Aki did, of course, realize that he was under some kind of charm. Likely some kind of bloodline ability if the princess' bombshell figure and demonic lineage were anything to go by. Plus, her flowing black dress was amazing in both design, affirmation of assets, teasing of further secrets of the figure and also made with machine-like precision in its threadwork, so there was no way he would normally dismiss it out of hand like this.

Nevermind his cultured views though, even if she wore a dress whose cleavage reached just above her crotch, he would normally only ever do a double take a raise a brown to the weird display of sexy, not this… enslaved mind that competed with him for dominance of his headspace.

Namely, he was horny as hell at the moment, but that made it so he was also afraid as hell. Concentrating on anything outside of running or how much he 'wanted some princess pussy because he was powerful now and deserved it already' was rather hard, though not impossible. There was even a way to reduce the difficulty further.

Upon sitting down, the first thing his smiling ass did was to grab a fork that was laid on the table and attempt to stab himself on the thigh.

Which caused his rather attractive host to lose composure as she jumped from her seat and gave him a full view as her iron grip stopped his movement mid motion.

So he started heating up the metal.

Had she held his smiling gaze for one more moment, he would have turned the melting metal into plasma for long enough to release a highly damaging electrical shock with a flick of his wrist and most of his mana, but soon enough Sera was again just Sera in a great dress that did her figure wonders instead of some wronged goddess he should take for himself/submit to.

As she sat down he started dispersing the heat into the air and infusing his mangled excuse of a hand with all the vitality he could muster. With any luck he'd have it functional sometime this week.

"I knew this could happen, yet it seems that I underestimated the chances far too much. Congratulations, you're the fifth person to ever resist my bloodline and the first to do so after I reached this level of mastery with it." Scoffed an incomprehending princess in utter confusion, as if she didn't know what to say now.

And indeed there were even a few congratulatory notifications from the system, but "Fuck if I care." He announced to the room in an angry and fluent fataram. Obviously the first thing he learned from his listening and speaking practice were ways to swear.

Even as the pain forced his mouth shut and he grit his teeth while suppressing a wail that wanted to force itself through his throat, likely with some puke alongside it as now the smell of burned human reached his nose.

It wasn't very different from any of the things he'd killed with fire before, but it seemed that somewhere on his modified brain there were remains of normal human instinct. No tears or snot came despite the expanding grounds of his consciousness that the pain was taking however.

Again, there was an obvious and simple solution.

In a frantic scramble, he seized the not-apple brimming with vitality on the princess' hand with his healthy appendage and promptly gulped it down. The fact his lips were torn further open than he thought possible as his jaw unhinged slightly past human standards was as irrelevant as the fact that neither actions had hurt at all as far as he was concerned.

No, rather, the pain on his hand even started to grow numb as his entire body was flooded with the vitality of the rapidly dissolving not-fruit. Looking at his stats, his half filled HP was shooting up and didn't seem to care that it had already passed his maximum.

'Ok, maybe shoving it down your throat wasn't the correct way of consuming it.' His mind noted as his body started to burn with vitality.

"You weren't supposed to do that either!" Exclaimed the princess who finally realized what he had done, confirming his fears. Not that there was much to be done about it now, he could only make the most out of it.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Vitality was a semi-contrast to stamina however, in that it was just as metaphysical as it was physical, meaning he was able to manipulate it both directly and through his mana. Which had just doubled apparently.

Either way, he started circling both his mana and vitality through his body. Which of course hurts a ton. 'Because it's the equivalent to a virgin suddenly getting a horse cock shoved into their ass but with your entire circulatory system! I blame my panic for this stupidity!'

With the table under him giving out below his sudden increase in strength, Aki stuttered in place despite the chair he sat on. Locking his muscles in place, he looked at the damned princess in front of him again. The paling woman seemed content to just stare at him in shock, but if they were going to fight then he needed more time. He also needed more time even if they weren't going to fight though.

"You stupid, scumbrained whore daughter. This no politics. No premises set. Me never see you as any but wroth waste of flesh and mana now. Should have already." He accused through teeth bared in very real anger and disgust as his words in heavily accented fataram sank to her brain.

Falling to the ground, he held himself like a beast in all four, fingers and toes digging into the wooden floor as they easily sustained his weight, the pain in his muscles from a completely different source of strain.

At the same time that he attempted to prowl away from the princess that launched herself from her seat, he searched for a way to go forward in this conflict. He could not understand her plan, but even if he wasn't in so much pain, bubbling with so much wrath, he still wouldn't have forgiven her for it. That, unfortunately, did not mean he could just directly kill royalty.

"I command you to…"

"You command nothing. You hold neither fake nor real authority, but others let you think so. They want this, they want that, you are but a convenient tool who has forgotten."

His scathing, villainous tone was cliche to a fault, but he was playing on a young woman's insecurities after she'd made a career destroying gaffe, there wasn't a need to be a genius at manipulation to make her suffer.

"You heard lies for so long that you believed them. Told yourself it was fine to pretend. That you didn't disappoint all that bothered to care for your frail and weak willed being. Easier than to pretend to be ashamed of a useless body. A doll pretending to be a princess. A doll forcing herself not to play. To be better than a mindless tool to sate…"

He jumped backwards from his position on the floor, reaching closer to the door as he dodged the shadow spike jutting out of his previous position.

"You are dismissed" Hissed the shadow protectively surrounding the crying princess. At his touch, the young girl fell to her knees, her eyes clouded with an expression of someone that wasn't fully there.

'Did I unlock some form of reverse charm or is the mana I'm circulating keeping the connection she made with her charm standing?' He wondered before practically running through the door and going to his room.

His skin was cracking and bleeding now, so he quickly began circulating the energies in his body faster. By now, his formerly skeletal hand was a whitish appendage that would seem completely normal if not for the different coloration of his skin, but the vitality was now escaping his body and dissipating.

Which was rather ironic since that meant the amalgam of internal injuries it had been causing through his body stopped healing back as fast as they did. Whatever happened next he would need plenty of rest, but he could already recognise where this was going.

Nevermind that pirate with a straw hat, he'd read enough xianxia to recognise a natural treasure when he saw one. Rather, this meant that he could not allow this chance to pass him by, as there was a very high chance that he could obtain permanent stat boosts by integrating the remaining vitality into his whole.

While he did not have any special method to absorb the extra resources, there was one tried and true method of having your cells absorb foreign substances.

BIG DAMAGE! And subsequent forced regeneration.

To guarantee that such destruction wouldn’t simply destroy the vitality as it harmed his body, he’d need to both be conscious and in control of it through the whole thing, so a few types of damage were out, as pure arcane energy, fire and even void…

‘Actually, wasn’t there a fucker that cultivated a life type constitution with void? Add to his method a Void of mind and push all of my concentration into one action and it’d be like that other guy that practically kills himself every time he trains shooting a bow while keeping a relatively high safety due to the exaggerated saturation of the environment.’

It took about one seconds for Aki to decide to go through with the pseudo-suicide, two to figure out his meditative trance and five more to figure out a task to focus on while doing so in a relevant way while keeping multiple conceptual-voids inside himself.