"I still can't believe they stuck me out in the sticks." Shouko grumbled as she swept the floors of the shrine she was forced to call home. She moved outside to take care of the leaves outside, sizing up the shrine. It wasn't ugly, at least. And while it was small and humble, it was at least easy to clean, with only a small front yard at the top of the steps leading to it, the main room for placing offering and praying, her bedroom, a kitchen, and a couple of storage spaces.
Small, reasonably sized for the modestly populated village it served, and easy for a single person to live in. And that turned out to be a good thing, because she was the only one working there! There wasn't even a single monk, and Shouko had found out when she first arrived that nobody had worked here for years before she came! When Shouko had finished her miko training, she had dreamed of being sent to a large, glamorous temple in a big city, with dozens of shrine maidens like her and a grand amount of ceremony.
Instead, she had discovered that those grand temples had more than enough shrine maidens, and that she was instead going to be sent to the quiet village of Kunohe out in the middle of nowhere not even half the size of her home town to serve one of the local shrines. Shouko begrudgingly admitted that somebody had to do it, but she certainly didn't want it to be her!
"And who cares about showing this off to a bunch of farmers?" Shouko continued to complain to nobody in particular, tugging the chest of her loose red and white miko uniform. She had been looking forward to wearing it after graduating so much, and the villagers weren't even impressed. All they had done was give her a friendly smile and give her variations of "So you're the new miko? Good luck!" every time she walked past. She could have tolerated the excessive friendliness if they weren't treating her like a child, even the women said it was awfully mature of her to be performing such a duty on her own when she was only as old as their daughters. Shouko was particularly sensitive over being compared to daughters who were sixteen years old at best, sometimes even younger. She was almost eighteen, she was practically an adult!
Of course, her short stature and skinny figure didn't help. Shouko was short even for a girl of her age with the standard short and youthful haircut of an apprentice miko, so it was particularly easy for the tall and well-muscled farmers to pat her on the head and send her on the way, even if she fumed every time they did it, not realising her cute reaction only made doing it more appealing. Perhaps if she had more chest she'd look more mature, she thought to herself with a quick peak at the washboard underneath the uniform. But of course, her treatment by the villagers, her being in the middle of nowhere, that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was...
"So you're the new miko? Sweeping so early in the morning? That must be hard for such a young girl."
Shouko sighed. This was exactly what she was talking abou... wait, there was somebody there! Shouko nearly jumped as she spun around, bowing as quickly as possible before she even got a proper look at the man who had arrived. Shabby shrine or not, she intended to do a proper job.
"W-welcome!" She stuttered, blushing and verbally assaulting herself internally. The frustratingly friendly man simply laughed, and Shouko raised her head reluctantly.
"Don't mind me, I'm just here for my usual offering." The man said, gesturing towards the small basket he was holding.
"O-oh, right, go ahead." Shouko said, awkwardly stepping out of the way. She had seen this man before, although she had never greeted him until now. This was her fourth day on the job, and this man always showed up first thing in the morning, deposited some food as an offering to the goddess, then left. Others would show up later in the morning or after the day's work was done, but this man was always the first she saw. He was middle-aged and balding, but had a youthful cheerfulness to him and a body tanned and honed by years of labouring at his farm.
"Hey, don't you think that's a little much?" Shouko said, leaning over his shoulder as he placed a bowl of rice on the altar, looking like it was good enough to be somebody's breakfast, perhaps leftovers judging by the egg in it. It was a waste of perfectly good food to be used as a mere offering, if you asked her.
"It's fine, I've had a good harvest and plenty of food to go around." The man smiled, despite Shouko's apprehensiveness. "I'm sure the goddess will appreciate it." He added, and Shouko struggled to keep a straight face.
"Yes, I'm sure she will, Mr..." Shouko said with a frozen face, bowing to him and realising she hadn't gotten his name.
"Inagi." He said, waving her goodbye and walking out of the small hall. "Don't forget it, we'll probably be seeing each other quite often, miss miko!"
