Hello. I was a goddess—the Moon God, specifically.
I was a high-ranking deity, though really, I was just one of many tasked with managing a single world. Perhaps I should have said "one pillar." That was the proper way to count gods, after all, though it always felt a bit pretentious to refer to myself that way. I was simply content to have the leisure to ponder such trivialities.
The truth was that until quite recently, the world under our management had been in a state of absolute crisis. The extinction of all life was a certainty. As for the total collapse of the world itself, the odds were about fifty-fifty. We had been using the vast majority of our divine power to prepare for a eventual reconstruction—or rather, a regeneration—in the event that the physical world survived.
To put it bluntly, we had given up.
No matter how hard we struggled, the situation remained impossible. I had predicted the future tens of thousands of times, but every single path led to failure. Every move we made turned out to be the wrong one. I was left lamenting my own helplessness, able only to watch the end approach.
It was then that a Higher God—one who managed multiple worlds—intervened and threw a certain individual into our world. They did so without any prior notice. It was a complete and utter overstepping of their authority.
Naturally, my first instinct was to wonder if this was a declaration of war. Just because they were a Higher God, they shouldn't have assumed I would simply back down. I began making preparations for a divine conflict, but then information arrived secretly from the other side.
They claimed that the one who had actually sent the individual was a god even higher than the Higher God. I scoffed at that. I didn't care who it was; if they were going to interfere with my territory, they deserved to be struck down.
Then I heard the name. "The one who did it was the Highest Creator God."
I immediately lost my nerve. It was impossible. Even if I was of the lineage of that Creator God's wife, I couldn't hope to win. We were on entirely different dimensions of existence. The power gap was so vast that I would have been erased by a single breath from him. He wouldn't have even registered me as an opponent.
All I could do was report the matter to the gods above me—specifically, the ones who were actually capable of punching the Creator God. I asked them to hit him on my behalf. A kick was also acceptable. I requested they give him a solid thwack whenever he was off-guard.
After filing that report, I spent the next twenty years sleeping in a sulk. When I finally woke up, I was stunned. The world’s crisis had been averted.
How was it possible to achieve such a thing in a mere twenty years? I immediately checked the records of the recent past. As the Moon God, time fell under my jurisdiction, so peering into the past was simple work.
The cause was that man sent by the Creator God. It wasn't that he had acted with the intent to save the world; he simply went about his life, yet he was intimately involved in every major transformation the world had undergone.
I wondered if the Creator God had sent him specifically for that purpose. Just as the thought crossed my mind, two letters arrived. The first was from the Highest God of Agriculture.
"I kicked him," it said.
I was grateful for that, though it left me in a bit of a bind. If the Creator God was the one who saved my world, then what of the second letter? It was from the Highest Creator God himself.
"It hurt," he wrote.
I decided to pretend I had never seen that. For the sake of my own mental stability, it was better that way. Still, I made sure to maintain a sense of gratitude toward him for sending that man.
With that settled, it was time for work. I had to process all the tasks that had piled up while I was sleeping. Just because the world had avoided destruction didn't mean everything would be easy. Countless hardships awaited in the future, and my role was to observe that future and move to avoid the truly hopeless calamities.
I assumed there wouldn't be any more of those, at least.
However, I started to wonder if the world we managed was cursed. It was supposed to be a reasonably important world that influenced many others, yet the disasters never seemed to end. Still, I refused to lose. I would do my best. I would downgrade world-scale catastrophes into regional disasters and reduce great wars to medium-sized skirmishes.
The earthquake scheduled for a hundred years from now was outside my jurisdiction, so I tossed that to the God of the Earth. The flood in five hundred years was also out of my hands, so I threw it to the Ocean God. They complained that they were already spread thin due to a lack of faith, but I was in the same boat.
Then I noticed an asteroid on a direct collision course three thousand years in the future! That would have wiped out almost all life. That was something I could handle. I arranged for a volcano to erupt on one of the moons, scattering volcanic bombs to shift the asteroid's trajectory before it ever reached the planet. It was a good thing I discovered it early.
I refused to be defeated by destiny. A god never gave up. While the sheer volume of work made me want to quit sometimes, it was a breeze compared to the despair I had felt before. I could afford to take things slow.
Suddenly, an alarm went off. When I checked the source, I was shocked. The Age of Gods Dragon Race was roaring in unison.
To explain, while gods watched the world from the heavens, the Age of Gods Dragon Race were the guardians who watched from the earth. Their collective roar was an emergency signal—a red alert to the gods. It essentially meant: "We failed. The world is ending, so the rest is up to you."
I rushed to see what catastrophe had occurred, only to find... a wedding.
I didn't even know the Age of Gods Dragon Race had the concept of weddings. More importantly, it was strictly forbidden for them to roar together. That was an ancient rule they had requested themselves. They wanted a way to contact the gods as a last resort during the apocalypse. To prevent false alarms, they had even agreed not to gather in large groups. They had laughed and said it was fine because it was rare for ten of them to be in the same place. So why were there so many of them now?
Ah, I remembered. To further prevent false alarms, they had begged for the ability to take human form, claiming that as long as they were human, there would be no issue. And yet, there they were, in their full dragon forms, roaring their heads off for a wedding! They were absolute idiots.
Regardless, I had to fix it. This was a false alarm. The world wasn't ending. However, even a false alarm was a massive blunder on our part. I called my fellow gods to find the one responsible for handling the situation.
Apparently, it was me. Why? Was it because I had more faith than the others? It seemed everyone else had even less. I couldn't believe it. Resistance was futile, so I accepted the responsibility. Using my abilities to the fullest, I searched for a way to recover.
I decided to treat the alarm as a training exercise. I would manifest words of blessing for the wedding and claim we were simultaneously conducting communication drills. It was the best move available. If the Higher Gods complained, I would just blame it on the Creator God's interference. Since the man he sent was involved in the wedding, I could make the excuse work.
I wasn't good at formal speeches, but I refused to back down. As for the Mixed-Generation Dragon getting married... I told them to do their best. Or rather, I told them we would both do our best.
I poured everything into that blessing. Now, all that remained was to settle the chaos over here.
"Moon God, this is bad," one of my subordinates said. "The Beast of the End woke up because of that alarm."
"He thinks it's his turn and he's already warming up," another added. "He won't listen even when we tell him it was a false alarm. Could you please handle this?"
I had one thing to say to them: "Stop calling my pet the 'Beast of the End'! He just has a bad temper when he wakes up. He's a perfectly normal chihuahua!"
"Normal chihuahuas don't grow to that size! Can't you hear that heavy, low-frequency sound he's making?"
He was just lonely. If I sang a lullaby, Serion—that was his name—would go back to sleep. I agreed to take care of it, but first, I ordered them to gather the idiots who had been communicating with the Age of Gods Dragon Race.
They tried to act confused, but they couldn't deceive me. They had been in contact with the dragons several times over the winter. As it turned out, the cause of the false alarm was a group of fools. The Age of Gods Dragon Race were ridiculous for relying on a god to consult about Mahjong discards, but the gods who actually responded were just as bad.
One of them had told a dragon that since the 3-Character and 5-Character tiles had been discarded in succession, the 1-Character tile was safe to play. You were supposed to judge such things based on your opponent’s Mahjong skill! I had told them repeatedly that reading based solely on discards was dangerous.
I decided that once I put Serion to bed, I was going to play Mahjong myself. My work was done for the day. They often said I was a fan of the game despite being terrible at it, but I was determined to win this time. I would keep playing until I won, and that would count as a victory.