hm?" We turned to her, "Excuse me, we? There is no we. Only the three of us will be working on the construction."

"Whaaaat?" She sighed, "But I wanna help out too!"

"I'd rather anger a God than have you working out in the scalding hot Sun." Ed said.

"Well yeah, you do that all the time." Aru smirked, "Angering a God, I mean."

"And I'll continue to do so as long as it protects my wife from hard labor!" Ed valiantly replied, "But yeah, actual construction should begin tomorrow, but for now we should have Grim set up all the materials."

"Aye, let's go outside now." I suggested, noticing everyone else in the house following the three of us outside to bear witness to the moment, "Uhh, you guys really that interested?"

"Of course, this is my house we're talking about!" Anna said with stars in her Eyes.

"Same here." Sigmund and Camilla agreed as well, "We're also pretty interested in those powers of yours."

"Yeah, I'd sure like if I could do that..." Eleanor sighed, "Dammit, I could just pull out a ton of money whenever I needed to if that were the case."

"Even I can't do that..." I chuckled awkwardly, "You need to really visualize the thing you wanna Materialize, and shils are really difficult to imagine at that level of detail."

"How does that work?" Cecily asked.

"I'll take it from here, hot stuff." Aru humbled her as she stood in front of me, "So yeah basically, this guy here's using another form of element manipulation. Recall how alchemy is based on turning any old rock to gold by changing its chemical structure, but instead of rock, he uses the surrounding air molecules, and instead of gold, he uses whatever he can construct in his head chemically."

"So, like in Fullmetal Alchemist?" Issei asked, clapping his hands together as if referencing something from his homeworld.

"I have no idea what that is." Aru shrugged.

"But wait, I'm completely lost here." Ed shook his head, "Alchemy, element manipulation... I feel like you're skimping out on some important details here. Alchemy... does that have something to do with that periodic table thing?"

"Don't worry, the readers probably get what she means." I added.

"Wait, so does that mean Lune knows the periodic table by heart and how to create almost anything from it?" Issei asked Aru.

"No, he never studied alchemy nor chemistry." Aru shook her head, "In fact, if I had to explain it in layman terms, he literally invented his own notation for the periodic table and can intuitively summon whatever he wants from that hand of his."

"Cool." I accepted that as fact way too easily.

"Hold on, not cool!" Eleanor seethed in her jealousy, "He intuitively gets something as complicated as the periodic table without any prior studies in the field?! An idiot that ate sand as a kid like him!?"

"Well that idiot that ate sand as a kid can summon in any number of dangerous weapons to vaporize you if you so much as say another bad word about him." I grinned at her, making her shut up and turn her external rage internal, "Alright then, now that that's out of the way - Shall I begin?"

"Whenever you're ready, Grim!" Ed made sure everyone stood a few steps back for good measure.

"Alright then!" I smiled as I connected my pinkie and thumb in a familiar hand gesture, reaching into the newly created wormhole with my remaining three fingers to pull out the first material of many, "Here goes!"

With the materials for the house being pretty big in comparison to my hand, I had to put extra focus on not separating my thumb and pinkie so as not to cancel the Materialize. Slowly but surely, I took out the first wooden plank that was to the exact dimensions we jotted down on the blueprint.

"...Ew." Ed was the first to comment on this, "Kinda looks like you're giving birth to the damned thing."

"Yeah, his pained and tired expression really sells it, too." Issei added, "Want me to hold your hand, bud?"

"Shut up!" I blushed lightly now that they popped the idea into my head, "Yuck, now I feel dirty for doing this..."

And so, focusing my all once again into the next item, I had felt my breath growing more and more ragged as I pulled out the next plank. Slowly, carefully, until it was completely out and-

"C'mon, honey, push!" Cecily too joined in, "Just a little more, we can see the head!"

"B-Be quiet, God!" I shouted back.

"Oh, the mother seems to be panicking." Aru smirked, "Doctor, what's the prognosis? Is she gonna make it?"

"Have no fear, we ran the tests and she seems to be in stable condition." Ed replied, putting on his best stoic expression before bursting out into a fit of laughter with everyone else.

Geez, had I known they were gonna make fun of me like this, I would have never returned from the dead... Well, that's a bit much, but I definitely wouldn't agree to making this damned house for them. Eh, if it means we get to clear out our own house, I'll handle a bit of shame on my name. Yeah, this is all good-natured fun.

"Is this bullying?" Othelia quietly turned to ask Issei.

"Well duh, it's certainly not good-natured fun." He replied, "Oh, he's crying now."