Shouko broke her bow and sighed, watching his balding head slowly disappear down the steps. If only he knew, he might be more hesitant to throw away his food, Shouko thought to herself as she brought herself back to the worst part of her situation. It was a waste of perfectly good food because unbeknownst to the less spiritually-inclined villagers, there was no goddess residing in this shrine at all! From the moment Shouko had walked in there was not a hint of godly presence, not even a hint of any sort of spirit hanging around and accepting offerings. To be brutally honest, what Shouko was doing was a complete sham!
They had been gone for years by Shouko's guess, and that was probably why there was nobody at this shrine before she had been assigned to it. According to the villagers they hadn't even bothered giving offerings with nobody working there, although they were resuming now that Shouko was living in it, perhaps out of pity and to give her something to do. Shouko couldn't bring herself to break it to them, and had very little hope for being reassigned if she told the monk who had sent her here about it. She knew that he would just recite to her the fable of the monk who served a vacant shrine for sixty years before a passing god noticed his dedication and became its resident god, and would probably tell her to follow in his footsteps.
And so Shouko kept up the farce, deciding it would be far too embarrassing to admit that she was a miko serving absolutely nobody. At least everybody else would think she had a purpose if she didn't tell them, otherwise she was just a glorified janitor for the shrine, perhaps doing the occasional divination and offering spiritual advice. She didn't think that villagers had much use for more than the odd prediction of rain and somebody like her was expected to increase their power via servitude to a local god, so she was still half-baked anyway.
With nothing better to do but silently mope, Shouko watched the morning drag by with increasing despair as she realised she had run out of food for breakfast, but couldn't abandon her post at this time of the day. She began to look at Inagi's offering enviously, her stomach growling in protest of the wasted rice. This jealousy grew as a few other villagers arrived, giving offerings of scraps the odd gnarled vegetable that looked like a perfectly good meal to the starving shrine maiden.
Trying to ignore her protesting stomach as the last regular for the morning left, Shouko asked herself a perfectly good question: what was she supposed to do with these offerings anyway? It had never been her job to deal with them, as far as she knew they took care of themselves and the person who offered it would return to reclaim their bowls or plates the next day. Did those in charge of the shrine take it for themselves? Was the god expected to eat it? Unsure of whether or not it was a faux pas to take it for herself, Shouko ahd watched several days worth of offering rot and need to be thrown out, and it felt like an even bigger waste knowing that the offering wasn't even being given to anybody. She wondered why such a vital piece of knowledge was missing from her mind. Had she slept through too many early-morning classes?
Shouko was wondering if she should ask the villagers to donate something besides food when her stomach growled louder than ever, and she decided she didn't care anymore. That was perfectly good food going to waste, and she'd be damned if she continued to let it be wasted on a non-existent goddess. Shouko grabbed the offerings and dumped it on the kitchen table, grabbing her chopsticks and digging in in a distinctly unladylike fashion. She was surprised to find that it added up to a very decent breakfast, and her hunger was completely sated by the time she was done.
She placed Inagi's bowl back on the altar, deciding from now on this would be her disposal method for the offerings. If any god decided to show up they could have the first claim to them, but until then she would consider it payment for her services as a miko. She mentally calculated how many offerings the shrine was given at morning, midday, and in the afternoon, and that added up to a decent breakfast and dinner. And if the other villagers joined in their offerings...
Shouko almost laughed to herself at what she was doing. It was probably incredibly irresponsible for a simple miko, but who was here to stop her? That was her payment for being forced to live out here on top of the modest pay she received for living expenses and shrine maintenance. And besides, it was a victimless crime. What was the worst that could happen?
