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"Damn it... damn it! I can't believe I got played like a complete fool!"
Alex cursed under his breath, his sharp voice echoing down the empty, dimly lit street.
It was well past midnight, and the cold night air of Iron Creek City brushed against his flushed skin as he walked home in a daze.
His hips swayed with a smooth, automatic grace he couldn't even control anymore.
He gripped his hair with both hands, feeling a deep, burning frustration boiling in his chest.
"You told me it was going to drain all your energy! You acted like closing that spatial rift was some kind of impossible, life-or-death miracle! And I believed you!"
"Hehee... that sounds like a personal problem, my little vessel," the Empress's lazy, seductive drawl echoed directly inside his mind, accompanied by the sound of her giggling.
She sounded completely smug, like a cat that had just cornered a plump canary.
"I never lied to you, darling. I simply said it would require my power to fix. I never said it would be hard for me."
"You literally just snapped your fingers!" Alex yelled out loud to the empty street, his face burning a furious red.
It wasn't an exaggeration.
Down in that blood-soaked underground cave, with the spatial crack crackling with purple lightning and threatening to unleash a monster horde upon the city, Alex was desperate.
He had to agree to her ridiculous terms just to keep his innocent people safe.
The moment he mentally signed that soul contract, the Empress had taken temporary control of his right hand.
She hadn't chanted a spell.
She hadn't burned through piles of rare materials or drained his mana pool dry.
She just simply raised his hand, snapped his fingers with a crisp click, and the massive, tearing wound in space had instantly shattered and zipped closed like a cheap jacket.
It was over in less than two seconds, although it was just a temporary seal that should give enough time for the city guards to find the anomaly and fix it.
"Why doesn't what you described add up to what you actually did?!" Alex growled, his breathing turning shallow. "You completely scammed me! Explain it to me clearly right now!"
"Oh, stop whining," the Empress purred. "What matters is the result."
"The city is safe, your precious little family is out of danger, and the spatial rift is gone."
"And in exchange... as per our agreement, I am allowed to completely take over your body for one full day."
"Hahaha! I can't wait to see what kind of fun we can get into!"
"Fuck you! That's just cheating!" Alex snapped, though deep down he knew complaining wouldn't break the contract they signed.
He was stuck with the deal.
To make matters worse, his physical body was currently an absolute disaster.
After the Empress sealed the rift, Alex didn't run back to his home.
Instead, he felt he shouldn't waste the opportunity and rushed back up to the upper stadium levels.
Part of him wanted to make sure Leo and Abu got out safely, but his real motivation was much more greedy: the stadium was still packed with thousands of terrified civilians, gamblers, and guards scrambling to escape the aftermath of the earthquake.
It was an all-you-can-eat buffet for his Void Yin Constitution.
He spent over an hour moving through the crumbling corridors, lifting fallen pillars with his strength and guiding panicked civilians toward the emergency exits.
Every step he took, his body acted like a starving sponge, greedily devouring the massive, overwhelming clouds of emotional residue swirling through the air.
Empathetic energy released from pure terror, panic, desperate hope, and explosive relief flooded into his body without stopping.
His system interface went crazy for a while, scrolling numbers so fast it made his head spin:
[ System Alert: Massive influx of Empathetic Energy (Terror / Panic / Relief)! ]
[ Source Power Increased: +45 Points! ]
[ Source Power Increased: +68 Points! ]
[ Source Power Increased: +92 Points! ]
[ Current Total Source Power: 2,140 Points! ]
He soon harvested over two thousand points of Source Power in a single night.
It was a great fortune; he thinks he won't be able to get such a good chance again, also this would let him simulate his skills to heights he couldn't have imagined a week ago.
But that power also came with a heavy, physical price.
Once the upper levels were clear and the crowd had dispersed into the city, Alex snuck back down deep into the dungeon.
He couldn't just leave those captured mutant serpents behind to die.
They were his own from now on.
Navigating the dark, blood-slicked tunnels, he found the iron cages where the Windrake family kept their captured beasts.
Among them was a twenty-foot Iron Armored Serpent King that had protected him outside the city days ago, along with any other beasts that were barely alive.
Alex had climbed up onto the cages, activating his newly upgraded Demon Snake Summoning Lv 2.
Placing his slender, pale hands directly onto their cold snouts, he used Mana Infusion, pumping streams of his pure, silvery-grey mana straight into their bodies.
The reaction was slow but steady; their wounds froze over and healed, their dull eyes flashed with a slight crimson glow, and their massive bodies began to shed their old, broken scales on the spot.
Recognizing the undeniable hierarchy of his True Naagin bloodline, the giant Serpent King and the other spirit beasts lowered their large heads, pressing their snouts against the floor in absolute, trembling submission.
"Listen to me," Alex had commanded. "The humans above are going to be searching this place soon."
"I can't bring you out into the city streets tonight. Use the underground tunnels beneath the coliseum and hide there. Keep your heads down until I come back to collect you. Do you understand?"
The giant serpents hissed in unison, their tongues flicking out to taste his sweet pheromones before they silently slithered off the platform, vanishing into the darkness, followed by twenty other smaller snakes.
After making sure his new snake army was hidden safely, Alex took a quiet underground escape tunnel that led out into an alleyway a few blocks away from the commercial district.
And that was when the delayed physical backlash hit him like a freight train.
Walking down the midnight street now, Alex had to stop, leaning his shoulder heavily against a brick streetlight just to keep his balance.
His breath puffed out in hot, ragged gasps, and a thick bead of sweat rolled down his collarbone, sinking directly into the sweaty valley of his breasts.
"System..." Alex gasped out, his eyes slightly red as he pulled up his status panel. "Check... check progress..."
[ Feminization Progress: Phase 2/9 (Ecdysis) – 85.6% ]
"Eighty-five percent...!" Alex cried, biting his lower lip hard enough to taste his own blood.
Absorbing all that intense, chaotic emotion from the escaping people forcefully accelerated his second Ecdysis phase again and again in a very short time; his body was screaming from the rapid changes since his fight against Abu.
He was experiencing the most intense, uncontrollable erection of his entire life, fueled by the massive surge of energy and the sweet, hypnotic pheromones his own skin was constantly leaking into the air.
His little brother was throbbing painfully, pitching a rock-hard tent against the front of his form-fitting white silk trousers.
"Ah... fuck, it hurts..." Alex groaned out loud, pressing his thighs together as a strange, deep ache pulsed right behind his erection, deep inside his lower belly.
It felt like something inside him was melting, shifting, and preparing for the inevitable transition into the next phase of his bloodline, but it wasn't fully there yet
"See how much your body is craving it?" the Empress whispered softly in his ear, her voice dripping with dark temptation. "Why keep suffering like this, little Alex?"
"Why keep fighting what you are becoming? Let me take over from here on; I won't let you suffer this loneliness… I'll help you find someone to relieve your stress!!"
"Shut... shut up! Get out of my head!" Alex mentally screamed, tearing himself away from the streetlight.
He couldn't afford to stand out here on the sidewalk.
His sweet, spiced-honey scent was getting thicker by the minute; drifting down the street might attract any passersby or late-night wanderers.
Gritting his teeth against the heavy bounce of his chest and the throbbing ache between his legs, Alex forced his trembling knees to straighten.
He gripped the sleeves of the blazer tied around his waist, kept his head down, and started walking as fast as he could through the dark, empty streets, desperately praying he could reach his home before his body completely betrayed him.