Mila

  After testing, it seemed God rank contracts were powerful enough that not even gods could block their punishments, so, if Mila forcibly cancelled one, tricking the other party’s soul into thinking they were at fault, it made almost all other preparations redundant. And this was incredibly useful new information, as, while Perival didn’t have any contracts with living gods where the punishment was death, there were about two dozen other gods he had contracts with, so it would make a big difference in the future.

  More important in the short term, however, were Carina the Wise’s memories.

  Looking through the goddess’s memories as Aalam brought her main body and Immortalia back to the Twelve Element Spirit Universe, Mila was able to quickly find the information she was looking for. Her master’s corpse had been preserved by the System after her death from old age and then sold to the Collector, the same god from whom they’d traded the Order Dragon back during the Universal Auction, but Carina didn’t know where it was stored, so Mila would have to look for it herself. More important, however, Carina’s memories also showed that the Lady of Laws, along with her son, had been missing since right after Mila and Aalam’s vacation had started, right after doing something very dangerous, and this had major repercussions.

  If the Lady of Laws was dead, that meant an extreme restructuring of the powers of the Prime Material, the Divine Child the most likely to take advantage, but it also meant the Primordial Sovereign might abandon his home universe and move to the Prime Material, which would also be bad. Long term issues aside, however, the gods under the Lady of Laws had at least temporarily lost their major source of protection, and this changed things.

  J’Marcus Koriander, the All-Seeing Eye, was the only god in the Prime Material with the Watcher divine role and a mastery of the space element, one of three remaining gods Mila couldn’t afford to let slip through her fingers, and he was currently hiding in a universe with only God rank portals, making attacking him far safer than when he was in the Prime Material.

  So, after a little discussion, Mila and Aalam entered into the Spirit Smith’s demiplane inside Aalam’s Personal Storage soulstructure, and then Aalam left Immortalia’s residence and moved the residential demiplane into his soulstructure as well. Then he flew to a universe owned by the Lady of Laws faction where the System had deliberately not been allowed in, and there, after Mila’s Perival clone and main body merged into her Carina clone, Aalam transferred Immortalia’s residence into Mila’s Personal Storage soulstructure and joined his master inside.

  It was finally time to hunt the pervert.

  J’Marcus Koriander, a tuathan, had been born to an A rank father roughly 12 billion years ago, and, with a great talent for the space element and all the resources of an A rank faction, he’d risen quickly, his focus on sensory skills leading him to become one of the best scouts in the universe, eventually even noticed by the most powerful tuathan god, Technique Master Karvan, who led him onto the path of divinity. Unlike the Technique Master, however, who’s passion was learning, improving, and then disseminating cultivation techniques, J’Marcus liked watching people from afar, especially when they were naked.

  Sure, she and Aalam, with their always active sensory domains, effectively saw everyone all the time, so she couldn’t take too much of a moral high ground, but, unlike J’Marcus, neither she nor her husband ever deliberately sought out such visuals, and they never used their recorded memories as blackmail material to get members of the opposite sex to sleep with them, so she could take the moral high ground a bit.

  The man had also tried to blackmail Nana Xara with recorded images of her consensual actions with her own disguised husband, which made Mila hate him more.

  Most important of all, however, was that his scouting skills made him a danger to her operations in the Prime Material, his abilities allowing him to watch locations from almost anywhere, and he was part of a faction that wanted her dead, so she wasn’t going to feel at all bad about killing him.

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  Disguised as Carina, she was able to enter his hideout easily, and then, with the excuse of having something private to talk about, she activated the barrier effect of Endless Seal using Aalam’s energy and stabbed J’Marcus in the heart with Giantslayer while breaking the minor contracts he had with Perival, her husband and Immortalia jumping out of her soul to help just to be on the safe side, but not really needing to do anything.