--
Shouko hummed to herself as she swept the yard free of the leaves that had dropped overnight. It had been a year since she was reluctantly sent to work in Kunohe, and eventually she had worked through the disappointment and gotten used to her life as the sole miko of the sleepy village, keeping the shrine clean and occasionally helping the villarges out when she could. It wasn't much, as her talents at divination and other supernatural arts were weak and often unhelpful, but she still tried her best. She hadn't gotten any taller and the villagers still treated her like a child, but at least she had gotten used to it and took it in stride. The morning sun grew high as the unchanging part of her daily routine reached the top of the steps, Shouko giving a friendly smile to her most regular visitor: the middle-aged Inagi.
"Good morning, Mr Inagi." She said with a smooth bow and a smile that had been missing from her first days as a proper miko. "Has life been treating you well?"
"About the same as yesterday, I'd say. The harvest is still going well this year, much better than last year." Inagi said with his usual kind look, walking up to the altar and placing his usual rice offering.
"It looks like the miko life has been treating you quite well indeed!" He noted with a grin, Shouko flushing as red as the bottom half of her uniform. She hadn't grown taller in a year, but that didn't mean she hadn't gotten bigger. Eating the shrine's offering had been an easy supplement to her diet in addition to the breakfasts, lunches, and dinner she made for herself when she started, but as time went on and more and more villagers made small offerings, the amount of food being offered rose little by little until Shouko eventually found herself eating enough for two or three people, and it had had an obvious effect on her figure.
In her embarrassment Shouko's hands moved automatically to the sash around her belly, an obvious gut that was visible even through the thick fabric of her uniform. Bloated by her generous diet, Shouko's sash was loosened as far as it could go and still held her snugly, and was was forced to admit that she was going to need to get it in a bigger size. Even if her rounded belly wasn't obvious through her outfit and her body wasn't noticeably wider, her face had softened to match, and her cute face was accentuated by a layer of fat that gave her a rounded face and chubby cheeks. While the extra weight didnt' bother Shouko too much, she was quite unhappy with just how little of it had gone into her chest. She had upgraded from flat to petite, but not much more than that. She had intially hoped that it would make her look more mature, but a year had passed and that hope was cruelly dashed against the waves of reality.
"Say, do you think you could answer a question for me, Shouko?" Inagi asked casually, Shouko's flush fading as she listened attentively. "I've always wondered..." he said slowly and giving Shouko a knowing look. "Where do these offerings go, anyway?"
Shouko's face froze and her mind raced faster than she had thought it was capable of. Her first thoughts were the most obvious: did he know? Shouko's weight gain was obvious to the world, and it didn't take a genius to figure out where she was getting enough food to fuel it. But maybe he was actually innocent, and it was an ordinary question. If that was the case, what would she say? Would she be a laughing stock if she admitted it? Was she already a laughing stock? Inagi's offerings seemed to have been getting bigger recently, after all. Did she only think that where the offerings went was a mystery to them all, and she was only tricking herself?
"They..." Shouko said, forced to say something, and her lips moved before her mind completely caught up. "The goddess eats them!"
"The goddess?" Inagi asked as Shouko screamed at herself inside. Now it was too late to back out!
"Yes, the goddess!" Shouko continued, attempting to sound like she knew what she was talking about. "Why else do you think you'd make offerings of food to a god? Otherwise you'd just be throwing your food away!"
Shouko began to sweat bullets under her confident, self-sure expression as Inagi was silent for a moment. And then the moment passed, and he was back to his easygoing smile.
"Makes sense. Hopefully the goddess likes it enough to help with the harvest!" Inagi said cheerfully, and went on his merry way while Shouko felt like she was about to have a heart attack. Perhaps she had expected too much from the simple, trusting farmer. She tried to put the incident out of her mind and went about her day, feeling a little guilt when she ate that day's offerings but little more.
She hadn't expected anything to come of it, but Shouko couldn't help but notice that over the coming weeks, her daily offerings seemed to be getting larger. Perhaps Inagi had said something to the other villagers, because the offerings were becoming larger, more generous, and less like leftovers from breakfast or dinner. Shouko would have felt guilty were it not for the fact that the farmers were having a rather successful harvest this year, supposedly one of the biggest they had ever had after the mediocre previous year. It made sense that the villagers had more to spare for their donations, and Shouko decided that she wasn't complaining. They would go back to normal when the harvest dropped off, she figured, and continued to eat them even as they began to become larger than her own home-cooked meals...
