[-=Nox=-]

The vines unceremoniously rolled me down a hill, out of the forest and onto a field. I panted, laying on my back amidst trampled wildflowers. Everything ached with pleasure.

"You damn forest." I groaned, shakily rising to my knees. "I'll be back and when I do you'll be sorry for crossing a Goddess."

My amulet of healing flew from the forest, smacking me right into the forehead.

“Aeeeeeeh!” I yelped, rubbing my head as it pulsated with bliss. A bruise was likely there now. I sighed. The forest had no respect. I did not like that it had taken the amulet of healing from me. The amulet was far too handy for me to lose it. The gemstone covered in healing runes was dangling within the damaged cloth mesh. If this foul forest elemental could just rip it from me, so could anyone. This was an inefficiency that required correcting. I decided to make the amulet part of my body.

I ripped the large gemstone out of the mesh, weighting it in my hand. This was the important bit, the part that did the magic. I pondered about swallowing it and realised that it was far too big and would likely block my human’s breathing tube.

I considered what other large holes my human had. Of course! My human had other totally useless holes. Perfect!

I felt the amulet within me. It sat safely, firmly between me and the white aura, so that it could still do its job in case I got injured. It wouldn't work as great now, due to being so close to me, but at least it was safe forever from grabby elementals.

"Come on, human bean. The healing amulet is safe from thievery! We have places to be. Things to devour." I patted my chest. It wobbled in response. Losing control of the human for a brief period was mildly worrying, but I pushed such concerns away.

"Fret not." I told my organic container. "This is but a temporary arrangement until I reach any one of my many temples. Once there I will devour the essence of belief collected from my followers, become reinforced by my dedicated Archbishops and get right back to my mission of ending the world."

I pretended that the human responded.

"You? Oh, you'll probably just explode. Or something. I dunno." I shrugged. "You're not the protagonist here. I am!" I laughed.

As I walked across the open, wild fields and hills, I tried to feel the location of my nearest temple of Nox. It didn’t work. The white aura was in my way. I opened my mouth as wide as possible, stuck out my tongue and extended the tiniest receiver from it. The receiver kept fuzzing out. I focused harder on maintaining it. Nothing. I spun in a circle, trying to detect my Nox temples. It was almost as if they weren’t there anymore. Was nobody praying to me and collecting belief for me anymore? Was nobody harvesting mana or sacrificing life in my name on the Void altars? This was a concerning development.

A supermassive black hole surrounded by a corona of light shone in the sky. The incomplete, corrupted project reminded me of my failure to devour everything. Eternal night would be upon the world if it wasn’t for those blasted Heroes and backstabbing Archmages!

The corona was made up of swirling sun remnants and a ludicrous amount of compressed mana. It was bathing the planet in both infrared radiation and magic. This would certainly explain the overpowered forest elemental and those other giant beasts. I think I scared them off with my explosion. Is that why the Dryad let me go? Wait.

“Check Quest status!” I commanded.

No pending quests.

“WHAT?!” I choked. Where did my task list go? How was I supposed to stay organized without a task list?! Did I already do all of them? I dove into the human’s stats.

Valerianne Yul

[Race]: Human

[Level]: [0] Pathetic weakling

[Progression to next level]: 0% [123’000 points required]

Stats:

[Mana] : 5’257 [Void]

[HP] : 10

[Affinity] :

[Aura] : 100% White

Inventory:

Divine gem of healing [Order of Virtue] [internal]

“What?! WHAT? How in my divinity have I freaking lost eight million mana?” I yelled in shock. Had the labyrinth sucked that much out of me? Did I pass out that long in there from the explosion? This was awful, horrible. I really had to conserve my mana now!

Then I saw the other huge number and cried. I had somehow failed all of my quests. The lack of the dead Dryad at least made some sense. How had I failed the others? I didn’t understand. I stood in the middle of the field, feeling irate at the universe at large. I was so close to leveling! So close! Damn it all!

Wait. The human. It got itself arrowed. Did it have agency to cancel the quests? Goddess me! What a freaking idiot!

“Okay. Okay. Don’t panic. This is bad.” I started to pace in the field, panicking a lot. The human turned out to be extremely foolish when it came to making decisions. If it spent all of my Void mana I would probably stop existing as Nox, dissipate into either, and likely join the big, dumb ball of Void in the sky that powered the entire Rewards System.

I had to find a way to communicate with my human host, to control her infernal human idiocy in case I passed out again. I connected to the sphere of Void in the sky and started to throw pointless, albeit informative quests at my human self.

Quest: Listen up, human imbecile! DO NOT lose any more Void mana or you will die horribly as your blood turns into dust and your organs shrivel up. Reward: 0 points.

There. Scary threats usually worked against humans. Maybe she needed more threats.

Quest: Stop being a moron. If you do anything else stupid like cancelling high reward Quests I swear to me I will cut off half of your limbs. Lets see how you like being without limbs! Reward: 0 points.

Quest: [A] If you have enough neurons to understand me, cancel this quest. Reward: 0 points.

Quest: [B] If you reject me and want to let me know that you outright refuse to cooperate with me, cancel this quest. Just be aware that I will find your human family and friends and murder all of them in their sleep. In fact, I’ll go out of my way to vaporise the entire village where you were born. I know everything you know. Reward: 0 points.

Double spooky threat! Excellent. I wasn’t going to cut off my hands or feet obviously. I required those to do stuff as a human bean, but she didn’t know that. Mwa ha ha.

Also, I knew only some stuff that she knew. I wasn’t too amazing at accessing her memories. The brain meat only gave me general information, alas.

I just have to avoid doing magic for a while. Magic = explosions and explosions = me passing out.

"No more passing out! Stay focused!" I told myself.

