Dominating The Age Of Gods With My Monthly Sign-In System!

Chapter 3: Ereba

The realization did not bring awe but instead it brought paralyzing terror. frёeweɓηovel.coɱ

The countless purple eyes spanning across the pitch-black sky of the void were not just looking at his physical body; they were peering directly into the very foundation of his soul.

Every single pupil carried the crushing incomprehensible weight of an ancient deity.

The pressure was entirely physical as Caius’s lungs instantly completely stopped working.

His jaw locked shut with an audible click, his teeth grinding together so hard he felt a hairline fracture trace up his molars.

He couldn’t speak... He couldn’t breathe... He couldn’t even force his eyelids to blink...

The liquid darkness beneath him seemed to rise, threatening to swallow him whole as his mortal vessel simply began to shut down under the sheer stress of being perceived by a higher-dimensional entity.

For several agonizing seconds, Caius genuinely believed he was going to die right there, crushed to death by a mere glance then, the oppressive silence was broken by a soft sigh.

"Ah. My apologies."

The voice was terrifyingly smooth, resonating directly against the inside of his skull.

"I have forgotten how fragile mortal vessels truly are."

High above, the sky of endless eyes began to ripple and close.

Dozens, hundreds, and then thousands of the massive purple pupils simply melted back into the inky blackness of the void.

They dissolved until only a single, massive eye remained suspended in the dark heavens, gazing down at him with a mixture of mild curiosity and deep apathy.

Instantly, the suffocating weight lifted from his soul.

"Gah—!"

Caius violently inhaled, his chest heaving as oxygen finally rushed back into his burning lungs.

He collapsed forward onto his hands and knees, coughing up the last lingering drops of black blood from his severed Ash contract.

He wiped his mouth with his entire body trembling like a leaf in a hurricane.

"Speak, human," the voice echoed again, it was smooth and entirely unbothered by his suffering. "How did you find your way into my prison? And why have you bound my authority to your frail soul?"

Caius swallowed hard, his mind racing at a million miles an hour.

He couldn’t exactly tell an ancient, imprisoned deity that a reality-breaking ’Sign-In System’ had bypassed the absolute laws of the universe to forcibly chain her to him.

He had to play dumb... He had to lie his way out of this to secure her cooperation...

"I... I don’t know," Caius gasped out, forcing his voice to sound as pathetic and confused as possible.

He looked up at the single purple eye, keeping his posture submissive.

"I have absolutely no idea what led me here. I was just sitting in my room, and suddenly, my contract with my former god was violently severed. The next thing I knew, I was pulled into this darkness."

The single massive eye slowly blinked as the liquid shadows around Caius churned lazily.

"Human," Ereba said softly. "Did you know that the Divine can smell a lie before it even leaves a mortal’s tongue?"

Caius froze as a cold sweat immediately broke out across the back of his neck.

’Shit.’

He had forgotten the most basic lore of the world of Ur.

You could not lie to a god. Their perception of reality was absolute; falsehoods tasted like bitter ash in their presence.

He braced himself, fully expecting a spike of Void mana to violently impale him for his insolence but the strike never came.

Instead, a soft hum vibrated through the darkness.

"But I suppose it does not matter," Ereba murmured. "It has been an incredibly long time since I have seen a human. Whatever anomaly brought you here is irrelevant."

The purple eye narrowed slightly as the atmosphere grew cold.

"Cut the tether."

Caius frowned with his hands gripping the liquid darkness beneath him. "What?"

"Sever the contract," the Goddess commanded flatly. "You are weak... Your soul is fractured... Binding yourself to the Void will not grant you glory. It will bring you nothing but absolute disaster and relentless bad luck. Walk away while you still draw breath."

She was giving him an out.

An ancient deity was literally telling him to run away to save his own life but Caius didn’t have a choice.

If he severed this contract, he would return to the Draxos estate as a completely empty vessel.

He would be legally Unblessed...

Worse, no other god in the entire Pantheon would ever look his way again. Severing two contracts was the ultimate divine taboo.

He would be executed by his father before the week was out or slaughtered by the reincarnated God of Light shortly after.

"No."

The word echoed loudly in the dark expanse.

The single purple eye stopped moving, focusing entirely on the battered crimson-haired youth kneeling in the shadows.

"No?" Ereba repeated with a hint of genuine surprise finally bleeding into her smooth voice.

