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Zarian let out a deep and low chuckle. Then it became a loud and hysterical laugh, as if he was a madman who had escaped an asylum.

“Heh heh heh heh HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!”

Laying on the sofa across from him, Gilbert gawked, his face turning pale. He might’ve dealt with a few crazies in his time as a cop, but none as dangerous as Zarian.

The Madness Wizard experienced a trippy feeling that made him want to lose all control. He felt like he could let go of everything and keep unraveling forever and ever.

He didn’t let himself unravel completely, of course. His Floridian Mindset and free evil +3 grounded him well enough.

He had a backbone. He had his determination. He had cunning, charm, and smarts. Combined with Unraveled Mind, Zarian had a better understanding of himself without going fully insane.

He’d come from nothing, forced to exist at the bottom of everything. Then all of that had changed with some magic and the opening of a portal. He was now at the center of everything.

He was becoming what he was truly meant to be, and part of that ‘becoming’ was going through the growing pains. He shouldn’t shy away from that.

No, no, no.

He should lean into it.

Go all in. All the way!

If Naomi wanted petty vengeance by awakening something inside of Zarian for having roused her attraction, then why shouldn’t he embrace that? Why stay shy and frustrated because of the past?

Fuck the past!

He was progressing every day.

He was changing every day!

He was living in a tower with magic artillery cannons protruding from the sides! He was securing mentorship from an elf empress who was thousands of years old, a survivor of three eras that even the so-called gods haven’t survived intact! An elf who was known as Corma’s Chosen One, the most powerful Master Ranker across most, if not all, the Lesser Worlds!

She could be his wizard mentor if he played his cards right.

He had actual friends who accepted him for who he was despite how much of a fuck up he could be. He was brimming with so much power and magic that his doomsday, crash-out option was only one part of his power set.

He was the better half of Overwhelming Darkness. He was the one who would reign supreme in the end, not the power itself.

So, yes, he was going through some growing pains. But that made everything matter all the more.

The frustrations wouldn’t go away completely. But how he reacted or acted toward obstacles was his to control.

And wasn’t control such a tricky but wonderful thing?

“Chief?” Gilbert called out nervously.

He was standing now. The books and snacks had spilled onto the floor. Someone was going to have to clean the stains off the rug.

Zarian held his finger to his lips. “Not now, my most sinful Christian friend. I’m having my eureka moment.”

Gilbert tried to talk past that. Zarian didn’t pay attention to his words. He watched the man himself.

Gilbert looked tense. Like he was going to use an ability and was second-guessing himself. Zarian predicted what Gilbert would do before he settled on the decision himself.

“No tranquilizer,” Zarian warned. “Or the next time you go horizontal with an evil strider woman, my spiders will ruffle the sheets. By the way, you have a weird fixation on sleeping with wild and evil women. You might want to check that out.”

Gilbert gaped at him. Zarian had thrown him for a loop. At the very least, Gilbert was holding back from using his Tranquilizer Shot +2.

Zarian didn’t blame him for being prepared just in case. The Madness Wizard was still getting used to his new Unraveled Mind.

For a rare trait, it had a tremendous impact. Not as obvious as some of his epic or legendary traits, but it almost mattered the most. Almost like a linchpin to who he was.

With Gilbert pacified, Zarian’s unraveling thoughts swept around to something that caught his attention. His mind wanted to pick at the concept of control.

He was obsessed with control.

He needed control.

He couldn’t overcome his Overwhelming Darkness without more control.

But, as of late, all that lust for control had turned a little detrimental, hadn’t it? He’d allowed himself to get stifled because of the desperate need for control. He’d slowed down. He’d lost some aspects of himself that made his new life fun.

He’d suffered quite the humbling, which had left its mark on him. But that didn’t mean he should let his peddle-to-the-meddle factor die off completely.

He was made for chaos. He was wild in his heart. He was a man with an impossibly immense lineage, making him an existential threat to all life, yes, but that only made the journey to conquer his own darkness even more interesting.

He was pretty sure his entire ultra god family was filled with chaotic, wild, and destructive individuals. He imagined they were far from perfect, hence why they acted in a laissez-faire manner to raising him.

