By the time morning broke, I had two completed digbots and had sent them to two other dig sites.

  The plan was ultimately to sink shafts down to the iron vein and then network all the tunnels together.

  While this would not be a permanent base of operations, it would still be a useful production facility until I travelled to the mountains in the west. Once I'd finished my business with the slaving ring operating out of Eprie, Armela and I would set out to find a suitable location to settle down.

  Once operations were underway on the surface, my next step would be to establish a space platform upon which I could begin growing a habitable 'Ark' for the population of the planet.

  One benefit of constructing an orbital habitation was that it could be fine-tuned to make much better use of the resources available. There wouldn't be as much waste in space allocation; people could more efficiently be balled together than just clinging to the surface of a massive rock.

  I had access to all three dimensions of expansion and development with no limiting factors. I would also flatten out the elliptical orbit around the star so that the energy collection was more uniform and consistent.

  This small platform would house everyone on the planet, assuming they chose to make the journey, and would eventually be centered at the very heart of my God's limb as I continued to build around it.

  One of the major changes in life on the planet and life on my station would be the elimination of scarcity. Because I had access to infinite energy, and because mass equalled energy, that boiled down to the fact that I had access to infinite mass.

  Which meant that the people of my station would never run out of anything. From hydrogen to plutonium, there would always be enough for whatever was needed.

  Obviously, they would consume and create things as they lived, but I would ensure that anything discarded by them in that process would be recycled to restrict the loss of material.

  A sensation pulled me from my musing, a slight tingling in my mind that something had shifted. It tugged my eyes over to where Armela sat, and I saw she had slowly begun flexing the fingers of her hands, rhythmically curling and uncurling them.

  I continued to watch as she did this, recognizing that her mind was working itself out of its trance-like state. It appeared as though she had finally mastered the speed of her thoughts, and could once again coordinate herself.

  It would still take some time for her to bring her senses back online, but she was now back in the world of the living.

  I strode over to the fire pit where I'd sat her down and restocked the wood supply. Likely the best thing for her, once she had finished bringing herself back into full consciousness, would be a solid meal to ground her in normalcy.

  Lighting the flames, I perused the larder along the edge of the camp and came away with another batch of pork chops, strips of cured bacon, mushrooms, beans, and potatoes. I hadn't eaten since coming to this place, but sharing in the meal with her might help to lessen the feeling of her exclusion this time around.

  After cleaning off the cast-iron skillet, I fried the bacon and pork. I'd use the grease to fry the beans and mushrooms before adding the potatoes. As the meat cooked, Armela's nose wrinkled and twitched, clearly smelling the savoury aroma being produced.

  Her eyes fluttered open briefly before slamming shut again. It likely felt quite a bit like stumbling out of a pitch-black cave directly onto the surface of the sun. The amount of detail her eyes could detect had now magnified exponentially.

  Every frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum likely assaulted her the moment she had cracked open her eyelids.

  "V-Vita...?"

  Her voice was shaky, and more than a little concern laced her words.

  "What's... what happened to my eyes? What happened to me? Where are you? I... I can't see."

  I spoke softly in response, setting the pan down and stepping over to her side.

  "I'm here, Armela. Nothing is wrong with your eyes; they're just working much better than you're used to."

  Her head snapped to me as I made my way to her. Her ears swiveled about, resembling radar dishes as she tracked the sounds of my feet crunching through the gravel and dirt.

  Coming to her side, I crouched down and gently took her hand in mine—which she immediately crushed like a bundle of dried twigs.

  "Oh, gods... was that your hand? I'm so sorry, Vita! I don—"

  I cut her off with a chuckle and reformed my hand after she had reflexively jerked hers away. I took hold of her hand once more and brought it down to her thigh, where she held it with considerably less force.

  "We're fine, Armela. All is well. Your eyes are just taking in a lot more information than you're used to seeing."

  I winced at my explanation. That likely didn't make things any clearer for her.

  "I want you to think about only seeing what you used to see. Remember how things had looked prior to your change and then open your eyes again."

  She hesitated briefly before peeking out through her eyelashes. A few quick blinks later, and she was looking into my eyes once more.

  "Welcome back, Armela."

  I smiled at her warmly. She trembled lightly in my grip as she looked around, exploring the camp through her unaccustomed eyes. Taking in everything she could see with a new, child-like wonder.

  "This is incredible, Vita. Everything is so... clear? Even the leaves on the trees outside the camp, I can see every small vein running beneath their surface!"

