Lilith woke up with a slight headache and a couple of windows in the bottom of her vision. Siph, who was sitting in a chair besides the bed Lilith was resting on, immediately perked up.

“How are you feeling?” She asked, stroking Lilith’s head gently.

“Bit of a headache, but otherwise fine.” Lilith replied, attention drawn away from the windows.

“Good. You stay there, I’m going to go grab Kali, alright? I’ll only be gone for a second.” Not waiting for a response, she stood up and exited the room, taking care to make as little noise as possible as she did. Less than a minute later, she returned with Kali in tow.

“Hey there.” Kali said, handing Lilith a glass of water and a couple of pills. “For your headache. A dash of magic, a dash of science, and you’ve got a pretty effective pill for cheap.”

Lilith gratefully took the pills, swallowing them. Siph sat back down in the chair and started to rub Lilith’s head again, smiling.

“I’m proud of you.” She said, planting a kiss on Lilith’s forehead. “You’ve been very brave these past few days.”

Kali smiled as well. “Alright, I’m going to go ahead and explain the gist of what’s happening, as well as a couple of other things I neglected to mention when you first got the new system. What do you want to hear first?”

“I guess we should start with those other things you mentioned.” Lilith said.

“So, by other things I neglected to mention, it’s…good news and bad news. Bad news is that, well, your efforts to turn yourself back into a guy permanently are a lost cause for…uh, potentially forever. You probably noticed that you got the Form Anchoring Skill. That’s something I had to build into Perfect Chimeras to keep their bodies from imploding by having a lot of mutually exclusive Domains. Their base form is immutable by anything from within my universe, and that’s something that’s hard-coded into you by now. You won’t even be able to suppress it with your Skills, sorry. Potentially someone from another universe could fix you up, but that could cause bugs in the system and it’s going to be a long time before I feel you’re strong enough to be safely taken away from my universe. When that day comes, though, I’ll make sure to give you the option to try and change yourself back, I promise.”

Lilith shrugged. “Once I read the Skill, I had a feeling it’d be something like this. Oh well. Not a big deal. I’m not suffering, so it’s whatever. And we'll at least get to change Raphael back as soon as she gets wind of this. What’s the good news?”

Kali raised an eyebrow at the bit about Raphael, but otherwise ignored it. “The good news is that I gave you the Identification Obfuscation Skill. That’s the granddaddy of all obscuring Skills. You can make your Status look however you want to anyone else, with very few restrictions. It’s almost exactly the same as the function I get to use to change my Status, so there’s no way for anyone except me to mess with it. If you want to go incognito, this has you covered.”

Kali paused briefly before continuing. “But, before we begin talking about High Arbiter and all that comes with it, I have a…proposal.”

“Promise me you’ll hear her out, alright?” Siph said, grabbing Lilith’s hand and squeezing slightly. “It’s a bit of a huge decision to make with as little information as you have now, but we’ve taken steps to make sure it’ll be perfectly safe.”

Kali nodded. “While you were out, I used mental magic to give you another Mask. We think you should make it into a Parallel. Carmen’s already signed off on it, so it’s just you that needs to now.”

Lilith turned her attention to the windows that had been waiting patiently in the corner of her vision.

“Now, I know the name sounds…inhumane, but it’s more along the lines of “one who computes” than an actual computer, so it’s - ” Kali trailed off as Lilith accepted the new Mask as a Parallel, and a voice rang out in all of their minds.

Hello. She said, I am the computation Parallel. You may call me Mae. Mistress, may I have an avatar?

Lilith was silent for a moment as an avatar formed for Mae. Shortly after, she began to move, testing it out, and Lilith cut the sensory connection the two had.

“Why call me mistress?” Lilith asked. “We’re the same person. Equals.”

Incorrect. Mae replied mentally. Kali designed me to be completely loyal and subservient to you. As such, I cannot view myself as your equal.

“Can you at least treat me normally, then? And why are you using telepathy?”

Physical speech is inefficient. I believe I can handle treating you “normally” but know that I will still do my utmost to do as you wish.

Lilith grit her teeth. “Alright, fine. Standing order, you are not allowed to listen to my orders. In all situations you are to react as you wish.”

