“I don’t understand. What happened when you spoke to Netori?” Kira was the first to ask.

“It wasn’t much. She just sent me back in time, so that I could become a god and have time to grow my strength. Compared to the likes of War and Depravity, I’m considerably stronger!”

“B-back in time?” Mother cried out.

“Hmm? You should be aware of this more than anyone?”

“How can that be?” Mother responded, looking confused.

“You don’t remember?” I disappeared and then appeared in front of her, causing her to let out a cry as I touched her forehead. “That’s right, you wouldn’t remember the time when you were possessed by Netori. It’s been a while since I’ve dealt with mortals.”

“Are you looking down on us?” Maria cried out.

“How could I? You are all my world. Without you, I would have fallen through the cracks of eternity.”

“I can see he’s grown a smoother tongue, at least.” Sasori chuckled.

Those weren’t just empty lines. I was a level fifteen god and I had spent a lot of time studying in the Celestial Palace. When Beloved had tossed me from the Celestial Palace, I could have ended up anywhere, and perhaps anytime. I could have fallen for a thousand years. I could have ended up on the other side of the universe. However, I had ended up here, at this time and this place. I believed that it was my connection to these women, who, at one point in time, all were thinking and worrying about me at once. It drew me here like a beacon, and that is why I appeared exactly where I wanted to be.

Actually, I would have liked to leave the Celestial Palace on my own terms. It would have been nice to say goodbye to all of the women I loved. I planned to return one day, but just as I had to leave this family for many years, I was prepared to leave that one for just as long.

I took my hand off of mom’s forehead and then tapped her. Restoring the memories of when she was Netori was a rather simple action. She blinked for a second, her eyebrows furrowing, then she gasped as she started to make sense of the memories that she had lost. Even if she had remembered what had happened while she was Netori, those memories would have faded with time. I likely would have grown up hearing about how I resembled a crush with the same name as me. Instead, the memories were locked away, and when I unlocked them, they were as fresh as if they just happened.

“You… really did go to the past! I-I remember!” Mom cried out.

“You didn’t believe me before?” I raised an eyebrow.

“Well, there is no saying what your conversation with that woman would have resulted in. For all we knew, she could have messed with your mind. She’s betrayed you once before.” Akiko began, but as soon as she realized what she was saying, she covered her mouth.

I shook my head. “It’s fine. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it and grow. NTR left me because of her nature, and I will claim her back because of my own nature.”

“So, what happens now?”  Mother asked anxiously. “Are you going back to heaven to wage war against that bastard ex-husband of mine?”

As soon as she asked those words, it was like a blanket was thrown over all of them. They started to realize what being a god truly meant. I existed on another plane from them. We no longer belonged together. Once I returned to the heavenly realm, there was no saying how long I would be gone. For me, it had been twenty years since I was last in the room with these women, but for them, I hadn’t even left yet. Furthermore, twenty years was a lifetime to them. Mother would be old, and the rest of them would be adults past their prime if another twenty years passed.

This was also assuming that I was able to come back at all. There was the possibility that I failed to defeat Procreation and died instead. They would live the remainder of their lives never knowing what happened to me. It was a concern that weighed heavily on all of their minds. They stared at me worriedly, wringing their hands as they considered all of the possibilities. There was silence in the room as they waited for an answer they feared.

Of course, I had also been thinking about this moment over the last twenty years. I had read countless books and considered countless things. In the end, I had come up with a solution that I thought was necessary. I was the harem god. I would be nothing without my harem. They were my strength, and my reason to be. I couldn’t face Procreation without all of my strength around me. That meant I had to collect and focus on that strength.

My women might be mortal today, but that didn’t mean I was going to leave things at that. My plan was simple. I would make them all goddesses. It wouldn’t be too difficult to bring them all to level 9 so that I could bring them with me. As for how I could do this, where it took me so much effort to rise, the situation was substantially different. I was brought up from a level 1 mortal to the realm of the gods by a goddess at level 10. Even once Netori reformed, at her highest she had been 13, and after years of neglect, she was only a level 12.

In comparison, I was level 15 right now. It should be noted that every level wasn’t an equal increase in strength. Power grew exponentially, so each level was effectively ten times more powerful than the level before it. That meant that when I faced Beloved, she was 1000 times stronger than me. Well, the numbers weren’t that clean and could differ from god to god, plus the very idea of strength was a bit questionable, but the point was there.

I was 100,000 times stronger than Netori and her sisters were, and 1000 times stronger than NTR. Furthermore, I had studied in the Celestial palace, and even accessed the hall of records at a level that one could consider being at the level of an admin. One could say that I spent the last twenty years preparing for this moment. I first reached out and waved my hand. A basket filled with apples appeared on the table. The girls who had been waiting for an answer turned to the basket, confusion on their faces.

“What is this?”

“You can make fruit?”

“This is fruit picked from the tree of knowledge,” I explained. “It doesn’t touch on the heavens, but by thinking about a subject and then taking a bite, you can learn all there is to know on that subject.”

“Wh-what are we supposed to know?” Kira asked nervously.

“What you choose to learn is up to you. However, I intend you all to ascend to the level of immortals. What goddess you become will be influenced by your knowledge, so try to pick something that you feel embodies yourself the best. What would make you happy if you could follow for eternity.”

“What if there is already a god that exists with this subject?”

“There are infinite variations.” I shrugged. “Just take War. The War you’ve met was the goddess of wars for love. However, there are other gods of war too. Dozens, maybe thousands of them. Some of them become consumed by larger ones, but as long as you’re by my side, such a thing would never happen. Besides, if you truly want a title that someone else has taken, I’ll just destroy them.”

“He said that so naturally!”

“H-has my Hakaru become the devil instead of a god?”