  The disbelief in her words was palpable.

  "The colours... it's all so... vivid and beautiful! Was this always how the world was? Is this how it is meant to be seen?"

  I laughed once more, giving her hand a small squeeze and kissing her lightly on the cheek before standing.

  "Your 'new' eyes can do a lit—"

  A yank on my arm swung me around to face her once more, and Armela's lips found mine. We shared a passionate kiss before she released me.

  "Don't just walk away without giving me what I need, you brainless mongrel!"

  She stuck her tongue out at me before smiling widely.

  "Go on then, my eyes can do what? I'm waiting for your enthralling explanation, oh great Reforged. Or is it you might have forgotten what you were saying?"

  This woman was indomitable.

  I didn't know precisely where this wellspring of fortitude came from, but she had been recovering from life-altering events with an insane level of rapidity. Sure, she had cried and been shaken, but it seemed every hard knock she had received only increased the momentum of her recovery.

  Pushing her to the ground really only helped her get back on her feet and running again.

  "You bounce back quickly for a woman who'd lost her sight only moments ago; were you born with a quick wit, or was it a gift from one too many hard knocks to the head?"

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  I rapped my skull to drive home my joke as I collected the pan with the rest of our breakfast in it and resumed cooking once more.

  "I'll have you know my wit was forged over years of dealing with meatheads like you. You'd be amazed what some words will get you out of... or into."

  She had locked her focus onto my cock and was now in the process of licking her lips. I levelled a withering stare at her and shook my head.

  "And here I thought perhaps a hearty breakfast would be what interested you most after your ordeal... perhaps I ought to stop cooking altogether if there's only one kind of pork that holds your love."

  She feigned a slighted gasp before snickering.

  "Alright, alright, I do seriously want to know what happened to me. Why were my eyes like that? What do you mean they're taking in more... information? What information?"

  I flipped the food in the pan before continuing where I'd left off.

  "Well, I want you to picture a little grain of sand hurtling through the air. If that grain of sand strikes something—say, a leaf—it will either become embedded in the leaf or get deflected and bounce away, right?"

  She nodded; unclear what I was driving at, but understanding the concept.

  "Well, the light around us..."

  I gestured everywhere.

  "Behaves exactly like that little grain of sand, for the most part. Each little 'grain' of light is vibrating as it flies through the air, and they're all vibrating at different speeds."

  She quirked an eyebrow, clearly finding the thought of vibrating light nonsensical.

  "So you're saying that light itself is basically just little grains of vibrating sand?"

  I smiled and pointed a finger at her.

  "Yes! Try not to let that concept run away from you; it's an incredibly deep rabbit hole once you start digging into it. So when the light strikes something—it could be anything, but we'll keep the leaf as the example—the light is absorbed or reflected depending on how quickly or slowly it's vibrating!"

  She nodded a little more stiffly; I could see the cogs grinding in her head. She was trying to relate what I was saying to what she was experiencing.

  "You'll have to take my word for it on this. It's not really something you can just observe happening around you."

  I shuffled the pan filled with vegetables and meat; it was almost done.

  She scoffed rudely and retorted.

  "Yeah... this is all nonsense to me, so I suppose I'll have to."

  Rolling her eyes, she resumed listening.

  "Just trust me, this is leading up to what's happened with your eyes. The more understanding you have, the better you'll be able to control what they can do for you now."

  Finishing up with the cooking, I dumped half onto her platter and half onto mine. She stared at my platter, and then hers, and then up at me.

  I slid half of what was on my platter onto hers, and with a feral grin, she devoured the meal. Shaking my head, I sat on the stump next to hers.

  I felt that my neck probably would have gotten sore from being around her, had my God not reshaped my body.

  "Anyway, the leaf from our example can absorb all the different vibrating grains of light except one! Can you guess which?"

  She chewed, staring blankly ahead of her while she thought. Then, speaking with a mouthful of pork, she spat.

  "I donf fuffin knof."

  I chuckled as she went back to scarfing down the food. She wasn't terribly interested in any of this, and I supposed that was just as well.

  "What do you see when you look at a leaf?"

  This time she swallowed before replying.

  "Are we doing riddles now? How the fuck should I know? I got your little thing about the sand or whatever, but what do you expect me to see on a leaf? Little veins? The shape? Should I say green? Just fucking tell me what you want me to know. Don't make me guess this shit, Vita!"

