Past the narrow, lancet windows of the chapel hung a leaden, rain-choked sky.
A thick, dreary drizzle drummed steadily against the cracked roof tiles, trickling in dirty rivulets down the plaster and turning the street into one vast, muddy trough.
On a gloomy morning like this, the dismal mood of the Veyrsend slums usually meant no one showed up for liturgy save for three half-deaf widows and an elderly tanner.
Mina stood behind the ajar sacristy door, holding her breath as she peeked through the gap into the main nave.
Her heart leaped into her throat.
Instead of the usual empty pews, a crowd of over twenty people was packed into the wooden benches.
They were almost exclusively young, broad-shouldered laborers from the docks, apprentices from the ropemakers' guild, and a handful of curious city watchmen in sodden doublets.
All of them sat ramrod straight, their eyes darting eagerly toward the altar, whispering among themselves with the kind of breathless anticipation reserved for the grand opening of an exclusive brothel rather than the pious Liturgy of the First Dawn.
Oh, gods... Mina thought in a panic, her knuckles whitening against the doorframe. Where the hell did all these people come from?!
Yet there was no turning back.
If she wanted to harvest the Faith points essential to survive and pay off her monstrous debt, she had to step onto this stage once more and play the role her depraved system had forced upon her.
She blew out a breath through her nose, gritted her teeth, and nudged the door open.
When the Daughter of Light emerged from the shadows of the sacristy, gliding toward the marble altar in a slow, stately stride, a deathly, absolute silence fell over the chapel.
The patter of raindrops against the glass became the solitary sound in the entire sanctuary.
Her debut at mass in the Habit of Indecent Piety was a brazen, shameless desecration of clerical tradition.
The plunging neckline, fashioned from gossamer, near-translucent white silk, groaned at the seams under the staggering pressure of her new E-cup bust.
A dark, heavily boned corset mercilessly cinched her waist, hoisting the lush curves sky-high so they pressed together in a deep, endlessly provocative valley of cleavage.
A slit ran up the skirt all the way to her hip bone, shamelessly flashing a long, pale thigh with every step, while a single, slender earring dangling a blood-red ruby heart swayed from her left ear.
Mina ascended to the carved wooden pulpit.
The sheer heft of her expanded chest dragged her shoulders down so ruthlessly that, simply to keep her balance, she had to rest her monumental, silk-spilling cleavage directly upon the wooden lectern, right over the carved emblem of the deity.
A collective, muffled gasp echoed through the pews.
The young dockers in the front rows flushed crimson in a split second, locking glazed, moonstruck stares onto the rim of the pulpit where two massive, supple globes rested.
A young carpenter took such a savage elbow to the ribs from his betrothed beside him that he doubled over with a breathless grunt.
“For the love of the Sun...” a hushed whisper drifted from the fourth pew. “Did the new priestess always pack such... heavy armor up front?”
“Stop staring, you idiot, your eyes are going to pop out of your skull!” hissed a woman beside him.
“She's an anointed woman of the cloth!”
“Holy or not... by all the gods, that silk leaves almost nothing to the imagination!”
Mina felt her ears and cheeks burn with living fire.
She wanted nothing more than for the stone floor to swallow her whole, to sprint up to the attic and set this cursed garment ablaze.
Yet she knew what had to be done.
Resting her palms against the lectern, she closed her eyes and drew a deep, steadying breath.
Tender Sermon!
With the skill activated, Mina parted her lips to begin the morning prayer:
“Children of the Light...” she began.
And in that exact moment, the system’s magic seized command of her voice.
No refined priestly oration left her throat.
The words rolled out in an impossibly soft, breathy, throaty purr, vibrating with thick, intimate warmth. It sounded like the sweetest sigh in a shadowed bedchamber, a velvet caress tracing the napes of every man gathered within the hall.
[System Notification: Resonance of Desire!]
“Ponto considers your breasts a miracle of creation. Faith +2.”
“Krokoi cannot focus on the deity; he is picturing you on a haystack. Faith +3.”
“Young apprentice Vael holds his breath, staring at your thigh. Faith +2.”
“The watchman has selected you as his evening ‘starting target’ in the latrine. Faith +4.”
That shameless degenerate came back again?! Mina screamed internally at the sight of the watchman's entry, yet her lips, subservient to the overarching technique, never missed a beat of the sermon.
“...we gather in His warmth to seek solace for our weary flesh,” she purred sensually, each syllable causing the assembled dockers to shift uncomfortably on the hard benches, frantically adjusting belts and trousers.
Beneath her navel, the Scarlet Brand smoldered white-hot, feeding on the thick male lust pooling in the air.
Waves of scalding, shameful pleasure rippled through her hips, turning her own breath shallow and ragged - which only heightened the erotic magnetism of the service.
At one point, the solemnity of the liturgy was nearly derailed by a shrill child’s voice piping up from a side aisle.
Eight-year-old Allie, daughter of one of the dockers, tugged on the sleeve of a boy her age, speaking loudly enough for the vaulted ceiling to echo her words:
“See, Tommy? Told you! Mama told Papa at the market yesterday that only shameless sluts dress like that!”
A few elder parishioners froze in horror, someone choked back a snort of laughter, and Mina nearly choked on her own spit.
Gritting her teeth, she raised her hands toward the golden disc and steered the liturgy to its conclusion, wrapping it in a final, velvety blessing.
“May the light of the Holy Sun walk with you throughout this day.”
“In His radiance. Forevermore.”
When the final bell chimed, the congregation rose from their seats with palpable reluctance.
