Chapter 222
Chapter 222
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Translator: Ebonarch
Chapter: 222
Chapter Title: Golden Talent
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Life might not be quite as eventful as people make it out to be.
Just eat well, live well, and fight well.
Siu had lost the freedom to take a shit after becoming a spirit body, but thanks to Sharon, he was unloading something entirely different—and refreshingly so—every single day.
It was originally the time for magic lessons with Sharon.
Even the one-sided curriculum of listening to her lessons on elements had undergone a change.
"Today's lesson ends here..."
"Huh? Already?"
"What do you mean 'already'? It's all because you pick things up way too fast, Siu."
It had originally been the time for Sharon to teach Siu the theory behind elemental magic.
Siu had nothing to share with her in return, so they would normally wrap up there and call it a day.
Afterward, Sharon would dive into her own research, while Siu handled his self-study.
But things had changed.
For Sharon, who needed Siu's internal ejaculation to recover her stigma, one extra class period had effectively been added to the schedule.
"Ahem... Now it's time for me to get my recovery injection from you, Siu."
Sharon shut her book with a snap and rose from her seat, wriggling her body seductively.
Here, "recovery injection" naturally referred to stigma-recovery sex.
Sharon apparently found "let's have sex!" a bit too crass, so she'd come up with that odd euphemism.
Yet once they were actually rubbing up against each other in bed, she'd spew all sorts of filthy talk without restraint. Women's hearts were truly unknowable.
"No, but seriously, can't you do something about that outfit? I don't even know where to look."
"I wore it on purpose. You like?"
Sharon had been lounging around naked except for Siu's shirt draped over her since morning, and she'd stayed that way right through the end of their lesson.
Naked with a shirt, naked with an apron, naked with this or that—endless variations, but Siu had no particular fetish for any of it.
Or so he'd thought.
Until Sharon's personally curated, outrageously provocative fashion show.
The shirt's hem teasingly covered and uncovered Sharon's plump ass cheeks.
Her hands slipped neatly into the sleeves.
And those magnificent tits powerfully thrust up the chest fabric, hitting him with both a remodeling of his tastes and a direct bullseye.
"You still like it even though we're doing it every day?"
"So you're the one getting sick of it? I love it every time. Especially when you take me from behind... Not that..."
Sharon braced herself against the bed and stuck out her ass. The shirt rode up naturally, revealing her tightly clenched slit.
Every time, he'd think, aren't we doing this a bit too often? Only to surrender to temptation without fail.
"So... you not gonna do it?"
Especially when she shook her hips like that in doggy position—impossible to turn down.
It had been a full fortnight since Siu and Sharon's first time together.
And it wasn't limited to lesson hours.
Siu, wanna try that with us too?
While watching a movie,
Siu... I think... I'm getting wet...
Right before bed at night,
Mwah, slurrrp... Siu... haa... you up...?
Upon waking in the morning,
S-Si... Siu... th-there too... the inside too... wash it thoroughly... Ah... haang... uh...
Or while bathing together.
And so on.
Taksho had offered all sorts of advice on dealing with women, and it had mostly checked out. But even the great sage had gotten one thing wrong.
That you'd get bored sticking with just one woman?
That was only because he hadn't held Sharon's scorching-hot body.
Anyway, they were at the point where a mere glance was enough to send plates flying off the table. Siu's cock was perpetually slick with her juices.
Thanks to that, Sharon had recovered a full stigma tier in just three days.
It was almost poetic, really—like unclogging blocked meridians in a wuxia tale by injecting inner power, only here it was with his dick opening up her imperfectly inherited stigma.
The day Sharon had first broken through that wall after three days...
Si... Siu! Siu! Siu!!! I did it! I did it!!!
Sharon had burst into joyful tears and thrown herself at Siu.
He'd half-expected her to rocket straight up to twenty tiers just like that, but alas, the world didn't work that conveniently.
Afterward, the recovery got tougher—no real progress despite the same routine.
Same creampies, same pounding, same floods of pure mana, yet no changes.
But Sharon had never been one to give up.
If she were, she'd have quit repaying her debts ages ago.
Undeterred by the sudden plateau, she dove into research on the eighteenth stroke she'd managed to recover.
Recovering a stigma didn't mean instant access to all the magic contained within.
Each stroke held decades—sometimes over a century—of accumulated magical knowledge, and digesting it took time.
Anyway, today as well, after slamming away at Sharon's plump ass to his heart's content and pumping her full of thick white seed, Siu received her meticulous cleaning blowjob before heading up to the rooftop.
2.
Siu's second daily routine kicked off after lessons: martial arts training under the Tiphereth Duke.
No one remembered who suggested it first, but Eloa was always waiting for him on the rooftop at 4 p.m. sharp.
"Hello."
"Yes. Prepare yourself."
"Please take good care of me in today's lesson too."
With that brief exchange, Siu began stretching in place to loosen up.
He rotated every joint, threw some light shadowboxing, warming his body just right.
Eloa waited, a small inner barrier deployed around them, as he got ready.
As Eloa had predicted, Siu had no martial talent to speak of.
If anything, he was just an athletic layman.
Truth be told, if he'd treated martial arts as a mere "hobby," Eloa wouldn't have given it much thought.
She'd have gone through the motions without caring whether he had talent or not.
