Jacob was tending to the Alchemical Garden, checking out the seeds he had planted to get new batches of Alchemic food. He had discussed briefly with everyone and remarked multiple times how resources such as the Alchemical Garden would be much more important in the long term compared to fighting all the time. Everyone needed a brief respite from everything, a moment of pause, something to hold onto to feign some normalcy.

Jacob’s heart was lighter after seeing Helena two days before.

Much, much lighter.

He had dodged Hektor multiple times when she had told him that the Vermillion Tyrant now knew about his cowardly confession to Juliet. So, he had decided to invest more time into the Alchemical Garden both for the long term and both to avoid the man. Juliet had later come to him and explained what type of reaction he had had.

Jacob was not worried about the Vermillion Tyrant seeing him as a weak coward ready to run. Oh no, he was worried that the guy would come to him and do something absurd. That was what he was worried about.

In his opinion, they needed to slow down a second. He had gone very close to burning himself.

It was time to refactor all they were working with.

Hektor had put together a sizeable force, but this time around he had no experienced general nor expert to take care of the logistics needed to house and feed all those people.

“Jaji! Can I have another kiss?!” Epagogia whined from a nearby table.

While Jacob was sitting among different roots, flowers and plant in front of him, she was doing a careful evaluation of the Formation in the Alchemical Garden.

“Eppy, please, get back to work. It’s been six hours only and you are already complaining!” Jacob grumbled.

For people who had lived as long as they had, six hours was not much. They all had been very hasty in trying to deal with the apocalypse as soon as possible. But Jacob had soon realized how asinine that had been.

There was no way they could save all the people in Marche and Abruzzo and house them in St. Peter or any nearby place. They had not enough resources and even if Hektor started raiding 24/7, they would sooner or later run out of everything.

Among Hektor’s force, more than two-thirds of the warriors had apparently died during their encounters with Demonic Beasts. Hektor had led them valiantly through some very thorny situations, but they couldn’t keep bleeding humanity to just get things faster.

“Jaji, I need another kiss! Muah!” she sent him a flying kiss and Jacob ignored her. “You and Helena did something!”

Well, that’s new.

“Nope, we didn’t.”

It was the truth. But it was also the wrong thing to say to a super-perceptive devil, wasn’t it?

“But you talked to her about something and that something has influenced your recent decisions, Jaji-boy. What are you hiding from your sweet Devil?”

Something I could probably get beaten to a pulp for?

“We secretly had steamy hot sex on top of the mountain behind St. Peter, Eppy. Sorry to break the news to you like that. We also participated later on in a threesome with Juliet. Terrible stuff for you.”

Jacob kept looking at the Earthy Knightly Fruits in his hands with narrowed eyes, not fully concentrated.

“Well, if you popped this life’s cherry, maybe I can now take part in all the fun,” Epagogia’s voice came from a few centimeters from his ear and Jacob jumped, throwing the two Earthy Knightly Fruits in the air.

“Fuck! Don’t do that! Jesus, you are going to give me an heart attack!”

“But you are ignoring me!”

Oh my God, what did I do in my past life to deserve—

To be fair, he did do a lot in his past life to deserve all of this.

“I’m just studying these fake potatoes and the rest of the ingredients we used so far to understand how I can not just feed them to humans, but maybe incorporate them in the diet of the Demonic Boars, which by now we should probably call Demonic Pigs, since they are mostly hairless.”

“Come on, Jaji, you are cute when you give the farmer boy act, but I don’t deserve some cuddles?”

Epagogia looked at him with sweet eyes, so sweet Jacob felt guilty about it.

Which is exactly her point, Jacob sighed.

“Eppy, please. The Formation is not going to crack on its own and we need to expand the Alchemical Garden since the lunatic is going to start brining all the people he gathered here. Everyone is running out of food and we need something that be grown easy, that can be nourishing to cultivators and even taste good! We are in Italy, people are not going to accept some ketchup on pasta or any nonsense like that!”

“I don’t know what ketchup on pasta is, Jaji, but I do know where I could go on.”

Wow. She’s really trying this time.

The kiss had changed Epagogia’s behavior quite a bit. They had always been a bit naughty, but she was now being as subtle as a sledgehammer.

“Eppy, I think we need to talk a bit about us, maybe? But can we finish all this work first?”

“Why?” she suddenly frowned, “is it the kind of talk that will make me want to kill you and not finish the work after?”

“Maybe?” Jacob cringed.