Chapter 179: Difference in Humour
"What is the name of your class? And why does your soul appear strange when I look at it with my spiritual vision?"
The question put Aaron in a bind.
He turned it over quietly, the worry arriving in a small but noticeable wave. Revealing his otherworldly soul to a woman this unpredictable — was that actually a sensible thing to do?
He ran the numbers.
The ’Otherworldly Soul’ was a legendary-grade title. His Primordial class was graded mythical.
And while he wasn’t the sharpest mind in any room he’d ever walked into, but even he knew that mythical sat above legendary in the tier list.
Though — and this was where it got complicated — comparing a title’s grade to a class grade wasn’t entirely fair. Titles were considered significantly harder to acquire than classes. A common-grade title could, in the right circumstances, be worth more than an epic-grade class.
The keyword being ’could be’, since titles provided blessings and passive boosts that stacked on top of whatever the class was already doing. When those layers combined properly, the result was something well beyond the sum of its parts.
But... the comparison went much deeper than that.
He wasn’t measuring his title against just any mythical-grade class. He was measuring it against the Primordial Consort — and the woman sitting across from him wasn’t simply a class holder. She was an actual primordial being.
Ancient. Rare. Divine.
Operating on a level that made his entire situation feel like a maths problem with several missing variables.
Surely, in the vast width of the universe, a transmigrated soul wasn’t the strangest thing she’d ever encountered. Right?
He finished the mental gymnastics, landed on a conclusion, and committed to it with a slow and focused deep breath.
"The thing is..." he began, "my soul isn’t the original owner of this body. I used to live in a completely different world called Earth. One night, without any warning, I found myself inside this man’s body — someone who had lived on Solaris. And one thing led to another, now here I am."
The empress, who had been sitting with the heavy-lidded stillness of someone either deeply relaxed or gently asleep — it was genuinely difficult to tell, given the bandana — changed.
Not dramatically. Not visibly, in any obvious way. But Aaron felt it.
The air in the room shifted. Her posture adjusted by a fraction. Whatever she had been doing before, she had stopped doing it.
For the first time since he’d arrived, he had the sense that she was actually, fully present.
That she was actually interested.
"Earth," she hummed. She crossed one leg over the other with quiet grace. "Is that the name of the planet?"
The hammock chairs continued their slow, even swaying behind them, and there was something strangely pleasant about that — the rhythm of it underneath an otherwise unlikely conversation.
Just two people with tea, talking.
"Yes," Aaron said. "That’s what we called it. Some people used older names — Gaia, Terra — but Earth was the common one."
"I don’t recognise any of them." She replied simply, and the tinge of genuine interest in her voice was unmistakable now. "Tell me more. The solar system, the galaxy, the surrounding structure. Whatever you know."
Aaron felt the shift in her attention like a change in air pressure. She was leaning in, in her way — not physically, but in every other sense that mattered.
And since she was leaning in — since she was, after all, a woman he was supposed to be courting, and things were going far too formally for his liking — he made a small decision.
He could afford a little push.
A gentle tease.
"That sounds like more than one question, empress," he said, keeping his tone easy and light. "I thought we agreed on one question, one answer?"
He took a small sip of tea as he said it, eyes staying on her bandana.
The tea was still doing its quiet work on the last traces of poison in his blood, though the urgency had faded considerably. He no longer felt the urge to rush to the bathroom and empty his bladder or it would explode.
Beside him, the bucket continued to sizzle steadily around Alyssa’s small figure, the surface disrupted enough that he couldn’t quite see what was happening beneath it.
But he trusted her enough that she won’t lie or use cheap tricks on him. So he wasn’t worried about Alyssa.
The empress’s lips parted slightly.
It was a small thing — barely a shift — but it was the closest he’d seen her come to being caught off-guard.
He understood, somewhere in the back of his mind, why.
She had been here a long time. The mushfolks revered her or feared her. The other races outside the forest did the same. Monsters knew nothing else.
When every being around you treats you as either a goddess or a threat, actual conversation — the kind with push and pull and a little friction — stops happening entirely.
That kind of loneliness had a particular texture to it. It made people slow.
And with this repetition for several years, she slowly got bored of her life in this ’private realm’ of hers, making her get lazier and uninterested in nearly everything that didn’t pick her curiosity immediately.
But after hearing Aaron tease her– both polite and playful, the perfect balance that needed to be maintained when talking to the beings at higher pedestal– a small smile crept up her lips.
It hit Aaron somewhere central. His heart stumbled over itself for a moment, and then, less helpfully, his blood made an enthusiastic decision about where it wanted to travel next.
His little brother twitched as if waking up from a nap, excited to greet his new friend.
He shut that down immediately and with considerable force.
’Not now. Absolutely not now.’
"One question, one answer," she echoed, and the laugh that followed was soft and low, musical in the way that felt accidental rather than deliberate. "Alright then, be a good lad and keep a count of how many I’ve asked. You can fire them all back at me later. Right now, I want my answers first."
"I’ll keep count then." Aaron chuckled, raising four fingers. "That puts us at four, currently."
"Four?" The smile stayed exactly where it was. "Then why are you raising only two fingers?"
He blinked.
"But I am raising fo..."
He looked down at his hand.
The world tilted.
His four fingers were no longer four. They were — merging. Not in the way of something stuck together with pressure or glue, but integrating, the boundaries between them dissolving smoothly, quietly, as though they had never existed.
His hand, his perfectly ordinary hand, now appeared to have always had three fingers in total — thumb included.
As if it had always been that way.
As if he was only noticing it now.
His instincts detonated.
His face went through several expressions simultaneously. He grabbed at the hammock chair, trying to get off it and away and somewhere with more distance between himself and — whatever this was — but the hammock, which had been a comfortable enough seat moments ago, turned against him entirely.
It swung wide and hard as he lurched, fighting him at every angle, his tea threatening to leave the cup entirely.
Then he heard it... a giggle.
Bright, clear, and completely unrepentant.
A crisp snap of fingers followed it. The sound he had heard several times by now.
The spilled tea reversed itself, floating back up from the air and settling cleanly into the cup. The hammock stopped its wild swinging.
Aaron’s fingers — his fingers — returned to their correct and original number, the extra ones re-emerging as if they’d simply stepped back in from wherever they’d been.
One blink, and everything was exactly as it had always been.
He sat very still for a moment.
’Am I high? Is the tea narcotic? Did touching Alyssa do something to me?’
The giggle came again, quieter this time. The empress had raised one hand to cover her mouth, the picture of restrained amusement, like a noblewoman remembering her manners half a second too late.
"My bad, my bad." She lowered her hand and settled it back onto the armrest with practiced composure.
"Your playful comment amused me, so I thought I’d try a joke of my own." A small, dignified cough. "Clearly, only one of us found it landed correctly. Call it a difference in humour, I suppose?"
Aaron looked at her bandana, wanting to make eye contact, but unfortunately this was the best he got.
He looked at it for a long moment.
What he wanted to say was: ’Woman, I nearly had a cardiac event. My fingers were merging into each other. You call that a joke? A DIFFERENCE IN HUMOUR?’
What he actually said, in a voice that was only approximately steady:
"I’m glad to serve as the practical demonstration of our differences in humour." He paused. "Perhaps we keep things a little more serious and professional from this point on."
Half serious.
Half — despite everything — genuinely amused.