"I’m not severing anything," Caius said while forcing himself to stand up.

His legs wobbled, his joints aching from the trauma but he locked his gaze onto the massive eye in the sky.

"If bad luck is coming, then let it come," Caius declared, his voice hardening with the bitter grit of a doomed man. "I’m already cursed. I’m already a dead man walking. Whatever ruin you bring to my life cannot possibly be worse than the fate already waiting for me out there."

A heavy oppressive silence fell over the void as Caius held his breath, wondering if he had just pushed the envelope too far.

Then, a sound vibrated through the darkness. It started low... a soft hum that slowly built into a dark melodic rhythm.

Ereba was laughing.

The sound was beautiful and terrifying.

"You are a fool," Ereba giggled, the purple eye curving in amusement. "A fragile, broken little mortal who wishes to wield the weight of Nothingness... You cannot even withstand my gaze, yet you demand to keep my contract."

"A contract requires the consent of both parties to work properly," Caius shot back, remembering the divine laws of the game. "I am not letting go."

"Very well," she hummed with the amusement still lingering in her voice. "Since you are so determined, let us make a wager."

Caius narrowed his eyes. "A wager?"

"A simple test of your resolve," Ereba said smoothly. "I shall reveal my true, physical body to you. If you can resist the urge to throw yourself at my feet and ravage me... I will allow you to keep this contract."

Caius blinked.

He stared up at the eye, completely taken aback.

’That’s it?’ Caius thought with a sudden surge of confidence welling up in his chest. ’Just a test of self-control?’

He was a modern man inside.

He had seen enough beautiful women in his past life. He wasn’t some desperate hormonal teenager who couldn’t control his own actions.

All he had to do was stand perfectly still and look at her without acting like an absolute degenerate.

"Deal," Caius agreed instantly with a confident smirk touching the corner of his lips. "Show yourself."

Ereba’s soft, echoing laughter filled the void once more but this time, the sound didn’t feel amused. fɾeeweɓnѳveɭ.com

It felt incredibly mocking.

It was the laugh of a predator watching a mouse willingly walk into a trap.

The moment that chilling laughter hit his ears, Caius’s confident smirk vanished as a violent freezing bucket of dread was unceremoniously dumped over his head.

His mind violently rebooted, desperately scrambling through the incredibly dense lore of [God Reborn].

’Wait...’

His eyes widened in horror as a specific buried piece of lore from the game’s loading screens flashed through his mind.

[The difference between Mortals and Gods is not merely power. It is conceptual. A true deity’s physical form is so conceptually, fundamentally beautiful that the human mind cannot process it as mere imagery. To look upon a god’s true form is to have your free will violently overridden by an absolute biological mandate to worship them.]

"You rigged the game!" Caius shouted with his voice cracking with panic. He violently threw his hands up, slapping his palms directly over his own eyes.

Caius squeezed his eyelids shut so hard the world turned into bursts of static.

’If I don’t see her, it won’t work!’ Caius thought desperately, hunching his shoulders to shield his face.

High above, the massive purple eye simply dissolved.

The darkness of the void aggressively descended, wrapping around him like a heavy suffocating blanket and then, it cleared.

Caius had his eyes tightly shut, his hands pressed firmly against his face but it did absolutely nothing.

The image bypassed his physical retinas entirely.

The most beautiful woman to ever exist simply materialized directly inside his mind.

It wasn’t just a visual; it was a conceptual truth that violently slammed into his brain, rewriting his neural pathways in a fraction of a second.

Her skin was pale, glowing with an unearthly radiance. Her hair was a cascading river of liquid night and her form was a terrifying flawless masterpiece of divine architecture that defied human comprehension.

Caius’s hands slowly slipped away from his face.

His physical eyes forcefully pried themselves open with the pupils dilating until the crimson irises were almost entirely consumed by black.

He couldn’t look away... He didn’t want to look away...

Every single cell in his body, every drop of blood in his veins, screamed at him to throw himself to the floor and worship the absolute perfection standing before him.

His body instantly betrayed him.

Without his volition, his right foot stepped forward.

His jaw slacked as a thick trail of drool slipping from the corner of his mouth as he stared blankly into the darkness.

His arms hung loosely at his sides as he began to trudge forward like a mindless, shambling corpse.

"Do you see now, human?" Ereba’s voice whispered, no longer echoing, but speaking softly right in front of him. "This is not a failure of your willpower."

