Chapter 227

The princess was enthusiastic enough for her tongue to invade my mouth aggressively, which was to be expected after she got a taste of the reward, and expecting even more leveling. Unfortunately, it was not what she would receive. Not because I wanted to ration my mana — as the regeneration helped me immensely on that aspect — but I had seen the risks of leveling too quickly.

While my method was not as barbaric as the Eternals had been using, it was still enough to make quick leveling a bit of danger. Her soul space needed to settle to make it safe.

Luckily for her, I had an even better reward. I reached a small internal storage, and pulled the little present I had picked from Mariel’s room.

A little flicker of Darkness Spark, beautifully treated with Tantric.

[-450 Mana]

[+1 Tantric]

A gasp escaped her mouth as the Darkness touched her, which was much more strained than I expected. Luckily, I was aware that it was an experiment, and used a very limited amount.

I wondered whether it was the difference between an angel and a human that was the source of the difference, or it was the fact that Mariel had been much more aligned with the nature of the Divine Spark after carrying it with her for two centuries.

Either way, I clearly needed to make it more malleable. Luckily, it was the whole reason I was experimenting with her.

“Focus on the way you have been using your Divine Spark,” I ordered, curious whether the mindset would have any impact on it. I didn’t do that with Mariel, but she was already strongly aligned with Light, making that redundant at best.

She tried to say something, but considering I had stolen her lips once again, the only thing she let out was a soft gasp. But I could imagine her trying to say my actions were not conducive to focusing on darkness.

I didn’t care about the intensity of her success. At this point, I was more interested in understanding the nature of Divine Spark than empowering her — for empowerment, I had easier options.

I just waited to see if the difficulty of the absorption process was changing.

Her mana started to cycle inside her. At first, it was smooth, but soon, she started to sieve her mana into her own Divine Spark reserves, letting it gain a shadowy quality while she tried to focus.

The result was not earth-shattering, but promising. As her mana started to gain Darkness nature, but not fully. In parallel, the difficulty of absorption started to reduce, but it was noticeable only because of my sharp senses. Maybe meditating for hours and days would have worked much more efficiently, but I didn’t have the time to do that.

Luckily, I had my own cheat tool. I used Tantric to dilute the darkness effect more and more, until her body finally accepted it, the minuscule Darkness Spark melding into her quickly.

It wasn’t a lot of Divine Spark, not enough to give her an actual power-up, which was nice since that was not my objective in the first place.

But, as a nice bonus, somehow it made an impact I hadn’t been expecting. Not directly, but somehow, it worked like a skill, and the ease of using her own darkness multiplied several times.

Fascinating.

Too fascinating, even. If I didn’t have the ability to examine her soul space to know the exact skills she had, I might have actually thought that it triggered a skill. The similarity, combined with my unique system’s constant demand for Divine Spark, raised some interesting questions about the link between the Skills and Divine Spark.

Pity we were facing an emergency, which prevented me from whisking the princess to a three-day retreat filled with experimentation and debauchery.

“How’s this as an advance payment,” I said, acting like I hadn’t simply multiplied her capabilities several times, making her a much more formidable and dangerous opponent.

“Enough to make sure I succeed,” she whispered. And, considering she was already capable enough to grab the Crown Princess position strongly enough that other princes needed help from the Eternals to push her out — and failed to attain complete success even then — it was not hard to imagine what that power up meant in terms of effectiveness.

“Good, but since I don’t want to show my face around, let’s make sure you will succeed,” I said as I captured her lips once more. I didn’t want to spend more mana, but since I was facing such a convenient experimentation opportunity, I decided to do so.

Especially I could feel the small pull of the System, trying to absorb the Divine Spark her body absorbed.

[Level: 36 Experience: 631374 / 666000

Strength: 46 Charisma: 63

Precision: 40 Perception: 42

Agility: 40 Manipulation: 45

Speed: 39 Intelligence: 49

Endurance: 39 Wisdom: 51

HP: 7334 / 7334 Mana: 7126 / 9000 ]

SKILLS

Grandmaster Tantric [118/140]

Master Melee [100/100]

Master Biomancy [100/100]

Master Elemental [100/100]

Master Arcana [100/100]

Master Subterfuge [100/100]

Master Craft [85/100]

Expert Speech [75/75]

PERKS

Mana Regeneration

Skill Share

Empowerment (0/1)

Teleportation

COMPANIONS

[Titania - Level 35/38]

[Cornelia - Level 22/26]

[Helga - Level 22/26]

[Marianne - Level 21/29]