I sat on the front porch of what was frankly a decedent, and excessively lavish, rococo palace. The house itself was roughly 125 square miles in area, with 100 floors. I’d basically done what every child who’d unlocked a game’s editor mode in a crafting/survival game would do, and had gone nuts with the building process.

Creating as big a mansion as I could, until I grew bored with the interior-design work and let my minions finish the job. Of course, I “did” eventually see sense and shrink the outward scale of the property to a more reasonable 10,000 square feet, but the inner-dimension of the house were still ludicrously expansive and I can’t say I’ve exactly learned my lesson, because I still occasionally add a room, or expansion when the whim catches me.

This mansion was the center of my private server. Sitting in the literal center of the entire dimension. Surrounded by enough wards, spells, enchantments, arrays, and technological defense to start and end, a war of apex-predator immortals. The front and back lawn of the property was a tame sea of immaculate, magically-managed, green-blue, grass. Then as one ventured outwards the environment got a little wilder and more varied as one direction became swampy, another direction became jungle, another direction became desert, and other directions led to other biomes and environmental genres.

These biomes were still included in what I called the central living area, or the main residence. My private server’s full scale was currently set at roughly 105,700 light-years in diameter. Only a small portion of that was occupied by my actual living space, an area amounting to 200 million miles. Two-thirds of what remained was occupied by defenses. Those were regions of my private server filled with nothing but death traps, mazes, wards, destructive beings that would attack any who didn’t belong, and pure, corrosive, volatile, unreality. The remaining third was occupied by various kinds of facilities, habitats, and storage spaces.

I had countless stars that I was able to steal from countless skies, and used as power sources. I had planets that I used as vast farms for growing medicinal herbs, rare plants, and food-stock. I also farmed numerous kinds of tasty beasts, birds, and fish in certain planets that I’d placed wards over to reduce the chance of the inhabitants gaining sapience. There were also gas giants and molten worlds that I used for mining chemicals and minerals.

One big benefit from living in a semi-digitized reality like Horologia was that instead of relying on the natural processes for producing things, one merely needed a suitable environment that one could alter the data for, to set the necessary “spawn points”, and things would just pop into being. Of course, this kind of easy matter-generation requires having a dangerously high amount of anomalous energy present in one’s universe, but you know,...you win some, you lose some.

Besides the resources worlds, there were research worlds. Planets and planet-sized constructs that were made up of largely autonomous laboratories and observation equipment. There were also production worlds, entire planets, and planet-sized constructs that basically served as massive factories. Factories that I used to produce various items...Only a small portion of which I'd actually sell, with the rest just going into storage because I’m basically like a squirrel, magpie, or dragon in terms of my hoarding tendencies.

Actually, in terms of my storage spaces, my private server might have been mostly storage space, since the cosmos was mostly empty space, and it wasn’t hard to use my power to pull space into a vessel. It was all just math for me, and I was good at crunching, and playing with, those kinds of numbers. As a result, I don’t actually know how much space I was using purely for storage. Especially in terms of the compressed spaces that I automatically expanded as needed.

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Anyway, Josephine and I were just taking things easy today. We weren’t busy with the shop. We weren’t out in the wilderness. Today was a lazy day, a day just for taking things easy. I watched another perfect sunset and then I wandered in the house. Josephine was sitting in front of the living room’s television, wearing naught but a pair of panties.

Her golden locks covered her ample chest, while her tail intermittently wagged behind her. Jo was the type to really let her hair down, behind closed doors. I think it was something she’d picked up from her original home. The Mirsada Military treated their tank-born soldiers like her, more like equipment, more than people, and their socialization reflected this. While she understood the nudity-inhibition in theory, and always dressed appropriately in public, in private, there were days that she’d just walk around as she was born, unless she was slightly cold, in which case she’d wear socks.

On the one hand, it was a sight to behold. The woman was all curves and rippling muscles. Wide shoulders, a phenomenally large chest, and even wider hips. She was pretty much what one would expect of a genetically-modified, tank-born, super-soldier...out of some kind of x-rated pulp novel.

On the other hand….On the other hand...Sorry, I got distracted for a second there. I am quite well aware that I’ve just dropped a detail about my wife’s background that some might feel bares more explanation than the description of my wife’s phenomenal backside and breasts, but honestly, right now I was kind of finding it hard to string thoughts together, as my wife fished a bit of chocolate out from between her breasts.

Also, in our home server, genetic-modification and tank-birth were quite common. Our world’s original apocalypse was no doubt one caused by genetic meddling run amok. Our nobility were ubermenschian monsters. Our soldiers were specialized clones. Our middle class barely dodged the fate of being remade into docile, obedient, dim-wits. Most of that knowledge was gone now, but enough had been rediscovered that despite being conceived first, and gestated first, I was still “born” roughly in the middle of my mother’s children. In other words, I too, am technically, a tank-born baby, though of a drastically more mundane sort. The kind career women and female household heads used to get over the practical issues of having to bear multiple children for multiple spouses, in short succession, so as to avoid large interruptions in their work and/or training.

Stories like Josephine’s weren’t all that uncommon. Though the knowledge was much reduced and the very laws of our server now restrained us from breaking certain boundaries, gene modification and designer babies were still a known thing in our world,...The mortal powers-that-be frequently skirted around the rules set by our servers heavens, in their attempts to make living-weapons, and ultimate lifeforms, using the fantasy-blight. Honestly, if Horologia wasn’t built to absorb and adjust to this kind of “stimulating” behavior we probably would have destroyed ourselves again.