--
"What the heck is going on out there so early in the morning?" Shouko yawned as she climbed out of bed, spotting the crowd that had formed outside of the shrine through the crack in her sliding door. In all her three years as a miko she had never seen so many people gathered up here at once, and wondered exactly what could be causing it. Over the years Shouko had become increasingly talented with her more supernatural abilities, being able to offer accurate divinations on rain, winds, and other strong weather, becoming a constant consultant for the townsfolk. She had even discovered that she had a talent for discovering fertile soil, something she hadn't even been taught back when she was a miko-in-training. But even these impressive abilities were clearly not what they were gathered here for today, otherwise they wouldn't be here so early. Whatever it was, she'd have to ask them to find out. But first, she had to get dressed.
She slipped on the white top half of her uniform then pulled up the skirt past her tree trunk-like thighs, and up past her enormous hips that were twice as broad as when she had first arrived, and then some. The top of her skirt settled just below her chest, designed to avoid digging into her truly prodigious gut as much as possible. Shouko would have been proud that her breasts had finally grown large enough to hang over the sash that barely needed tightening were it not for the fact that her belly was so big nobody would notice them anyway. Her belly stuck out as if she were pregnant, only far too wide for anybody to think it were more than a food baby.
The two folds of her fat gut were obivous as the fabric was draped over them, and no part of the bulky garment could hide the bulk of her body as she waddled out of the room. Her gut bounced, her ass jiggled, her hips rocked to and fro with each lumbering step, and although the skirt somewhat obscured her large legs, her blobby biceps were betrayed by the sleeves of her top. And crowning her obese body was Shouko's broad face adorned with a large second chin that would let anybody know exactly what kind of woman they were looking at even if she had somehow managed to hide the rest of herself. The last difference, although almost minor compared to how drastically her body had changed, was the fact that she had grown her short hair out, now reaching to her shoulders and giving her a slightly more mature look as she had desired.
This was the Shouko born from three years of gorging herself on offerings, offerings that seemed to get larger and larger as the village's harvests grew more and more bountiful with each passing year. Many attributed it to Shouko's work with the "goddess", and increased their offerings to match. And somehow Shouko had not heard anybody accuse her of stealing the offerings even once, seemingly accepting at face value that they were all going to the goddess even as Shouko went from plump to fat to outright obese. Shouko didn't know how it had happened, but as long as the harvest was good and there was more than enough food to go around, she didn't feel any reason to change the status quo any time soon.
"Miss miko!" One called as Shouko lumbered into view, the crowd starting to babble and drown each other out.
"Alright, be quiet! One at a time!" Shouko shouted authoratively with her hands on her broad hips, now commanding some respect after having somewhat come into herself as a young woman even if there were a few villagers that couldn't drop the habit of petting her on the head whenever she walked past. The crowd quickly settled down, and Shouko spoke again.
"What're you all doing here? And only one of you answer." She commanded, and the crowd briefly murmured amongst themselves, quickly electing a leader to represent themselves. One of the more respected farmers named Nakayama stepped forward, bowing in respect to Shouko despite being more than twice her age.
"We came here today for one reason!" He said loudly and clearly, the others nodding appreciatively.
"And what would that be?" Shouko said, crossing her arms. Nakayama prostrated himself, putting himself in the ultimate begging position.
"We want to know Inagi's secret!" he blurted out, with a round of agreements from the crowd.
"Quieten down!" Shouko said, shutting them down with a puzzled frown. "What? Inagi's secret?"
"For the last three years, Inagi's farm has been leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of us." Nakayama explained, the wisened farmer's expression being a mixture of frustration and envy.
"I've known him all my life, and I'm sure he's not doing anything differently from the rest of us. Therefore!" He said, pointing his finger at the oversized shrine maiden. "It must be something to do with you!"
