Lifre gave a small pout when Tsubaki delivered the reply from the Keeper about her most recent report. “Obviously I know to keep a better track on things now…” She said with a sullen sigh, shaking her head. She was still out in the highest layer of Fyor, looking at the terminal that she had brought with her. After she delivered her report, the first thing that she did was to investigate each of the other villains that she had summoned in the past, carefully checking their stories for any details that were different from what she originally wrote. Thankfully, the only one that showed any obvious changes was the Cackling Demon.

As for the others… there were some things that looked strange to Lifre, but that was also because she had just not written those books in a while, so some details could have been jumbled in her mind. There was nothing that jumped out to her as a red flag, at the very least.

With a groan, she pushed herself up to her feet, looking at the crevice where she had previously found the gems. “So, these are good materials, right?” She asked with a playful grin. Now that the ‘owner’ of the mine had been dealt with, Lifre was able to jump down without worry.

She had long sent her clone down further, exploring the depths of the cave to confirm that there weren’t any more nearby monsters. Instead, what she saw was a large pile of similar gems arranged in what seemed to be some sort of massive cave nest. Seeing as how her clone was already plundering the nest, she herself went to work mining out the vein that she had found.

Lifre may not have been instructed to do this… but she found it interesting, so she was going to anyways. As long as she didn’t have an important matter to attend to, she was free to do whatever she pleased for the most part. And right now, that meant mining out a highly magical crystal.

Once she got to the level where she had seen the gems previously, she lifted her arm, allowing it to morph into a curved pick once more before slamming it into the crack in the wall where she had unearthed the original gem. Every time she saw more and more of the gems reveal themselves, her smile widened. It had to be known that the ore veins in Fyor typically scaled up as the size of the floor itself did. That meant that this one vein could be as large as an entire country if it was a decently sized vein, or it could be considerably smaller.

The more she unearthed, the more certain she was that it was a large vein. Whenever she broke a gem off, she stored it in her inventory, continuing on deeper and deeper. In under ten minutes, she had broken off hundreds of meters worth of gems, carving a tunnel for herself in the cliff face. Of course, given that this was a material that was good for crafting magic items, she was careful to avoid using any special energies in her mining, for fear of causing a chain reaction.

After mining another fifty meters, though… Lifre saw something up ahead. A golden gem that released a faint light within the blue crystals. Drawn to this gem, Lifre immediately changed course, carving out the additional five meters in order to reveal this strange stone. “If the rest of this is already on the level of creating divine artifacts, this should be even better…”

As she muttered that to herself, her pickaxe-arm struck once again. Lifre put a considerable amount of strength into this ‘attack’, causing web-like cracks to spread out from the point of impact. A second later, shards fell down in front of her, and the golden gem fell free. Strangely, the damage caused to the surrounding crystals didn’t impact the golden gem in the slightest, and it fell loose without being attached to any of the others.

“Neat…” Lifre blinked, looking down at the curious stone, before she reached to pick it up. When she did, she could feel something tugging on her energy. Whether it was her mana, ki, divinity, even her spirit and world sight felt attracted to the gem.

Lifre’s eyes widened as she felt the attraction, immediately rushing out of the cave for fear of impacting the crystals around her. Once she was out, she shot into the air, flying high above. As she did, she felt her mana being the first to connect with the golden gem. There was the sound of something cracking, and Lifre glanced down to see a small amount of blue gems forming along the edge of the golden gem, before falling down below.

“Wait… is this…” Lifre blinked in confusion, forcibly cutting off the connection with her mana, before switching to let her ki connect instead. This time, specks of red gemstones began to form, similarly falling off. “So they’re not connected, just produced within the aura of the stone…”

Lifre switched to her spirit, and then world sight, receiving similar responses with a silver gem and a green one with a wavy silver pattern. Each time, the gem fell off as it was formed, creating little more than sparkling dust depending on the amount of energy absorbed.

“So… the giant blue crystal vein should be formed by the passive release of mana in Fyor over a really long time. Since it was trapped underground, it wasn’t able to scatter. And if the mana crystals are already comparable to divine materials for artifacts… what about when divine energy is used?”

Lifre had an excited smile on her face when that thought occurred to her, channeling her divine energy into the crystal. She expect to see golden flakes forming, or maybe the crystal itself would grow larger. Oh, maybe it’s like divine gold, and it can be infinitely replicated with divine energy!

When that thought crossed her mind, she saw the golden gem… shatter. Before she could react, the entire gem turned to dust in her hand. Lifre stared at it, her smile frozen on her face as her eyes began to twitch.

Lifre had just started to lower her hand in disappointment when she felt something strange in her divinity. It was no longer being drawn towards the dust, but was rather drawing the dust into her. She let out a startled gasp, preparing to shake off the dust in case it would turn her into a crystal, or absorb her to replenish itself, or maybe turn her into a frog. A thousand possibilities flashed inside her mind as her hand waved, scattering the dust into the air.

