I thought I was powerful before... I mused to myself, a grin on my face, as thousands of notifications appeared and covered my vision in swirling green-text.

Domains, sub-domains, and even... one... two... three cult-size notifications! How grand. I thought, as my eyes lit up filled with new, eldritch power.

It took even me nearly a full two minutes to read through them and to grin at the power at my disposal before I willed them away. I only left one up, one to admire and to bask in for a moment.

[Alert: Your cult has surpassed 500... 2,500... 12,500 worshipers!

Your activities in the large dark-elven city of Undermoon, coupled with your activities in Infernius, have resulted in you not only obtaining the required worshipers but smashing through the numbers set in place for deities to acquire what are called "Universal Deity Abilities". These U.D.A.'s are powers that are common to every god.

These things include powers like the ability to gain the powers of your worshipers, the power to possess those who worship you, and the ability to make race-specific dogmas.

The reward for surpassing 500 worshipers was the ability to possess your worshipers, which you can do once a day for up to an hour.

The reward for surpassing 2,500 worshipers was the power to create race or community-specific dogmas, a power which past deities have found immensely useful. Along with that power comes a power you'll likely find more immediately useful: The ability to gain the lowest level of influence over a single domain and a single sub-domain of a handful of domains and sub-domains.

The domains are war, healing, chaos, darkness, light, luck, civilization, and law. The sub-domains are liquid, leadership, fire, earth, air, shape-shifting, and corruption.

One of the rewards for surpassing 12,500 worshipers is the ability to choose two additional domains and sub-domains from that same list. The other is that all of your divine powers automatically level up.

In the cases of powers like your tremor-sense power and your radar, this means that they hugely expand in range and sensitivity, your appraisal and identify powers grant you more information, and all of your domain-specific abilities find their potency doubled and their cooldowns cut in half.

Your reconstitution power can now create 2 creatures every half an hour, and now creatures that are part of the domains and sub-domains which you command at least the fifth level of influence no longer count against your limits. You can create an army of fungal creatures even outside of your realm. As for the others... well it depends on the power in question.]

Now that is a beautiful notification. I thought to myself, as I read through it once more and then willed it away.

I found myself standing in one of the newly built fortresses deep within the Infernian desert. Gathered around me were nervous devils, staring off in the distance as another enemy salvo approached us. I watched as the projectile drew nearer and nearer to us. I wasn't nervous. This was a regular phenomenon I had long learned to deal with.

The projectile itself was unsophisticated. Paimon's forces had long stopped attacking us in sophisticated ways. They knew better than to do that by now. They had grown tired of us either stealing their technology in the wake of a failed attack, or me seizing Paimon's minions.

"Again huh? Why do they do it?" One of the technologist devils I had brought over to my side in the wake of the first handful of Paimon's uninspired attempts to dismantle my rebellion muttered under her breath.

"Because they can't do anything else. Paimon is in a terrible situation here. He can't win, but he also can't stop fighting. If he does he'll no doubt lose what support this war must have gotten him among his followers, and he'll be even further from his goals. I don't doubt that the devils who are actually attacking us, the ones in their catapults or whatever siege weapons they're using are sincere, but they can't win. They never could." I remarked, not bothering to turn to face the devil, a frequent companion of mine named Selena.

I heard her sigh in annoyance. I chuckled. "Sorry, was that one of those rhetorical questions?" I asked, feigning ignorance of speech devices.

That always annoyed her. She knew that I wasn't as bad at social interactions as I often pretended to be when I didn't feel like dealing with people. She sighed and shook her head at me.

"It's getting closer." I said, still not looking at her. She nodded. The thing had been sailing towards us for nearly a minute now.

The salvo that was soaring through the air was little more than a hunk of infernian metal fused together by a speedy but unskilled devil with a fondness for welding torches. That said, it was still fast enough to zip through the air, crossing a distance of dozens of meters per second. That's close enough I suppose. I thought idly when the projectile was high in the air and a few dozen meters away.

I rose a hand at the thing and wordlessly cast a spell on it, a spell that was handy in fending off these lazy attacks: Weight of the Dead. It was a necromantic spell that greatly increased the gravity on whatever it was aimed at. The spell instantly collided with the object, and the hunk of metal immediately began its rapid descent.

The thing crashed to the ground about fifteen seconds later, disturbing a ton of desert sand and sending it sailing in the direction of the fort.

"How many is that today?" She asked, curiosity audible in her voice. I looked at her, studying her scarlet eyes.

"Here?" I asked. This time she chuckled.

"No, overall." She said, her voice quiet. I let silence fill the air.

"This is the 8th salvo today." I told her, after allowing the silence to ratchet up the tension.