  With this done, Mila used her space element clone to take in J’Marcus’s power, and then she merged the clone back into her main body, Aalam and Immortalia again hiding in her soul. And, with the disguise of Carina, she moved back to the universe where the Lady of Laws’ faction had deliberately not let the System gain influence. And there she returned to her true form and switched places with Aalam, her husband then moving between universes to return back to the Twelve Element Spirit Universe, where Immortalia’s residence was placed back in its normal position, attached to one of the universe’s B rank planets.

  “Here, come sit with me.” Immortalia called to Mila as she entered the goddess’s residence, finding the former goddess sitting under the largest of the flaming trees in her human form.

  And, as she had no reason not to, Mila complied. “Thank you, Immortalia.”

  “How are you doing?” The woman’s golden eyes, a shade more orange than Mila’s own, even while pretty much exactly the same shape, looked her up and down as she sat. “Is your soul feeling better after your break?”

  “My soul?” A couple of Mila’s minds focused on the words and she quickly realized what the former goddess meant. B rank oaths improved the quality of a cultivator or monster’s soul, as did the overpowered racial abilities she, Aalam, and Diana had awakened, but there was another method as well, meditation and coming to terms with oneself. Even without an oath like Aalam’s Oath of the Acceptant God Touched, just the insights that went into making that oath possible improved the quality of her husband’s soul quite a bit, and Mila had also benefited from her realizations about herself after finally allowing herself to deal with her emotions concerning her grandfather, along with her subsequent experiments during her vacation. “I’m doing quite a bit better.”

  “Do you feel ready to make an oath?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Good.”

  Mila raised an eyebrow at the phoenix and the other woman smiled at her.

  “The fact you know yourself well enough to know you’re not ready is to be commended.” The former goddess leaned back and looked up at the flames above her. “There is no rush.

  “Sure, you could gain more power with another oath, but a hastily made oath is often more of a hindrance than a help, with limitations something you would be more likely to run into. And no one but our enemies want your soul to be shackled.”

  Mila felt a slight weight lift off her shoulders, and she was about to thank the woman, but then another of her minds, the one going through the memories of the All-Seeing Eye, found a very important detail, so she instead focused on explaining the new information to her allies, pinging her husband and her master to focus on their shared senses with her even though she knew they already were.

  “After the Lady of Laws left to fight the eldritch terrors, the Divine Child left the Prime Material as well, and neither of them, at least according to the All-Seeing Eye’s surveillance, have come back. The Goddess of Emotions also disappeared from the Prime Material around the same time, and Primordius is still in his home universe.” Mila took a deep breath to calm down her excitement. “This could be a trap, but it seems unlikely. So, I think we should stop the secret operations and go for the big move now.”

  “Isn’t it too early?” A clone of Aalam’s appeared standing over the two of them, his face showing concern. “Given more time, we could still increase our strength.”

  “No. Your wife is correct.” Immortalia rose to her feet, her face and aura showing excitement. “The longer we take, the more likely my existence or your ability to travel through elemental universes will be exposed.

  “If Quandra and that devouring abomination are both missing, their forces’ most powerful members will be busy hiding and won’t have the time nor inclination to hunt you, so we won’t have to contend with anyone else on the level of the God of War. And, if we can finish before the elder gods return, there will be a lot less risk.”

  “Still, we’ll have to prepare.” Mila also stood up. “With this change, we’ll go with variant D.”

  Aalam’s clone took a deep breath. “The artifacts aren’t ready. I wanted to wait until I had some Laws at the peak grade Law Dragon level before starting their creation.”

  Mila grabbed his right hand and squeezed, feeling how nervous he was. “How long do you need?”

  “Six days.”

  “Okay then.” Mila turned to Immortalia and then back to her husband, an excited smile on her face, hiding her own nerves. “In seven days, the battle to see if Aalam and I will ever have the chance to reach God rank will commence.”

  Immortalia’s smile grew wider. “We either succeed or we die.”

  “No.” Aalam, far wiser than when he was young, shook his head. “We either succeed, or we run away so we can try again.”