"And what reason do you believe that? Maybe you just aren't giving him enough credit." Shouko asked skeptically.
"No, we're absolutely sure." The farmer insisted. "We all asked ourselves what he was doing differently, and this is the only conclusion that we've been able to reach! Every morning he's up here earlier than everybody, and he's been doing it longer than anybody else. Plus, he was the first to start getting unusually good harvests the year you arrived, and since then we've all been lagging behind! The men who started giving offerings later than the rest of us even said that they were the last to get similar results. Therefore, we can say with absolute certainty that you absolutely know Inagi's secret, and it has something to do with this shrine and the goddess!"
His tirade over, Nakayama stopped to catch his breath as Shouko remained stone-faced. Inagi's secret? Her being responsible for the village's prosperity? That was absolutely ridiculous, and clearly a coincidence. After all, she knew better than anybody else that there was no goddess to bring them blessings to begin with! Of course, it was years too late for her to tell the truth now, and she was as clueless as the rest of them as to why a devoted offerer like Inagi was getting better results. As far as she was concerned this was just a massive coincidence that they were overthinking.
But she couldn't just say that. She had to come up with something that would satisfy them, something that sounded just plausible enough to work, something that would make them happy and make them feel like they had made a difference...
There was a glint in Shouko's eye as she struggled to avoid smiling. It was such a naughty idea, there was no other way to put it. A self-serving idea, born of the slightly swelled ego Shouko had gotten after fooling them for all of these years. If she could get away with that, why not with this? With foolish confidence, Shouko let herself give a smile as broad as her bloated face as she gave a simple answer.
"Inagi's secret? He gives better offerings than you. Simple as that."
The crowd murmured amongst themselves, Nakayama ducking back in to hear what everybody had to say, which turned out to be roughly the same thing.
"Better offerings?" he asked, waiting for her to go on.
"The goddess likes good food just like the rest of us, and Inagi happens to be quite generous with what he gives to her on a daily basis." Shouko explained, feeling a rush at how intently they were listening to her. "She's a goddess of a farming village after all, what do you expect? You weren't giving her offerings before I arrived, were you? It's no wonder you were getting such mediocre harvests before I arrived."
The farmers once again chattered amongst themselves, loud enough for Shouko to hear that they seemed to be accepting the logic of her words. Soon Nakayama spoke up again with eager eyes.
"So if we want to beat Inagi, we just have to give the goddess more?" He said, and Shouko shook her head. She couldn't go too far overboard, after all.
"Not more offerings, just better offerings." She explained to the assembled men. "Inagi has always given the goddess something good enough to be his breakfast, good enough to make me jealous that she's the one getting it. The rest of you just give her some plain vegetables, plain rice, some leftovers at best. How can you expect to compete with offerings like that?"
"Well, that sounds simple enough to me!" Nakayama declared, turning to his followers. "Alright, men! Starting tomorrow, we're going to make Inagi's offerings look like something you'd give to the dogs!"
There was a grand cheer and the crowd quickly dispersed, thanking Shouko for giving them the "secret" of Inagi's success. A few minutes later a very confused looking Inagi came up the steps, walking up to Shouko with his usual modest offering of rice with a little extra mixed in.
"What was all that about?" He asked to Shouko, who was giggling uncontrollably, her whole body wobbling from the motion.
"N-nothing!" She wheezed, her chubby hands placed over her face not wide enough to hide her grin as she searched for her broomstick to start sweeping up the everpresent leaves.
As Shouko had instructed, the next morning she found her altar covered in meals that were indeed better than any breakfast she could have prepared for herself, with more coming at lunch and more than enough at the end of the day presented steaming hot by chefs eager to please the "goddess". Shouko ate so well that day that she didn't even need to make any food for herself, nor the next day. Nor the day after that.
By the end of the week Shouko realised that the competitive farmers weren't going to tire of the idea and slow down, but she found herself enjoying having such fine meals leagues above her own mediocre cooking far too much to discourage them. And even stranger, it seemed to be working, as the town's produce increased even faster than Shouko's expanding waistline.