As I continued to pace, thinking of more possible ways to threaten my human with, I noticed that my body became covered in tiny droplets of liquid. Ah. This is called sweating.

I smudged it, shivering. I examined the tiny droplets. They were sparkling with my Void mana. DAMN IT ALL! I was sweating out liquid blessed with my divine essence! What?! I poked a drop of sweat, trying to push it back into me. It didn’t work. At this rate, I would run out of Void all on my own! I angrily glared at the brilliant corona in the sky. It was unnecessarily bright, warm and kept blinding me.

“Just you wait! I will finish you sooner or later and no damn Archmagi will stop me this time!” I angrily squinted at the light-ring that was slowly baking my human shell. I proceeded to wipe myself and lick my hands in a genius yet incredibly inefficient attempt to keep my divine essence contained. My sweat tasted great at least, so at least I had that going for me.

I started to feel very tired. I wasn’t even sure where I was going.

“What is it that humans do to gain energy?” I demanded of the meat-brain. It didn’t answer my query. I had grown weak due to lack of believers and massive loss of mana. My thoughts kept on wandering and I was barely keeping the meat brain under control.

Surely, this environment contained sources of energy!

Vast fields of plant life stretched out in all directions.

“Could I consume these to gain energy?” I inquired. The answer was a resounding no, confirmed by the disgusting flavour of grass that I tried to chew. Things tasted bad, I learned. None of the plants I tried to bite had Void mana in them. These limits on devouring things were getting annoying. I kept walking forward across wild fields. The fields assaulted me with long ticklish grasses, uneven ground, and smells of wildflowers. I decided that the human sense of smell was an utterly useless, misleading sensation. For example, flowers smelled nice, but tasted horrible and provided no nutrition. Seriously, what sort of foul deception is this? I spit out the flower that I was chewing.

After much endless walking I finally came upon a river. Oh! Water! I think humans need this to survive. My body felt like it was demanding this sustenance now, practically begging for it. I rushed towards the water.

The nearest bank of the river was a mixture of very soft gold sand and brown mud. My feet quickly sunk into the wet mud before I even made it to the water. I flailed, struggling to pull my appendages out and only managed to sink deeper.

I swore and yelled and struggled, slowly retreating away from the mud. I escaped the muddy death trap panting in concern and covered in mud, leaving both of my boots behind somewhere in its depths.

“You’ll pay for this insolence, freaking mud.” I growled, circling the mudpit.

My exposed foot stepped on a particularly pointy rock. “Ahhh uhhhhh ahhh!” I moaned, rubbing the sole of my foot as it sent waves of pleasure into my brain. It was getting harder to control my human feelings.

“I’ll come back to devour you at a later date, damn pointy rock. Once I’m not impeded by faulty human anatomy!” I shook my first at the vile rock, fighting off the waves of distracting pleasure.

There was water to devour.

I tried to approach the river from another angle, avoiding the pointy rocks and stumbled into a bush covered in pink flowers. The brain trudgingly provided me with info that this was called a rosebush. The rosebush turned out to be very thorny. The pointy thorns were immensely distracting, stabbing me in numerous sensitive places. As I tried to escape it by slowly crawling over it caught onto my cape, refusing to let go.

“You damned chlorophyll-monger! Give me back my cape!” I yelled at the rosebush, flailing about, pleasure and anger fighting for room in my head. The flailing managed to get my cape further caught up in the bush. I pulled hard and the cape tore in numerous places. Human apparel was apparently not rosebush proof. I looked at the new holes in my cape with mild annoyance. This was fine. What’s a few more holes when there’s already so many holes in it?

There was water to devour. I crawled towards the edge of the river, lowering my head towards the cold, rushing water. It felt amazing. AMAZING! Devouring water as a human girl felt so much more satisfying, so much more gratifying. My body sang in satisfaction. I kept drinking. Finally! Something I could devour! It felt good to drink. I set out to devour this entire river dry, greedily gulping on and on and on. This river was no match for me!

“Ha ha ha! Ouhhh. Ahhh. What?!”

Waves of immense pleasure now radiated from my stomach. I momentarily stopped my process of consuming the river, glancing down at it. I now had three spheres present on my person. The lower sphere - my stomach, ached with unbearable pleasure as it was seemingly stretched to its absolute limit.

“A limit on consumption of water?! Seriously?!” I groaned, panting. “Are you kidding me?! Whyyy...”

I whimpered, rolling over onto my back, sand crunching beneath me. Stars were sparkling in my eyes. Pleasure. Too much pleasure. My brain was refusing to answer me coherently, lost in a delirium of pleasure signals that intensified further and further. Pleasure signals ran from my rock-damaged feet, from my stomach and from my radiation-burned skin. The signals of pleasure were overwhelming all of my other senses.

I started to whine, defeated by a river and my own foolish decisions.

As I struggled to manage my pleasure-ridden body I didn't notice that a water elemental emerged from the river. A girl made of sparkling water quietly stepped towards me, curiously observing my predicament.

"Another one?" I groaned.

"Another what?" The water elemental tilted her head made of water to the side. "You know, you're kind of rude. Drinking from me without asking."

"If you're not here to pay me respects, go away." I waved off the river spirit.

"This isn't how this works, human. You're the one that must show respect to me."

"Do you imbeciles not see a Goddess when one is in front of you?!" I growled.

"You're no goddess." The nymph angrily leaned towards me. "Show respect, mortal!"

"Screw off." I growled.

The water elemental frowned. “I see how it’s going to be.”

She lifted her right hand and an enormous hand as tall as a few trees shot out of the water. I gaped at the absurd power of the river spirit. The nymph swatted at me and the giant hand copied her motion, descending upon me with an ear-piercing shriek. I tried to roll away, but was far too exhausted and dizzy to move quickly.

The hand struck with a deafening splash, swatting me if I was but a tiny insect.