Overlord Tamer: All My Pet Monsters Have God Potential

Chapter 221: In The Monster Paradise, Starting Eldritch Gear Craft

Ythera’s enormous eye stayed fixed on John a moment longer, and then, slowly, something in the impossible weight of her presence eased. It was the same way a clenched fist finally decides it doesn’t need to hit anything after all.

’Very well,’ she said. ’I accept the pull, John Wicked. Do not make me regret centuries of caution in the span of an afternoon.’

He crossed the last stretch of dark glass toward the nearest curve of her coil, taller than any building he’d ever stood beside, and pressed his palm flat against one massive scale. The pull didn’t feel like effort. It felt like recognition, the same quiet click he’d felt with every Monster who’d ever chosen him back.

Light gathered, and the domain of dark glass and frozen stars folded away around all of them at once.

...

Monster Paradise received them with open skies, three suns hanging low and warm above rolling grassland, and a chorus of familiar sound John hadn’t realized he’d missed until it hit him all at once. Alfred came bounding over the nearest hill first, utterly unbothered by the mountain of coiled scale that had arrived alongside them, tail already wagging.

Ythera’s true form settled as it crossed the boundary, not shrinking exactly, but folding the way distance folds when you stop needing to measure it. She still stretched longer than any river John had ever seen, but the paradise had room for that, and more.

"Welcome home," John said, grinning despite himself. "Sort of. New home. Whatever this counts as for you."

’It counts,’ Ythera said, six eyes drinking in the open sky above her, ’as the first ceiling I have seen in three hundred years that isn’t trying to hold me down.’

Terravax lifted his head from the restorative pool Selenroot tended near the edge of the Forging Island, blinked twice at the newcomer, and went right back to soaking. Emberlune uncurled from her sunbeam long enough to yawn at Ythera, unimpressed, before curling back up with all nine tails wrapped tight.

"They get used to big things fast around here," John said. "You get points for not eating anyone on arrival."

’I have standards,’ Ythera said dryly.

He walked her through it properly after that, the way he’d once walked Alfred through his very first patch of grass. The main island rolled out in gentle hills and quiet forests, home to most of his and the girls’ Monsters when they weren’t out in the world. Starry and her three sons wheeled overhead, eagles grown massive and proud, while Digger Worm and Barkhide Beetle worked the soil nearby without ever quite stopping.

The second island held rows of custom attribute trees, blood-red and frost-blue and storm-gold, each one grown specifically to feed whatever Monster needed it. Draconite Bloodlight Worm was curled happily beneath its favorite branch, gorging itself in slow, contented bites.

"This one’s Rexion’s territory," John said, nodding toward a coiled shape half-hidden in tall grass, scales catching the light in shifting embers. "And that’s Chronavael, over by the river that runs backward on Tuesdays. Long story."

’Everything here has a story,’ Ythera said, watching Levi’s void-threads shimmer briefly between two trees before vanishing again. ’That is not something I expected to find inside a Tamer’s collection.’

"It’s not a collection," John said. "Never has been."

’No,’ Ythera agreed, something almost gentle in the words. ’I am beginning to understand that.’

Past the second island, a newer stretch of terrain shimmered faintly out of place, all crystalline trees and slow rivers of light drifting sideways instead of down, the last remnant of a dimension John had swallowed whole rather than leave to rot in someone else’s hands. Ythera lingered there longest, coiling herself loosely around one of the floating crystal spires until it looked almost natural, like it had grown there specifically to hold her shape.

"You can stay there if you want," John said. "Nobody’s going to tell you where to sleep."

’I intend to,’ Ythera said, and something in her voice suggested she hadn’t chosen anything so freely in longer than she cared to measure.

...

The Forging Island waited at the far edge of the paradise, and the Eldritch Gear Forge stood at its center like a cathedral built from black metal and slow-turning rings, each one etched with runework that shifted whenever anyone looked at it too long.

John laid the haul out across the Forge’s central platform. Titancore Duskstone, dense and dark as collapsed starlight. Chorusglass Shards, humming faintly whenever the wind moved past them. The Fractured Hourglass Core, still ticking with time that led nowhere. The Sableborn Heartstone, versatile enough to anchor any attribute. Chunks of refined Godsgrave Marrowvein for the housing, and beside all of it, three dense monster cores pulled from ninth-calamity kills, each one pulsing with its own patient, contained light.

