The moment Shadow and I arrived at the river where my pet was eating its fill the sun had been beginning a gradual climb upwards to the zenith of its daytime position. At this point over fifteen minutes had passed. The sun was currently beating down on my fungal servant and me, and the flaming star was currently at its peak high above us.

Over the course of the past few minutes, I had kept tapping my feet and hadn't paused once. It was a constant, rhythmic tapping as if I were dancing along to some strange, inaudible music. While I was doing this Shadow had kept on hunting for its lunch, its hyphae lazily and unofficially damming the river. Had anyone been around to see us we'd probably look like a strange druid and its even stranger familiar.

It was while we were idly relaxing in our own ways that I began to be approached by the first creature, a Pitfall Spider, to fall for the bait that was the vibrations I was transmitting using Earth Control. I had begun sending loud vibrations into the earth beneath the shore just so I could meet more creatures, particularly more animals and insects.

I smiled when I noticed the little blip that represented the creature located deep underground begin to speedily shoot upwards, probably intent on discovering the cause of the vibrations that had reached even it, deep under the earth.

It took the speedy spider that was approaching me a few minutes to get from deep underground to the topmost layer of sand that separated it from me. While the thing was skittering towards me I used a power I only rarely used, Remote Viewing, to lay my eyes on it.

Deep under the ground, the thing that was speedily clambering upwards was positively and beautifully monstrous. It was a spider the size of a decently large horse, with eight large and barb-covered and claw-tipped legs that were well suited to both climbing and digging, as well as two powerful arms that ended in bony, unsettlingly human-like, hands.

The thing's exoskeleton was a stunning shade of red and the central part of its abdomen had a distinctive marking that resembled an ivory-colored human skull. And there was a look of determination on the things thick-fanged face. Each of its azure blue eyes, all eight of them, were staring straight ahead, which meant that the thing's gaze never fell off of the dirt, rocks, and earth it had to dig through to get to its destination.

The thing's legs were a dizzying blur as it moved. It just so happened that the monster had an incredible work-ethic and possessed a seemingly limitless vitality. This led to it making short work of the distance between us, a distance that was originally measured in kilometers.

By the time the monster was less than a minute away from where I was seated, I began to get up and stretch. I got up and took my time stretching my muscles, doing a variety of low-intensity exercises, before walking a few steps to the right of where I had just been standing.

I waited for about five seconds and then the sand of the beach where I had just been sitting was violently flung out of the way of the now sandy spider that had come to investigate me. Some of the sand landed on me, and I removed it by shaking and flinging it off of me. Shadow turned to face me, and I could hear the thing's heartbeat quicken.

I casually shouted, "Don't worry about it, this thing is a friend." I told my fungoid familiar, quite confidently and to reassure my minion that I wasn't harmed, surprised, or upset.

And then I waited for the spider to finish climbing out of the pit it had just made while burrowing upward to find me, the source of the constant vibrations.

One leg shot out of the hole the spider's violent climbing had created in the thin shoreline. I watched as the thin limb seemed to take a second to do something like searching its surroundings, rotating in a complete circle before abruptly deciding on a course of action.

When the limb finished its rotation it suddenly slammed into the ground beside me, missing me by less than a meter. I could actually feel the force of the impact of the limb into the ground, which exploded away from the thing. I was still while I watched this, utterly unafraid of the massive arachnidian limb, and even less afraid of the monstrous possessor of that limb.

And then another limb shot out of the hole the monster's dramatic entrance had created. This limb was the same color and size as the other one. Rather unsurprisingly this limb didn't have to take the same preparatory phases as the other one and instead immediately plunged into the sandy flooring on the other side of me. It produced an equally loud explosion of noise and was immediately followed by the emergence of the third leg.

At this point, the cycle began to repeat itself, with each leg violently impaling the floor around the hole. Once all eight limbs had been violently thrust into the floor the spider they were attached too threw its bulbous mass upward, causing its thick exoskeleton to bound into view for the first time.

At this point, the thing's full body was out of the hole it had created, and it was looking around, searching its surroundings to find the cause of the vibrations that had lured it upwards in the first place. I was behind it, and in the proper position so that it would lay its eyes on me first before it glimpsed Shadow.

"Look at you... absolutely splendid." I muttered, amazed at the sight of the monstrous predator now that I could study it up close. And in my defense, it truly was a beauty as far as such things go.