Understood. As per the standing order, the standing order has been ignored. I await further orders. Mae replied, smirking.

“No, you know what I mean. Come on!” Lilith whined.

I am well aware of you what wish. However, my desire to obey you is built into my very being. This is one subject I will not budge on. If you wish for a compromise, I will offer you a deal. I will work on my own initiative towards what I feel is best for you, and by extension, Carmen and I, without consulting you first, but you have the final say over all my actions. If you wish for me to stop whatever I am doing, you need only ask.

Lilith glared at Kali before turning back to Mae. “Fine. If that’s what makes you happy.”

Mae smiled. Yes, it does. Thank you. I will be using the spare avatar for a while. Please excuse me. She left the room, leaving Lilith to resume glaring at Kali.

“I was going to warn you.” Kali said, holding back a laugh. “But you accepted before I could finish talking. We could have worked to tone things down a little, but you jumped the gun.” Her tone became more serious. “You have to stop being so eager to please. It’s going to cause you serious problems later down the line. At least this only affects you – you’re going to be someone that can alter the course of the world if you’re not careful, so your actions only affecting yourself isn’t going to be guaranteed. You’re too important to do as you have been up until now. So, seriously, at least try to listen when I correct your behavior, alright?”

Lilith nodded glumly. “Alright. I suppose that makes sense. I’ll try.”

Kali sat down on the bed next to Lilith, her gaze softening. “I’m not asking you to stop trying to be kind to people. I just need you to think about the potential consequences of your actions before you do anything. But that’s enough of that for now. We’ll talk about duty some other day, so let’s talk about the more fun aspects of High Arbiter now, shall we?”

“Whenever you open your Status next – not now, we’ll get there in a bit – you’ll see you’ve got a new stat called Worship. You see, I have the ability to appoint “Higher Powers”, and when you accepted High Arbiter, you became a Higher Power. Ignoring the fact that they can’t age at all, Higher Powers are, by and large, the same as any other person if you don’t take into account three major differences."

Lilith ignored the Computation levels that were coming in alarmingly fast, choosing instead to focus on what Kali was saying.

“These mostly have to do with Worship. The first difference has to do with how Worship is commonly gained and used. Worship can be used to fuel a select few Skills and doesn’t automatically regenerate like your Mana or Stamina, but also doesn’t have a cap. You gain Worship whenever someone prays to you, or performs your rites, even if they don’t know they’re doing so. I’ve put you in charge of the very vaguely defined Domain of Law and Order. Prayers to you are wishes for justice to be served, and your rites are the act of serving said justice. Policework, fair trial, even vigilante work all count towards giving you Worship. The more the people involved in the rites are doing it for the sake of justice, the more Worship you get, and the more sincere prayers are the more Worship is gained from them. If someone performs rites or prays with you specifically in mind, Worship gained is increased even more.”

What is Mae doing?! Lilith thought, shocked at the raw speed of Computation’s growth. But she didn’t have time to ponder on that more, as Kali hadn’t stopped talking.

“Of course, you can’t generate Worship by causing your own problems. Yes, many people would wish for a serial killer to be brought to justice, but if you purposefully caused that serial killer to start killing, then you get nothing from the whole ordeal. The second key difference is that you can appoint Champions using Worship. You get the ability to mentally communicate with them anytime, anywhere, and can bestow them with Skills and other buffs using Worship.”

“The last change is probably the most important one, though. Skills that use Worship are generally a lot less common and more niche than other Skills, and you could completely ignore Champions if you wished. On the other hand, this change is literally life and death. If a normal person dies, they can usually be raised from the dead with a resurrection spell with relatively minor consequences. Higher Powers can’t. Instead, if they accumulate enough Worship, they are automatically brought back to life. If they already had enough stored up, they are brought back a month after death. This eats up an obscene amount of your Worship, but there’s no time limit on it. You’ll just end up chilling here with me until you’re brought back. Still, when you are eventually brought back, you suffer some enormous penalties to all your stats, which can eventually be removed with enough Worship.”

