Divine Milking System

Chapter 369: 369 | The Butterscotch Question

I uncapped the bottle. The smell hit me immediately, warm and complex, the butterscotch and caramel notes that I’d catalogued during long nights in the Sanctum when Belle was underneath me and the taste of her was the only thing that mattered in the universe. My body recognized the scent before my brain finished processing it, something in my blood chemistry responding to Silver-tier essence the way a dehydrated person responds to water.

I drank.

The first mouthful coated my throat like silk. My stomach accepted it, and then something happened that I’d experienced dozens of times before but never in a combat scenario.

The warmth started in my core and moved outward through my veins, a gentle pressure that wasn’t heat and wasn’t pleasure but occupied the space where the two met.

It moved through my torso, down my arms, into my legs. The exhaustion didn’t vanish. The ache in my bones didn’t disappear. But the edge came off everything, the worst of the fatigue blunted by whatever chemical reaction Belle’s essence triggered in my modified biology.

The System chimed in my head.

\[You drink a mouthful of milk from a Silver-tier source. As a result, you get 25 points!\]

The second mouthful hit my chest wounds. I felt it, actually felt the essence interfacing with the damaged tissue, the Silver-tier nutrients flooding the torn muscle fibers and providing the raw material that my C-rank regeneration needed to begin closing the damage. The mana corruption from the leopard’s claws fought back, a cold resistance that pushed against the warmth of the essence, but Belle’s Silver-tier quality was better than whatever Void-tainted garbage the creature had deposited in my skin.

\[You drink a mouthful of milk from a Silver-tier source. As a result, you get 25 points!\]

Third mouthful. Fourth. I drank like a man who’d been wandering the desert for a week and found an oasis, tipping the bottle back and letting the essence flow without pause. The heat in my chest wounds faded from screaming to aching to merely uncomfortable. The white sparks at the edge of my vision dissolved. My hands stopped shaking. The blunt trauma along my spine, where I’d hit the water back-first from a hundred feet, downgraded from crippling to annoying.

\[You drink a mouthful of milk from a Silver-tier source. As a result, you get 25 points!\]

I finished the entire cup, all eight mouthfuls, in under thirty seconds. Two hundred points of banked survival consumed in the time it took Blair to stare at me with an expression that cycled through confusion, disgust, fascination, and something she buried before I could identify it.

The bottle vanished back into inventory as the System updated.

Health Status: MODERATE. Lacerations closing. Spinal trauma reduced. Blood volume recovering. Mana reserves at 34%.

Not perfect. Not even good. But functional, which was the only metric that mattered right now.

I sighed. The sound came from somewhere deep in my diaphragm and carried the weight of the entire evening up into the canyon air like a balloon made of exhaustion and relief that neither of us had died in the last ten minutes. The essence settled into my muscles with the specific warmth that I’d come to associate with Belle’s particular brand of Silver-tier sustenance. The kind of warmth that made you want to close your eyes and sleep for twelve hours in a bed that smelled like her shampoo and pretend that Void Gates and cliff diving weren’t part of your daily routine.

"You just drank milk."

Blair’s voice was flat. Not angry, not disgusted, not even confused anymore. Just flat, the way people sound when they’ve processed something so bizarre that their emotional response system has simply given up trying to categorize it and moved on to acceptance as the only viable option.

"Yes."

"From a bottle."

"Yes."

"In the middle of a Void Gate." She paused, and I could see her brain working through the sequence of events like she was assembling evidence for a prosecution. "While we’re being hunted by leopards the size of sedans. After you threw me off a cliff."

"In my defense, the cliff worked."

"We fell a hundred feet into a river."

"And we’re alive." I wiped the last trace of Belle’s essence from the corner of my mouth with the back of my hand, letting the taste of vanilla and something sweeter linger for just a second longer. "Which is more than the leopards can say about us."

Blair’s eyes tracked the movement. Found the spot where I’d wiped my lip. Something moved behind the ice blue. Something dangerous and curious and immediately crushed under the weight of whatever self-control mechanism kept Blair Davenport from asking questions she suspected would have answers that shattered her worldview.

"Where did you get the milk."

Not a question. An observation delivered with the specific cadence that Blair used when she was assembling information into a framework she could weaponize later. I recognized the tone from six weeks of watching her dissect other people’s weaknesses during combat evaluations.

"Special ability." I stood up. My legs held, mostly. The essence had done enough to get me vertical and mobile, which was all I could ask for given that the alternative was lying on a rock shelf until something with teeth found us. "Healing properties. Works on me specifically. Don’t ask how I make it because you won’t like the answer."

"I already don’t like the answer." Blair pressed her good hand against the canyon wall and pushed herself upright. The movement cost her. I could see it in the way her jaw clenched and her pupils dilated and the rapid blink that she used instead of screaming when the pain hit. Her burned side was bad. Really bad. The kind of bad that academy healers would need to address within hours rather than days, and we were fresh out of academy healers.

I watched her stand there, soaking wet and burned and bleeding, wearing the ruins of a seven-hundred-fifty-thousand-credit combat suit that her daddy’s company manufactured, and I had the deeply inappropriate thought that Blair Davenport’s legs were unreasonably long for someone who was currently a liability.

"Stop looking at my legs."

"I’m assessing your injuries."

"My injuries are not located on my legs."

"Your gash is literally on your leg."