Apocalypse: Every Woman I Invest In Makes Me Stronger

A soft, velvet displacement stirred the air near the eastern shore of the newly expanded lake.

Ethan materialized in the open clearing, the cool, pristine breeze blowing across the water gently rustling his torn clothes. Standing tall in the dark loam before him was the monumental Life Crystal.

The relic stood half the height of a grown man, resting like an ancient obelisk in the fertile earth. Beneath its translucent crystalline exterior, a milky-white luminescence drifted like liquid moonlight trapped within polished marble, exuding a steady, peaceful aura that seemed to calm the violent aches running through his body.

Ethan knelt slowly, favoring his bandaged ribs, and pressed his uninjured left palm against the stone’s smooth facet.

An immediate, soothing warmth seeped into his skin.

A faint pulse of restorative energy resonated through his arm, traveling through his meridians and pooling around the bruised edges of his spiritual dantian. It felt like stepping into a warm spring after an eternity in a blizzard.

Yet, despite the pleasant sensation, the actual therapeutic effect was painfully slow.

Following the initial expansion of the Survival Space to one hundred thousand square meters, the Life Crystal had settled into a dormant stabilization phase. According to the system’s rules, it would not release another monumental surge of primal energy until Ethan’s personal strength broke through the threshold of true S-Rank. For now, while it continuously purified the ambient environment, its ability to directly replenish a wounded warrior was passive and gradual.

Ethan pulled his hand back, noting the difference with a wry, self-deprecating smile.

It would take an entire day of direct contact with this sleeping artifact to absorb the volume of restorative essence that Debbie and Tessa could generate in a single coordinated hour of dual-cultivation healing.

”Still, having this stone here has worked wonders for those two,” Ethan murmured, his expression softening.

Both Debbie and Tessa possessed rare, support-oriented life abilities, granting them an extraordinary natural affinity with the Life Crystal’s frequency.

Whenever Ethan was out scavenging the ruins, the two women spent hours meditating beside the stone, resting their palms against the milky facets to absorb its ambient light. Over the past several days, the transformation had become unmistakable. The soft green luminescence generated by Debbie’s palms had thickened into a rich, emerald radiance, and the restorative potency of her Healing Essence had nearly doubled in density.

Similarly, Tessa’s Life Link ability had shed its previous volatility, becoming remarkably smooth and resilient, allowing her to bridge and purify spiritual streams for extended treatments without suffering physical exhaustion.

The Life Crystal was an investment that continuously paid dividends, quietly upgrading the capabilities of his healers.

Ethan pushed himself up from the loam, stepped through a short spatial fold, and returned to the quiet interior of the wooden cabin.

Sitting down on the edge of the mattress, he reached across his torso and carefully unpinned the blood-crusted bandages wrapping his chest.

The sight exposed beneath the linen brought a deep scowl to his face.

Three puncture-like wounds remained wide open over his pectorals. The surrounding flesh was blackened, inflamed, and oozing a thin, dark fluid that hissed faintly when it contacted the air. The Blackscale Drake’s corrosive bile was stubbornly clinging to his cellular structure, actively eating away at any new tissue his body attempted to generate.

Debbie had already warned him during their initial emergency session that this draconic toxin could not be purged with a single treatment. Its spiritual viscosity was too high. It required systematic, daily cycles of purification to break the poison down layer by layer until the underlying flesh could knit.

Ethan released a sharp breath through his nose and lay back on the pillows.

There was no shortcut around it. The next few days would be spent in complete confinement.

----

For the next four days, a soft, rhythmic current of restorative life energy circulated continuously within the walls of the wooden cabin.

Every afternoon, without fail, Debbie and Tessa arrived at Ethan’s room at the appointed hour, carrying fresh rolls of clean gauze, warm water, and clean towels.

The treatment process was intricate, intimate, and physically demanding.

