《Returning Skills.》 《Returning Status.》 《Returning Title.》 《Returning Skill Points.》 《Returning Experience Points.》 《Installing D's Original "Divine Basics Course."》 《Deification is now complete. You will no longer receive any system support going forward. Thank you for using the system.》 Slowly, change stirs within me.
This is deification—a phenomenon fundamentally different from any Evolution I've undergone before.
It means losing the strength guaranteed by the system, and being reborn into the world with only my own power.
But it also means that the strength the system had restricted is now unleashed.
My scattered soul, once cobbled together haphazardly, now merges gently under my own will.
My soul, which had been split into multiple parallel wills by a Skill, coalesces back into a single whole.
The fragments of the Queen and the Demon King, the portions of soul gained through Experience Points—I digest these impurities slowly, absorbing them as part of myself.
This isn't the rough patchwork I had before. This is true absorption in every sense of the word.
And when it's all done, I am reborn—the real me, free of impurities.
Then, my consciousness surfaces from a deep sleep.
I open my eyes.
What fills my vision is a white wall.
To put it simply, it's something like a cocoon.
When I touch it, it crumbles apart, collapsing in on itself.
It seems this thing was made from my own thread.
I must have cocooned myself unconsciously.
Once the cocoon breaks away, I find myself underground in a facility—the same place I'd been before losing consciousness.
I stand up from inside the cocoon.
Huh?
Something feels off—oh, I'm walking on two legs.
Probably an effect of the deification.
Extending my earth magic, I create a mirror.
I peer at my reflection in the finished mirror.
My upper body hasn't changed much.
But my eyes are… something else entirely.
Inside each red iris, there are four smaller pupils nested within.
What the heck is this.
I try moving each one individually.
They move exactly as I will them.
And in the mirror, the multitude of tiny pupils spin and swirl around inside my eyes.
Creepy.
I'll just keep my eyes closed during normal times. Not like it matters—I can see just fine with Appraisal or x-ray vision anyway, whether my eyes are open or shut.
But the eyes can wait. The real issue is my lower body.
From the spider form I'd always had, I've become completely humanoid.
I suppose that's fine in its own way, but having lived as a spider for so long, losing that feels… oddly lonely.
And as I'm thinking that, something cracks with a sharp sound down below.
Well, not so much cracks—transforms.
My two legs split into eight, and my familiar spider form reappears.
Though this time without eyes.
If I concentrate, I shift back to two legs again.
It's some kind of variable transformation.
A shapeshifting function built in? Not bad, me.
I was having fun cycling through the transformations back and forth when a voice drifted over from the side, dripping with exasperation.
"How long do you intend to keep playing?"
Hey there, Gyurie.
"So you really have ascended to the seat of a God. To accomplish that in such a short span of time… truly baffling."
Well, y'know, I don't wanna brag, but… yeah, kinda.
Still, what am I going to do?
Even after becoming a God, I'm still socially hopeless. I literally can't hold a conversation.
*Plop*—a smartphone drops to the ground.
"Hello, hello! This is everyone's favorite evil god, D!"
There she is.
The worst possible person to show up right now.
After deifying, I understand everything now. This woman's personality is absolutely atrocious.
"It appears the spider has truly reached Godhood—congratulations. Incidentally, since you've become a God yourself, I can no longer read your thoughts. Consider yourself forewarned."
For real?
Yes!
No more violations of my privacy—hell yeah!
Oh, wait. But the "Divine Basics Course" thing was a huge help. Thanks for that.
The "Divine Basics Course" was, true to its name, a collection of fundamental knowledge about being a God.
Now even a freshly debuted God like myself can lay claim to the title with some confidence.
"D. Were you the one who guided her through this?"
"I offered only the smallest of nudges. Reaching Godhood was entirely her own doing. I did nothing of significance."
Yeah, right!
This lady interfered like crazy and then has the nerve to lie about it with a straight face.
"I'm not lying. I truly did very little. Simply surviving was hard enough, and from there to ascend to Godhood exceeded even my expectations. That's precisely what makes it interesting."
Wait, what!?
You said you couldn't read my thoughts anymore!
"I can't read them, but I can certainly make predictions."
Oh, you've got to be kidding me.
"By the way, perhaps you should put on some clothes?"
Oh, right.
I'm completely naked at the moment.
I use my thread to generate clothing.
I put on underwear and craft a robe-like garment on top.
Since the lower half of the outfit flows freely, I can still shift into my spider form at a moment's notice.
"It's white. Won't you add some embellishments?"
Too much trouble.
I could color it, I suppose, but my thread defaults to white, so…
"You're a young woman, you know. You really should care more about fashion—it's a loss not to."
Ugh, too much effort.
"Never mind fashion—what are you going to do from here on out?"
Good question.
Honestly, becoming a God was never part of the plan. It just sort of happened.
In other words, I'm now equal in standing to an Administrator.
That said, I'd still probably lose in a fight against Gyurie. Even if we're the same rank, the length of time we've lived is vastly different, and the experience we've accumulated isn't even comparable.
Appraisal—I can't use it.
I'm now a being that exists outside the system's framework.
All my Skills have been converted back into the raw power of my original soul and absorbed.
Which means I can't use Skills anymore.
Well, I can reproduce something similar with magic, but still.
Appraisal has an especially strong affinity with the system, so I'd probably need to hack into the system first before I could use it.
So the long and short of it is, I don't really have a clear sense of just how strong I am now.
That said, it's undeniable that breaking free of the system has made me incomparably stronger than anything that still exists within it.
Now I could totally take on the Demon King and win—hell yeah!
"Mind if I join that conversation?"
As if on cue, the Demon King actually shows up.