Agonizing pain!
Lilia felt as if she were no longer human.
She felt like a leather pouch being forcibly filled with water, destined to burst at any second.
The Magic Power originating from the world’s core was pure and vast, yet it was also violently irrational.
It wasn’t “nourishing” her; it was “remodeling” her in the most barbaric way possible.
The magic energy pathways in her body were stretched to their limits, emitting faint, cracking moans.
Cracks began to spread across the inner walls of her meridians.
But before she could even catch her breath, more Magic Power surged in, forcibly washing over and widening those wounds.
Tearing, repairing, then tearing again…
Every cycle brought a new wave of bone-scraping pain.
“Ah… ugh…”
Lilia fell to her knees, her body twitching uncontrollably.
As soon as sweat broke out, it was evaporated by the high concentration of Magic Power surrounding her.
Only the discordant growls of a wounded beast could escape her throat.
Her consciousness drifted in and out of the agonizing pain, like a flickering candle in the wind that could be extinguished at any moment.
She wanted to give up.
She wanted to actively sever the connection with that Light Sphere.
However, that power had already domineeringly taken over her body, giving her no chance to resist.
She was like a small, broken ship caught in the eye of a storm, forced to passively endure wave after wave of giant rollers.
‘No… I’m going to die… This time, I’m really going to be played to death by this pervert…’
Just as Lilia’s consciousness was about to sink into darkness, a cold voice pierced through the infinite pain, exploding directly in her mind.
“You can’t even handle this much?”
It was Lucia.
“Is your grand plan for a ‘counter-push’ really this fragile?”
Those words were like a red-hot iron poker, ruthlessly stabbing the dying spark of Lilia’s consciousness.
‘Counter-push… Right!’
She hadn’t pinned this pervert to the ground yet! She hadn’t let her taste what it was like to be played with in the palm of someone’s hand!
How could she… How could she die here?!
‘I won’t accept this!’
A powerful obsession stemming from the depths of her Soul suddenly erupted from her body.
That unwillingness swept away all pain and despair.
Lilia snapped her head up.
On her small face, distorted by pain, her gold and blue Heterochromatic Eyes burned with a frantic fire.
She glared deathly at the indifferent figure standing nearby, her teeth chattering.
“I… haven’t… given… up! Meow!”
She used every ounce of her strength to squeeze those words out, each one carrying the metallic taste of blood.
She no longer passively endured.
Instead, she went mad, slamming her will against the torrent of energy raging inside her!
If she couldn’t hide, she would eat it!
She twisted her newly stabilized Third Tier Spirit Force into a sharp blade, forcibly carving a path through that chaotic storm of energy!
She stopped resisting.
She stopped trying to divert it.
Instead, like a beast that had been starving for three days and three nights, she began to actively bite and devour!
She treated herself like a madman managing a flood, channeling all the water that was enough to collapse a dam toward the pathways in her body that were on the verge of shattering.
She was gambling with her life.
The slightest mistake would result in her body exploding.
But Lilia had gone mad; she couldn’t care about that anymore! All her mind and spirit were immersed in this war against her own body.
She “watched” as the energy washed over her bones and pathways over and over.
She felt the tearing pain, but she also tasted the new life that came after the remodeling.
Time lost all meaning at this moment.
After an unknown amount of time, Lilia gradually discovered a pattern within that violent energy.
Although this power was barbaric, it didn’t truly want her life.
Every impact and every tear acted precisely on the weakest and most critical nodes of her body that needed strengthening.
This didn’t seem like an accident.
Rather, it felt like… a precisely calculated surgical operation.
A thought flashed through her mind.
‘Could it be…?’
She struggled to spare a sliver of her attention to look up at Lucia.
The woman was still standing there quietly, her face devoid of expression.
But at that moment, Lilia “saw” it.
One of Lucia’s fingers was lightly tapping the air at an extremely subtle, fixed frequency.
Every time a tap landed, the pulse of the violent energy torrent inside Lilia’s body would turn docile for a moment, perfectly synchronizing with that rhythm.
‘It’s her! This pervert is using her will to remotely control everything!’
She wasn’t just watching the show! She had been in control of the entire field the whole time, ensuring that Lilia wouldn’t actually meet her end!
This realization made Lilia’s emotions complicated to the extreme.
There was the anger of being toyed with and the humiliation of being treated like a plaything.
And there was also a sliver of… relief that she was unwilling to admit.
It turned out she had been under this pervert’s protection all along.
This life-threatening Game had never been truly “life-threatening” from the start.
‘Bastard… Meow…’
Lilia cursed softly in her heart, though there wasn’t much hatred left in her voice.
Since she wouldn’t die, what was there to be afraid of!
Setting her heart, she completely let go.
She was no longer cautious; instead, she became even bolder in devouring and fusing that massive power.
Her body was becoming stronger at an incredible speed during this painful baptism.
Her originally fragile magic energy pathways had been widened several times over, becoming terrifyingly resilient.
Every cell in her body felt as if it had been re-tempered, brimming with power.
She could clearly feel an invisible bottleneck in her body being ground down bit by bit.
The wall separating her from a higher level of power had become so thin that light could pass through it.
Just… just one more! One more push and it would break!
Right then, Lucia’s finger tapping the air stopped.
The torrent of energy surging into Lilia’s body also came to an abrupt halt, cutting off completely.
“Huh?”
Lilia had been immersed in the pleasure of upgrading — a mix of pain and joy — when she was suddenly interrupted.
It felt like a bucket of cold water had been dumped over her head, and she looked up with a dazed expression.
The sensation was like being tripped right before reaching the finish line of a hundred-meter sprint.
“Today’s practice ends here,” Lucia’s flat voice rang out.
“What? Meow?”
Lilia panicked instantly.
Ignoring the difference in status, she blurted out, “Don’t stop! Mistress! I’m about to… about to break through! Give me one more minute! No, thirty seconds! Thirty seconds is enough! Meow!”
“I said, it ends here.”
There was no room for negotiation in Lucia’s tone.
She walked over to Lilia and leaned down, picking up the limp little creature who was trying to linger on the ground.
“Haste makes waste.”
Lucia wore that malicious expression of someone who had seen through everything.
She looked at Lilia’s impatient face, held her close, and leaned into her ear.
Blowing hot breath, she whispered in a voice only the two of them could hear, “And… if I let you break through so easily, then what… would I have left to play with later?”
……