  She had been waving her fork at me accusingly as she spoke. Clearly, I'd frustrated her by being overly cryptic with my information.

  I probably should have seen this coming, as she hadn't struck me as the most patient of people.

  "You're right, I apologise about that. I get a bit excited talking about things like this, so I hadn't considered how you'd see it."

  I put my hands up in surrender as I conceded her position.

  "I'll just lay it out for you, and if you have any questions, then just let me know and I'll try to give you a concise answer, deal?"

  She nodded, adding.

  "It pisses me off when I get talked around in circles. I'm not stupid; I just don't know what you expect me to say, so give me something I can work with before you start pushing all of that mystic 'what's a leaf look like' bullshit on me."

  She waggled her fingers to emphasise the ephemeral nature of my vague questioning before going back to eating her meal. All in all, she had a point, even if it was made rather harshly, though I expected that from her.

  She had told me she wasn't nobility, and scraping through by the seat of her pants for most of her adult life definitely would have broken some chips off her shoulders.

  Especially considering the kind of company she had kept within the mercenary bands she travelled with.

  "Alright, we'll save the riddles for later. That's fair. Though you did sort of get the answer when you mentioned green, so, well done I suppose."

  She twirled her finger up through the air in a sarcastic 'woo-hoo' motion. Piling another mouthful of potatoes into her ravenous mouth.

  "Yeah, yeah... the reason things are different colours is that they're absorbing every different type of vibrating light except the one you see."

  I could see her working to put that into perspective as she chewed.

  "So the leaf is absorbing everything except the vibrating green light. Again, it's a little more complicated than that, but that's the gist of it."

  She nodded, concentrating a little too hard for someone with a mouthful of potatoes.

  "So what does that have to do with my eyes?"

  I had expected that question.

  "Right, so your eyes have changed in a way where they can now detect all the different kinds of light. Even the ones that you can't normally see."

  She followed up immediately.

  "And those are all vibrating too?"

  She had finished the food and was now licking the platter.

  "That's right; most of the light is vibrating either too fast or too slow for us to see typically, like sunlight. Your eyes can now pick up the different speeds and see them. So when you first opened your eyes, you were seeing all of them at once. It probably looked a lot like really gross soup."

  She grimaced and nodded.

  "Yeah, actually, now that you mention it, that's kinda what it looked like. So can I switch back to seeing... that? Or is it just stuck like this now?"

  I scooped up the last mouthful of my potatoes and set the platter down on the ground. Armela was absentmindedly picking at her teeth with a splinter of wood she'd stripped from the stump beneath her.

  "You can switch back to that if you wish, though it wouldn't really do you very much good. If you want, I can make it so that you are aware of the different options you have available. Think of it like a modified version of the screen the crystal provided you."

  She shrugged, answering.

  "Do what you want; what's another change at this point?"

  I reached over and placed a finger against her temple.

  Slowly meshing my body with hers, I wove my cells between the swarming mass of her flesh. Eventually, I'd established enough of a connection that I could transmit data and wrote some instructions to be encoded into the hive mind of her body.

  The system would be a simple user interface for her, taking the form of a heads-up display. With a thought, she could pull up a menu which listed all the quantified statistics of her existence. It would tie into the system I'd produced for the drones, so she would gain the benefits of that as well.

  Obviously, I completely stripped the physical portion of it for her, since no matter how hard she worked out, no new muscle would ever grow. Food would never make a difference, and she would never grow weak with indolence or rest.

  I provided a comprehensive list of 'abilities' that she could engage at any time. The suite of detection characteristics was listed as things like: radio, infrared, X-ray, gamma, etc. Each of those having its own drop-down box of more specifically refined bands on the spectrum.

  Beyond just her sight, I did the same for all of her senses and physical aspects of her body as well. The ability to manipulate the cells of her form would ultimately feel second nature once she had practised with it enough.

  As a finishing touch, I added a small build menu where preset designs for things like my drones or digbots were listed. I provided this to her on the off chance she decided she wanted to make some of her own.

  She couldn't produce the blueprints for them the same way I could, but running the existing blueprint through her body would produce the object so long as she had enough material on hand.

  Inevitably, she would have accumulated the knowledge required to draw her own blueprints and follow them, but she'd have to do it manually.

  Each of the options provided in the breakdown of skills would have a small tooltip attached to explain what each function was, what it could do, and how it worked. She could spend the rest of her life experimenting with the different presets or eventually edit her own in.