He wanted to control his Overwhelming Darkness so he could do more with it, not less. He wasn’t trying to just control it for the sake of controlling it. Or at the very least, he wanted it to serve as a tool in his tool box just like any other power.

It shouldn’t be bigger than him.

He should be the biggest.

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“I alone am the Dreaded Outsider,” Zarian said. “I do what I want.”

Parasitic threads wriggled everywhere from under Zarian’s flesh.

Gilbert paled even further from hearing those words.

The reality of the world seemed thinner than before. Like it leaned more toward the conceptual than the actual.

Like Zarian’s mind was on the verge of unraveling the dimensional integrity of the universe and slipping into the depths of the abyss far beyond the Star System’s grasp.

Maybe all he needed was a push.

Or maybe he simply needed to push harder.

But that didn’t really interest him. While he did want to loosen up a lot more, he didn’t want to forgo everything he’d worked for.

Chaos was fun. But applied chaos, the type that was focused and purposeful, was even better. So instead of trying to paint far outside of the box, he could make his box the most fantastic thing anyone had seen.

“I’ve been going at the gravity spell wrong the whole time.”

Zarian touched the crystal ball. After a few inputs, he erased months of work. Just like that. It was all gone.

He turned to the Knighted Healer. “Gilbert, my friend, what is gravity?”

“Can I talk now?”

“Yes, you very much can.”

“Well, I reckon gravity is the thing the eggheads say keeps us on the ground, yeah? I don’t believe that, but that’s what they say.”

“Close, Gilbert. Gravity is the relativity of importance. It’s when time, space, and energy are bent to the whims of what matters most. Everything else that is less important falls into the influence of what is relatively the most important.”

“I’m not much into science, but even that doesn’t sound right to me,” Gilbert admitted.

“That’s because magic doesn’t work entirely under mathematical and scientific principles taught by human mortals without Systems and without real magic. That’s limiting. In fact, philosophy is just as important as math and science for spellcraft.”

Zarian summoned his black magic grimoire, the spectral chains rattling between the covers and his soul. He thumbed through its pages rapidly. He loved how the pages sounded extra demented the further along he went. He hadn’t paid that little detail much mind before.

“For example, the Bloody Lifesteal spell is an attempt at prolonging one’s life at the cost of others. This is a spell crafted by someone who doesn’t believe they can make it to their first ascension without the sacrifice of those around them, whether friend or foe.”

Zarian flipped to some other pages. “Then we have the Raise Advancing Skeletons spell, which was made by someone who believed in the superiority of skeletons as a clean, efficient, and pragmatic workforce. In fact, the person who crafted this spell wanted to use necromancy for all the right reasons.”

Zarian shook his head with a dramatic sigh. “But it fell into the evil camp because of how gruesome and unholy necromancy looks at certain stages. Don’t pretend that you don’t get the ‘ick’ when my beautiful skeletons are shedding their useless flesh.”

Zarian waved the grimoire around, its spectral chains rattling some more. “Now, back to the original topic. The importance of the gravity spell makes it the biggest in my grimoire. Bigger than all the spells among all my grimoires, really. It’s so big that I do everything I can to study other spells instead. Or I try to understand the gravity spell as linearly and quickly as I can to get it done and over with.”

Zarian shook his head.

“But that’s the wrong way to approach gravity. The importance of the gravity spell makes all of its parts dense and influential, regardless of me looking at the beginning, middle, or the end. It doesn’t matter how far along I go, I will never finish understanding the spell if I keep thinking linearly.”

Zarian scrutinized the pages of his grimoire.

“Honestly, I think the spell adds more pages and scripts to itself when I’m not looking. It literally gets denser and denser the further I delve. And that is happening no matter how quickly I try to study in a straight line. In fact, lines are faulty here. Gravity encompasses the entire spell like a curve. Or better yet, a sphere. I need to think more circularly to grasp the whole reach of gravity. Maybe even beyond three-dimensional concepts. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“No,” Gilbert said flatly.

Zarian nodded rapidly. “That’s okay. I’m glad you’re here, buddy.”