Caius took another step forward.

He was trapped inside his own skull, screaming at his muscles to stop, but the connection had been completely severed.

"This is how the human body reacts to a god," she educated him calmly, watching his pathetic drooling approach. "Flesh simply obeys the divine."

Caius’s mind was a whirlwind of absolute panic.

He was failing...

If he touched her, if he submitted to this biological override, he would lose the bet...

He would lose the contract...

’If I lose this...’ Caius thought, the gritty survivalist terror finally overriding his awe. ’I won’t just be an Unblessed One.’

He pictured his monstrous father, Voran Draxos. He pictured the blond, psychopathic Protagonist driving a sword through his chest.

’I’ll be a Cursed One.’

No god in the Pantheon would ever offer a contract to someone who had severed two divine bonds.

Without this Void contract, he would never be able to use Mana... He would be less than dirt which meant that his grimoire wouldn’t work in the first place.

With an agonizing herculean effort, Caius forced a single command through his hijacked nervous system.

He threw his center of gravity to the left.

Instead of walking forward, his body violently tipped over.

He crashed heavily onto the liquid floor of the void with his shoulder taking the brunt of the impact but his legs immediately tried to scramble back up, driven by the compulsion to reach her.

"Stop," Caius roared through gritted teeth, fighting a war against his own anatomy.

He dug his fingers directly into the solid darkness of the floor.

He gripped the void so tightly that the skin on his palms began to tear.

Friction burns violently erupted across his knuckles, rapidly turning into massive bleeding blisters as his body desperately tried to drag itself forward while his mind commanded his hands to anchor him in place.

"Do not hurt yourself, fool..." Ereba’s voice commanded as a sudden note of genuine concern breaking through her apathy. "The damage you take here will reflect upon your physical vessel in your world so stop resisting."

But Caius wasn’t listening. He could feel his grip slipping.

The conceptual beauty in his mind was too strong... It was going to force him to stand up and it was going to make him submit so he needed to shatter the image.

He needed to break the connection.

He remembered the feeling of the Void mana that had aggressively swallowed his Ash core just minutes ago.

It was still lingering in his veins. Caius forcefully tore his right hand away from the floor.

He channeled every single ounce of that lingering Void mana into his fingertips.

The darkness wrapped around his nails, instantly hardening them until they were sharper than forged steel knives.

’I am not dying in this rigged game!’

Without a single second of hesitation, Caius violently shoved his right hand directly into his own face.

He jammed his razor-sharp fingers straight into his eye sockets and the sound was sickening.

A wet, tearing crunch echoed through the silent void as his Void-coated fingers ruthlessly punctured his eyeballs, destroying the optic nerves and tearing through the delicate tissues in a geyser of blood.

The blinding agony was instantaneous but it worked.

The moment his physical eyes were violently destroyed, the conceptual image of the Goddess in his mind violently shattered into a million pieces.

The mind-control snapped.

"GAAAAAAAH!"

Caius threw himself backward onto the floor, tossing and turning in the liquid darkness as he shrieked in blinding agony.

He clutched his ruined face, thick streams of crimson blood pouring through his fingers and staining his clothes.

His legs kicked out wildly, splashing the dark liquid as his nervous system completely overloaded from the trauma of his own self-mutilation.

The void was dead silent, save for his agonizing screams.

The Goddess did not laugh... The Goddess did not mock him... Ereba’s face turned entirely somber.

The casual, predator-like amusement vanished from her aura replaced by a profound chilling stillness.

She slowly stepped forward, her bare feet making no sound against the liquid floor.

She stood over his thrashing, bleeding body, looking down at the ruined, crimson-haired boy who had just blinded himself simply to win a bet.

"Why... do you keep going?" Ereba asked softly with her voice barely a whisper against the void.

Caius stopped thrashing, his chest heaving as he lay on his back, panting through the blinding pain.

He kept his bloody hands pressed against his ruined eyes but he honestly couldn’t muster a heroic answer.

He didn’t have some grand, righteous motivation to feed her.

"Because..." Caius choked out, coughing up a spatter of blood onto his own chest. "It’s either I die right here... or I die the second I walk out the door of my room."

He let out a weak, breathless, and incredibly bitter laugh.

"So... if you’re going to take the contract... just kill me already."

His body went limp with exhaustion completely taking over.

’I’m not cut out to be a Main Villain at all...’