"So it's true. It's getting worse." She said, grimly. I nodded, rather nonplussed about the whole thing.

Because of this conflict, I had spent the vast majority of my life at war. I had only been alive for twenty-four hours when I met Paimon. I was only a few days old when I began my rebellion against him, in front of several dozen devils. Not even a day after the declaration he launched his first attack on my allies and myself.

"That's why I did this. That's why I cut the layer up. Because I knew it'd come to this. I don't know how many tens or even hundreds of thousands of devils he has at his disposal. Not to mention resources and forces that aren't devils or devilish in origin. Imagine if this constant deluge of nonsense was happening at the Dark Cathedral? It'd be worse." I told her.

She was silent for a moment, and my mind turned to the choices I had to make. What should I pick?

If it were younger I'd be more worried about my choices clashing with those of the other "me's". One of the many things I had learned over these last two months, via trial and error, was that when it came to choices I was never contradicted by myself. We may question each other, but we didn't disagree. Whatever choice I made was one that the other me's would understand and agree with. Same for them. We were of, weirdly enough, one mind when it came to decision making.

Healing and law are obvious choices. I prefer my servants alive, and I am in Infernius, trying to successfully, legally, overthrow a pseudo-dictator. But what should I get for my last domain? And all of the sub-domains are excellent choices... which makes that choice really hard. I thought to myself, grimacing at the choice I'd have to make.

I looked out in the distance and examined the hunk of metal my enemies had hurled at me. I aimed a single hand in its direction and willed the projectile off the ground. It didn't resist and was lifted into the air with ease. Come. I commanded, willing the thing to float speedily towards me. I watched as it came my way, obeying me and defying gravity while doing so.

"That's it..." I said, watching what had been fired at me, at my forces, as a weapon of war become another tool in my hands, one I planned to use against my foes.

At the same time as one of me was handling another attack on our fortifications along the border between our part of the layer and Paimon's part, I was walking through the streets of Namira. Namira too was beginning to feel the impact of my presence and I could see it in the streets.

Camilla and Kuzco walked behind me, their eyes rapidly studying our surroundings. They were unaware of what stealthy activities I had undertaken in the city, as I had often acted while they were asleep, but nonetheless at this point, the city was beginning to undergo remote physical changes.

"Is that... a flower beginning to bud from within those cracks?" Camilla asked, her voice soft and curious at the odd scene she was studying. Kuzco turned to look at it, and I smiled.

"Yes it is. I'm surprised it's taken them this long to grow." I responded, not bothering to look at thing. I could sense its life-force fighting to ensure it grew. The flower bud she was starring at was a thin thing, just barely visible if one close to the ground stared at the street studiously.

It made sense that she could see it. She wasn't much taller than the average jackaloid and was much closer to the ground than I was. She looked at the thing, focusing on it for a few moments.

"Are you memorizing what it looks like? I could tell you what sort of flower it'll be when it finishes it maturing, if you'd like." I told her, since it was unusual for her to pay so much attention to flora. She shook her head.

"No it's not that. It's just... weird, to see something like that." She said, thinking for a moment mid-sentence. I chuckled internally.

"Is it though? We've seen an abundance of flora growth since we arrived..." I pointed out, not wrong in my statement.

When we had first arrived in the city of Namira the place was struggling to successfully nurture crops to maturity. I myself was in the process of unraveling why, but in one of the schemes, I was in the process of enacting to subtly influence the city I had begun a small cult here, aiding a few farmers throughout the city in exchange for their loyalty and worship. I had tentatively named them the "Order of the Golden Sickle".

My farmers and an arboreal angel I created named Menanam had begun experimenting in the fields to discover why crops weren't growing, while I created more than enough crops to aid the city. We still hadn't discovered the reason why the crops weren't growing like they should have been, but we were hopefully inching closer to discovering the truth every day.

One of the quiet ways I had opted to influence the city, purely for fun, was to cover the place in divine energy and use it to coax plant growth and infiltration. With my enhanced radar and tremor-sense, I could easily sense the hundreds of tiny, inedible plants that had successfully wormed their way under the city and were sneakily growing underneath it.

Underneath our feet, every second tiny plants wormed their roots deeper into the sand and fought to get closer to the surface. Every time my party went to sleep, before beginning my other activities, I released more and more divine energy to the plants that were struggling the most.

I turned to look over at Niqi. The girtablilu looked straight ahead, uninterested in the plant growth around us and of all of the party members the one the most aware of my schemes. I grinned at the pale-skinned hybrid and spoke to it.