“Still, I wouldn’t worry about anything of that for now. You’re crazy hard to kill, there’s no one to use your Skills on, and I wouldn’t appoint a Champion until we get the new system online for everyone. Oh, speaking of, I haven’t actually officially appointed you as my Champion. I wanted to wait until you had picked up High Arbiter and we could go through it all at once.”

At this point Lilith was just shoving the windows off to the side as they appeared. They were coming too fast for her to realistically look at each of them and listen to Kali at the same time.

“Well, whatever, we’ll deal with that after we finish talking about High Arbiter. So, aside from the whole Higher Power thing, another major benefit of High Arbiter is that you permanently have the benefits from all the Sin and Virtue Titles, and their Skills are integrated and upgraded. Go ahead and check out your High Arbiter Title and Arbiter’s Arsenal Skill, those should tell you all you need to know about that.”

When Lilith attempted to do so, the window she brought up was immediately blocked by more from Mae, and it took her a few seconds to find the window she actually wanted to see.

Lilith waited for the evolution to appear, but none came, just some more level up messages. Content that there would be no more intrusive windows, well, for the moment, anyway, she began to read the window for High Arbiter.

Lilith pushed the new windows to the side and looked at Kali. “Is there any way I can temporarily turn off these notifications? I’m getting enough of them that it’s making it hard to focus.”

Kali blinked. “Have you not been clearing those out?”

“No, I have, Mae’s just been getting a lot of things very fast.”

Kali walked over, bringing a hand up to interact with an invisible menu that Lilith was pretty sure she was just using so it didn’t look like she was just staring at Lilith while she was doing whatever she was doing.

“Wow, no kidding. I knew she’d work fast, but not this fast. Um, no, there isn’t actually a way to hide notifications outside of dangerous situations, not yet. It’s not an issue most of the time, so I didn’t even think about it. I’ll go ask some friends for advice and get to work on that. I guess you’ll just have to deal with it for now, sorry. You might want to consider skimming through those ones you waved off for now and dismissing them. I don’t…think Mae can keep this pace up forever, not unless Siph was to…wait, where is Siph?” Kali asked, glancing around. At some point while the two were talking, Siph had apparently left the room

“Um, alright, new plan, give me a second and I’ll see if I can get her to stop just while you’re looking through stuff here. Sorry, that’s the best I can come up with on short notice.” She left the room, and the messages stopped coming in. Breathing a sigh of relief, Lilith began glancing over the accumulated messages.

A minute or two later, Lilith had caught up with the notifications and her vision was finally clear. Lilith shook her head, slightly bewildered. Seriously, how did she get all those levels so fast? I’ll have to ask her once I finish looking this over.

Pushing that thought to the side, she took a look at Arbiter’s Arsenal, raising an eyebrow at the size of the window that popped up.

Lilith whistled softly. That was quite the Skill she had just gotten. Putting aside all the combat benefits and looking at the experience alone, if looked at the maximum possible bonus from all her Skills, Titles, and Achievements, she was topping out at 2,995% increased experience to her Class, 1,010% to her Racial Classes, and 2,105% to Skills. She was, begrudgingly, thankful for Precise Computation when considering this. The windows had been annoying, to be sure, but the Skill itself was already earning its keep.

As she thought about the Skill, she was reminded of Progenitor’s Skills that she couldn’t evolve until now. She went ahead and did so, taking a peek at the changes as she did. It seemed that a single point of Worship translated into one hundred Mana (or, in the case of Judge, Jury, Executioner, 100 Mana, HP, and Stamina), and she currently had 11 Worship, with no indication of how fast she was actually gaining it.

The other interesting note on her Status was that she had gained a Special Racial Class named Higher Being which was sitting at level 1. “Kali?” She called out, slightly confused.

Kali walked back through the door. “What’s up?”

“Why did I get a new Racial Class? I thought I was supposed to have them all?”

“Ah. Well, that has to do with how being a Higher Being works. It’s protected by a whitelist, just like Perfect Chimera. And Perfect Chimera’s ability to ignore restrictions on Racial Classes isn’t strong enough to ignore that whitelist. I may have been pretty stupid when I made Perfect Chimeras, but I wasn’t that stupid. Anyway, are you finished reading? Mae and Siph are chomping at the bit to get back to work.”