“Uh, sure, man. Same here.” Gilbert gulped and straightened up, looking firmly down at Zarian. “Just don’t shoot yourself again, okay? I’m serious.”

“Yeah, yeah, I won’t. By the way, if Naomi doesn’t give Jack a worthy death, I certainly will. I’ll revive him just so I can torture him and kill him again if the first death isn’t good enough.”

Gilbert slowly nodded. He had little more to say.

Zarian was on a roll. “Anyway! I’m going to be busy for a while. I need to start from scratch and be more encompassing of the entire gravity spell. Heck, I can already see things I’ve missed on the first pass from trying to brute force everything in a line!”

Elated, Zarian dove into his studies. He’d never felt so excited about studying before. Studying gave his Unraveled Mind a purpose, because it wanted to solve this long, tedious, and complicated puzzle of a spell that would’ve broken most wizards.

Zarian didn’t mind his mind getting broken anymore. He refused to let that stop him. He was feeling giddy about the aspects of what this spell could do, so a failure was nothing more than a mini pit stop for him.

Hell, the gravity spell could possibly ‘guide’ his Overwhelming Darkness better than his current options. Maybe it could make his Twenty Dark Locks Sealing Style redundant.

Zarian found that funny. The spell that had haunted him for what felt like a long time could be his salvation. Or maybe it was just another fun spell to toss into the mix because being a wizard with OP spells was the best.

Hopefully, there would still be interesting challenges that could make him think a lite once he claimed the gravity spell. Or he would have to ask his wife to create bigger and badder monsters for him, which he probably shouldn’t do, since that would most likely backfire, but that might be the better option than letting himself get bored.

Nobody should let a bored son of ultra gods run around unchallenged and unchecked.

By the time Zarian finally took a break to feed himself, it was morning. Gilbert had fallen asleep on the sofa. He stayed even though he had nothing to do but hang around.

Gilbert really was a bro. He had a horrible taste in women, but he was a bro.

Other than that, there was a plethora of new notes on the living room magic screen.

The previous Zarian, before gaining Unraveled Mind, would’ve found it all incomprehensible. Most people, wizards included, would’ve seen it all as gibberish, too. But the current Zarian, with his new Unraveled Mind, understood it all well.

He also had an extra guest in his room who understood his notes as well, or maybe even better than him.

Looking up at his notes with a serious gaze, Empress Ruvaria was wearing a light green nightgown that was loose and billowy on her petite frame. Her hair was fizzier than before. She hadn’t even bothered to clean herself up.

She tilted her head from side-to-side, toes curling into the fibrous rug under their feet. With a flick of her finger, she operated his private network herself and scrolled through his notes on his big living room screen.

Zarian held his breath as she examined his notes and findings.

“Impressive,” she said.

She approves! Zarian had no idea how tough of a teacher the Sorceress Queen could be. He imagined getting a compliment from her on anything magical was a hell of an accomplishment.

“I’m only getting started,” Zarian said.

“This is the work of an unsound mind that is immensely gifted. You’ve changed drastically compared to last night. What trait did you advance with the upgrade?” she asked, her eagerness peeking through.

Zarian told her about his new Unraveled Mind. He even went as far as reiterating his thought process from before he gained the rare trait to how he was thinking afterward. The empress nodded along, showing more interest in him as he explained.

When he finished, he waited for her to speak. She took her time.

Zarian and Para starved as they waited. Gilbert got up, made himself breakfast, and went out by the time Ruvaria finished thinking.

“Keep going,” she said.

“I gotta feed us before we can keep going,” Zarian said, his body growling with monstrous hunger.

He turned toward the exit. Ruvaria disappeared. Then she reappeared with multiple trolleys stacked with freshly cooked and meaty beasts. She also brought untouched bodies of monstrous creatures as big as three bulls combined.

Zarian was pretty sure these offerings didn’t come from the tower.

Where had Ruvaria snatched these from?

And why was she so eager to feed him now?

Wasn’t that a little funny? She was good +4 and ruler of an entire continent, while he was free evil +3 and lord of a little village on the frontiers. Yes, there were universal and apocalyptic factors, but despite that, Zarian found this budding relationship with Ruvaria becoming quirkier, more amusing.