The thing smelled of the varied scents that one found deep underground. It smelled of strange gases and even stranger metals. And it was strangely quiet for such a hulking beast, as most of the noise it had made so far it made when it violently decimated the final layer of sand standing between it and myself.

The thing slowly turned when it couldn't catch a glimpse of anyone. In a matter of seconds, it had turned enough that the thing was staring at me. I was smiling at it, and the second it saw me, even as I glimpsed at it the thing suddenly froze up, its mind adjusting to my presence.

"Hello there little one." I said, greeting the thing warmly and openly.

The spider studied me, each of its eyes focused on a different aspect of my form. I took a step forward, slowly and carefully approaching the brave thing so as to not startle it. It followed my movements, studying me openly, and there wasn't a hint of fear or suspicion in its gaze. And then I received a notification that explained why it wasn't afraid.

[Alert:

The spider is currently under the effects of the assorted animal and vermin abilities and feats you've gained over the course of your life. It could easily fall under your influence, especially now that your influence over the faith domain has been increased.]

I sighed as I read the notification. And then I willed it away. In the presence of my new friend, I found my mood rapidly improving, but for now, I still wanted to be sure I considered how to ensure that the system and the domains took me seriously and treated me as an equal before I went back to business as usual.

A small part of me did appreciate the system informing me that the spider was being affected by my powers though. It served as handy confirmation that I possessed significant sway over animals intrinsically.

"You're a very pretty thing." I told the spider, a grin on my face as I took in the wild majesty of its enormous form.

Pitfall spiders were not a particularly intelligent type of spider. They were crafty, even among a trap-making species like spiders, but they were only just smart enough to be considered sapient. Functionally that meant that they were a bit dumber than a human that had just reached the point in their development wherein they could speak.

The one that had burst out of the ground right where Althos had been sitting seconds earlier was a dim-witted member of its kind which explained why the thing had opted to take the obvious bait Althos laid out. It was also a big, brutish member of its species that had survived several years and had done so by being big enough to tackle other creatures stupid enough to fall for its subpar traps.

And the second the spider laid its eyes on Althos the thing's lack of intelligence came into play. Because it was immediately struck by the number of powers, titles, domains, and feats Althos had that were related to animals, and darkness, which were two things that influenced its very soul.

Its low intelligence made an already suggestible creature become putty in the hands of the curious god, whose curiosity and studiousness made it difficult for him to intentionally exploit the thing that, in his eyes anyway, was adorable.

The spider stared at the youthful deity. The spider was only barely sapient and a part of it was awed by the fearless god. That part grew with each word the deity spoke to it. What made the effect Althos had on the spider was that it sensed no hostility from the human-like entity it was studying, and obviously it couldn't sense any fear either.

It could even sense a mighty air about Althos. He was not only brave, but the air around him shimmered with a dazzling mixture of divine and magical energy giving him an aura of splendor. That, coupled with the powers related to animals and vermin that Althos had earned over the course of his life, kept the spider abjectly fascinated while it was in his presence.

"Hmm... what should I do with you?" I wondered, aloud. I was now petting the head of the spider, who at this point had given up all pretense of being anything short of awed by me. It looked up at me, adoringly as I ran a hand over its somewhat bumpy head.

The thing was tall, almost my height in fact. At the moment I was a bit taller than the average human, but because that was my current height and the thing was just shorter than me that meant that it was bigger than some bears, and that was a dizzying height for a thing like a spider to be.

"Are you hungry?" I asked the thing, treating it more like an adorable puppy than a terrifying and deadly predator. The beast nodded at me, its eyes growing wide at the thought of food. I laughed and held out both of my hands in front of the thing.

"Watch this." I said, pompously while tilting my head down towards my hands. My newest friend thought about my words for a second before its head titled downward and its eight eyes all began to stare at my hands.

Just relax... and now, visualize a fish. In the safety of my mind, I pictured a fish. It was a simple thing, but it was also nice and fat. Lots of delicious and nutritious flesh for my new friend.

Imagine every part of the fish. Every bone, every bit of muscle, every organ. I told myself, carefully visualizing an anatomically correct fish in my mind. At this moment I was grateful to every cook who worshiped me because they all spent countless hours and had thousands of memories of preparing fish, which meant that I had those memories as well, so it was thanks to them I could do this.

And now... direct magical power into your hands. I said, in the void of my mind. I felt power begin to concentrate in my hands, mostly magic but also some divine mixed in there as well. My hands began to warm up as the power settled in them, called there by me and now awaiting an action to perform.

