A flicker of surprise flashed through Hypnos's eyes as he raised a hand, sending the divine power of sleep gently down upon the creature.
There was no struggle, nor even the momentary stiffening from before.
The creature simply allowed its heavy eyelids to drop shut, its breathing growing steady as it quietly drifted off to sleep.
For the first time in this world, Aergia witnessed what it truly meant to "fall asleep."
Hypnos felt the shift that had just occurred, speaking slowly after a moment, "It does not belong to sleep, yet it leads toward sleep."
Wind swept through the forest as Aergia looked down at her palm.
A strand of light, so hazy as to be nearly imperceptible, was slowly gathering there.
"Drowsiness."
The word spilled naturally from her mouth with barely a thought, as though it was always meant to be called by that name.
After the two returned to the Temple of Sleep, Hypnos truly inspected that newly born rule for the first time.
The divine power of sleep brushed gently over the faint light in Aergia's palm, and he quickly arrived at a conclusion.
"Its root comes from your sloth," Hypnos said, leaning lazily back onto the stone couch. "It is just that its connection to sleep is deeper than I originally thought."
Aergia lowered her eyes, gazing at the strand of light that had yet to fully stabilize.
"Aergia."
"Hmm?"
Aergia looked up. Hypnos still lay on his side upon the obsidian couch, propping his temple with one hand, his pinkish-purple eyes half-lidded and his expression showing little change.
"Starting today, the peripheral rules of the sleep domain will be open to you."
He spoke very calmly, as if merely passing along the most ordinary matter.
Yet Aergia knew full well what those words signified.
A deity's domain was not a place anyone could set foot in as they pleased, especially in regions involving law itself.
Although she had previously been responsible for gathering the law fragments that occasionally drifted out from the edges of the sleep domain, she had lacked the authority to analyze or invoke the rules within them.
"Your Highness?"
Hypnos flicked his eyes upward.
"Now that drowsiness has appeared, my sleep has become more complete. The rules scattered along the edges are too fragmented and chaotic. Sorting through them one by one would be troublesome. Since you enjoy studying them, those things are yours from now on."
Aergia stood where she was, knowing he spoke casually. Yet she knew even better what those words truly meant. To Hypnos, they were merely peripheral rules too bothersome to organize.
To her, however, it was entirely different. Drowsiness had already proven one thing.
If she could truly understand an incomplete rule, find the connection between it and her own godhead, and then firmly establish the concept in reality—then law itself might respond to her.
A godhead was not something gained solely through innate talent at birth; it could be condensed, perfected, and even created.
She suddenly realized a question she had never truly pondered before.
This world was newly born, not yet developed to the degree of later eras.
The vastest, most central rules—earth, night, sky, death, sleep—already possessed their deities, yet the subtle concepts sprouting around those core rules were far from mature.
Some were merely occasional phenomena; some were just fragments of law scattered along the borders of divine domains; others did not even possess a stable definition.
It was not that they did not exist.
They were simply—not yet complete.
Aergia suddenly remembered the most immediate predicament she had faced upon arriving in this world.
She was too weak!
Third-Rank Divine Power... a status so low that Uranus could crush her with mere pressure alone, without ever lifting a hand.
She had always wanted to become stronger, yet had never truly found a path of her own.
Yet now, a path that had never existed before was slowly unfolding in front of her.
The laws had not yet been fully written, and she happened to be born in an era best suited for redefining rules.
Aergia's consciousness submerged into the sleep domain; gazing at those scattered fragments she had once gathered merely as routine work, they now resembled an unmined mountain of gold.
Drowsiness did not instantly transform into a complete godhead.
Aergia could feel that the strand of new law had established a stable link with her godhead of Sloth, yet it was still missing the final step.
She soon realized why: a phenomenon that appeared only in a few experiments was not enough to become a true rule of the world.
For a concept to shift from "possibility" to "existence," it had to genuinely take part in the operation of the world.
When night enveloped the earth once more, the God of Sleep lay back down on his obsidian couch. His pure-white wings folded behind him, and the never-fading poppy hummed softly in his palm.
As the first wisp of pollen drifted away, the divine power of sleep extended outward toward the earth once again.
Aergia closed her eyes as that not-yet-fully-solidified rule of "Drowsiness" flowed slowly out from her body; rather than entering the core of the authority over sleep, it attached itself to the leading edge of that immense power like a thin layer of mist.
In the past, sleep had always arrived directly. This time, drowsiness descended first.
The herds in the forest gradually slowed their movements; the birds perched on branches no longer abruptly lost consciousness, instead slowly burying their heads beneath their wings; young beasts that had just returned to their nests snuggled against their mothers' bellies, their eyelids drooping bit by bit; creatures drinking at the river lifted their heads, blinking sluggishly a few times before slowly collapsing by the bank.
For the first time, they knew—they were drowsy.
No one told them, nor did any voice echo in their minds. The feeling simply emerged naturally, like hunger, like thirst, like exhaustion.
Then, Hypnos's sleep arrived. Without an abrupt plunge, without the crushing force of a severed consciousness, sleep simply caught them as they began to sink downward.
The strand of light inside Aergia that had been constantly blurred suddenly grew clear in this instant. As more and more living beings experienced the same state, more and more matching traces were carved into the operation of the world.
It was not a rule forcibly declared by any deity, but an order naturally formed after all living things repeatedly experienced it in truth.
A soft vibration echoed from deep within her godhead core; Aergia opened her eyes as a hazy light core slowly condensed before her.
It was not large, its color suspended between morning mist and twilight dusk; a single glance instilled a sense of relaxation in one's consciousness—Drowsiness.
This time, it was no longer merely a name; it truly possessed a godhead.
The instant that newly born godhead fused into her body, Aergia clearly felt her strength undergo a change.
Her total amount of divine power expanded outward by a margin; the subtle, sluggish places in her divine body were swiftly filled in, and her perception of external rules became far clearer than before.
It could not be called a monumental leap, yet the growth was real.
It was not a gift left behind by the Vase of Life, nor Gaia's bloodline, nor Nyx's protection. This was the first time she had earned power truly by her own efforts.
Aergia lowered her head, looking at her hand. Before she even had the chance to savor this long-absent feeling of satisfaction, the entire sleep domain suddenly vibrated softly.
Hypnos opened his eyes, and Aergia's consciousness sank uncontrollably into the sleep domain.
Along the edges of that domain, which had always been quiet to the point of stagnation, tiny sparks of faint light suddenly flickered to life.
One, two, ten... more and more.
Those law fragments that had spent the past aimlessly floating around the outer bounds of the sleep domain—fragments that even Hypnos himself had been too lazy to organize—seemed pulled by an invisible force all at once, slowly shifting direction.
They were drawing near to Aergia—or more accurately, toward the newly condensed godhead of Drowsiness within her.
Aergia did not reach out right away; she quietly felt the rule fluctuations transmitted by those fragments.
Some were exceedingly faint, representing consciousness gradually drifting away during prolonged repetition; some were heavier, related to the decay of vigilance; others carried a distinct sense of sluggishness, as if thought itself were being dragged down, every idea turning thick and sticky.
In the past, these elements had been independent of one another, lacking names, order, and a sufficiently stable core to connect them.
Yet with the emergence of drowsiness, everything was different.
It was like an anchor driven into the dark, giving those once-scattered fragments a direction to cluster around for the very first time.
Rate on N.U.
