I stepped into the water and the water recognized me—every element of the bath ARIA had engineered for me, the tub, the mineral blend, the temperature-coded surface tension, all of it settling around my body the second I broke the surface, courtiers arranging themselves around a king who had just walked into the throne room.

The water rose to meet my thighs, my hips, my ribs. Curled along my spine and folded under the small of my back. Closed over my shoulders with the unmistakable enthusiasm of something that had been waiting all morning for the privilege.

Reverence, I think you’d call it.

If you were being generous.

But if you were being honest, you’d call it worship.

I leaned my head back against the curved lip of the tub and let myself, for the first time since I’d opened my eyes three hours ago, look at what the universe had built me into.

The mirror across the bathroom—full-length, frameless, set into the wall at exactly the height a god deserved—showed me back to myself in soft candlelit gold.

’Hm...’

The thing about a body like mine was that nobody, including me, had any frame of reference for it. The world had cycled through gym rats and Olympians and supermodels and pornstars and demigods on the silver screen for two thousand years, and not a single one of them had ever been built to the spec the System and the cosmos had been quietly cooperating on for the last months.

The shape across my chest. The architecture along my abdomen. The way my shoulders sloped into my neck.

The small pulse of warmth where my deltoids met my collarbones, where the muscle fibres had been rewoven during last week’s unlock and were still settling into their new permanent shape.

This wasn’t a man.

This was an aesthetic argument the universe had decided to settle, in flesh, on my behalf.

The water hit the lower line of my abs and caught there, refusing to crest higher than it had to, sitting along the cut of my obliques because the temperature gradient ARIA had built into the bath agreed with my body that some surfaces were too important to be submerged.

The candle-gold light worked the rest.

It found the line of my throat, the long taper of my torso, the carved division at my hip flexors, the gentle curve of muscle along my forearms where the gold filament from the bar had left a faint warm afterglow my skin hadn’t fully released yet.

I was, by any honest mortal accounting, spectacular.

By any honest god accounting, I was on schedule.

I tipped my head back further. Let the water find my hair, work its slow careful way through the dark length of it, arranging it along the rim of the tub for me with the patience of a stylist on the clock.

I closed my eyes for one luxurious second, listened to the residence settle around me—far-off creaks, Mom’s vanity light still on three corridors east, the soft thrum of ARIA’s architecture humming gently through the walls—and let the body that had been carrying me through the morning’s session breathe out the last of its surplus heat.

The tub purred under my shoulder blades.

A god in his bath.

Honestly? Sustainable.

Pulled up my stats.

The window opened in the steam-lit air, gold against the soft white tile, hovering at the perfect viewing distance for my reclining position in the bathtub at six in the morning with one foot draped over the edge.

The numbers I was about to read weren’t the ones I’d left on the screen the last time I’d bothered with this. Those numbers—Peter Carter Level 4, Eros Level 11, the cute baseline I’d been so pleased about cracking out of lastly at Dmitri warehouse—were ancient history.

Between the warehouse and now, several things had quietly happened like trying out with ARIA the night of her birth... that straining as I tried to match her, had increased a few of my stats.

Then the morning workouts had filled in the rest.

Then the women had filled in the rest of the rest. Sex with women whose own stats were climbing past their human peaks tended to feed the system points in a way I was, frankly, no longer keeping track of.

SP arrived in the way rain arrived.

You didn’t count the drops; you noticed when the lawn was wet.

So.

Time to actually look.

[DING! PETER CARTER & EROS MODE—DUAL STATUS ]

PETER CARTER—BASE FORM

Name: Peter Carter

Age: 17

Level: 6

Physical Stats:

Physical: 311 / 400

Charm: 311 / 400

Stamina: 311 / 400

Charisma: 311 / 400

Sexual Stamina: ∞ / ∞

Intelligence: ∞ / ∞

Sexual Abilities—Dark Lord: Magical Fingers (Touch), Eyes, Cock Control, Complete Toggle, Infinite Stamina, Supernatural Charisma, Pheromone, Lust Presence

Taboo Abilities: Touch of Taboo, Gaze of the Unspoken, Whisper of Sin, Forbidden Plea Whispers, Taboo Aura, Forbidden Appeal, Generational Heat, Cougar’s Instinct, Bloodline Tension, Sin Resonance

Active Talents:

—Eros Mode (Supreme Form transformation)

—Strategic and Calculative

—Master Seducer

—Downloaded System Skills (cooking, languages, combat, music, law, finance, IT, design— etc)

—Huge Cock

—Psychological Manipulation

—Reckless

—Women Care Ability (Tracks all claimed women: current knowledge, growth rate, limiting factors, recommendations. Measured against the System’s downloaded knowledge base, which is roughly 60% of what humanity might develop over the next fifty years. Master can see the progress regardless of physical distance from his women.)