Eventually, pampered and spoiled by the village's lavish cooking, Shouko became too big for her own good. She rarely made the trip down the steps to the town anymore, finding the trip up and down exhausting and too much effort when the offerings made to the shrine meant she no longer had to buy or make any food for herself. She still saw the villagers regularly as they themselves made the trip to consult her services, but she was rarely spotted beyond the tiled yard of the shrine, the most movement she did in a day being sweeping and cleaning the tiny space.
Her supernatural powers only continued to increase as her physical powers decreased, being able to provide accurate weather forecasts more than a week or two in advance, and could spot anything from a good spot for farming to where a new well should be built in an instant. Shouko was well-respected despite her lethargy, the formerly tanned girl growing pale as she spent most of her time indoors. She stopped cutting her hair, the impractical length that it grew to being deemed little trouble when she spent most of her days lounging and eating.
Living an easy life full of respect and good food, the years passed by without giving Shouko any reason to believe they would change, until one fateful day...
--
Shouko awoke to the usual sounds of the early morning air, yawning and stretching back as she prepared for one of the most physically strenuous times of the day: getting out of bed. Shouko reached for her bedcovers but found thin air, looking down curiously to find the pure white of her uniform keeping her warm instead.
"Oh right, I forgot to get undressed..." She mumbled, feeling particularly drowsy this morning. Last night she had been unusually tired, and had fallen into bed fully clothed. She really had to not do that, it was awfully immature for a twenty-five year old woman to be doing. She pulled herself upright with a grunt, her incredibly long hair not being lifted above the ground until she was standing fully upright. Shouko yawned again and scratched the end of her belly with difficulty, her sash now pulled tight in an attempt to keep her gut under control. It wasn't enough to stop it from sagging down past her waist, but at least she could reach the end of it. She gave it an appreciative pat for its years of hard work as she opened the sliding door wide enough for the impossibly broad woman to pass through, ready for her morning routine that hadn't changed even after all these years.
And as she expected, there was Inagi, balder every year but no less friendly and no less dutiful in offering an extra big bowl of rice to the shrine's resident goddess. At this point Shouko had to thank whoever the original goddess had been for leaving, if she had stuck around there was no way Shouko ever would have ended up with such a lavish lifestyle!
"Good morning, Inagi." She said with her usual cheer as Inagi put his offering down before the altar. She waited for his usual reply, but unusually received nothing.
"I said good morning, Inagi!" she repeated, to no response. "Are you going deaf as well as bald?" She teased loudly, but still he failed to respond.
"Hey, Inagi, this isn't funny." She said with slight concern as he turned and seemed to look right past her. "Did something happen? Hey, listen to me!"
Shouko almost shouted at him as he began to walk towards her with an unsettlingly normal expression, and she reached out to grab him when to her shock her hands completely passed through him!
"W-what? What is this?" Shouko said with a trembling voice, chasing after Inagi, yelling and grabbing desperately at him to no effect. She couldn't touch him, and he didn't seem to be able to hear or see her.
"This is bad, this is really bad..." Shouko said, almost in tears as she realised what this meant. She must be dead! There was no other explanation, she had died and her spirit lingered on!
"Which means my body must be..." Shouko gasped, and ran back into the shrine as fast as her obese body would let her. For some reason she could still move the doors of the shrine, but didn't seem to be able to influence any of the other furniture beyond sitting on them. She rushed to her bedroom, but found no corpse waiting for her, which only worried her further.
"What happened to me? Was I murdered? Where's my body!? My body must be dumped out in the woods somewhere!" Shouko began to wail, imagining all number of horrible things that could've happened to her since last night.
"You're not dead, you silly girl. Calm down!"