However, it wasn’t going to give up so easily. The crystal dust had locked onto her divinity, and surged towards her as soon as it was airborne. Before she could react, it had turned into three streams to enter her nose and mouth at the same time.

“No no no no, I’m the one supposed to do weird things like that, get it out!” Lifre shouted, trying to expel the dust from within herself. She knew that she would be reborn in the Admin Room if she died, but she still didn’t want to lose this life of hers. Unfortunately for her, the moment that the dust entered her body, it merged together with her divinity.

Once the last of the dust had finished this process, Lifre’s entire body shook, a thunderous pressure pressing down on her mind. Her thoughts went blank, as did her vision.

The next thing she saw, she was standing on a golden pool of water, three stone pillars rising up before her. On the leftmost pillar, the word Adventure was written. On the rightmost pillar, the word Trial. However, the central pillar was completely blank.

“Adventure? Trial? Wait… my domains?” Lifre blinked, looking around. She was seeing if she could find the ‘Stories’ domain that she could access as Terra’s apostle. Yet, despite searching, there was nothing within sight aside from the three pillars before her. “Maybe… because it’s an external source, it doesn’t count?”

Lifre furrowed her brow, walking up to the central pillar. Part of her wanted to smash it, just to see what would happen. Thankfully, that little voice in the back of her head told her that would be a bad idea. There were a lot of times that she didn’t listen to that voice, but this time… she thought she’d give it a try.

“Okay… unless I’m a total idiot, this should be some subconscious representation of me being able to choose my third domain. I don’t think I’m a total idiot, so…” She took a deep breath, bringing a hand up to the pillar. She had long ago decided what her third domain would be, should she ever get the chance to receive one.

As her finger drew along the surface of the pillar, a golden trail etched the word in. “Every story requires three things.” She muttered to herself, her eyes losing focus as she drew. “First, the adventure, the context in which the story takes place. An adventure can be anything from a grand tale spanning a galaxy to a simple trip to work.”

“The second thing required in any story is a trial, some task that must be overcome. Typically, this is seen as the great villain, or a goal that must be reached. That’s why I write so many villains, because they are the trial.”

“Finally… every story needs a hero, someone that overcomes the trial within the adventure. The hero doesn’t have to be a person, it could be anything that is the focus of the story. Perhaps an entire kingdom is the ‘hero’ of their tale, or maybe it is an enchanted weapon. No story can exist without a focal point, a hero around which the story revolves.”

Saying that, she pulled her hand back, the word ‘Hero’ etched into the stone pillar. “An adventure, a trial, and a hero. The three things that every story must have.” She smiled at the three pillars, before blinking as they began to sink down into the golden pool beneath her feet. Belatedly, she realized something rather crucial.

“Wait… if I was given three pillars… would I have been able to edit my existing domains?” Lifre’s eyes widened in shock as she thought of that possibility, but her chance had already come and gone. That said, she wouldn’t have chosen to edit her existing domains even if she could, but still.

Her vision faded once again, and she could feel the wind rushing through her face. Her eyes opened slowly, and she could see a stone wall rapidly approaching her. Wait, no, that wasn’t a wall… that was the ground. “Oh, I’m falling!” With that realization, Lifre immediately mustered her energy to halt her momentum, slowing herself until she paused just inches from the rocky surface.

Congratulations! You have earned an achievement!

After gaining a new domain, you have become the Goddess of Heroes! Permanent access to the Hero domain.

“...So that’s a thing that happened.” She thought to herself, reaching out to sense her clone. Like Lifre herself, the clone had also blacked out when she absorbed the golden dust. Feeling that her clone was waking up, Lifre immediately tore open a portal through the void, rushing to Olympus.

“Daaaaale!” Lifre shouted, her arms waving as she entered the elevator, clearing her throat. “Take me to the Keeper, please.” She said in a polite tone, blue light flashing.

Once the door opened, she once again began running frantically, her arms waving over her head. “Daaaale!”

“Daaale!” I looked up from the report I was reading as the door to my office was thrown open, Lifre jumping in with an excited smile on her face. “Dale!”

“Yes, that is my name.” I nodded in agreement.

“Gem!”

“...Yes, you reported about the gem. Did you get my response?” I had a feeling one of us was missing some information here…

“No, different gem! Golden gem!”

I blinked when Lifre said that, looking at her curiously. “Okay… so there’s a golden one. Did you bring back a sample of it?”

“Couldn’t! It can produce blue gem from mana, red from ki, green from nature--not important! When you use divinity, it breaks and goes fwoosh, and the dust goes zoom right into your body, and then you black out and go to this weird inner mind world with pillars and a golden ocean, and I have a new domain!”

“...Can you say that again, but with regular words?”