—Divine Seed

Active Marks:

—Protection Mark

System Points: 1,200,000 SP

Wealth: $—(off-window)

Relationships: 31+ women related to Master.

Weaknesses: Reckless, Always Lustful (constant sexual drive and forbidden desires), Lust Mode Risk (potential loss of control under extreme situations), Emotional Attachment (protective instincts can override logic)

EROS MODE—THE SUPREME FORM

Name: Eros Velmior Desiderion

Level: 13 (Dark Lord Form, ascending)

Physical Stats:

Physical: 4000 / ∞

Charm: 4000 / ∞

Stamina: 4000 / ∞

Sexual Stamina: ∞ / ∞

Charisma: 4000 / ∞

Intelligence: ∞ / ∞

Presence: Lust Incarnate

Sexual Abilities—Dark Lord Seduction Abilities (Maximized): Magical Fingers (Touch), Eyes, Cock Control, Complete Toggle, Infinite Stamina, Supernatural Charisma, Pheromone Enhancement, Lust Presence

Taboo System (Maximized): Touch of Taboo, Gaze of the Unspoken, Whisper of Sin, Forbidden Plea Whispers, Taboo Aura, Forbidden Appeal, Generational Heat, Cougar’s Instinct, Bloodline Tension, Sin Resonance

Eros Exclusive Abilities:

—Perfect Physique

—Enhanced Anatomy: optimised for maximum pleasure

—Emotional Control: amplify or soothe any emotion in proximity

—Memory Implantation: lasting impressions, by design or by accident]

I read it twice.

Then I let out a slow appreciative breath and slid a little further into the water, because every ounce of that window was, frankly, delicious.

Three-eleven across, at a four-hundred ceiling. Up from one-oh-five out of two only a few days ago. The Peter form had blown right past Level 5 and then through Level 6 in the time I’d been ignoring my own feed.

Whoever the System’s accountants were, they’d been busy.

Eros at four thousand. Up from two. Doubled. The Eros form had lapped its previous self while I’d been brushing my teeth.

The 10:1 sync still held—every hundred I gained on Peter still translated to a thousand on the god-engine underneath, and the day Peter cleared a thousand the engine cleared infinity.

The mortal cap had moved again—a hundred per tier had become two hundred, and now four—which meant the System was actively scaling the staircase under me as I walked up it. Polite of it.

One-point-two million SP.

Levels 5 and 6 had come and gone on the Peter side, and 12 and 13 on the Eros side, and I hadn’t bothered to look in on any of it because the System had stopped giving me anything that resembled a meaningful mission about three weeks ago.

And, apparently when you cleared a million SP and started orbiting Eros tier 11, the System ran out of ideas for what to ask of you.

Which is fair.

Befriend a girl. Steal a watch. Beat up some boys.

I’d graduated past those.

But definitely no cucking some male souls out there.

I smiled at that. The first million had hit the system somewhere around the achievement that unlocked Women Care, and I’d kept the screenshot of that particular ding because it had been a satisfying little moment.

The next 200,000 SP had quietly accumulated since then—drop by drop, woman by woman, orgy by orgy—and the System had stopped commenting on my SP balance about ten thousand SP into the climb.

Which was, in its own quiet way, a compliment. The System had gone from cheerleading me to filing my receipts.

Not my problem. The System could find me a new use for itself, or it could file my receipts indefinitely. Both worked.

My eye caught on the two new lines I hadn’t fully read yet.

The numbers sat there in their gold field, the Mark line reading its quiet held in reserve, the Talents column wearing the full inventory of what I’d accumulated across a ridiculous few month.

I closed my eyes.

Smiled.

[Mm,] Taboo purred, somewhere underneath. [Not bad for a Tuesday, Master.]

"Not bad."

The window collapsed in a soft golden pulse. The bath dimmed itself another shade. The water curled higher up my chest in delight at being given another three minutes of me to enjoy.

A god in his bath.

Paris at noon.

The world had been on notice for a while now, even if it didn’t entirely know what it had been put on notice about.

That was about to change.

****

What Peter didn’t know... death was already at his doorstep this very day!