Divine Milking System

Chapter 445: 445 | Folded Dimensional Alloy

"The more people who care about you at a level that registers on the devotion tracker. Casual acquaintances don’t move the needle. Sakura the nurse at eight percent attraction doesn’t contribute. It requires genuine emotional investment sustained over time."

Yumi pulled a stool over and sat down at my eye level. "The divine-class graft you carry was designed by something that understands this principle at a level no human scientist has achieved. The patron who built your system didn’t just give you a power source. They gave you a dependency on love. Literal, measurable, dimensionally quantifiable love. And they made your survival contingent on acquiring enough of it to keep the graft from consuming you."

She said the word love like a scientist says it. Like a measurable phenomenon with properties and constraints. No judgment, no warmth, no poetry. Just observation.

It still hit me in the chest like a Wave Motion blast.

Vale closed his phone. "We should discuss the timeline."

"The timeline for what?" I asked, though I already knew the answer would involve more violence and complicated women and supernatural bullshit that I’d have to pretend I understood.

"The Phase Edge prototype will take three weeks," Yumi said, standing and returning to her workbench where the blueprint spread like a surgical diagram. "I need you back here next Saturday for a fitting session. Bring someone with high devotion so I can observe the resonance coupling live. I’ll need blood samples today before you leave. And Dominic is going to set up a secure channel so I can send you diagnostic protocols during the week."

"Blood samples?"

"Three vials. I have sterile equipment." She paused. "Mostly sterile."

"Mostly?"

"The autoclave broke last month. I’ve been using mana purification instead. It’s actually more effective than heat sterilization for biological samples, but the IHC would throw a fit if they knew I was operating a forge that processes dimensional substrates without certified medical equipment, so we maintain the fiction that everything here meets OSHA standards."

I looked at the bird in the jar on the shelf above the workbench. The bird that had died because it flew too close to the first prototype of the weapon she wanted to build for me. It looked perfect, frozen mid-wingbeat, like something you’d find in a museum if museums displayed evidence of accidental interdimensional murder.

"The bird."

"What about the bird?"

"You keep it in a jar on a shelf."

"It’s a valuable data point. The cellular preservation was complete. No degradation after two years. The Phase Edge didn’t just kill it. It arrested every biological process simultaneously and permanently. If I could replicate that effect on a larger scale with targeting specificity..." She stopped herself and put on a smile that probably fooled people who hadn’t watched her eyes light up at the mention of total biological cessation. "But that’s future research. Right now we focus on your weapon."

Vale stood and brushed burger crumbs off his jacket. "I need to make a call. Yumi, don’t break him before I get back."

"I make no promises about the blood draw. His veins are probably trash after six weeks of Silver essence oversaturation."

"My veins are fine."

"Your veins are my concern now. Everything below the skin is my concern now. I am going to understand every molecule of what keeps you alive, and when I’m done, I will know things about your biology that you will never know about yourself." She paused. "Mostly for science."

Vale left through the steel door. The workshop fell quiet except for the hum of equipment I couldn’t identify and the persistent pulse of the sphere on the shelf, which continued its synchronized conversation with whatever lived behind my sternum. Yumi assembled blood draw equipment from a cabinet with the focus of someone who had done this many times, though the setting suggested she usually drew blood from weapons rather than people.

"Roll up your sleeve and make a fist."

I complied. She tied a tourniquet with knots that spoke to years of dealing with Vale’s spatial manipulation and various sharp objects. The needle went in clean. Three vials filled with blood that looked normal to me but apparently contained dimensional energy signatures worth risking scientific credibility for.

"Your red blood cells are carrying traces of multiple essence profiles," Yumi said, holding the first vial up to the blue-white light. "I can see the Silver layering. Three distinct sources." She rotated the vial. "Vanilla. Butterscotch. Strawberry."

"You can tell flavors from my blood?"

"I can tell essence signatures, which your brain interprets as flavors during extraction. The graft translates dimensional frequency into sensory experience because human neurology can’t process raw dimensional data. Taste is the most ancient sensory pathway, hardwired deepest into the brain’s reward centers. Your patron chose taste because it creates the strongest positive association with the extraction process, which encourages repetition, which keeps you alive." She slotted the vials into a foam-lined case. "It’s elegant engineering. Cruel, but elegant."

I pulled the tourniquet off and pressed a cotton ball to the injection site. Yumi labeled the vials with a marker, writing my name and the date alongside symbols I didn’t recognize.

"The weapon," I said. "What will it look like when it’s done?"

Yumi set down the marker and walked to the blueprint. She ran her fingers along the curved blade drawn in the center of the design, following the channels that would carry my abilities from handle to edge.

"Beautiful," she said. "It will look beautiful and wrong and unlike anything that has existed before because nothing like you has existed before. The blade will be sixty centimeters of folded dimensional alloy with Phase Edge integration at the striking surface.

The channels will accommodate both your spiral energy and the death aspect without cross-contamination, which required me to invent a new metallurgical process that I’m planning to name after myself.

The handle will be wrapped in something organic because dimensional alloy rejects synthetic materials, so probably sharkskin or ray skin, I haven’t decided."

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