Chuthulos floated in beside him, small hands rubbing together with anticipation. "This is the good part, brother John. Frame, attribute, core, housing, ignition. Everything a top-tier Eldritch Gear needs, laid out and ready."

"Everything except a plan for what shape it wants to be," John said, cracking his knuckles.

"That part tends to surprise even me," Chuthulos said cheerfully.

He’d barely started arranging the first materials when a familiar weight settled over the island, gentler now than it had been in her own domain, but unmistakably hers.

Ythera had followed, coiling herself along the Forging Island’s outer ridge until her head rested near enough to watch without crowding him. ’You are building something,’ she said. ’I have watched Tamers craft before. This is not that.’

"Eldritch Gear," John said. "Something all four of us can bind to. Grows with us instead of capping us the way most gear does."

’I have something that may interest you, then.’

A section of her coil shifted, and where scale met scale a small hoard spilled loose across the platform, a dozen gemstones catching the Forge’s light in colors that had no business existing together. Each one pulsed with a slow, dense heartbeat John recognized instantly, because he’d felt it three times already that same week.

"These are Calamity-9 level," John said, stunned. "All of them."

’Refined over centuries in the ground beneath this crater,’ Ythera said. ’Power seeps downward eventually, even power the world insists on containing. I gathered what settled near my roots long before I understood what to do with it. Take what you need.’

John picked up the smallest one, a shard of pale, star-flecked crystal that felt warm and alive against his palm, humming in a register that matched the tremor in Ythera’s own voice.

"Thank you," he said simply, because anything more felt like it would cheapen the gift.

’Build something worth the centuries it cost,’ Ythera said. ’That will be thanks enough.’

...

He fed the Forge everything at once, frame first, then attribute, then the Sableborn Heartstone humming to life at the center, then all three ninth-calamity cores in sequence, their light bleeding together into something denser than any of them had been alone. Last of all, he pressed Ythera’s gem into the molten heart of it, and the whole Forge shuddered like it had finally been given a reason to try.

Crystallized Eldritch Energy poured in after that, siphoned steadily from his own reserves, and the rings above the platform began turning faster, runework blurring into streaks of violet and gold. Heat that wasn’t heat rolled off the Forge in waves, and John kept both hands pressed flat against the central plate, feeding it intention as much as material, shaping without fully understanding the shape yet.

The light collapsed inward all at once, folding down to a single point no larger than a fist.

When it finally cleared, a small cube sat where the platform’s molten heart had been, faceted rather than smooth, its six faces uneven like crystal grown too fast to settle properly. Each face held a different fragment of shifting imagery, deep violet starlight on one side, a slow coil of pale scale on another, threads of void-black lattice crawling across a third, all of it looped through with fine cracks of light that pulsed in time with something that felt, unmistakably, like a heartbeat.

John turned it over in his hands, watching the patterns rearrange themselves every time the angle changed.

"Chuthulos," he said quietly, "please tell me you’re seeing this too and I haven’t just lost my mind."

"I’m seeing it," Chuthulos said, eyes wide with something that looked a great deal like awe. "Brother John. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a first attempt come out looking like that."

Ythera’s massive head lowered until one eye filled half his vision, studying the cube with open, ancient interest.

’It carries pieces of everything that went into it,’ she said. ’And something else besides. Something that wasn’t in any of the materials.’

"What is it?" John asked.

’Choice,’ Ythera said simply. ’Yours, mine, and every creature who agreed to be part of this rather than being forced into it. I have never felt that particular texture in a crafted thing before.’

John looked down at the small, impossible weight in his hands, warm and humming and entirely unlike anything he’d expected to pull out of that Forge.

"The Cube of First Choice," he said finally, testing the name the way he’d once tested every name he’d ever given something that mattered. "That’s what I’m calling it."

’A fitting name,’ Ythera said, ’for the first thing I’ve seen made in this cosmoverse that didn’t require anyone to break.’

...

"What the hell is going on?! Where did Ythera go?!"

"It’s impossible for Ancient Ones to leave the forbidden ground, right?"

"That’s...correct. But if so, how did Ythera disappeared?"

"Maybe she finally accepted the slave contract from an Upper-layer god-rank being. That’s the only way Monsters can continue to get stronger."

"We have to inform our leadership in the upper-layer. Ythera was someone that even they couldn’t kill nor suppress. But now, she’s gone."