  One of the massive benefits of living forever is that you eventually learn everything there is to learn. If she encountered any problems, or things that confused her, she could ask me to make adjustments down the line.

  Finishing up, I slowly retracted my cells from her skull and then sat back down at my stump.

  I'd also taken the opportunity to make communicating with her through her H.U.D simpler. I didn't want to be too invasive with it, and I'd probably need to dip my toes into establishing that level of contact multiple times, but it would be worth it in the long run for us to communicate instantly over great distances through our bond.

  "Alright, that should do it. Anytime you need information about what's going on with your body, just think about yourself, and you should be greeted by a menu."

  I pantomimed a window with my fingers to illustrate the point.

  "You can alter it as you like; the whole thing is based around your thoughts, so if you want something to change, just think about the change and your body should sense how to make it happen."

  She jumped slightly as the screen popped up in her vision. Once the initial shock had worn off, she eagerly dove into flying through the various options, taking in as much information as she could.

  Though I wasn't entirely certain she was really paying attention to any of it, that wasn't terribly important since she'd remember it all perfectly, anyway. She likely wasn't aware of that fact yet, but as time wore on, she would notice how easily memories would come to her.

  Having explored enough of the options available to her, she experimented with them. Glancing around through different filters over her vision.

  "Vita! Your head is glowing!"

  She stared at me in wonder, eyes wide.

  I chuckled and ejected a small drone.

  "Do you want to see what you look like?"

  She looked puzzled, but nodded. I sent an access request to her on behalf of the drone, to which she accepted.

  Soon, the image of her from the drone's perspective filled her vision. She didn't know what to do at first, but after a while she moved her arms, then tilted her head to look up at the drone.

  "THAT'S ME!"

  She waved up at the floating machine before wagging her middle finger at it.

  "Go fuck yourself!"

  Her glee was interrupted by a brief bout of vertigo; she swayed slightly on her stump before settling.

  "Whooaaaa, ha ha... that's... uncomfortable."

  I laughed alongside her, enjoying the levity of the situation, considering the past few days.

  "You'll get used to it quickly; already, your mind is likely adjusting things to make the experience easier on you the next time you do this. It's something you should practice with in case you ever find yourself in a position where it might save you."

  She turned the view off and cut the link to the drone. I was surprised at how rapidly she was getting accustomed to the thought-command system.

  Of course, it was incredibly intuitive, but for someone who had never interacted with this level of technology, she was adapting remarkably.

  "How are you feeling right now? Are you uncomfortable anywhere? Struggling with anything? Any noticeable problems at all?"

  She thought for a moment, jumping again as a diagnostic screen appeared before her. Looking it over and contemplating, she shook her head.

  "I feel better than I ever have, in every possible way I can think of. This is astounding. I feel like I could run in endless circles around this entire hill. I feel like I could punch clean through the gut of a wyvern. I don't know how to describe just how phenomenal this feels."

  I smiled broadly and stood, extending a hand to her.

  "Then let us test your mettle a little more thoroughly. Come."

  Taking my hand, she stood and followed me to the sparring ring. I tugged lightly on her hand, and she twirled as I tipped her into my arms. Leaning down, I kissed her passionately. She reached up to place a hand on the back of my head as we continued to embrace for several moments. I broke the kiss off and stood her back up before backing away.

  "Just in case you started thinking I don't like you!"

  I winked at her as I grinned and raised my fists to either side of my head. She wiped her lips with the back of her furred forearm and assumed a similar position.

  "If I land a punch on you this time, I won't let you live it down, you know?"

  I huffed a laugh and circled her in a counterclockwise rotation.

  "If you land a hit on me, I might just let you take the lead during sex."

  Her expression shifted, the implications of that statement racing through her mind at the speed of light.

  Her cheeks darkened, and an insane grin crept across her lips, turning into something more lecherous by the time it reached her eyes.

  She leered at me; the fuel I had fed her confidence and sense of power was now fully burning in the raging inferno inside her mind.

  She was picturing all the ways she could use her newfound strength to force my submission, everyone's submission, at her feet.

  And she loved it.

  I could see it in her dilating pupils, the flare of her nostrils. The idea of standing above someone, having them kiss the dirt she walked across, infused her with an elation she had never known.

  And the knowledge that she now possessed the means by which that submission could be not just demanded but expected drove her into a heated frenzy.