Aalam

  “My thoughts don’t work like those of most people. I’m overly logical, I easily grow obsessed with topics others would consider odd, and, if I’m not focused on something specific, I automatically process all sensory information I receive instead of just part, causing me to quickly grow fatigued when around too many sources of chaos, like humans and other intelligent lifeforms.” Aalam smiled as all the primal energy he’d absorbed over the last several years, held inside his Titanic sized Concentrated Primal Energy Well soulstructure, began to transform. “But I like the way my mind works.

  “The way I think makes me me, and I am awesome.”

  All his primal energy, a truly massive amount, transformed and entered into his soul, forming what he was pretty sure would be his most powerful Oath yet.

  Oath of the Acceptant God Touched

  You are god touched, and you’ve come to view this as a blessing, not a curse

  Benefits:

  Increase the effectiveness of the Aura and Luck stats by 500%

  The natural state of your energy provides passive cleansing of your soul

  Greatly increase control over all forms of energy

  Limitations:

  Worrying about how you are different than other people will temporarily shackle your soul, the longer you worry the worse the shackles and the longer they will last

  “Yes!” With a fist pump to the sky, Aalam jumped up from where he’d been sitting on a moon of one of his B rank planets in one of his multiple Medium size universes.

  Even while he’d managed to maximize his stats, he’d yet to maximize his level. And this was because of the sheer amount of primal energy required.

  With a Divine grade race, the primal energy from a single god was only enough to raise him a few dozen levels, and there were 216 levels in B rank. More important, oaths, especially incredibly powerful oaths like the Oath of the Acceptant God Touched, required massive amounts of primal energy as well, more required for each subsequent oath.

  Primal Energy usage aside, however, he felt good after making acceptance of himself an inherent part of his soul, both emotionally and in terms of his path to power, the oath pushing the quality of his soul by about as much as all three of his previous oaths combined, and likely saving him thousands of years of soul refinement and a massive amount of nascent energy.

  * * *

  Mila

  Mila felt as her husband formed his fourth oath, which he’d delayed until he could gather enough primal energy, and she was happy. At the same time, however, she was a bit jealous of his faith in himself.

  “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Do you want my honest answer or some sort of therapist ‘guidance’?” Sally Davies, who was sitting with her on a different moon around a different planet in a different universe, smiled slightly as they both looked down at the blue and green ball turn below them, the woman having decided long ago to stop trying to hide her emotions from Mila given that it never worked.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  “Neither. The question was mostly rhetorical.”

  Sally turned to look at her and raised an eyebrow, her expression and aura saying ‘You and I both know there had to have been a reason you called me here. Do you really want to continue to avoid talking to me?’

  “Fine.” Mila had already decided to accept the therapist’s help, having seen the good work Sally had done with Aalam, Isaiah, and many others, but she still wasn’t comfortable talking about her emotions, so she was falling back into her old patterns. “What do you think?”

  “I think you have trust issues.”

  This time it was Mila’s turn to look at Sally and raise an eyebrow.

  “What?” Sally smiled, her aura showing amusement. “That’s pretty much your core issue, at least as far as I can tell.”

  She turned to look at the planet below them again. “You had a twisted childhood that turned you into a rather twisted adult, but the end result is pretty amazing.” She waved a hand at the planet down below and then to the rest of the universe. “You’re the empress of what is probably one of the best empires to live in throughout the entire multiverse, and that is far more you than Aalam, or any of the rest of us.

  “You should take pride in that.” Sally’s smile turned into a smirk. “Not too much, of course, but a big healthy amount of pride.”

  She reached over and tapped Mila’s chest with her right index finger, right above Mila’s heart. “But you need to get better at expanding the number of people you allow in a position to truly hurt you.

  “Assuming you want more friends, of course.”

  Mila thought about it for a few seconds. Sally had a point. The only people she was truly herself around were Aalam, Isaiah, and Diana, and to a certain extent her grandmother, but she hadn’t allowed herself to grow that close to anyone else since Diana’s death, even in the thousands of years after Diana’s rebirth.

  She didn’t really want to think about that rather complicated situation, however, and instead wished to focus on something else.

  “I killed a god today, who, by all accounts, was a good person. And I did so by taking the form of another god, his daughter, who seems to have been a good person as well. Yet I didn’t feel a thing.”

  “Oh.” The tone of Sally’s mana vibrations and her aura grew more serious. “So that’s what has you worrying enough to actually seek me out, that you are becoming a dark version of the trickster archetype rather than one of the heroic variety.”

  Mila just stared at Sally for a second. “Have you been talking with Diana too much?”

  “Very much so.” Sally nodded, a hint of amusement entering into her aura again. “But I do think it’s a reasonable and accurate metaphor.

  “What I will say about your worry, however, is two things. First, evil people generally don’t worry that they are becoming evil, and, more important to your situation, evil people generally don’t make semi-utopic meritocracies.

  “Personally, I am far more interested in why the deaths of these two individuals would hit you so much harder than the many others you’ve already killed in this war.”

  Sally looked her right in the eyes. “Are you thinking about having kids in the future?”

  Mila felt her heart start to race and her minds start to panic, which, upon giving it some thought for a few seconds as Sally smiled at her, likely meant the woman was onto something, even if it wasn’t exactly what the therapist was thinking.

  During the happiest times of Mila’s pre-integration life, she’d worked as an elementary school teacher. She liked kids. And she especially liked how pure they were, not understanding the gray shades of life yet. But she wasn’t sure if she wanted to have children of her own, and it was mostly a moot point anyway given the grade of her and Aalam’s races.

  But she placed a high value on parent-child relationships, and that extended to teacher-student relationships.

  “It wasn’t your daughter calling me evil that started me questioning myself, but Edi agreeing with the statement.” She spoke out loud as her mind continued to process the situation. “And I’m probably also feeling guilty about not talking to my own master much anymore, as she’s probably the closest thing I have to a parent.”

  Mila could feel the emotions churning in Sally’s aura and decided to preempt her budding questions so they wouldn’t get off topic. “Silvia was making a joke while complimenting me.

  “Me and my unresolved family issues, however, latched onto the word evil when I started feeling things instead of the true source of what I was actually feeling.”

  “Oh.” Sally’s aura calmed down for a second and then started to get really excited. “Oh!”

  Less than a second later, the slightly older woman was hugging her. “Yay! Mila, that’s great!”

  Mila took a deliberate second to process things and then internally groaned, not giving Sally the satisfaction of her admitting the woman had been right about what she really needed to talk about in therapy, either verbally or through her body language.

  “Does this mean you’re ready to talk about Dai-Zhao?”

  “Nope.” And with that, Mila took the coward’s way out, teleporting away to another part of the universe.

  She was going to go congratulate her husband, hide away her emotions for maybe a couple hundred more years, and then talk to Aalam about what she was feeling, not Sally.

  Only when she was more comfortable with her own emotions would she seek out the therapist’s help again.

  Before that, however, she was going to try and continue to be more honest with the United Federation of Planets’ upper echelon; she was going to carve out some more one on one time with her apprentice, maybe have a serious talk about his nervousness concerning his own relationship; and she was going to stop blocking Nana Xara from watching her as the default, or at least transition to that slowly.

  Book 3 will consist of chapters 100 to 150. Does anyone have any iconic scenes they'd like to see immortalized from those chapters? I need one primarily with Mila and one primarily with Aalam.