The sounds of violence drifted out from a certain cottage on a range of black mountains.

Lila, the main source of the noise, was currently in the middle of smacking Gemini’s chest repeatedly with her right hand, her left hand occupied by the tedious job of wiping away a nosebleed. The Demon Sovereign felt somewhat aggrieved — he had explicitly warned her not to look at the fragments of the Demon God’s inheritance — but he was still getting punished for it.

To be fair, however, her little fists felt more like a massage than anything else, so Gemini didn’t really make any effort to stop her. Instead, he took this opportunity to fiddle with her hair, but before he could do anything else, Aria’s curious gaze had fallen on him.

As such, he could only make do with Lila’s hair. It was somewhat a let-down, but getting a less potent dose of Lila-ium was better than none at all. Besides, playing with her hair was doing wonders for his mental state, so he really couldn’t complain all that much either.

“Sorry to break your little bubble, but what do we do about Pai-Relix?” Quinn asked.

Gemini didn’t know what bubble was he talking about, since Lila showed no signs of letting him off, but that was a good point anyway. “We’ll…let her stay here, then. Pai-Relix will recover in an hour or two; she was just suppressed by the remaining bits of the Demon God.”

“Very well.”

Quinn shot another glance at Pai-Relix, who was sitting on a small sofa with vacant eyes, and then made his way to a certain cot, where a bright-eyed Aria was waving him over and babbling happily.

“Right, did anything happen in the few hours I was away?” Gemini asked, his words broken up by Lila’s regular smacks, which were doing wonders in loosening his very stiff muscles.

“Nothing much,” Lila replied. “Aria was busy biting my shoulder, as usual. I’m nearly done with all the books here, and no military reports of any emergencies have popped up either.”

Pulling the collar of her shirt to the side, she revealed a set of bite marks. They were faint, but simply looking at them was enough to make the Demon Sovereign wince.

“Let me carry her for the time being,” Gemini replied. “She’s teething, and my forearm’s a better chewing target.”

He rubbed her bitten shoulder gently, willing out some divinity to speed up Lila’s rate of recovery. Within seconds, the marks had vanished, and her skin looked as flawless as ever.

“Done.” Gemini closed one eye and inspected her shoulder once more. “Should be fine now. Lila, try moving your arm around, and tell me if there are any issues. Doctor’s orders.”

“Save the doctor play for when there’s no one around, okay?”

Quinn coughed twice at those words, prompting Gemini to glare at his erstwhile clone. He turned back to Lila a moment later, a nasty grin on his smile. “Your wish is my command, then. We’ll save it for later.”

“Hey!”

The two chuckled after that, and after making a few more jokes, Gemini rubbed off some blood from Lila’s face.

“Right, those tiles…you should keep them away from Aria,” Lila noted. “I’ll smack you really hard if you let her look at them, okay?”

“Don’t need you to tell me twice,” Gemini replied. “Still, what did it feel like to look at one of those tiles? What did you experience?”

“Me?” Lila tilted her head. “Like millions of people talking in my head, I guess. Why? Does the experience vary from person to person?”

“Not really, I think. However, I am fairly certain that my experience will be a unique one, different from anyone else,” Gemini replied, conjuring up the image of the orb those tiles used to be. “These little slabs were originally one; a fist-sized orb of these things. I had to break them up, since looking at the orb was making my brain hurt.”

“Didn’t I tell you not to do dangerous things?” Lila asked, glaring at Gemini.

“Yeah, but—ahh! Have mercy!”

The two ran circles around Aria’s cot for the next two minutes, prompting the little baby to giggle and laugh at the sight. Gemini knew that Lila actually had no intention of doing anything remotely painful — not that she could — but it was fun to play around with her.

Lila picked up Aria, and the baby promptly latched on to her shoulder. “Papa’s being bad again. Always putting himself at danger. Papa bad!”

“Paba, bah?”

“Don’t teach her the wrong things, Lila.” Gemini rolled his eyes and offered his forearm to Aria.

As Aria promptly chewed on his little offering, Gemini wondered what kind of person his little daughter would grow up to be. Her father was the mightiest person in the Wildlands, while her mother was the best wife — although just about every other person would claim the same about their spouse — in the world.

“She really doesn’t hold back on chewing,” Lila noted wryly. “What’s so good about your arm anyway?”

“Maybe it’s because there’s so much lean muscle on it. Anyway, the hearts of people are hard to control, but the minds of babies are unfathomable,” Gemini replied. “This is a perennial truth that transcends both time and space.”

“True.”

“Indeed,” Pai-Relix chimed in.

The Demigod shook her head. “Wow. That was not an experience I want to relive for the next couple of years. Bah.”

“Yeah, you looked like a mess,” Gemini replied. “I assume that the other demons probably won’t fare well there either. That tower is a coagulated mass of divinity, so much so that it’s converting ambient energy around it into divinity as well. On its own, it can operate for a darn long time.”

“Have you found a way to control it yet?”

“Not yet.” Gemini shook his head. “But I’m about to. I’ll be in mediation for a bit, pop out for some dinner and night activities, and then return to mediation.”

“Night activities?” Pai-Relix asked.

Gemini grinned. “Don’t ask.”