And now... create the illusion. I said, both to myself and to the power in my hands. And as soon as I said it or rather, as soon as I thought it, it began to occur. Power began to bleed out of my palms and into the empty air in my empty hands.

And then the fish slowly came into existence. It phased into existence in the safety of my hands, rather than forming in some sort of eldritch geometry like the devils had when I had resurrected them months ago.

Once the fish was fully formed, but still not real, I did the last thing I needed to do. And it was a multistep process.

The first step was to use my memories to recall the exact thing I did to make my one Arboreal Angel an actual being. Once I had the custom effect I used to make Menanam real locked in my mind, I replicated it. And a second later I hit the fish in my hands with it, causing the thing to spring to life in my hands instead of being a static hologram-like image in my hands.

The fish's eyes opened wide and the now living creature began to shake and struggle in my hands, presumably trying to get free so that it could go to water and begin to breathe. I kept my arms locked tight around the little fellow, easily holding onto it. I grinned at my newest companion and told it something pretty simple.

"If you stick with me you'll never go hungry." I said, confidently. I beamed at the thing as I said it, feeling pretty proud of one of my strangest and most chaotic powers: the ability to bring my illusions to life.

"Now... do you want to eat?" I asked it. I spoke very casually about what may well have been the strangest moment in this creature's life, and my friend was quite reasonably too astonished to react immediately.

My little friend was beside itself. Its eyes were conveying its legitimate astonishment at what it had just seen, and in fairness that made sense. The creature had just seen a god quite literally create life out of nothing, and then ask it if it wanted to eat that life.

Over the course of my life I had met enough creatures and absorbed and studied enough memories to develop a baseline for what could be considered normal, and what couldn't, and what I had just done definitely couldn't be considered normal.

In response to the absurdity of the situation, I kept a grin plastered on my face, and eventually, my friend regained its senses. When it did it casually nodded at me, indicating a desire to eat something for lunch.

My most inexperienced friend reached out with one of its thick arms. I gave the limb the fish, and the beastie happily accepted it, pulling it to its ebon maw, and devouring the thing in moments. The fish vanished into the monster's mouth, and I watched the newest sort of creature I had met to date visibly relax and shiver in satisfied delight.

I chuckled at it and then began to speak to it once more. "If you liked that... I'd definitely like to keep you. I'd keep you nice and fed." I said, genuinely enjoying everything about the thing. I found myself comforted by its simplicity,

And it was while it was relishing my ability to give it food that I quietly sealed the hole it had created when it first revealed itself to me.

Shadow began to walk over to me and to the spider who had kept me company over the course of the last few minutes, and when my fungoid friend arrived the three of us settled down in the river and began to relax. I began to make more fish so that I could continue to feed my hungry new companion.

For a few hours, I allowed myself to enjoy the simple and leisurely life of a powerful forest creature while experimenting with different ways to use my powers chaotically, most of which didn't work.

I didn't give myself a time-limit or anything to frame how long I enjoyed a snippet of simple forest life, but when the end of that period came, I knew it had come. I ended my brief break when a new figure appeared at the outer edge of what my Tremor-Sense could detect. The new figure was cloaked in the color my mini-map used to identify friends, but the precise identity of the figure was the shocking thing, not the fact that it was a friend.

The second I saw the comforting shade of silver on the mini-map I clicked on it since I had very few allies in this forest. And I was pleasantly shocked to see that the figure my mini-map detected wasn't just an ally but someone with whom I had a real history.

The figure my mini-map detected was the goblin Amelie. She was the very first creature who had ever willingly allowed me to make a copy of all of her memories, thoughts, knowledge, and secrets. Those were the terms she needed to accept if she wanted me to save her life, and the lives of the squad of goblins she was a part of. She had accepted those terms and I kept my word, copying her memories and then proceeding to save the lives I swore to save.

And upon seeing her name in front of me for the second time in my entire life, I felt like going to go and greet her. I looked at my companions and gestured for them to follow me. And the three of us took off in the direction of the person who inadvertently taught me so much about the world.

There was a grin on my face as I began to saunter towards the woman who in a thematic sense was the first person I had ever made a devil's deal with. As I began to take off towards her, several mischevious thoughts crossed my mind. Fun, and usually somewhat wicked things I could do to the little goblin.

Of those thoughts the most fun one of them had to have been the one that told me that I should make an actual devil's deal with her and acquire her soul. The thought of it struck me as both chaotic, due to its randomness, and also lawful because of the mechanics of what I actually wanted to do.