Josephine laughed at something onscreen and now...I got distracted again. Which I suppose is kind of the point. I should be better than this. Even if I didn’t keep as much of the “age”, or “time” that I’d spent as my other-selves, during the big consolidation, I was still pretty ancient mentally speaking. However, the mind adapts to the body more often than not, and right now “Ellis” was still a barely eighteen-year-old brat, with the raging hormones to match.

Fortunately, I’ve come through the worst part of it. The awkward honeymoon phase where both of us were feeling each other out emotionally and physically. Ironically, those times where I ended up becoming some kind of figurative, and often literal, Devil of Lust and Depravity proved to be more of a detriment to the situation, because those versions of me understood physical desire well enough, but only in absence of emotional attachments...Or at least, the healthy sort of emotional attachments. There were sadly a lot of things like that, for me. Where I knew how to do it, if I wanted to approach the goal as a fucked up sociopath, but doing the thing like a person was something alien and new for me.

Oh, well...We eventually got through that rough patch…(mostly thanks to Jo’s wide heart and good temperament.) Still, even out of the honeymoon phase, I was still quite sensitive to my wife’s presence. The scents, the sights,...the tastes. My senses were all far too sharp for their own good. Also, I suspect that for all that she played the innocent ingenue, Jo was quite well aware of her effect on me. Sometimes, she’d tease me with exaggerated stretches, exaggerated movements, simple but sensuous shifts in posture. I suspect I was slowly being tamed and for the life of me, I couldn’t muster the energy to care.

Funnily enough, despite her bold and deft use of coy seduction on what was once a demon lord of seduction, Jo wasn’t particularly roundabout or shy about her own desires. This was evidenced now as the cartoon she was watching came to end. She stood and stretched, the arch in her back making her round, full, breasts even more prominent. Then Jo turned to me, a languid smile spreading across her face. A certain, familiar, hungriness hidden within her easy grin.

“Ah, there you are, Elly...I’m heading to be now. Do you want to join me?” said Jo.

“But it's still barely midday?” I said.

“And so…?” said Jo. Blinking at me, merrily.

“...Fair enough,” I said. Giving in almost immediately.

Sure enough, by the time we both collapsed into a restful slumber, midday had already long ago turned to midnight, with morning on its way.

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The next day was spent doing maintenance and upgrades on my minions. At some point, my alternate-selves always ended up producing the same set of minions. I think the knowledge was being passed through my main-soul. I call my minions “figments” They were complex creatures of magic, technology, and mental energy. Some of them were sapient thanks to the soul magic and soul-contracts used in the figments’ creation, many were not.

There are six types, or models, of figment that I utilized most often. The first type were my pawns. They were diminutive, slender, humanoid fellows in jumpsuits. They had no faces, and were akin to store mannequins, or the mooks in old hero shows. They were barely larger than your average pre-adolescent but they were much stronger than they looked. Possessing the strength, speed, endurance, and intelligence 25 times that of your average person.

They were equipped with shapeshifting abilities and illusion magics that allowed them to alter their appearance to blend in with a local populace, or even do impersonation work to take someone’s place. They were also equipped with a broad amount of general knowledge and combat knowledge, to make them more suited for general labor tasks, and low-ranking military roles. This is why I used to use them as my main infantry, and currently used them as part of the general staff for the store.

Besides the pawns, there were my “helpers”. Helpers were adorable little balls of living moldable clay. Their shapeshifting abilities far exceeded the pawns, and they could operate as, or turn parts of their bodies into, nearly any tool, no matter how complex. My Helpers’ size varied depending on the tasks they were expected to do, but they generally were around the size of a large toddler, or mid-sized dog. They were all equipped with construction, repair, and fabrication knowledge for many fields, including the medical field and biology. Which is why I generally had an ample population of helpers working in my factories and laboratories.

Thinkers were basically magical artificial-intelligences that I utilized when I needed an extra mind looking into an issue for me. They were a fusion of hardware and software, in that the Thinker-itself was basically an artificial spirit that also served as an intangible, magic-based, quantum-computer. However, since that intangible form made them extremely fragile, all thinkers also had a housing-unit, or core-body, in the form of large crystals that the Thinkers could reside in. I made up for the Thinker’s fragility, by giving them an extremely broad and deep, knowledge-base, and magical powers that could be used to convey their knowledge and intentions into the physical world. Thinkers were also given an innate ability to create and manipulate, solid-light projections.

Besides the pawns, helpers, and thinkers that made up the bulk of my forces, there were Knights, Rooks, and Bishops. A Knight was basically, a bigger, smarter, stronger, pawn. One knight was the equivalent of 30 pawns, both in terms of knowledge and in terms of stats. Which was why I often had Knights commanding teams of pawns.

Rooks and Bishops were like the rogue and mage variations of knights, respectively. Rogues were slim and lithe and pre-programmed with all sorts of sneaky-type skills. Bishops were slightly less physically robust compared to Knights and Rooks, but they were smarter, and that lost muscle mass was for the sake of expanding their aether channels and aether storage capacity. I, of course, had other figments, but these six were the main types that I used, in general, and in my shop.