Divine Milking System

Chapter 374: 374 | You Don’t Worship a Hammer

I closed my eyes expecting nothing. Maybe four hours of black unconsciousness, the dreamless kind your body forces on you when organ failure becomes a realistic scheduling concern. Instead, the dark behind my eyelids shifted, warped, and pulled me sideways through something that felt like falling through a floor that didn’t exist into a room that absolutely shouldn’t.

The library.

Same as before. Shelves that went up forever into a ceiling that wasn’t there, books glowing in soft purple and gold like they were alive and breathing. Same impossible architecture where perspective broke down if you looked at any single point for too long. The floor existed because I was standing on it, but the moment I tried to focus on the material or color, it slipped away from my attention like a word on the tip of your tongue that refuses to form.

The desk sat in the center of the space. Enormous. Dark wood, or something pretending to be dark wood. Papers and open tomes covered its surface alongside what looked like a half-finished game of chess played with pieces I didn’t recognize. Some of the pieces moved on their own, repositioning themselves when they thought nobody was looking.

And behind the desk, in a chair that probably weighed more than my apartment building, sat the old man.

He looked exactly like he had last time. Long white beard that belonged in a fantasy novel cover illustration, robes covered in patterns that shifted between constellations and mathematical equations depending on which eye you used, and a face that could have been sixty or six hundred depending on the light. His eyes were the real problem. They were the color of old brass, and they looked at you like they were reading a book you didn’t know you’d written.

"Ah." He smiled. "You’re back."

"I’m asleep in a cave. In a Void Gate. Next to a woman who wants to incinerate me." I looked down at my hands and found them clean. No blood, no river water, no leopard claw wounds. My body felt whole in this space, which I immediately distrusted. "So either this is a dream, a hallucination from blood loss, or you’re pulling me back here on purpose."

"Can’t it be all three?"

"Not really how logic works."

"Logic." The old man said the word like he was tasting something he wasn’t sure he liked. He picked up a teacup from somewhere on the desk and sipped from it. The tea smelled like something from my old life, like the jasmine blend from the corner bodega on Dot Ave that charged too much and always had a cat sleeping on the counter. "Logic is a tool, boy. Not a religion. You don’t worship a hammer."

"I also don’t have conversations with hammers at two in the morning while I’m dying in an alternate dimension."

"Technically you’re not dying. Your health status reads RECOVERING. I checked." He gestured at one of the open books on the desk, and I caught a glimpse of text that looked disturbingly like my System interface rendered in calligraphy on yellowed parchment. "You consumed the essence in time. Smart choice. Belle’s Silver-tier output has always been remarkably potent for someone at her rank. Something about the emotional investment in production, I think. The girls who actually care about the recipient produce better quality essence. It’s a documented phenomenon."

"Please stop talking about my girlfriend’s breast milk like it’s a wine vintage."

"Former sommelier in a past life." He tapped the side of his nose. "Three past lives ago, actually. The French one. Lovely century, terrible plumbing."

I stood in the library that shouldn’t exist, talking to a man who claimed responsibility for transmigrating my soul into a teenage body with a death timer and a lactation fetish power system, and the conversation had veered into medieval French hygiene within ninety seconds. This was my life now. This was what I’d become.

"Why am I here?"

The old man set down his teacup. The chess pieces on the desk stopped their subtle repositioning and went still, as if they were also waiting for the answer.

"Because you almost died tonight." His tone shifted. The grandfatherly warmth dropped away like a mask being set on a table. Underneath was something older and colder and far more aware of what it was looking at. "Not the performative kind. Not the kind where you make a clever play and pull through with style points and your girlfriends waiting to pat you on the head. The real kind. The kind where you simply stop and nobody gets to know why."

"I know what kind it was. I was there."

"You were there, and you threw yourself off a cliff with a woman you don’t even like because your body moved before your brain finished arguing with itself." He leaned forward. "That’s interesting. That’s very interesting to me."

"Glad my near death experience is entertaining."

"Not entertaining. Informative." He reached across the desk and moved one of the chess pieces, a figure I couldn’t quite focus on, from one square to another. The other pieces shifted around it like water flowing around a stone. "I told you last time. I chose you specifically. Not randomly. Not through cosmic accident or divine lottery. You, Jace Monroe. Or rather, the soul that calls itself Jace Monroe in this iteration."

"You said something about shamelessness. About needing someone who’d actually use the system."

"I did. And you have. Three stolen abilities in six weeks, an extraction network that would make a guild recruitment officer weep with envy, and a physical transformation that has a Diamond-tier investigator questioning the laws of nature." He smiled, and it was the kind of smile that belonged on someone who built mazes and watched subjects navigate them from above. "But the abilities and the points and the women, those are mechanics. Tools. The system works because the system was designed to work. What I needed from you was the thing that can’t be designed."

I waited. The library breathed around us, the faint sound of pages turning in books nobody was reading.

"I needed someone who would jump off a cliff for a person he doesn’t like, because the alternative was watching her get eaten."

"That’s not special. That’s just not being a complete psychopath."