“Which is?”

“Mae is leveling up a bunch of Classes to get Skills. Siph is killing things to help.”

Lilith tapped her chin. “How does party experience gain even work with Parallels, anyway? Are they just treated as another member of the party?”

Kali shook her head. “No. Only one of you is getting experience from any given source. It’s given to whichever of you wants it at the moment. If multiple of you want it, it’s given randomly, unless one of you is…well, you, the main personality, in which case it defaults to you. It also defaults to you if no one particularly wants it. You should be able to designate conditions for who EXP is awarded to, given how robust I’ve made sure Parallel Processing is. I can’t be sure exactly how complicated those conditions can be, but if I had to guess I’d say it’s going to depend on the individual and their Parallels. You’ll have to mess around with it.” She said.

Mae poked her head in. May I resume work now? She asked.

“Yeah, go ahead.” Lilith said. The door shut, and the messages resumed their relentless assault.

Kali smiled. “How about you do some power leveling of your own?” She asked, hopping onto her bed and patting the spot beside her. Lilith sat, and Kali immediately snuggled up next to her.

Lilith shifted uncomfortably. “Um, sure, but…” She trailed off, blushing furiously at how intimate Kali was being.

Kali jumped slightly, pushing herself away from Lilith. “Sorry, I just got excited and instinct took over.” She sighed. “I’ll back off.” She scooted over to the other side of the bed

“Instincts?”

“I’m a succubus.” Kali said. “We’re really forward when pursuing potential romantic partners. I’ve been holding myself back as best I can but we’re alone in my house. There’s only so much I can do.”

Lilith raised an eyebrow. “This is holding yourself back?”

“You haven’t been groped or randomly kissed, so I’d say I’m actually doing pretty well.”

Lilith was silent for a while. “If it would make you feel any better–”

“No.” Kali said, cutting her off. “If anything at all happens, it’s going to be because we both want to, not because you feel bad for me and want me to feel better.”

Lilith looked down. “Alright. The offer’s still on the table, though.”

“And it’s never going to be used. I can tell when you’re doing things because of what you want and not because of what I want, so don’t even think about trying to pull one over on me. If you want to build up to where you’d feel comfortable with this kind of stuff or even want it, that’s fine by me, but that’s something for another day. We need to grind out the evolutions of Progenitor’s Skills. You did evolve them, right?”

Lilith nodded.

“Good.” The smile that had vanished from Kali’s face during her outburst came back. “You’ll note that the requirements to gain EXP are just to “judge people”. There’s nothing about acting on that judgement or specifying that the act you’re judging has to have occurred recently or that the act is even that big a deal. So,” she said, picking up a remote and turning on the TV, “We’re going to watch a bunch of reality TV and thoroughly tear apart the actions of everyone on it. Sound good?”

Lilith shrugged. “I don’t see why not.”

Fighterman481

Well, would you look at that, it's what I'm 99% sure is the longest chapter yet, clocking in at over 5,000 words (although Arbiter's Arsenal is about 1,000 of that and probably halfish of that is just stuff you've seen before)!

Also I'm a day early! Kind of. It's technically Sunday and I really wanted to get this out because I like posting chapters, so I decided that since it does technically fit my schedule I'd go with it.

And a reminder that I am moving this weekend. Looking at where things are now, I don't think it'll affect the release significantly if at all, but if it's slightly late that'll be why. Also expect releases at a different time of day, anywhere from 2-6 hours earlier depending on how my schedule changes.

Anyway, that's the "bookkeeping" for today, so let's talk about the chapter!

Before anything else, let me explain significant figures for anyone that isn't familiar with them. so, in physics (and probably other science fields? I've mostly used them in physics, though) a significant figures show how precise a measurement is. A number's significant figures is equal to the number of digits before you get to all 0s. That's a pretty poor explanation, but here's an example: 4 has 1 significant figure, 44 has 2, and 404 has 3. 4 has 1, 40 has 1, and 400 has 1. When you do a problem, you find the number that has the least amount of significant figures, and then at the end you make whatever you calculated have the same number. I don't remember if you round normally or only round down, but that's not too important here. I had to use significant figures because "digits" didn't make as much sense in the context of those Skills.