Coins showered into the wooden alms box with a steady, loud clatter - mostly coppers, but punctuated by the heavy chink of several silver discs tossed in by flustered watchmen.
Mina bolted straight for the sacristy, slamming the door behind her and collapsing back against the wood.
“Sweet Jesus...” she choked out, sliding to her knees and wiping sweat from her temples and cleavage.
Her heart hammered like a sledge.
The sheer white silk covering her nipples was damp - the crushing squeeze of the corset had coaxed several droplets of magical milk from her swollen glands during the service, leaving faint pearlescent stains on the fabric.
Damn it, I have to remember to milk these tits first thing in the morning when I wake up... Otherwise, I'm just asking for a disaster...
Yet the harvest from this single mass was staggering when Mina checked her system balance:
[Accumulated Faith: 148]
From barely a dozen points, she had leaped to nearly a hundred and fifty in under thirty minutes!
It was undeniably gross and degrading, but it worked with ruthless efficiency.
Mina stood, stepped over to the desk, and opened the parish ledger alongside the supply cupboard.
She wanted to take inventory of her herbs before noon.
But when she swung the cabinet doors open, she froze, hand hovering in mid-air.
The shelf was completely, utterly bare.
The thirteen vials of Purification Elixir she had brewed on her first day and set out on the vestibule table were gone.
Every last one had been bought out in the span of a few hours, and in the pewter bowl beside the display lay an even six hundred and fifty copper coins.
Her accountant's instincts flared in alarm.
“What is going on here?...” she murmured under her breath, knitting her brow.
Fifty coppers apiece was the equivalent of two full days of backbreaking labor at the docks.
The paupers of Veyrsend pinched every copper, subsisting on bran bread and haggling over every turnip.
No one in their right mind would buy out expensive antidote potions down to the last drop unless a lethal threat was sweeping through the district.
Before she could pursue that thought, a thunderous commotion erupted from outside.
The heavy oak doors of the church slammed against the wall with a deafening crash.
The chill of the rainy morning rushed into the sanctuary, accompanied by the frantic shouts of adults and the piercing wails of a child:
“Mother! For the love of the gods, save Lawrence! He’s dying!” New chapters come out on g.com first.
“Waaah! Sister Mina! Papa’s foaming at the mouth! Please do something!”
Mina didn’t hesitate for a heartbeat.
Throwing her worn gray traveling cloak over the revealing habit, she rushed out of the sacristy into the main nave.
A crowd huddled before the altar beneath the smoke of flickering oil lanterns.
Three burly, heavily tattooed dockers strained under the weight of an improvised stretcher cobbled together from a tattered, soiled sail.
Hurrying beside them was a weeping, disheveled woman in a frayed bonnet, while little Allie clung to her skirts, bawling her eyes out.
“Set him across the pews! Hurry!” Mina shouted, sprinting toward them.
Heaving for breath, the men lowered their burden across the pushed-together wooden seats.
Mina cast the cloak aside onto the stone floor, shame completely forgotten in the heat of the moment.
She dropped to her knees beside the stretcher, leaning over the stricken man.
In that same motion, the tight corset pushed her lush bust forward, thrusting it nearly into the faces of the dockers hovering above.
A callous notification flickered in the air:
[Porter Barnaba feels a sudden surge of adrenaline at the sight of your cleavage. Faith +2.]
Shut the hell up, you cursed interface, a man is dying here! she snarled internally, batting the window aside to focus on the patient.
The sight was horrifying.
The docker - a powerfully built man in his forties with weather-beaten, sun-cured skin - was in a state of profound, septic shock.
His breath whistled in shallow, agonizing gasps, while thin, yellowish foam flecked with dark clots of blood seeped from the corners of his bruised lips.
The true horror, however, lay along his right arm.
His shirt sleeve had been torn away, exposing a forearm swollen to twice its natural girth.
The flesh had turned a mottled, livid purple, densely blistered with weeping pustules oozing a foul, clear discharge.
It looked as if someone had plunged his arm directly into liquid, corrosive fire.
“Was there a fire at the harbor?!” Mina demanded sharply, seizing the man's wrist. “Did he take an acid burn? Anything?!”
“No, Mother, I swear on everything holy, there was no fire!” the woman wailed, wringing her hands.
“Lawrence came home at daybreak from the graveyard shift in Fourth Dock Basin! He said they were offloading strange, sealed crates from the deep south! As soon as he walked through the door, his arm swelled up and started burning like living fire! I poured three whole bottles of the Purification Elixir I bought this morning down his throat! Three whole bottles! And nothing! It didn't even touch it! Then he started vomiting blood, clutched his belly, and dropped like a felled tree!”
Mina shut her eyes, tuning out the woman’s wailing as she focused every ounce of her will.
“Mana Control,” she whispered.
She threaded a narrow, azure filament of her own energy into the man’s veins, probing his internal state.
What she sensed churning in his bloodstream sent an icy wave of sweat down her spine.
This was no ordinary illness or food poisoning.
Raging through Lawrence’s vessels was an alien, monstrously dense, virulent energy of a tainted nature.
The substance was literally dissolving his tissues from the inside out, eating away cells and obliterating internal organs at a terrifying speed.
The common Purification Elixir, formulated from gentle restorative herbs, had been neutralized by the venom in a split second, like a single drop of clean water plunged into sulfuric acid.
Mina's eyes snapped wide as she stared at the dying docker.
They hadn’t been offloading ordinary freight in Fourth Dock Basin.
Something forbidden, toxic, and lethal had leaked into the air - and Lawrence was merely the first harbinger of a catastrophe poised to drown all of Veyrsend in ruin.