Divine Milking System

Chapter 426: 426 | ???

It wasn’t enough. It was never going to be enough. The System demanded constant feeding, a parasite with a spreadsheet and a countdown clock that would never stop counting no matter how many women I convinced to let me drink from them in pocket dimensions shaped like farmhouses and classrooms and luxury penthouses. Every day I extracted bought me another day. Every cup of essence consumed converted to points that converted to lifespan that converted to additional hours of existing in a world where the people I cared about kept getting hurt because of what I was.

Charles Leone was dead. A blonde-haired guild heir with perfect timing and more arrogance than talent, dead because the FGRA’s sensors failed and a professor sent ten first-year students into a Void Gate that should have killed all of them. Dante Pope was broken somewhere behind private security, his Elite Ten rank meaningless against the memory of watching his ability accomplish nothing against a creature that treated his nullification fields like a mild inconvenience. Jordan bled from both ears. Naomi’s arm had broken. Blair’s body bore burns that would require weeks of treatment she’d never sit still long enough to receive.

And I’d burned eleven days of my life to save them.

The old man in the library had called me the boy who jumps. The one element his System couldn’t design. The soul that moves before the brain finishes processing, that catches people who’d rather burn than be caught, that throws itself off cliffs and punches through monsters and refuses to accept the mathematics of inevitable death.

Twelve previous souls had optimized the System into perfection and died alone because nobody loved them enough to save them back.

I was number thirteen.

Lucky, in the most fucked up interpretation of the word available.

I pulled the System interface back up and looked at one more thing. One number I’d been avoiding since Addison left the room.

◆ DEVOTION TRACKER ◆

├─ Naomi Love: 97% (Status: YOURS)

├─ Belle Fox: 89% (Status: YOURS)

├─ Aurora Fitzgerald: 84% (Status: YOURS)

├─ Addison Baxter: 78% (Status: YOURS)

├─ Misato Ayame: 31% (Status: Complicated)

├─ Hikaru Tanaka: 12% (Status: Trust)

└─ Blair Davenport: 27% (Status: ???)

Blair Davenport at twenty-seven percent.

I stared at that number for a long time.

Twenty-seven percent. Up from three percent six weeks ago when she registered as nothing more than background radiation on my Snake Eyes scan. Twenty-seven percent from a woman who had spent the semester trying to bribe me, threaten me, sabotage my team, and convince her Diamond-tier sister to investigate my existence. Twenty-seven percent from the ice queen heiress of Davenport Industries who kissed me in a collapsed cave and told me it meant nothing while her pulse hammered against my chest fast enough to power a small generator.

The status read three question marks. Not "Yours." Not "Complicated." Not "Trust." Just three punctuation marks stacked together like even the System couldn’t figure out what the hell was happening between us.

I laughed again. Softer this time. The ribs protested less.

Twenty-seven percent. In a stone coffin under a collapsed mountain in a Void Gate that should have killed us both, Blair Davenport’s attraction to me had jumped from whatever it was before to twenty-seven percent. While her burns were still fresh. While her team was scattered across God knows how many corridors. While a creature that defied classification hunted us through canyons and caverns like we were prey animals too stupid to notice the teeth.

She’d told me it meant nothing.

She’d also told me she hated everything about me, using a voice that cracked with wanting so badly I could have reached out and touched the lie between us.

I closed the interface. The System’s blue glow faded from the room until only the hospital lights remained. The monitor beeped its steady rhythm beside me. The angry rabbit on the ceiling continued its eternal judgment of everyone who dared to look up and notice it existed at all.

Tomorrow the Gold-rank healer would arrive, courtesy of Johnathan Davenport’s generosity and whatever strategic calculation made covering my medical bills more useful than letting me die. Tomorrow I’d walk out of this hospital on functional legs and return to an academy where people whispered about the lottery kid who killed a dimensional guardian with his bare hands. Tomorrow Vale would push me harder. Cassandra would watch from whatever shadow she’d chosen. Blair would pretend the cave never happened. Naomi would hold my hand. Belle would steal another one of my shirts. Aurora would return from her gate run furious enough to burn everything in her path. Addison would show up with hair dye and three coffee jellies and opinions about everything.

Tomorrow the clock would start running again. Five days, thirteen hours, and change. Enough to survive. Never enough to stop.

But tonight. Tonight I was alive in a hospital bed in California with essence warm in my stomach and six women’s names on a devotion tracker and a water stain on the ceiling that looked like an angry rabbit and a phone full of messages from people who spent three days believing I was dead and chose to love me anyway.

I reached over and grabbed the remaining Silver-tier essence bottle from my inventory. Belle’s milk, preserved at perfect temperature by the Vault’s dimensional storage, glowing faint honey-gold in the hospital light. I uncapped it and drank. Slow. Letting the butterscotch warmth spread through my chest and settle into bones that still ached from fighting a god.

Twenty-five points per mouthful. Eight mouthfuls per cup. Two hundred points buying me two more days stacked on top of the five I already had.

Seven days and fourteen hours now. A full week of existing.

I finished the cup. Put the empty bottle on the nightstand next to Naomi’s pink and black jacket and Addison’s discarded lollipop stick and the phone that kept buzzing with messages from people who refused to let me disappear.

One cup left in the Vault. One emergency dose between me and permanent death.

Better odds than I’d had this morning.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!