It had been four years.
Sun sat in a wooden chair by the window. He was someone who had once governed a divine concept and now had to wait for his legs to reach the floor when he sat down.
Four years since the seed. Four years since he had opened his eyes in a body that was small, loud, and apparently found the absence of milk deeply offensive.
He adapted.
Mostly.
The chair was uncomfortable. The cushion was too thin. He had been sitting in it for three hours.
His spine had opinions about this. He noted them and continued sitting.
Across the room, his mother moved between the kitchen and the table wearing slippers.
She was D-rank. Her skin could deflect a blade without bruising. Her feet had not required protection from anything in years.
And yet, slippers.
Every day. Indoors.
With the commitment of someone performing a ritual whose original purpose had been forgotten by everyone, including the person performing it.
He asked her about it once.
She looked at him the way she often did, with the particular warmth of someone who found him strange but loved him anyway, and said it was just what you did indoors.
Just what you did.
Sun had briefly considered whether the slippers were a form of indoor armor.
If so, they were strategically unsound. They protected only the feet, leaving the rest of the body completely exposed.
Mortals had a remarkable ability to focus their energy on the least important part of any problem.
He turned this over carefully.
Not the slippers.
The answer.
Outside the window, uncle Julius was speaking to the woman from the house next door.
She was nodding in the way people nodded when they wanted a conversation to end. Julius was interpreting this as encouragement.
He has been interpreting it as encouragement for four months.
The woman had started using her back door to avoid passing the front fence.
Julius interpreted this as coincidence.
Sun has briefly considered explaining the situation to him.
He decided against it.
Observational studies required minimal interference.
Sun watched through the window with the expression of someone who had witnessed the collapse of civilizations and found this somehow more difficult to explain.
He had heard mortals say that everything happens for a reason.
He had spent a long time thinking about that statement. He still had not identified the reason his parents made strange noises at three in the morning.
The noises suggested either ritual combat or some form of cooperative exercise.
Neither explanation had been confirmed. This bothered him more than he expected.
Upstairs, his father was thanking the God of Light for the promotion he had received that morning.
Sun could hear the genuine gratitude behind it. The tone of a man who truly believed that something vast and luminous cared personally about his career.
The strange part was that his father was not pretending.
He genuinely believed the God of Light had personally involved himself in the staffing decisions of a D-rank household on the tenth floor.
Last month, when the promotion had not come, his father had said nothing to the God of Light at all.
Sun thought about this.
The God of Light receiving credit for the outcome of his own mechanism. Excused from the failures of the same mechanism. The logic was so circular that no one could see the flaw in it anymore. It had been repeated so many times it felt natural. It had become common sense.
That was how these things worked, Sun had observed.
You stopped questioning them not because they became true, but because questioning them started to feel unnecessary.
His father also gambled.
He had gambled every week for as long as Sun had been observing him.
He had not won once.
He continued anyway, with a system. Calculations written in a small notebook, lucky tokens arranged in a specific order before each game, a ritual that looked like strategy and produced consistent losses.
Sun had reviewed the calculations once.
They were made almost entirely of optimism.
Last week he had lost three months of savings.
He blamed the dealer.
This morning he had thanked the God of Light.
Sun had spent three thousand years governing a divine concept and had encountered many things.
The ability to apply completely different explanations to identical situations depending on which one felt more comfortable was, he had found, the most consistent thing about mortals.
Not desire.
Not fear.
Not ambition.
This.
They called it common sense.
He supposed the common part was accurate.
Outside the window Julius was still talking.
Sun watched the woman's gaze drift to a point roughly fifteen degrees above Julius's left shoulder. The specific direction of someone who had mentally left the conversation while their body remained out of politeness.
Julius had not noticed.
Sun watched him for another moment, then looked down at his own hands.
Small.
Pale.
Four years old.
The seed pulsed somewhere beneath his ribs with the slow patience of something that had existed before patience had a name. He could feel it the way you feel a second heartbeat. Present. Specific. Occasionally reminding him that whatever he was now, he was not entirely what either category suggested.
Not a god.
Not quite a mortal either.
Something in the process of becoming whatever came after both.
He flexed his fingers and stood up from the chair.
Tomorrow his education would begin.
His parents had arranged a teacher. A retired climber named Instructor Kael, who specialized in preparing young children for the system merger.
Sun had overheard the conversation.
His mother was pleased.
His father thanked the God of Light.
Sun said nothing.
He simply noted the time and returned to his observations.
He was not particularly concerned about the curriculum. He was, however, already curious about the instructor.
In his experience, which was considerable, the most interesting thing about any person was not what they knew.
It was what they were absolutely certain of without knowing why.
Teachers, he had found, tended to have a great deal of that.
He picked up his chair and moved it slightly to the left so the afternoon light stopped hitting his eyes at an inconvenient angle.
Then he sat back down.
Outside, Julius had finally stopped talking.
The woman was already inside before he finished his farewell.
Sun watched the empty space where the conversation had been and noted, not for the first time, that relief looked the same regardless of the situation.
Whether a climber survived a trial or a woman escaped a four month conversation, the feeling was identical.
He filed this observation with the others.
Tomorrow he would meet the instructor.
He was already preparing his first question.
The seed pulsed beneath his ribs.
Once.
Sun paused.
That had been slightly stronger than usual.
He tilted his head and considered it with mild curiosity.
Interesting.