Chapter 520: 520. Got Something Better Than That F-Ing Scam Called Infinite Regeneration

[Current balance: 2,150 points]

The skill settled into place with the particular clarity of something that had found its location in the existing architecture, and Rex sat with it for a moment, checking the integration against Infinite Regeneration. The two abilities were compatible in the way of two systems that addressed the same problem from different angles, one proactive and one reactive.

"Aggghhhh... that was some good shit!" He said slowly, and then he moved on to check something else.

[Peak Super Human Physique — 12,000 points.]

He looked at the number and thought about what Lustia had said about people who would require absolute capacity, and he wondered about the Balance Keeper’s primordial energy base and what it had done to Apollo’s designation.

Celestina Von Starlight. Thirty years were spent building an organization that had eliminated forty-three reincarnators.

Thirty years were spent operating out of an unmapped kingdom that no reincarnator had entered and survived. The extraction ring Kregg was carrying had a core that worked on a very basic frequency, covered by a device that hid its divine nature.

Creating something like that needed either materials from the second stratum or a skilled craftsman who knew about primordial-frequency mechanics in a way that no known surface institution could match.

This meant that either Celestina had her own second-stratum contacts, or she had someone in her network who possessed such connections. Either way, she was not a person he would be walking into an engagement with at less than full capacity.

’But still... my goal to go there is still far away... I need to take over Aethelgard and check some kingdoms outside.’

The price was not achievable based on his current balance, which meant it was a medium-term goal. He filed this.

In theory, the path to twelve thousand points was straightforward. It required time and the right sequence of encounters, and the Underlayer operation would generate both.

Mordecai’s gacha system had been producing expertise-class demons for months. The restructuring, when he ran it, would involve enough high-desire interactions to move the energy balance meaningfully.

The math worked. It just required patience.

He was accustomed to patience.

He moved to the next item on his mental list, which was less about the skill interface and more about the specific shape of the opportunity sitting in front of him.

He needed a pregnancy trigger. The system’s free skill option is activated upon confirmed conception with a maximum-bond partner.

One unlock per woman, with the cooldown running until birth. Mara had already triggered hers, as had Marceline and Viscaria.

There were three free selections available, and three pregnancies were already in progress. The pattern was clear, and the mechanic was generous, but it required planning because the window was specific and the candidates with the highest strategic value for the free selection were not interchangeable.

He considered the relevant candidates and, as he had been doing for several days, ultimately chose Amelia Brightsoul.

Amelia Brightsoul. Late forties, high priestess, Apollo’s mother, desire level held at approximately ninety percent over the past several weeks.

Ninety percent was not the maximum. He knew this, and the distinction mattered.

Ninety percent was close enough that the remaining distance felt negligible from the outside, but the system was not approximate. The threshold was exact, and the bonus was tied to the exact threshold, not the approach to it.

He had seen this with Elizabeth, who had been at eighty-something for most of the week before the final day closed the gap completely.

The arc toward maximum bond had been running since their early interactions. Amelia had the specific quality of someone who had not been genuinely curious about a person in a long time and had found, somewhat against her expectations, that she was intrigued about him.

She asked questions that were interesting rather than polite. She listened to the answers in the way of someone who was actually revising their model of the world based on new information rather than waiting for their turn to speak.

What he had with her already was close enough to the threshold that a single meaningful encounter would likely push the number to its completion.

The relevant question was what free selection would follow. A peak superhuman physique at twelve thousand points was currently out of reach from his energy balance.

A free selection had no cost and no prerequisites. The math on this task was not complicated.

’This is going to be easy... she’s close, and she’s probably missed me by a lot, feeling all longing towards me.’

He stored this and began thinking about the morning.

...

Elizabeth was awake before him, which he had expected.

She sat at the small writing desk in the corner of the guest room, with the Key fragments arranged on a cloth in front of her. Her head was bent over one of them, engrossed in the problem at hand with the focused attention she reserved for topics she found genuinely captivating.

When she heard him move, she looked up. The quality of her attention shifted from the fragments to him, and her expression transformed in the way it had been increasingly doing over the past week: a warmth that signaled she had stopped managing her facial expressions around him because that effort had become more taxing than it was worth.

"Good morning," Rex said.

"You slept for ten hours," she said. "Also... good morning to you too, Rex."

"I had a long conversation in my dreams."

She looked at him for a moment with the familiar evaluating attention, and then she set down the fragment she was holding and came toward him with the particular directness of someone who has decided that what they want to do has become more immediately relevant than the thing they were doing.

She kissed him, which was not the brief, efficient kiss of someone observing a habit but the kind that communicated that she had been thinking about doing it since before he woke up.

"What’s this...? Already feeling all cheeky, huh?" Rex grinned.

"It’s just a good morning kiss," she said when she stopped.

Rex looked at her. The desire level, which he had confirmed last night, sat at its maximum, and what that maximum had done to Elizabeth Von Starlight was the specific thing it did to everyone who reached it, which was dissolve the layer between the professional and the personal in a way that was permanent and could not be reversed.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed beside him now, her hands in his, and the amber morning light coming through the guest room’s window put warm color on the side of her face, and she was looking at him with the expression she had when she was not performing anything for anyone.

He looked at her for a moment without saying anything, which he did sometimes, not as a technique but because she was worth looking at properly, and she had learned over the past week that he did it specifically when he was paying attention and not for any other reason. She had stopped finding it uncomfortable around day four.

"You were up before sunrise," Rex said.

"I couldn’t sleep through it," she said. "I kept thinking about the lattice scoring."

"The fragments or me," Rex said.

She looked at him. 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

"Both, if I’m being accurate." She said it the way she said most things now, without the layer of management underneath it. "The fragments because they’re a genuine problem."

"And you, because you were asleep and I was not and the room felt different when you weren’t part of the conversation."

Rex reached up and gently tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear, a small, deliberate gesture from someone who felt entitled to do so. She froze at his touch, just as she had been doing for the past several days whenever he acted this way—not out of surprise, but because she realized that remaining still was the only reaction available to her that didn’t feel awkward.

"You could have woken me up," Rex said.

"You were sleeping properly," she said. "And I noticed that you don’t always sleep like that."

He looked at her. "You noticed that, huh?"

"I notice most things," Elizabeth said. "That’s not new to me..."

"What’s new is that I’m telling you about it instead of filing it away."

"What changed?" Rex said.