Shouko stopped, a female voice calling out to her. She turned in its direction with her eyes full of tears, and found a woman standing in the doorway of her shrine, her arms crossed. It was a tall and mature woman with long done-up hair and an otherworldy beauty to her, but her most noticeable feature was the fact that she was enormous pregnant, with a bust even bigger than Shouko's fat-swollen breasts on display in an beautiful kimono with an open chest, Shouko unable to avoid being envious of the head-sized mammaries despite her situation.
"Then what happened to me? Who are you?" Shouko demanded with a sniffle, desperate for answers.
"You finally ascended, that's what happened to you. And it took you long enough." The woman said, showing little sympathy for Shouko's confusion.
"Ascended? To what?" Shouko was more confused than before.
"To godhood, obviously." The woman said like it was nothing.
"What? Godhood? I'm a goddess?" The apparent goddess said, looking around herself for some obvious sign of it.
"And not a very clever one, with the way you went about it. Is your brain made of blubber too?" The woman continued to say in her unconcerned tone, which was starting to irritate Shouko.
"Alright, just who are you? Just how did I become a goddess, if I really am one? Tell me exactly what is happening to me!" Shouko demanded. The woman sighed, cradling her large belly.
"I suppose I should introduce myself. I'm Natsue, or at least that was my name when I was human. It'll be good enough for now."
"You're a goddess?" Shouko asked dumbly, being very unprepared for actual divinity after having never seen a god in her life.
"Yes, of fertility as you may be able to tell." Natsue gestured to her belly. "I've been keeping an eye on this town ever since the old goddess left, although I've been keeper a closer eye since you showed up."
"Hang on, you knew the old goddess?" Shouko interjected.
"Yes, but she wasn't born a human like us." Natsue explained as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Which, Shouko now realised, it probably was. "She got tired of "being out in the sticks". She wanted a big, glamorous temple with lots of shrine maidens and worshippers with elaborate ceremonies and all of that sort of thing, so she packed up and left. I kept an eye on the place to make sure it stayed out of trouble, and then you came in and ended up setting yourself on the path to godhood."
"You say that, but just how did I become a goddess? It's not like it was gradual, it just happened overnight!" Shouko asked, desperate for an explanation. Natsue gave a deep laugh, a rather refined one that Shouko felt befitted a goddess even if she was the one being laughed at.
"Not gradual? It's been happening practically since you got here!" Natsue said when she finally stopped laughing. "You didn't think that the farms started doing so well on their own, did you? Even as they started producing, three, maybe four times as much as they used to?"
"That was me?" Shouko's said dumbly, the poor girl unable to process so many revelations so quickly.
"Who else could it have been? It was just a little at first, but then you sped it up on two different occasions. If you hadn't done that it might've taken ten, maybe twenty years longer. I can see you don't seem to understand." said Natsue with a smirk. "Allow me to explain, but only since you look adorable when you're confused. And it's not like your body changed just now, let me just say that. For one thing, you're more beautiful than you really should be at that weight."
Shouko was about to get indignant, then realised that Natsue was right. She didn't have a hint of celluite on her body, and despite her obesity her body was all smooth idealised curves, as idealised as rolls of fat could get. Her pale skin didn't look sickly, and her fat face and second chin looked smooth and almost complimented her looks, rather than blobby or detracting from her natural looks. Her hair had also taken to being so long abnormally well, when Shouko had always kept it short not just out of it being part of the standard miko appearance, but because she had never liked it it looked when she grew it out before when she was younger.
"It all started when you started taking those offerings." Natsue continued. "Even if there was no god to receive them, the intent was there, and a god draws strength from those who believe in it. You had strong spiritual power to begin with, even if you didn't seem to be able to consciously use it, so you took those offerings and those wishes that came with them and granted them. Not a huge amount, but enough."
"That did a little, but wouldn't have led to godhood if it wasn't for the time that you told that Inagi man that it wasn't you who was fattening themselves up on the offerings, but that goddess who you knew didn't exist."
"But why would that-" Shouko started and was swiftly cut off.
"I'm not done explaining." Natsue said, closing in quickly and placing a long-nailed finger on Shouko's lips. She continued.
