Divine Milking System

Chapter 441: 441 | My New Guinea Pig

Yumi set the sphere on the workbench between us with the care of someone handling a sleeping grenade. The blue-white veins pulsed in slow rhythm against the black metal, casting moving light across her face and turning her neon eyes into something alien. The graft in my chest answered each pulse with its own, a low tug below my sternum that felt less like pain and more like recognition.

Like two dogs hearing each other bark through a fence.

"This," Yumi said, and she pulled her goggles down over her eyes, clicking a secondary lens into place that made her left eye look enormous and slightly insectoid, "is the second prototype of something I’ve been working on for six years. I call it a Phase Edge."

She let that hang there. I waited.

"Phase Edge doesn’t mean anything to you."

"Not a thing."

"Good. I’d be worried if it did. The concept doesn’t exist outside this workshop and a theoretical paper that got buried so deep the author was reassigned to counting gate frequency oscillations in a basement in Geneva." She ran her finger along one of the blue-white veins without touching the surface, tracing the path of light through the air a centimeter above the metal. "The short version is that this sphere contains a dimensional substrate compressed into a stable physical form. Think of it as a piece of gate, except instead of being a tear between worlds, it’s been folded inward until it became a solid. The energy density inside this thing is equivalent to the core of a B-rank gate packed into something that fits in your palm."

I looked at the sphere. It looked back. That was the only way to describe the sensation of those veins pulsing at me.

"And the long version?"

"The long version involves seventeen equations, four of which I invented, and a manufacturing process that requires me to channel mana through a furnace hot enough to melt the spatial boundary between this dimension and whatever sits underneath it. I lost feeling in my left hand for six weeks after the first prototype. The second prototype killed a bird that flew through the window at the wrong moment." She paused. "The bird just stopped. Like someone hit pause on a video. Its heart ceased beating, its wings froze mid-flap, and it dropped out of the air and hit the floor as a perfectly preserved specimen with zero biological function remaining. I still have it in a jar upstairs."

"You’re showing me a weapon that kills birds by existing near them."

"I’m showing you a weapon that kills anything by existing near it if the resonance frequency matches. That’s the entire problem. The Phase Edge doesn’t discriminate. It amplifies whatever dimensional energy it comes into contact with, and if that energy belongs to a living creature, the amplification overwhelms the biological substrate and shuts everything down. Heart, lungs, mana channels, nervous system. All of it goes quiet at once. Like pulling the plug on a server rack."

She pushed the secondary lens back up to rest against her forehead and stared at me with both eyes fully visible. The neon green had lost its playful spark. Not scared—Yumi didn’t come across as someone who feared what she created. But careful, in the same way an engineer is careful when handling a machine they’ve built from scratch and understand better than any other living person on the planet. The kind of care that comes from knowing exactly how bad things can get if even one variable shifts outside its tolerance range.

"The bird died because its frequency fell close enough to the sphere’s ambient output that the resonance closed the distance and bridged the gap on its own. A normal human standing at this distance from the Phase Edge would feel uncomfortable. Like standing too close to a microwave with a faulty seal. A hunter with active mana channels running through their body would feel actual pain. Sharp, immediate, hard to ignore. A hunter with a divine-class graft that operates on the exact same fundamental dimensional frequency as the sphere itself would feel..."

She stopped talking mid-sentence and looked at me, like she expected me to finish it.

"What would they feel?" I said.

"I have no idea. That’s why I need you."

Vale had stopped eating my burger. He sat on a stool near the door with his arms crossed and his mismatched eyes fixed on the sphere, and his expression belonged to someone watching a chess game where both players had forgotten the board was wired to explosives. He said nothing. Vale said nothing when he wanted me to make my own decision, which meant either the decision didn’t matter or it mattered so much that influencing it would defeat the purpose.

I hated when he did that.

"Let me make sure I understand," I said. "You built a bomb that kills things by resonating with their dimensional frequency. The bomb killed a bird by accident. You want to turn this bomb into a weapon. And you think I’m the person who should carry it because my graft operates on the same frequency as the bomb."

"Weapon is reductive. And I said the frequency was similar, not identical. If it were identical you’d already be dead."

"That’s comforting."

"It should be. It means there’s a compatibility window. Your graft and the Phase Edge share enough dimensional substrate that they could theoretically synchronize without the catastrophic shutdown I observed in the bird. The graft acts as a buffer. A translator between your biology and the sphere’s output. Your body has already adapted to channeling divine-class energy through human tissue. That’s what the system does every time you activate an ability or run that golden fire thing that ate eleven days of your life." She leaned forward. "What I want to build is a weapon that plugs into that same channel. A blade, or a polearm, or whatever form factor makes the most sense for your combat profile, with the Phase Edge integrated into the striking surface. When you channel your abilities through it, the weapon amplifies the output by a factor I can’t predict until I test it. Could be two. Could be ten. Could be something that makes the numbers irrelevant."

"And if the amplification kills me instead of the target?"

"Then I’ll have collected extremely valuable data about the failure threshold of divine-class grafts on human substrates and I’ll publish a paper."

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