Divine Milking System-Chapter 11 | One Segment of Nothing

The alarm went off at 5:00 AM and I was already awake.

Hadn’t slept much. The countdown timer does that to you. Hard to drift off peacefully when the number in the corner of your vision keeps ticking down like a bomb nobody else can see.

67 hours. 12 minutes.

I lay there for about thirty seconds staring at the ceiling.

Then I got up.

The gym clothes in my duffel bag were technically the previous Jace’s. Grey sweatpants, a black t-shirt that was tight in the stomach and loose everywhere else, and a pair of beat-up running shoes that had seen better years. I put them on in the dark, drank two glasses of water from the kitchen tap, and checked the academy app for the rec center hours.

Open 24 hours.

Perfect.

Hikaru’s room was dark under the door.

I left the apartment without making noise.

The Recreation Center sat in Zone Four between the dining hall and the library. According to the app it was a seven minute walk from Building C. I made it in ten because I took one wrong turn near the memorial garden before the app corrected me.

I was getting better.

The rec center lobby was empty except for a student worker at the front desk who was asleep in his chair with his chin on his chest. I scanned my ID card on the reader, pushed through the turnstile, and followed the signs to the main gym floor.

The weight room was large, clean, and smelled like rubber flooring and industrial cleaner. Forty-eight students capacity based on the sign by the door.

Four people inside at 5:10 AM.

Two third years on the bench press talking quietly.

One second year doing pull-ups in the corner.

And Hikaru Tanaka on the cable machine with her back to the door, working through rows with the kind of form you only get from years of somebody correcting you every single rep.

I’d half expected her to be here.

The novel mentioned she trained early specifically to avoid crowds. Quiet hours. Minimal interaction. Controlled environment. Hikaru was someone who optimized everything, including the time of day she chose to exist in spaces other people used.

I walked to the free weights section on the opposite side of the room.

Did not look at her.

This was important.

The absolute worst thing I could do right now was make her feel watched. Hikaru noticed everything. She would catalog the fact that I’d shown up at the same time she did, file it somewhere in that razor-sharp head of hers, and upgrade her threat assessment of me from zero to active concern. I needed her to see me as background noise. Harmless. Pathetic even.

The fat lottery kid who woke up early to embarrass himself with weights.

Let her think that.

I found an open stretch of floor near the dumbbells and looked at the rack.

Then I looked at myself in the mirror on the wall.

Let me be honest with you about what I saw.

It was not inspiring.

The grey sweatpants were doing their best. The black shirt had given up around the stomach area. My face was round and soft and had the specific look of someone who’d spent the last year treating food as entertainment.

I was five-nine and carrying weight in all the places that made movement inefficient.

My arms had no definition. My chest was soft. My neck was thicker than it should’ve been.

This was the body I’d inherited.

And somewhere inside this body, according to the Divine Milking System and its frankly deranged documentation, was an ability called Limit Breaker that removed all genetic caps on physical growth and made sexual activity count as training at three times the normal rate.

Training at three times the normal rate.

I looked at the dumbbell rack.

I looked at myself in the mirror.

Then I pulled up the system in the corner of my vision.

Strength: E, one segment out of ten.

Endurance: E, two segments.

Agility: E, one segment.

There it was. The full picture. A complete disaster wrapped in a black t-shirt.

But here’s the thing about progressions systems.

In every web novel I’d ever read, the most satisfying Chapters were always the training montages. The grinding. The slow accumulation of segments on a bar. The moment the number clicked over and a notification popped up and something that used to hurt didn’t hurt anymore.

I’d spent years mocking those Chapters for being power fantasies with no grounding in reality.

Now I lived in one.

So. Let’s find out how this actually works.

I grabbed a fifteen pound dumbbell from the rack.

And I started.

I did not know how to lift properly.

That’s a lie. The previous Jace Monroe didn’t know how to lift properly. The person currently operating his body had five years of gym experience from a past life where staying in shape was a point of personal pride. I knew form. I knew which movements built what. I understood progressive overload and recovery windows and why most beginners failed.

What I didn’t know was how this specific body would respond.

The first set of bicep curls confirmed my worst fears. Fifteen pounds felt heavier than it should have. My arms shook on rep eight. My grip was weak. The stabilizer muscles that normally handle the secondary movement of a curl were basically nonexistent.

Starting from zero.

I switched to goblet squats. Body weight first, no weight added, just to see how the legs handled basic movement.

Badly.

My knees ached by rep five. My hip flexors were tight. My balance was off because the weight distribution was wrong for the body I was used to inhabiting.

I kept going anyway.

The two third years on the bench finished up and left without acknowledging me.

The second year doing pull-ups glanced over once, assessed me as not worth thinking about, and looked away.

Hikaru didn’t look at all.

I kept working.

After forty minutes of rotating through basic movements, I pulled up the system again.

Strength: E. Still one segment.

Endurance: E. Still two segments.

I stared at the numbers.

"That’s it?"