"By saying that the goddess was the one eating them, you effectively put yourself in the place of the goddess. This greatly increased your spiritual power, and as you blew up like a balloon you began to represent in both body and mind the bounty that these fortunate farmers were being granted. Now before you ask, this wouldn't happen to just anybody, you're a rather special case. Otherwise any old cult leader could become a god, and that'd be a complete mess. Now here's the part that really cemented it: when you pulled that ridiculous stunt and got them to cook for you. I can't believe you did that!"
"You were there?" Shouko said helplessly as Natsue laughed at her, flushing bright red as years of embarrassment suddenly piled up.
"I was, I had to keep an eye on a goddess in the making, after all." Natsue explained. "So not only did you put yourself in the place of the goddess, you convinced them that the more faith they put in you, and the more devoted they were, the more they would be rewarded. This greatly sped up the process, and it's why you've been living like a queen since then. Even if they didn't realise it, people have been worshipping you, and those special abilities you've been showing only made it worse."
"So that brings us to now." Natsue concluded as Shouko continued to take it all in. "This all built up and up, until finally you completely ascended, and here we are. Any questions?"
"How was I helping them if I didn't even know it?" Shouko asked.
"You've been using your powers subconsciously. You'll probably continue to do that, but you should gain more control of it over time."
"I'm really a goddess?" Shouko said once again in a small voice.
"Yes dear, you are." Natsue said with yet another sigh. "You'd better get used to it, because it's not changing, even if everybody stopped worshipping you. That's the good thing about immortality, you won't be going away any time soon."
"What'll happen if they stop?"
"You'll get a lot skinnier, presumably. It sounds like a good thing to me, but what do I know, fertility is my domain, not bounty."
"I'll never get to talk to anybody ever again?" Shouko said, starting to tear up and looking utterly heartbroken as the reality of her situation began to sink in. The seemingly unsympathetic Natsue broke her cold facade, bringing the short but enormous goddess into the best hug she could manage between the two's respective bulks.
"It'll be alright. It seems bad now, but it'll all be alright." Natsue said, sounding very motherly as Shouko began to sob in her arms.
When Shouko eventually calmed down, wiping her eyes and looking a little braver, she was the one to talk first.
"A goddess? Can't be that hard. It's not that different from what I was doing before, right?" The fledgling goddess said with all of the confident she could muster.
"That's the spirit." the fetility goddess said encouragingly. "While your contact with the human world is limited, there are plenty of gods in the world. You won't be lonely, I promise."
"Hang on, where are you going?" Shouko said as Natsue turned and began to leave.
"I think you need a little time to yourself to get used to this. I'll be back later." Natsue paused in the doorway. "Oh, and a little advice. Don't go crazy with your new powers! Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should, if you try to help too much it's only going to make things worse in the long run. Just let things go the way they are right now until you get used to being a proper goddess. Trust me, when I first became a goddess I used my powers just because I could and there was nearly an overpopulation crisis."
And with that, before Shouko could stop her Natsue vanished, disappearing the moment she stepped out of the doorway and leaving the fat goddess to her thoughts. Shouko wandered into the main room of the shrine, sitting down next to the altar. A goddess, huh? It really was a crazy situation. But then again, her whole life after coming here had been odd. The fact that she could no longer interact with the villagers in any way had left her with a deep and sore pain in her chest, but she had resolved to serve them as best she could even if she was no longer a physical part of their lives.
And plus, this situation finally gave her the answer to a question she had been asking for years. Shouko looked carefully at Inagi's bowl of rice, reaching out slowly to it. She confirmed that her divine digits could in fact pick up the bowl, then pick up the rice, then put it in her divine mouth and send it directly to her divine stomach. It was certainly a roundabout answer to a mystery. And it meant that those offerings weren't going to go to waste after all.
Shouko put the bowl down and saw another one of her followers making their way up the stairs, the smell of their offering wafting on the wind. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad after all.