Marrianetta pressed forward.
John watched what the motion did to the silk dress and his brain split into two separate processes running simultaneously. Process one was extremely on board with the current situation and had no notes. Process two had pulled up a full-body mirror in his mind and was making him look at it.
He looked at himself.
Not metaphorically. He actually looked down at himself, standing in the room he'd generated for a six-foot-nine reanimated torture artist in crimson silk, and conducted an honest assessment.
Five foot eight. Not tall. Not short enough to be interesting about it, just unremarkably, boringly average in height, which somehow felt worse than being short. Soft around the middle in the specific way that came from years of convenience store snacks and the kind of lifestyle where the most physical activity in a given week was reaching for something on a high shelf. His jaw was fine it existed, it held his face together, but it did not project authority. It did not project anything. It was a jaw doing the bare minimum.
And then there was the other thing.
The thing that he had, on multiple occasions across his life, quietly made peace with in the way you made peace with something you couldn't change, which was to say he had not made peace with it at all and had simply stopped looking directly at it, the way you stopped looking directly at a disappointing grade.
Two inches.
On a good day.
He was standing in front of a woman he had literally designed from scratch, a woman he had given specific and deliberate anatomical specifications to with the focused attention of a professional, a woman who was currently looking at him with dark red eyes and an expression that suggested she had expectations, and he was bringing a two-inch dick to this interaction.
This was, he decided, the antithesis of a demon lord situation.
"Wait," he said.
Marrianetta raised one elegant eyebrow.
"Three minutes," he said. "Just — three minutes. Don't move. Stay here. I'll be right back."
He left at a pace that was not technically running but was everything running was in spirit, his footsteps loud in the corridor as he navigated back through the connecting gallery, back through the two corridors, back to the office where the floating interface was still waiting exactly where he'd left it.
He dropped into the chair. He grabbed the armrests. He thought.
Okay. Okay. The universe responded to him now, Zero had said that, had implied it, the walls of this palace existed because he'd thought them into existence. He had a character creator with no ceiling on inputs. There was absolutely, definitely, certainly a way to change how he looked, and if there wasn't he was going to type one into existence right now.
He needed an avatar.
Not just a makeover an avatar. A form he could inhabit. Something that looked the way a demon lord in a fifty-million square foot void palace should look, not the way a greasy half, Japanese kid from Sacramento who'd spent four years eating convenience store onigiri and crying at Miku concerts looked.
He pulled up the character creator.
The question was what. He could go reference-based — just pick a character design he already liked, something field-tested by a professional artist, something with established cool credentials. Goku was the obvious answer and was therefore wrong, too recognizable, too borrowed, not his. He ran through options. Aizen was solid but too finished, too complete a character to wear. He thought about Aiden Nightshade from Beast Taming Reincarnated with the Bond System for approximately four seconds — Aiden had good bones, white hair, decent armor design, the author was genuinely unwell but had built a character that worked visually — before deciding against it.
He wasn't going to wear someone else's design.
He was going to build his.
He clicked Custom Race and typed: Husk.
Not a human. Not quite. Something that wore human shape but wasn't constrained by it, a husk was a vessel, a form, something that existed to be inhabited rather than to be a person on its own terms. He liked the philosophical cleanness of that. Avatar energy.
Build: muscular. He pushed the slider and then pushed it further, not comically large, not the kind of muscular that became its own joke, but the kind that communicated that whoever lived in this body had either trained seriously or been designed seriously, and in this case it was the latter.
Height: six foot three.
Hair: spiky white. He specified the texture not soft, not flowing, spiky in the way that meant deliberate, each point maintaining its shape through whatever chaos got thrown at it, the kind of hair that looked like it had opinions.
Eyes: red. Deep red, not the pale pink of certain albino designs but a saturated crimson that sat in the face and looked like it meant something.
Everything else he left blank. Deliberately. No specified facial features beyond the eyes, no detailed skin tone, no accessories or defining marks. He wanted the generation to fill in the gaps, wanted to see what the system extrapolated from the inputs he'd given, because he'd found through building Marrianetta that the system's instincts were good. It had chosen her eye color better than he would have. He trusted it with the rest of this.
Powers.
One or two, he'd decided. Because he already had the god powers Zero had given him and he wasn't trying to stack infinities on top of each other, he wanted this avatar to have something specific, something that had texture to it as a fighting style.
Item and creature summoning.
He typed it and then refined it: can summon items and creatures at will, inventory and roster powered by kill count. Each confirmed kill banks currency toward summons, creating a hard limit that scales with combat activity. He stared at that and nodded. It was balanced. It was interesting. It meant the avatar was powerful but not static, that the power grew with use and was spent in use, that there was a rhythm to it. He'd read enough progression fantasy to know that the best abilities had texture, had trade-offs, had a feeling of earned to them.
He looked at the pre-render on the side panel.
The husk stood in the preview window, form assembled from his inputs, and it looked — it looked good. Clean lines. The white hair was doing exactly what he'd wanted. The red eyes were vivid against whatever complexion the system had settled on, something pale and slightly unnatural, fitting for a husk. Muscular without being absurd. Six-three, which from the inside would feel enormous given where he was coming from.
He was about to hit generate when something caught his eye.
The preview figure.
Specifically: the preview figure's lower region.
The system had generated a default.
John looked at the default. The default was fine. The default was a five, which he knew because he'd spent enough time on the kind of internet forums that discussed these things with the rigor of engineering specifications. Five was average. Five was adequate. Five was what you got when you didn't specify, which he hadn't, because he'd been thinking about the hair and the eyes and the powers.
He deleted the default from the manifest field and opened the manual input.
What was the number. He thought about it. Porn performers ran six to eight inches as working baseline with the upper range pushing toward eleven or twelve before things crossed into specialty territory. Over twelve and you were in the realm of diminishing practical returns and increasing logistical complications. He wanted impressive without architectural dick tower. He wanted the kind of number that landed with weight without requiring advance planning.
Ten.
He typed ten inches and looked at the render update and grinned like an idiot sitting alone in an office in a void palace. Then he laughed, a real laugh, not a cool laugh, not a composed laugh, the laugh of a guy who had been in a goblin cave three hours ago and was now custom-building an attractive avatar body because a Victorian torture artist in his living quarters had told him to come to bed.
"Let's go," he said, to nobody.
He hit generate.
The husk appeared in the center of the office.
White hair, red eyes, six foot three of muscular form standing on his stone floor, and John looked at it and felt a strange vertiginous pride, the way he'd felt looking at the palace for the first time. He'd made that. That was his.
It was also completely naked.
He had not specified clothes.
The husk stood in the center of his office completely naked and John stared at it and the situation was not helped by the fact that the render had been accurate and the ten inches were simply present, ambient, part of the room now, not asking for anything, just existing.
"Right," John said. "Clothes. That's. I'll sort that after."
He walked forward. Some instinct he hadn't known he possessed until this moment guided his hand — he pressed his palm flat against the husk's chest, right over where a heart would be, and felt the surface warm under his touch.
A notification window materialized in his vision, clean white text on a dark field:
Entity recognized. Avatar-class construct detected. Consciousness transfer eligible. Initiate transfer?
Two options below it. Yes and No.
John didn't hesitate.
He hit Yes with everything he had.