Hearing from Liliane’s own lips that she could neutralize this magical radiation, Mina released a long, shuddering breath.
Cold sweat trickled down her temples, her legs still quivering from the sprint through Veyrsend’s mud. Undoing her soaked, heavy gray cloak, she carefully slipped it off her shoulders.
Reluctant to track rainwater and dockside grit deeper into the warm café, she hung the dripping fabric from a brass wall peg by the entrance. In the meantime, Liliane glided back to her post behind the bar.
Yet when Mina turned back toward the counter, Liliane froze dead in her tracks.
The crystal snifter of brandy hovered in the succubus’s manicured fingers barely an inch from her lips.
Her emerald pupils dilated so violently they nearly swallowed the whites of her eyes, and a low, drawn-out, shamelessly flirtatious whistle slipped past her lips.
For the first time, she was seeing Mina stripped of her concealing, baggy outerwear - beholding the Habit of Indecent Piety in all its unadulterated glory.
To the demoness, the sight was pure sinful poetry. Snow-white, near-translucent silk clung to the priestess’s chest with such agonizing tightness that her monumental E-cup bust looked ready to burst right out of the neckline.
The plunging slit dipped far below her sternum, laying bare sweat-glistened skin and an intoxicating, deep valley of cleavage.
The dark corset ruthlessly cinched Mina’s waist into an hourglass taper, while the skirt’s high slit bared her lush, smooth thigh all the way to her hip bone with every subtle shift of weight.
“Abyssal gods...” Liliane purred in a low, throaty rasp, a predatory heat of desire flaring in her gaze so thick the air around the bar seemed to crackle. “Little priestess... Where, by all the demons of the night, did you get your hands on that habit? You look so shamelessly magnificent in it that my finest girls at The Pink Haven would slit the throats of half the nobility just for the tailoring.”
A scalding crimson flush rushed up Mina’s cheeks and down to her collarbones. Instinctively, she tried crossing her arms over her chest, but given their monstrous volume, the gesture came off more comical than modest.
“I got it on sale at the market! But that doesn't matter!” she blurted in a panic, feeling her ears burn like open coals.
Liliane let out a peal of mocking laughter, her eyes drifting straight down to the taut nubs of Mina’s nipples straining beneath the silk.
“At the market in Veyrsend? Good one, little blossom. In that godforsaken slum, seamstresses can't tell a potato sack from fine wool, and that fabric looks like exquisite work. Whoever stitched that for you knew precisely how to turn a holy nun into Asterion’s sweetest courtesan.”
“I said it doesn't matter!” Mina snapped, slamming her palm onto the bar counter to cut off the commentary. “You said you know what this plague is! My parishioners are dying on the chapel floor, and you're just staring at my tits! Explain it to me, right now!”
Liliane sighed with feigned disappointment, but set the snifter aside. Propping her elbows on the wooden counter, her expression sobered, adopting the cool, scholarly poise of a true master of the arcane.
“From what you've described, it is almost certainly Mana Contamination,” she began plainly. “An ancient, high-capacity etheric crystal powering the deep furnaces likely breached in the boiler room. Raw, condensed mana erupted into the air like an invisible gas, bombarding everything within a radius of dozens of meters.”
“Then why didn't my healing spells work?” Mina asked, furrowing her brow. “I channeled Lesser Heal into Lawrence, and the spell shattered like it hit a brick wall!”
“Because raw, feral mana behaves like a raging vortex inside a living body,” Liliane explained coolly. “It invades the bloodstream, tears through natural elemental balances, and generates a chaotic field of energetic disruption. Every healing spell is an ordered structure. When you attempt to pour holy light into a vessel overrun with rampaging ether, the hostile energy tears your spell matrix to shreds and turns it back against the patient. Conventional herbs are just as useless.”
Mina connected the dots at once.
“And us? Why didn't that dust affect me the same way?”
“Because you are a Transcendent, little priestess,” the succubus smiled, tapping a claw against the wood. “Your innate mana circulation, even at the Apprentice rank, functions like an active immune system. Your energy continually filters, neutralizes, and purges ambient micro-contaminants. As for me, I could bathe in that ruptured reactor core and walk away with nothing more than a faint headache. But an ordinary mortal? Pure flesh and blood without a drop of magical circulation. To a body like that, free ether acts like concentrated acid, eating through cells, dissolving vascular walls, and scorching marrow.”
A sudden, chilling epiphany struck Mina.
Those thirteen vials of Purification Elixir bought out down to the last bottle that morning... Commoners had instinctively felt their bodies burning from within. Gathering their last coppers, they had bolted to the church to down detox draughts, assuming it was a bilious fever or foul vapors from stagnant cargo holds. Yet it was a magical radiation disaster, against which a simple cleansing brew had zero effect.
Liliane measured her with an unsparing, merciless stare.
“Does this laborer of yours keep a chest brimming with gold at home?”
Mina froze.
“What?...”
“I’m asking if he's swimming in coin,” the succubus repeated bluntly. “Because the procedure is simple in theory, yet monstrously expensive in practice. To save a mortal with severe tissue contamination, an advanced mage must thread their own energy deep into his circulatory system. They must flush his veins centimeter by centimeter, binding loose etheric particles and diluting them with their own condensed mana. Such an operation burns through roughly eighty percent of a high-tier mage’s reserves. At the guilds in the upper city, the going rate for that procedure is a flat hundred gold coins per head.”
Liliane folded her arms beneath her lush bust:
“Lawrence is a docker from a harbor slum. If he lacks a hundred gold coins to hire a guild mage, and you lack the mana capacity to execute it yourself... that man will rot from the inside out before tomorrow noon. And with him that young lad, and every poor bastard who breathed the fumes from that boiler room.”