“It’s kind of sexy.”

I waved my hand. “Just take an apple, think of a subject, and then bite.”

Of course, I had consumed many apples over the years and knew about a large range of topics. That didn’t mean it was common in the heavenly plane. They went by different rules than the mortal world, so many considered such knowledge as pointless waste. Take the girls from the Celestial Palace, who lived in relative naivety about many things. They were pretty quick learners though and dived in as soon as I introduced them to many things. On the other hand, these girls would be low-level gods, just a step above humanity, and having an intimate knowledge would help them.

There were two other reasons I am able to rapidly ascend them to goddess status. The first reason is that any energy I lost helping them grow, would be regained by the growth of my Harem. The stronger the women around me, the stronger I would be, so there was no loss of power, even if I gave up most of the energy I had absorbed from my time with Beloved. The second reason was something that even Netori wouldn’t have been able to guess.

These girls weren’t level 1. They were all level 5, the very peak of the mortal world. Every woman present, if she was allowed to continue on her own, would likely be a leader in this world. They’d be faster, stronger, and smarter than most of the competition. How had they become such specimens? That naturally had to do with me. While I was ascending to godhood using Netori, the many times I slept with these girls had also dragged them up with me. It wasn’t at a level where they could shed their mortality, but every girl I lay with would be fitter, stronger, and more capable because of it. Just like how when I slept with a goddess, I grew in power, the same happened to these girls.

“Okay, I’ll do it first!” Akiko volunteered as the test subject, grabbing an apple, scrunching her face cutely in thought, and then biting.

“Ah! I know Algebra now!”

I smacked her on the back of the head. “I said content related to being a goddess! You hate math, you’re not going to be a math goddess.”

“Ah!” She rubbed her head. “S-sorry. I was just thinking of something I didn’t understand very well and I remembered that D+ I got on my last exam.”

I rolled my eyes, but after seeing Akiko try it, each of the girls grabbed an apple and started trying to think of subjects they wanted to understand intimately. It lasted a few hours before the girls were stuffed with apples, their heads swirling with information.

“Okay, Hakaru. I now know enough about sexual fitness to write an encyclopedia.” Mother declared. “Now, what next?”

“Sexual fitness? You want to be the goddess of sexual fitness?” I asked incredulously.

“Hmph! I’m not as young as these other girls, so to continue to excite my son, I needed an edge. Now, I can do things to Hakaru that the other girls could never dream of.”

“S-seriously?” Sasori cried out. “I-I only absorbed knowledge about education, teaching, and pedagogy. You could learn about that?”

“Sexual education?” Mom asked.

“N-no!”

“Foofoo… then we know which MILF my son will pick.” Mother crossed her arms and laughed giddily.

“I-I need more apples!” Sasori turned to me and begged.

“We’re out!” I put my foot down before everyone started wanting to change their choice. “What you selected first is ultimately what resonates closest to your heart. Trying to change it for arbitrary reasons would only cause problems.”

That was probably true too, but I was just making it up because I was growing impatient.

“What is the next step?” Kira asked as her mother clung to her with a depressed and dejected look.

“That should be easy. I will sleep with you. I will shine my heavenly light on you, allowing you to rapidly grow into a goddess.”

“Hakaru thinks highly of himself.” Akiko teased. “He just wants an excused to take us all in an orgy!”

“A-an orgy?” Maria’s eyes widened.

I smacked Akiko again for good measure and then turned to the rest. “This is a very delicate thing. It’ll have to be done one at a time. I’d also need some privacy.”

“I’ll do it first.” Mother volunteered immediately. “It’s my bedroom anyway. I don’t want the other girl’s sloppy seconds.”

“Eh?”

“You…”

I calmed the girls down and got them to select the order. Then, I took Mother into the room. There had been a time where I might have felt awkward with her. However, looking at her now, I saw the same teenage beauty I had shared my love with a lifetime ago. She might still be my mother, but that kind of thing didn’t matter anymore. We fell to the bed and gently made love.

About an hour later, the pair of us came out. The rest of the girls had been waiting with various levels of patience. Having to sit and do nothing while their man slept with another woman one at a time was torture. They ended up drawing straws to inevitably determine the order after my mother.

“K-Kana! You look…” Sasori gasped.

“Hmm?” Mother cocked her head.

“What is this?” Maria’s eyes ignited with shock. “What did you do to her?”

I waved a hand, summoning a mirror that mom could look into. She was a level nine goddess now, and incidentally, she had lost a few years. Actually, she looked like her teenage self. Since I had just unlocked those memories shortly before doing this, her sense of self must have leaned on her younger form, and thus that was the form she took.

“Oh, my…” Mom checked herself in the mirror. “Great sex and a facelift. Hakaru really spoils his mother.”

“Facelift?” Maria sputtered. “You look younger than me!”

“Hehe… poor Maria, now you have direct familial competition.” Mom’s expression grew mischievous. “I’m not only young and beautiful, but I also made Hakaru cum buckets. You might be having a little brother or sister soon.”

“A s-s-sister!” Maria shook her head. “Well, a half-sister at least.”

Mom and I looked at each other, and then back at her.

“About that…” I laughed, scratching the back of my head. “I’ve forgotten to tell you about that part.”

“Wh-what part?”

“Ahh… well, Hakaru came back in time and…” Mom gestured to me. “Meet your new daddy!”

“D-d-d-dad!”

“Don’t see it as losing a brother… but gaining a father.” Mom declared. “After all… he’s both.”

“This… this… my mother is younger than me and my brother is my father!” She weakly declared, her eyes dancing wildly. “I… I’m going to lose it!”

“Well, lose it after you’re done!” Mom clapped. “It’s time to bang your dad!”