It was pitch-black in the room, but the two gods lazing about on the couch still glared at the shivering god sitting in the corner of the room. “Nothing to say for yourself?” Karta asked, raising an eyebrow and an ear. “If Vremya’s avatar fails to ascend because of you, you know what’s going to happen, right?”

Vremya didn’t say anything, but he harrumphed, evidently agreeing with Karta’s words.

“Don’t worry,” Pravos said, puffing her chest out. She nodded. “I, Pravos, have admittedly made a lot of poor decisions in my life in the name of justice, but at the same time, I’ve also made a lot of good decisions in the name of justice. There’s this funny feeling in my chest telling me this decision is a good one. If it isn’t, I’ll take full responsibility for everything.”

“So, if Vremya’s avatar fails because of this, you’ll be breaking us out of this black hole?” Karta asked. “That’s the only real way you can take responsibility for this kind of mistake.”

Pravos bobbed her head up and down. “If Vremya’s avatar fails, then I’ll send an avatar down and do it myself!”

“I won’t fail,” Vremya said. “However, nothing is absolute. If by some miraculously unfortunate event, my avatar fails because of this choice you’ve made, then I’m revoking your bellybutton privileges.”

Pravos swallowed. If Vremya’s avatar failed, then she’d have to sit in the corner of the house until he succeeded. Without access to the outside world or access to the world inside of Vremya’s bellybutton, what was she going to do to entertain herself? How was she going to last that long without correcting an injustice? When she couldn’t go around confronting injustice, it physically pained her. She’d much rather be banished a few thousand years into the future instead. However, she didn’t have to worry about it. Her decisions had wound up with bad consequences a lot recently. It was about time for her luck to turn. Surely, this decision would wind up with a good result, no?

***

Rachel growled and groaned, her saliva dripping out of her mouth as she panted for breath. Veins twisted and squirmed on her skin, which was bruised in multiple places where her blood vessels had ruptured. The tribulation of the body was ten times, no, a hundred times worse than the first tribulation she encountered. Without the help of the warmth in her belly, she would’ve died ten times over. She wasn’t sure how Maximillius, Bullet King, and Jade managed to pass their tribulation. She didn’t believe she was weaker than them in willpower or strength when compared to their past selves. Either they were aided by unknown forces as well, or negative karma really played that much of a role on influencing the strength of her tribulation. She knew she’d have to relive the dying moments of everyone she had ever killed, but perhaps the bad karma also increased the duration and intensity of the tribulation. That was the only reasonable explanation she could come up with while her mind was addled by the pain of having her body crushed and remolded.

Finally, like all things, the tribulation ended. Rachel exhaled and pushed her crumpled body off the ground, taking a sitting position. While she had been undergoing the tribulation, her body thrashed and squirmed, and she fell into the river that Jade had drew the water from to trap Rachel in the first place. As a result, she had been washed several tens of miles downstream and had nearly drowned. Now, she was sitting up on a riverbank in the middle of nowhere. It took a bit, but Rachel absorbed the spiritual energy in her surroundings and used it to repair her broken body. Compared to before, it was definitely stronger. She felt like she could push the world if she wanted to.

Wings of ice spread out of Rachel’s back, and they flapped hard, carrying her into the air. She flew towards the waterfall that Jade was training under. It was about time for Rachel to pay back the grievance she had suffered for half a millennium. Although, she didn’t know how far she’d get with her vengeance. It was clear the empire’s false immortal had been going easy on her, not even attacking, choosing to imprison her instead. Now that she was too strong to be imprisoned, if she confronted Jade, then Rachel could expect some serious attacks coming her way. However, as someone who threw away her fear long ago, why would she back off because of some danger?

It didn’t take long for Rachel to arrive at the area she had been imprisoned in, but when she got there, a frown appeared on her face. Jade was gone, and there wasn’t a single trace of her. It was as if the false immortal had never existed in the first place. A dark expression appeared on Rachel’s face. She hadn’t expected her target to run so fast. With her arrogant attitude, it would’ve made sense for Jade to stay underneath the waterfall for the next four years until the Snow Fire Lightning Fruit ripened. Rachel’s eyes narrowed. Luckily, she knew the empire’s false immortal’s goal. Even if Jade escaped now, as long as Rachel showed up at the fruit’s location, she’d definitely get her revenge. In the meantime, she’d focus on finding the fruit’s location and getting even stronger. The gap between the two false immortals’ strength was huge, but that didn’t mean she shouldn’t attempt to close it.

***

Azalea walked into Grandpa Vremya’s room, expecting him to still be inside his cauldron. He had been inside of it every day for the past year. However, today, the giant metal cauldron was nowhere to be found, and Grandpa Vremya was sitting at his desk, stacks upon stacks of paper laid out in front of him. A pen was floating in front of him, scribbling down a dense forest of ink atop the page closest to Grandpa Vremya’s leg. Not wanting to disturb him, Azalea kept her mouth shut; however, she couldn’t do anything about her curiosity. She approached Grandpa Vremya from the side and took a peek at the pages; they were filled to the brim with mathematical symbols. There were so many symbols that it almost looked like writing rather than math formulas. It pained her to admit it, but other than the few numbers that would crop up here and there, Azalea had no idea what anything on the pages meant.

“What are you doing?”

“I finished honing my body,” Grandpa Vremya said. “Now, I’m preparing myself for the tribulation of the mind.”

“Does this help?” Azalea asked, raising an eyebrow. “Who am I kidding? Of course, it does. If it didn’t, you wouldn’t be doing it.”

“Exactly,” Grandpa Vremya said. “I explained it to you earlier this year. The body needs to be strong enough to withstand a dimensional distortion, and the mind needs to be sharp enough to adapt to the logic of a higher realm. Luckily, mathematics exists. Even though we’re in a lower dimension, with mathematics, we can accurately explore higher dimensions.” He gestured towards the stack of papers on the desk. “This here represents how my heart would beat in the eight thousand eight hundred eighty-eighth dimension.”

Azalea frowned. “Do I have to learn this to pass the tribulation of the mind?”

“No,” Grandpa Vremya said. “But it’ll help. If you can master the math behind it, the tribulation of the mind will be easy to pass. If not, you aren’t guaranteed to fail, but you’ll certainly suffer during the process.”

Azalea placed an interspatial ring down onto the desk, the reason she had entered the room in the first place. The ring was filled to the brim with titan flesh. As soon as the ring hit the table, four feathery and scaled heads popped out from underneath the desk. “Dinner?”

“Dinner,” Azalea said, nodding at the phoegons. She glanced once more at the stack of papers before shaking her head. Math wasn’t one of her strong suits, and her tribulation of the mind was so far away. Why should she worry about it at all?