Debbie would sit gracefully beside Ethan on the edge of the bed, her fair hands hovering inches above his exposed chest as she activated her awakened talent. Soft, pulsing waves of emerald light would condense over her palms, gradually coalescing into drops of glistening, translucent Healing Essence that carried the potent vitality of her life core.

Tessa would then lean forward, taking the concentrated essence into her mouth. Channeling the emerald brilliance of her awakened Life Link through her throat and lips, she acted as a living filter—refining the raw essence, stripping away foreign spiritual friction, and infusing it with pure bio-compatible resonance before gently transferring the purified vitality directly into Ethan’s open wounds.

The coordination between the two women had evolved into seamless harmony. Debbie focused entirely on extracting and sustaining the flow of raw healing power, while Tessa dedicated her concentration to the meticulous task of filtering the corrosive black energy and stimulating cellular regeneration.

Even with their combined efforts, the drake’s venom fought back with savage tenacity.

A session would successfully clear a layer of decayed tissue, only for a stubborn bluish-black stain to resurface hours later from deep within the muscle fibers. The dull, throbbing ache would subside into numbness, only to flare up into sharp agony whenever the lingering toxin made a desperate push against his immune system.

They repeated the cycle tirelessly, day after day.

By the end of each multi-hour session, Debbie and Tessa would emerge from the cabin leaning against one another, their delicate cheeks burning with a deep, breathless crimson from the prolonged intimate contact, while Ethan remained propped against the headboard, staring at the ceiling in quiet contemplation as the restorative warmth warred against the poison.

Time drifted slowly in the timeless haven.

Yet, inch by inch, human perseverance overcame the beast’s malice.

The dark necrosis gradually receded from the margins of his chest wounds. The persistent weeping of dark blood slowed to a halt, the swelling around his fractured wrist vanished as the bone fused securely, and the constant, burning fire that had accompanied every breath finally cooled into a clean, faint ache.

On the evening of the fifth day, the final trace of bluish-black discoloration faded completely from his skin.

Ethan stripped away the last layer of soiled linen and ran his calloused fingers across his chest.

The ragged tears had fully closed, leaving behind three pale, faint silver scars across his ribs. The corrosive rot that had tormented him for nearly a week was completely eradicated, and his muscle fibers felt tight, dense, and full of vitality once more.

He drew a long, deep breath into his lungs, reveling in the painless expansion of his chest, and focused inward on his spiritual sea.

His spatial reserves had replenished to absolute capacity.

”Finally,” Ethan exhaled, a profound weight lifting from his shoulders.

With a thought, he summoned the translucent interface of the system.

[Current Energy Points: 11050/100000 (Quasi-S-Rank).]

Ethan arched an eyebrow, a spark of genuine satisfaction gleaming in his dark eyes.

Prior to the battle at the library intersection, his energy reserves had been hovering just above the ten-thousand-point mark. Surviving the clash and enduring the grueling five-day recovery cycle had yielded a clean jump of over a thousand points.

”A single life-and-death struggle against an apex predator yields more progress than weeks of mundane meditation,” he mused quietly. ”And far more than swallowing dozens of ordinary beast cores.”

He vividly recalled devouring ten ordinary hyena crystals weeks ago, which had barely moved his progress bar by fifty miserable points. Pushing his limits against a Quasi-King Rank titan had fundamentally expanded the capacity of his spiritual meridians.

Of course, Ethan was far too pragmatic to become addicted to near-death gambles. There was a razor-thin line between calculated risk and suicidal stupidity; had Daisy been a fraction of a second slower with her psychic needle, no amount of potential energy points would have saved his liquefied corpse.

He closed the system screen with a flick of his wrist.

Now that his physical form was restored to peak condition, his schedule could resume. He needed to prepare his gear, double-check the perimeter of Victoria’s villa, and finally hunt down that elusive Red-Haired Monkey to claim the Mental Core needed to wake Rose from her slumber.

Just as he reached for a clean combat shirt folded on the side table, the wooden door of the cabin swung open with a soft, cautious creak.