I read through the volume of insights into the ‘Great Book Heavenly Library’ a bunch of times. It was…messy. Collecting information on a technique was difficult without having it directly described. My dad had cobbled together a dozen sources, but there were all kinds of footnotes on memories he’d traded for, impressions he’d gotten, and even secondhand accounts that were at least a little suspect.

According to the text, the Great Book Heavenly Library (hereafter referred to as GBHL) wasn’t exactly a secret, so much as it was something that the Old Man didn’t bother talking about. The pseudo Domain required an absurd amount of talent in either Skills or techniques.

The original Wishmaster hadn’t used pure technique to make it, he’d built it out of stats, similar to the way my forms worked, but I knew that I had absolutely zero chance of managing that at my current level. Techniques were my only real chance. While my father had managed to collect hundreds of thousands of secondhand accounts from things like journals and stories of people who had known the Old Man in his youth they were all just vague mentions.

Except they weren’t. Focusing with my soul like I had for the chair, I manifested something else. A book. My book of Skill construction information.

I’d been around this thing in Dantalion so many times that I’d absorbed the entirety of the text as written, even if I didn’t KNOW the information yet. It was all progressive knowledge, and you needed the context of mastering earlier steps to learn it, but I was at least able to recreate the text from memory.

Flipping through it, I started picking out pages. Mentions of concepts from the journals. Nothing too concrete or that I could understand, but enough to help me cross reference the two books and figure out which insights were accurate.

As I read, and cross referenced, and collated, I was forced to expand my mind. Parallel after parallel was split off with Piece of Mind. Oddly, they didn’t seem to produce much strain. In this odd space where time stood still I wasn’t using them long enough. I managed ten of them before I officially couldn’t handle any more, but that was more than enough.

The first step, from all accounts was the foundation. Like my dad had said, this would be the heart of all my pseudo Domains, and it would always be active. It needed a real foundation, which meant at least a Chronicle, so I’d need to manifest that first.

I noted how many parallels I had, and decided to try something. I started to split them off. Not using Beelzebub, but just manifesting clones with pure soul power. Each one got its own body, until it was me and nine simulacrums, each with my mind. One by one, they each triggered one of my forms.

First came Belial, then Mephistopheles, Mornax, Zagan, Bael, Beelzebub, Agares, Dantalion, and finally, Sammael. The nine other mes returned my gaze steadily, each of them understanding their role.

The Chronicle was the beginning. The lodestone on which everything I was going to make had to be built. Not just this library, but the Saga that came after, and all my pseudo Domains. It needed to be as sturdy as possible, able to withstand the events I would inscribe on it, the changes I would make, and truly support my domain seed later in my journey.

So I started with construction. Agares raised his hands, and from the void around us, ash bloomed. Swirling into a maelstrom of chaotic motion. Dantalion joined in, preparing to process all the information to craft the best possible result, with Bael joining in, lending his unholy perception to the information gathering form to increase his effectiveness. Agares condensed that ash into Sammael, who accepted the power into himself, amplifying it, and as he did, his form changed, shifting from a winged angel to a towering black tree.

Next was Zagan, who placed his hands on the tree, channeling his purification and life force into the bark, and washing away the darkness. The tree erupted into green flame among the canopy, the bark expanding into living wood under the power of the life energy and the fertile ash.

In the back of my mind I heard a chiming cry, and the flames on the tree exploded into a bonfire, leaping to the sky as Archie, somehow connecting to me even through whatever this temple was made of, infused the Life Nova into the leaves. Beelzebub was next, placing his hands on the tree, and suddenly, there wasn’t just one tree, there were thirteen, all blazing brightly in the void.

Mephistopheles and Belial came after, jointly calling their power, creating that black corroding fire and letting it rain down onto the trees. As it passed through the Life Nova, it was purified, and strengthened, becoming a sort of concentrated pure acid that seeped down over the trunks and began to melt them into a thick white slurry. Agares pulled the slurry from the air, slowly drawing it toward him, and then began to condense it.

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Soon there was a block of the stuff, and Mornax stepped forward, hands on the block, and I could FEEL his defensive power seeping into it. As we watched, the earth based defensive form turned to dust flowing over the block, creating a dark brown cover made of hard stone. It receded around the edges, and as it did, I saw the block had split into a hundred thin sheets of paper, each lined with a sparking green energy.

One by one, the other forms dissolved, their parallels and energies infusing the book that all of them helped create, and across the cover, three words carved themselves into being in green eldritch fire. “Ten Demons Tome.”