"Niqi, what do you think?" I asked the thing. My familiar, and the second creature of all of my followers to evolve naturally, kept walking. It was disinterested in all of this and more interested in pursuing our latest quest.

"Plants are plants. We've been seeing more and more of them every day we've been here." It explained, neutrally and detachedly summarizing the reality of our last two months in the city. I wasn't surprised that Niqi's analysis was spot-on, even if it didn't say how it felt about that odd reality.

"That's true, but is that normal?" Kuzco, our resident thief asked.

Internally I knew the answer to that question: it wasn't, I had long snatched up and copied the memories of the majority of residents and checked them out. This city was a wasteland aside from its fields.

And those weren't the only memories I had devoted a considerable amount of my time to sussing through. I had absorbed and studied the memories of my followers and worshipers. All of them. Billions of hours of memories.

Studying the memories of my followers was an incredibly useful past time that taught me an immeasurable amount about the multiverse.

I learned about the nature of the world I was born in, its history, politics, and peoples. I learned about the twenty schools of magic, and their classifications, "Basic" "Intermediate" "Expert" and "Quasi-Divine".

I learned about the nature of the universe I lived in. Its dimensions, its inhabitants, and even about some of its mysteries such as the identity of the killer of Mahmud Suti, how Raverangos came to wander about within an eerie demonic castle before wandering through a portal into Golden-Gate, and the cause of Hagitha's eerie insanity.

And perhaps most importantly, I learned about my own limitations. I had begun studying the countless memories I had stored within myself eagerly, throwing myself into them thinking that through them I'd learn things like the true-names of the demons and devils I had come across during my lifetime. I didn't.

There were only two serious limitations that my memory powers had. One of them was that within the memories I could only see what the person whose memory it was saw. My divine senses were hobbled within memories. But that wasn't a serious limitation. The serious limitation was my other limitation.

The other limitation, the serious boundary I couldn't get over, was that I couldn't learn true-names. I had countless extraplanar beings under my command. Some of them even worshiped me. But when I dove into their memories and studied them all, I'd see their true-names emblazoned in their consciousness.

Unfortunately for me, and fortunately for them, when I tried to learn the names, they'd be obstructed from view, hidden behind a protective and eerie wall of light. The first time this happened was when I studied Raverangos' memories, and it has happened without fail every single time I was researching the memories of an angel, devil, or demon.

And even when I heard the true-names uttered aloud in the incredibly rare cases someone's true name was known to someone else and used in their presence or to influence them I couldn't hear the names either. In those cases what I heard was an incredibly loud, buzzing sound almost custom made to annoy me.

I hated it.

Back in the present, I opened my mouth to speak. I intended to address my follower's question.

"It's not. But these plants haven't fully been noticed... yet." I explained to the three of them, speaking in the language of the jackaloids for a moment. That way fewer people understood us but we didn't abruptly stop talking in public, conspiratorially. I nodded at a single guard as we walked by him, and he nodded back at me, politely.

"What makes you say that?" Niqi questioned, and I could hear the faintest touch of curiosity in the thing's voice. I grinned and pointed to my head.

"Their thoughts. I've been... checking in on the thoughts of over two dozen different desert giants daily, including guards. None of them have noticed the plants yet. At most a few children have mentioned them, which makes sense because children like to play in areas where the plants grow more fiercely." I explained, smiling gently at my party.

A silence fell over the party as they digested my words. We were now just a few minutes away from the gate leading to the part of the city we had been asked to go to for our next quest.

Camilla broke the silence. "So when do you think they'll notice the plants?" She asked, both curious and suspicious about them. When indeed... I mused.

"I'd say... another two weeks is the most time they have left before the plants start to grow noticeably. I can sense them you know. Some of them aren't far from the surface now. Only the most tenacious are already visible but over the next few days it'll start to get harder to ignore." I told my servants.

Niqi spoke next, only needing a few seconds after I finished my statement to ask a good question. "Was this you?" It asked suddenly.

I kept walking, nonplussed by the question and let out a hearty laugh. "Good question Niqi! Yes. Yes it was. Is." I confessed, not really caring to hide this from a loyal follower of mine.

"The plants are harmless. They are just an attempt by me to... practice my plant-based abilities. Though, depending on how the giants react to them they may present an interesting possibility, politically." I said, suggestively. For a moment I pictured one of the few creatures left in my prison, a desert-giant noblewoman and the tantalizing drive to gain power.

"But that's neither here nor there. At least not right now." I told my party, effectively kicking this can down the road. At this point, I could see the gate that we needed to get too, though the rest of my party couldn't.

I sped up slightly, but only barely enough to not be noticed by the rest of my companions. I was looking forward to this quest.