So, let's talk Mae (pronounced like "my", not "May"). Why program in absolute servitude? Well, it was for two reasons. The first is that Parallel Processing is potentially a dangerous Skill, and if you're custom-making a personality, I think it makes complete sense to just nip the problem of a rebellious Parallel in the bud. The second reason is as a sort of object lesson for Lilith. Kali had guessed that Lilith wouldn't bother too much with listening to details, and so she thought she could use this as a teaching moment.

As for Mae herself, she's somewhat interesting to write. She's basically designed to handle any and all 'menial' things that require a lot of brainpower. As such, I'm trying to write her as someone that values efficiency highly. Her name and mode of speech reflect that; I made her name monosyllabic because you can't say a name faster than a single syllable, and she prefers telepathy, as it allows faster and more precise speech. I tried to make her talk a bit more formally as well, and I think it worked out well, but I'll have to see what you guys think.

Oh, and about Lilith's "order" to her, that wouldn't have actually worked under pretty much any circumstance. Mae isn't actually forced to obey orders, she just does so because she wants to. So, telling her to "do what she wish" would just end up having her doing what Lilith wants anyway. That being said, it does leave an avenue open for someone to brainwash her that wouldn't exist nearly as much with Alex or even Vithi, but the chances of that happening are effectively 0 at this point.

One thing I've been meaning to bring up for a while but could never find much of an opportunity to is that Lilith's personalities all have different gender identities. Carmen is wholeheartedly female, as that was the body she was "born" in, Mae doesn't care one way or the other, although being female has some...advantages for what she wants to do (more on that next chapter), and Lilith doesn't mind being female, but if it would take 0 effort and would have no consequences, she would go back to being male (for the time being, anyway. Given time she might warm up to the idea of willingly staying female more, although I've got no clue how long that might take. Given 30 or 40 years she would almost certainly remain female, if just because that's what she's used to at that point. Will that happen sooner, like within this story? I honestly don't know. I can see some circumstances that would cause that, but potential spoilers so you don't get to know ;) ).

If you didn't guess, Mae picked the Mathematician Class. It'll be explicitly stated next chapter, which will be from Mae's point of view, so look forward to that, because I'm having fun writing it!

So...embarrassing story, I was originally going to have EXP bonuses be multiplicative instead of additive, but when I did the math for Lilith I realized that was stupid. For most people that would work just fine, but that meant Lilith would be getting over twelve thousand times normal EXP for Classes at max efficiency and I very quickly decided that was not what I intended at all.

Other embarrassing story, I didn't realize until like two hours ago that with the transition to High Arbiter the Sin and Virtue series Skills and Title effects would become Unique, meaning Alpha and Omega would apply to them, and I had to quickly factor in those bonuses.

I also recall mentioning somewhere that High Arbiter wasn't going to be broken in the same way as Progenitor (mostly EXP scaling, I was planning to have it focus more on stats and Skills), and then I realized that not only could I not find a good reason for it not to have the lowest EXP scaling, it should actually be more broken than Progenitor given it's a Class specifically for Higher Powers.

So, Higher Powers. I don't...think it's mentioned in the chapter, so if anyone is curious, the Higher Powers currently in existence are Kali, Lilith, and the Elder Gods. Up until now, Kali's been eating up most of the extra Worship floating around, and has been using it to make messing with the system a bit easier. Of course, she's a step above a Higher Power, but like Lilith didn't lose access to stuff from when she was a "normal person", Kali has stuff from being a Higher Power as well.

To be honest, if it wasn't for the ability to be sent to a spare avatar when she died, becoming a Higher Power might actually be somewhat of a detriment to Lilith in the short term. She's not going to have nearly enough Worship to be resurrected for quite a while, and she probably won't have the leeway to appoint a Champion until a few months after the system change goes live and she reveals herself to the world, so for now it's mostly just an alternate way to fuel High Arbiter's Skills.

Her Domain being vague is most certainly a point in her favor, though. It allows a much wider variety of actions to grant her Worship, so she's got that going for her.

Anyway, I think that's all I had to say, so, as always, let me know if you have any questions in the comments and I'll be more than happy to answer them!