Mina’s stomach twisted into a tight, sickening knot. The memory of little Allie sobbing in the cold rain and the docker's helpless wife struck her like a sledgehammer. If she did nothing, her chapel would turn into a morgue. She had only one lifeline left: the ruthless, predatory demoness standing across the bar.
Mina swallowed hard. Swallowing every ounce of pride, she leaned against the counter and fixed the succubus with the most desperate, pleading look she could muster:
“Liliane... I’m begging you. Help them.”
The succubus arched an eyebrow, offering only silence.
“Take it on credit!” Mina pressed feverishly, her voice breaking with emotion. “You saw my Vigor Elixir! You tasted it! I can deliver five... no, ten vials every week! I’ll brew as much as you can flip on the black market! I’ll pay back every single copper, I swear it! Just save that man!”
Liliane stared at her in silence for a long moment. In her emerald eyes flickered a glint of genuine surprise - she hadn't anticipated that a priestess draped in such a scandalous outfit would be so eager to leverage her own body and labor for some filthy, unrelated docker from the slums.
Yet across the succubus’s lips bloomed her signature, predatory merchant smirk:
“I see you truly care, little blossom... Very well. I accept. But business is business. I am no third-rate apprentice from the provinces or a gasping Adept. My personal intervention costs a flat thousand gold coins.”
“A-a thousand coins?!” Mina gasped, the terrifying figures flashing before her eyes, dizziness washing over her. “You literally just said a hundred!”
“A hundred coins is what some academic hack charges for a makeshift flush that leaves the patient a cripple half the time,” Liliane countered smoothly, stepping out from behind the bar. “I guarantee complete cellular regeneration. Quality has its price, my little debtor.”
Before Mina could voice a protest, Liliane was standing right before her.
“Before we step foot outside, however... I must purge that filth from you. I won’t have you tracking ether through my establishment.”
The succubus reached out and placed her hand unceremoniously atop Mina’s head, threading long, black-lacquered claws through her golden hair.
“Hold still,” she purred.
A dense, overwhelming surge of violet energy swept through Mina’s body. This was no gentle healing touch - it was a brutal, merciless scouring of her aura from the crown of her skull to the tips of her toes.
The resonance was instantaneous and debilitating.
Beneath Mina’s navel, the Scarlet Brand flared white-hot, answering the touch of succubus mana with a deep, scalding spasm. At the same time, an electrifying jolt shot straight through her mammary glands - a wave of suffocating heat erupting from her engorged, corset-squeezed breasts. Mina arched backward, clutching the edge of the bar for dear life as a strangled, humiliating moan ripped from her throat: You are reading on novelping.com, the official source.
“Nnhh... a-aahh!”
The girl’s frame trembled, her cheeks burning crimson.
Liliane pulled her hand away, giving the shaken priestess’s blonde head an amused pat:
“All done. Pure as a tear. And as of this second, you owe me a flat thousand gold coins.”
The succubus took a step back, but her gaze never left Mina’s body. On the contrary - it traveled shamelessly downward. A long, black claw traced the rim of the priestess’s plunging neckline, gliding languidly across the smooth white silk hovering just above her heavy, heaving bust.
“You know, little nun...” Liliane purred, her voice thick as warm honey. “A thousand coins is a mountain of cash. But as a businesswoman, I’m always open to alternative in-kind settlements... That little body of yours is so deliciously delicate, and those breasts... mmm, truly worth a sin or two~”
Mina instinctively crossed her arms over her chest, stepping back under the ravenous stare.
Yet something inside her snapped.
Enough of this, she seethed.
First Ashcroft and his fifty thousand, then this fucked-up degenerate system, and now this horny demoness is trying to turn me into a bedroom plaything!
I am a grown, educated woman!
Gritting her teeth, she took a sharp breath, squared her spine, threw her chin high, and with all the righteous indignation she could muster... proudly thrust her chest straight toward Liliane.
“I will pay off every single copper through potions!” she declared with icy, pious gravity, glaring right into the succubus’s eyes. “And don't you dare think for a second I'm one of those shameless nuns you can buy for loose change and bend into bedroom tricks! I have standards!”
In theory, it was a noble, heroic declaration from an unyielding priestess.
In practice... Mina had completely forgotten the laws of physics governing her new anatomy.
When she snapped ramrod straight and thrust her torso forward, the rigid corset acted like a spring-loaded catapult. Her monumental, breathtakingly soft, and buoyant E-cup globes bounced skyward, practically spilling out of the white silk to heave barely inches from Liliane’s nose. The deep chasm of cleavage yawned wide open, her erect, rosy nipples straining against the translucent fabric with the sudden jolt.
Liliane froze.
Her gaze was magnetically vacuumed into the explosion of curves. She swallowed so hard the gulp echoed audibly through the quiet café, her pupils dilating into pitch-black chasms. From beneath her velvet skirts whipped her long, spade-tipped tail, drumming frantically against the floorboards in an ecstatic, erratic rhythm.
“Of course... my holy, immaculate priestess...” Liliane rasped, pulling her gaze from the cleavage with heroic effort and catching a bead of sweat from her lip with the tip of her tongue.
The succubus gave an obedient nod, but in her mind, a brazen new scheme snapped into place.
Naive little mouse... She actually thinks she's in control.
The moment they were alone in the dark, locked sacristy of the church, Liliane fully intended to discover firsthand just how “immaculate” a Daughter of Light could remain under the right touch.
Spinning on her heel, Liliane threw a dark, fur-lined travel cloak over her shoulders and seized a heavy, iron-bound satchel of alchemical instruments.
“Let us go save your wretched paupers, little sister,” she purred with a predatory chuckle, swinging the door wide to the rainy night. “And as for the itemized settlement of your balance... we can handle that in your private bedroom~”