Nine forms, and me. Ten demons. It resonated with my soul, synergizing with me in a way I’d never experienced. This was my Chronicle, my perfect book of deeds. In this I would record my rise to prominence, my ascension to power, and this book would be the cornerstone on which I built everything that was to come.

From there, I didn’t need any more time or study. I understood what I needed to do. How I needed to proceed. I held out my hands, and the book floated over to my grasp. It felt strong. The individual legends of my powerful forms, my techniques, my challenges, it had all gone into this book. This book was something like what the Wish power had become eventually. More than the sum of its parts. A perfect technique.

I doubted, if you gave me a hundred thousand years to study and reflect, to experiment and attempt, I would have ever managed to make something this flawless again. This was lightning in a bottle, a moment of pure creative genius sparked by the realizations about my father, by this special space, and by the knowledge and ingenuity of my ancestor. Here, inside my soul, where my genius was at its apex, I had sown these seeds of greatness and they had borne fruit.

I had done it, and now I would put it to use, while I was still in this inspired state. Holding out the book, I set it down in the air, and the void beneath it began to ripple. From the space beneath it, dark stone began to form, flowing up from nothing and melding together. This wasn’t like what Agares did, this was more than just liquid rock, no matter how condensed. If I looked close I could see the faint shadows of stats in the flowing stone, see the building blocks of Ascension shifting and remaking themself at my command.

This wouldn’t be possible again. Only here, in the moment of creation, when my Chronicle was forming and redefining everything I was, could my soul claim dominion over the concrete fragments of renown that made up my being and twist them as it would a technique.

Part of me wondered if my dad had known it would work like this, and I decided he probably had, and then immediately dismissed the information as unimportant. I had a library to create.

Of course, I wasn’t reinventing the wheel completely. Some of the content in my Skill creation book came in handy. As the shelves formed from black stone and the books that represented my Skills, forms, abilities, and every other quantifiable part of me came together, I realized that my ancestor’s special form of notation was probably made for exactly this scenario.

Each book filled with diagrams and symbols, deduced from Dantalion into perfectly legible and understandable script, even as they slotted themselves on the shelves. There weren’t that many of them, but I could get more. In fact, I noticed with surprise that there were more books than I had Skills. Skills I’d lost when combining them into other Skills were still represented here, and could still be refined.

That ability alone would have made this powerful, would have made all of it worth it. But I could see the potential here. To create perfect Skills the same way I could techniques. To identify and patch flaws I’d never have seen before. To make myself into a being like my ancestor, creating a library of techniques to use for any situation, each one perfected and tested and at my fingertips.

Because Skills aside, I could see the technique books, novel length stories with the legends I’d carefully crafted, each with notations and written in my stats themselves, easily fixed with just a little effort. Easily improved.

This would be the heart of my power. The core of my Domain, the lowest level of the underworld upon which all my other powers would rest, held up by this unspeakably sturdy foundation. A demonic hall of knowledge containing the wisdom of all thirteen circles of hell, a repository of forbidden texts that would propel me into the stratosphere and out into the great universe as a future god among gods.

Pride. The thirteenth circle of hell, conceived early to set the stage for what was to come. My head swam, not with pain, but with power. I felt odd, different. I forced myself to stop, to think. I was spiraling. The recursion of all my forms crashing into me as they merged with me in the truest sense, the Ten Demons Tome making us all one being in a way we had never been before, at least in the eyes of the universe.

A hand landed on my shoulder, and I turned and found Callie, no mask, no costume. Just my wife, smiling up at me proudly. “I heard you calling,” she said with a cheeky grin. “Guess you still need me, even after becoming a big bad future demon god.”

I laughed, reaching down to put my arms around her, and all the recursion just…blew away. Because I might be all those demons, but when I was with Callie I was just Shane. And I wasn’t afraid of a few figments of my imagination. I’d have gotten past the recursion myself, I was sure, but it might have taken longer.

Sadly, with Pride finished this strange void space where I had so much power was fading, and I was returning to the world. I gave my wife a quick kiss. “I don’t know how the hell you got here, but I appreciate the help.”

She rolled her eyes. “Don’t you know by now? I’m always with you Shane, just like you’re always with me. Even if I’m not in the room or can’t reach you through the bond. We’re always together.” She smiled up at me warmly, stood on her tip toes, and gave me a lingering peck on the lips. “Now go kick the shit out of that priest, If you can’t manage that after all this buildup, I’ll be seriously disappointed.” I started laughing, and the blackness faded away. I was still laughing when I opened my eyes, only a blink of time having passed. Well, I couldn’t fail after a challenge like that.