But he was sharpening his fangs for survival—for gaining every possible edge in dire straits.
Eloa knew full well that a blade forged from half-baked talent would turn against its wielder in a crisis, not the enemy.
She'd held back several times from saying, why not look into a different path altogether?
Frankly, she'd expected him to quit soon.
What he called "lessons" were just the total time spent flying through the air and crashing to the ground after her strikes.
No matter how sturdy a spirit body, that much pummeling left the bones aching.
And after days of rolling around without so much as grazing her hem, doubt should've set in.
"Hup-cha!"
Yet there wasn't a hint of it in Siu as he rolled his neck with his usual expression.
The very next day, he'd show up brimming with enthusiasm all over again.
His persistence and grit alone deserved applause.
"I'm ready. Please take good care of me today too."
Siu smoothly raised his guard, muscle memory kicking in.
Eloa let out a sigh.
If he wouldn't quit on his own two feet, it was her duty as instructor to show him a dose of reality—in moderation, of course.
"Siu."
"Yes!"
Siu snapped to attention with crisp discipline.
Truth be told, Eloa felt awkward even broaching the topic.
Especially with someone who charged ahead so relentlessly, never knowing defeat.
"I'll speak frankly. Try not to take offense. Martial arts... it doesn't seem to be your path."
"Pardon?"
"Surely you've felt it yourself? Two weeks in, and you can't block so much as a single exchange—can't even dodge. I'm not saying this lightly. I'm exerting less than half... no, a quarter of the power you put out."
That was the truth.
In all their countless spars, Siu hadn't once managed to respond to Eloa's strikes.
He'd barely implemented any of her advice, either.
"Ah... is it that bad? I thought I was doing okay..."
Siu's face fell visibly.
Eloa, pricked by conscience, hurriedly pressed on.
She'd planned to brush him off right there, but his crestfallen look made words like "stop wasting time and quit" stick in her throat.
"So let's try advancing in a different direction. How about starting with mana-based body reinforcement?"
She regretted the words the moment they left her mouth.
Up until now, they'd clashed using only pure spirit-body strength—no mana involved.
Your own hands and feet: where they extended, how your center of gravity shifted with each stance, and so on.
Visualizing every nook and cranny of your limbs' movements even with eyes closed—that was the bedrock of martial arts.
The foundational groundwork before piling on any advanced techniques.
If that base wasn't solid, anything built atop it was doomed to crumble.
For Eloa, who lived by that creed, impulsively skipping ahead to the next phase felt all wrong.
Perhaps it was Siu's momentary gloom that conjured memories of Rafi's own disappointed, heartbroken face.
"That works too. I'm somewhat confident in mana usage, at least."
Siu brightened up, oblivious to her inner turmoil.
Eloa schooled her twitching eyebrow and stepped up beside him.
"Have you ever tried body reinforcement before?"
"I've always done it by reinforcing my armor."
"That's the usual approach."
Most witches didn't bother with mana-based body reinforcement.
Unless you were a special case like Eloa, spirit-body enhancements had hard limits anyway.
Better to leave defense to the stigma's autonomous protections and pour spare mana into offensive spells—that was more efficient.
Reinforcing the spirit body directly came with far greater risks than any returns.
"On the surface, reinforcing your spirit body with mana looks foolish. But even for a witch, nothing's freer to control than your own limbs—your spirit body. Get familiar with it, temper it, and it'll outperform any reinforcement spell in efficiency."
Eloa laid out the basics, and Siu nodded agreeably.
"Then first, I need to gauge your mana reserves... Can you show me?"
"How much should I do?"
"Your maximum. Pull up as much as you can."
"Got it."
Siu nodded with grave seriousness.
And then...
-Shuwaaaaak!
Golden light scattered like shattering glass.
His golden eyes—which already drew the gaze under normal circumstances—began to glow, devouring every scrap of ambient mana around him.
"What?"
Using "self-polarized mana" within one's stigma to draw in surrounding mana was Witchcraft 101.
That alone wouldn't have surprised Eloa in the slightest.
But the suction power was on another level.
Typically, the greater one's mana pool, the stronger the pull on neutral mana in the air.
Yet here was Siu, with mana reserves that were practically nonexistent, emitting a gravitational force stronger than any being she'd encountered.
Strong enough that a moment's lapse might even yank away Eloa's own polarized mana.
But Eloa's shock didn't end there.
A deep thung of mana pulsed outward, and the gathered power swelled to double its size.
That doubled mana doubled again. And again. And again.
Amplification upon amplification, repeating endlessly.
It was shattering every known law of magic.
Before long, dazzling golden mana reflections rippled through the air around him.
"Is this enough?"
"........."
The sheer volume of mana he'd amassed already dwarfed Eloa's total reserves by an absurd margin.
It rivaled the overwhelming mana storm of a massive homunculus, storage overflowing—now sparking visibly beyond mere reflections.
"Should I gather more?"
There were too many jaw-dropping aspects to count.
First: the sheer volume, defying all common sense.
Second: that it had been achieved through repeated amplification, of all things.
Third: its impossible purity, free of any noise or impurities.
And finally: Siu's utterly innocent expression as he asked if he should continue, as if he had plenty more to give.
Eloa had just uncovered a glimpse of the radiant talent she'd never suspected in him.