Divine Milking System-Chapter 12 | The Long-Term Investment

I said it out loud by accident. Quiet enough that no one heard. But still.

Then I thought about it properly.

Forty minutes of beginner-level resistance training in a body that had been sedentary for most of a year. What was I expecting? A rank-up notification and a dramatic music sting? This wasn’t a video game. Limit Breaker removed the caps. It didn’t remove the actual work required to reach them.

I needed to recalibrate my expectations.

More importantly, I needed data.

If I was going to turn this body into something functional, I needed to understand the rate of change. How many segments per session. How many sessions per rank. Whether certain exercises moved certain stats faster. Whether the 3x multiplier from sexual activity stacked with conventional training or replaced it.

A hundred questions I couldn’t answer yet.

But I could start collecting information.

I pulled out my phone and opened the notes app. Started logging what I’d done.

Goblet squats: 3 sets, 12 reps, bodyweight.

Dumbbell curls: 3 sets, 8 reps, 15 pounds.

Dumbbell rows: 3 sets, 10 reps, 20 pounds.

Walking lunges across the floor: 2 lengths.

I noted my current stats before and after. No change yet.

Tomorrow I’d check again after another session and see if the numbers had moved.

If one session didn’t move the bar, maybe two did. Maybe five. Maybe the system updated in chunks rather than real time. I needed to treat this like an experiment.

Which meant consistent variables.

Same time. Same routine. Same duration. Track everything.

I added a note at the bottom.

Check stats immediately post-session. Check again 2 hours later. Check again before bed. Record any changes.

Gamify it.

That was the word.

Gamify the entire process.

Because if I could figure out the exact conversion rate, I could optimize the training schedule around the extraction sessions. Stack the multipliers. Run the numbers on how fast I could move from E-rank physical stats to D-rank, then C, then B.

I put my phone away.

Grabbed the twenty-five pound dumbbells.

Started another set of rows.

My back burned by rep six. I finished the set.

Hikaru finished her cable work and moved to the pull-up bar.

I tracked this in the mirror without turning my head.

She reached up and took the bar with a neutral grip and did twelve pull-ups without breaking rhythm. Clean movement. Full range. No kipping. The kind of reps that look easy from the outside and aren’t.

Then she dropped, shook out her hands, and went again.

She was wearing a black long-sleeve hoodie and dark grey training shorts that hit just above the knee. Her hair was tied back. The same red eyes from last night, now sharp and focused on nothing in particular on the wall in front of her.

Hikaru’s baseline attraction rating was something I hadn’t checked yet.

My Charisma stat was at E-rank, two segments. Snake Eyes had a charm effect that scaled with existing interest.

If Hikaru had zero interest in men, which according to the novel was a reasonable assumption, the charm effect would be working with nothing.

Building from absolute zero.

That took time.

Which was fine.

Because I had a plan.

Not a fully formed plan, more like the skeleton of a plan.

What Hikaru needed, underneath all the armor, was someone who treated her the same way regardless of context.

Treat her like a person who occupied the same space.

Acknowledge her when it would be strange not to.

Leave her alone when she wanted to be left alone.

Show up to the gym at the same time not because she was here but because this was when the gym wasn’t crowded.

Let her build the mental model of me as harmless.

Then patient.

Then maybe, three weeks from now, interesting.

Then useful.

Then something worth looking at twice.

It was a long game.

Too long for my 67-hour deadline, obviously. Hikaru was not my survival target. She was my long-term investment. The foundation of something bigger once I wasn’t running on a countdown.

For right now, she was an ambient presence I needed to not scare off.

I did another set of lunges.

My left knee complained loudly on rep nine.

I finished the rep anyway and stood up.

Hikaru dropped from the pull-up bar, rolled her shoulders, and pulled out her phone. Checked something. Put it away.

Then she looked up and our eyes met in the mirror.

I held it for exactly one second.

Looked away first.

Went back to my dumbbell rack.

That was it. That was the entire interaction. One second of eye contact in a gym mirror at 5:40 in the morning, followed by me going back to my embarrassing beginner workout like nothing happened.

Perfect.

No Snake Eyes. Not this time. Too obvious. Too early. The ability required sustained eye contact to trigger and one second in a mirror was not that.

Today was not about extraction.

Today was about being seen without being a threat.

There’s a difference between invisible and harmless.

Invisible means she doesn’t see you.

Harmless means she sees you and decides you don’t matter.

I needed harmless.

I went back to the cable machine after she moved away from it. Started working through lat pulldowns at a weight that was genuinely humble.

Checked the system stats again at 6:05 AM.

Strength: E. One segment.

Endurance: E. Two segments. Actually.

Two point five. The second segment had a partial fill that hadn’t been there at the start.

I looked at it.

The progress was tiny. Almost meaningless. Half a segment on endurance after an hour of work.

But it was there.

It moved.

The bar actually moved.

Something in my chest did a thing I wasn’t going to call excitement because that would be embarrassing, but it was adjacent to excitement. The very specific satisfaction of confirming a hypothesis. The system responded to training. Not fast. Not dramatically. But it responded.

Which meant it was a game.

A very slow game with very real stakes and a body that was starting from the absolute floor, but a game with rules I could learn.

I started calculating.

Half a segment per hour of training. Ten segments per rank. Twenty hours to rank up endurance from E to D at this rate.

That was before the sexual training multiplier.

One hour of extraction activity counted as three hours of conventional training. So theoretically, a successful extraction session could move the bar one and a half segments instead of half.

Belle Fox.

Bronze tier. She wasn’t going to break any records but 160 points on first extraction and a session that could chip away at my stats simultaneously.

I needed to move on her today.