Although Liesar beheld the pulsating and cartilage-like heart of Spiderland, the goat god did not proceed any further with his strike while in front of the young Ameen above the generating desert.

  "Are you starting to come around Spiderland?" Ameen asked. "I heard everything you said."

  Despite the predicament Spiderland found verself in, ve was as stolid as Liesar was. "What do you mean?"

  "Do you know what kept the wealthy in check back in my time? When I was a mortal?" Ameen asked. "Back when I lived as Muhammad?"

  "Tell me," Spiderland insisted. "Clearly I don't have a choice in the matter."

  "Religion," Ameen said. "The human race does not care about truth, they only like to pretend to care about it... so we must do it all over again. We can do an inquisition of the rich and those that put them on a pedestal. The book can be a banner for those that see what must be done to secure any kind of future. This is not the solution, this is just a matter of securing survival. Clearly the Bible and the Quran are not doing the job anymore, and showing the truth to human beings simply makes them double down in their wrongness, so rallying and inquisition are the only ways out. Of course, the new book will eventually fail too and be used to manipulate the population once more, but the cycle must repeat itself again. Who knows, maybe in the year four-thousand we will finally have robust educational systems where we do not need to create religions anymore."

  "Are you referring to the existing one's reality or ours?" Spiderland asked even though ve already knew the answer.

  "Both of course," Ameen answered, finally cracking a smile. "We are in the future of the existing one's story."

  Spiderland paused for a moment. "Now that I hear it coming out of your mouth, the idea sounds less appealing."

  "I took what you said to the existing one to its natural conclusion," Ameen said. "All the people that agree that there are indisputable truths can form another book club around this. Who knows, maybe will erect new buildings in service to the new book clubs like they did in the past. For example... climate change is a factual reality, those that want to argue about it, they shall be stoned to death. If they deny either the Jewish or the Palestinian holocaust, then that individual shall be stoned to death too. Those that deny health care of homosexual individuals who want to change their—"

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  "Shut it," Spiderland commanded, getting Ameen to laugh. Liesar's entire black sleeve was drenched in translucent blood at this point.

  "Why?" Ameen asked insincerely.

  "I know what you've done to eunuchs," Spiderland said. "You don't get to pretend to care about them."

  Another night breeze passed the three beings by the inflamed shrub, Ameen looking away from Spiderland to observe the tall hoodoos and the new moon. "I had to do what had to be done."

  "So the ends justify the means?" Spiderland asked cheekily.

  "You must be referring to my life as Ameen... and the lives I reincarnated as imams and priests," Ameen replied. "Indeed, after my first death, I realized the writers of the Quran made a mistake regarding their interpretation of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, which was based on a deliberate mistranslation of the Bible to persecute homosexuals. Sodom and Gomorrah was actually a condemnation of the copulation between humans and angels, however... those homosexuals that deny their own nature made such perfect footsoldiers. They can be so easily controlled, and I did not want to give that power away."

  Spiderland's bone and sleek helmet tilted lower. "So you went along with it... despite the lies. I guess you don't care about the truth either."

  Ameen shrugged.

  "Maybe you're the reason the existing one wants to stay in between the lines," Spiderland said. "I can see the thousands of ways this can go wrong if you get to be any kind of authority again in the existing one's reality."

  "So no compromises then?" Ameen asked. "I guess you don't see how dire the circumstances of the existing one's world is? This is the reason we exist. We are going to be the ones to resolve it. We can be the reason every billionaire's head ends up on a pike. We can be the new God of the next two thousand years."

  The blood made it harder to spot, but even when Liesar noticed it, it was too late to do anything about the heart strings that split apart and wrapped Liesar's body beneath his robes. Before he could even lift his left arm to cast a spell, not only did half his torso blossom into flesh and burst arteries, but Spiderland's translucent flesh strings became a lance that pierced teenage Ameen's heart, almost as if Spiderland wanted to say heart for a heart instead of eye for an eye.

  However, piercing where Ameen's heart was supposed to be would not prove to do much, because the piercing attack brought out wires, sparks, and broken metal.