Chapter 16: My System Is Useless, So I’ll Lie Instead

Once Max revealed his secret to Zerena, it was only a matter of time before it reached her daughter.

The reaction was... intense.

She’d been shocked—angry, even. For a brief moment, Max had genuinely felt threatened by the look in her eyes. But Zerena stepped in quickly, her voice low and firm, shutting it down before it turned into something messier.

Max never found out exactly what she said.

But he could guess.

It definitely involved words like potential, profit, and don’t be stupid.

Max didn’t really care how they saw him. Asset, resource, gold mine—it was all the same to him. As long as he had money in hand, he could make people bend. That was how the world worked. Power just took different forms.

At least, that’s what he thought.

Almost a week passed after he revealed that he could sense mana and engrave runes. In that time, he’d produced nearly five hundred of those small metal pipes. He could’ve made more—many more—but he deliberately slowed down.

As he needed to figure out some way to complete his next forbidden act, Max found himself... a little distracted. Quite a few new ones had been unlocked, and honestly? Just reading through them was enough to get his imagination running wild. He didn’t even need to actually do anything—thinking about them was more than enough.

Which, in a way, was exactly how he’d survived living with those two big-breasted women without completely losing his mind.

And when he wasn’t busy entertaining himself like that, he was trying to come up with a proper plan to complete his current forbidden task—which, unfortunately, was proving just as tricky as the first one.

[Forbidden Act: Fondle Breasts]

[Target: Zerena Falkner]

[Reward: 2 Forbidden Points per full minute of fondling]

[Reward is doubled due to host’s close relation to target]

Max stared at the screen for a long, very thoughtful moment.

Out of all the tasks available, this was the one he picked—and, let’s be honest, the "double reward" part had absolutely nothing to do with that decision.

Nope.

Purely strategic.

Totally logical.

Definitely not influenced by anything else.

Still... there was one tiny issue.

Max wasn’t sure if the system was just incredibly generous... or completely clueless.

Because from what he knew, his relationship with Zerena was about as "close" as a cat and a bathtub. Which is to say—barely tolerable and one wrong move away from disaster.

Unless...

He narrowed his eyes slightly.

...unless the system knew something he didn’t.

Like the possibility that Zerena secretly had some kind of hidden affection for him?

Yeah... no.

That had to be a bug.

There was absolutely no way they were that close.

Right?

...Right?

And honestly, his confusion wasn’t even surprising.

Because unlike those generous, hand-holding systems from his beloved webnovels, this one? This one had the personality of a brick. No guidance, no tutorials, not even a proper "welcome, dear protagonist" package.

"...Wait, no—there was one," Max paused, frowning slightly as he recalled that single, lonely message.

Not a single response to any of his very reasonable, very important newbie questions.

Rude.

Now, sure—Max was a certified, veteran-level weeb. He knew how systems worked. He knew the tropes, the mechanics, the usual cheat paths.

But still...

Would it have killed this thing to be a little more interactive? Maybe throw in a voice? A cute assistant? Something?

Nope. Just silence.

Truly tragic.

Putting that aside, though, there was a bigger issue.

He had absolutely no idea how he was supposed to complete the next task.

Sure, he had a few... ideas. Some very bold, very questionable ideas. But every time one popped up, it was immediately followed by a much more realistic image—him getting smacked into the afterlife for trying something stupid.

Yeah... not ideal.

’Come on, Max,’ he told himself, frowning. ’You’re not becoming a god by playing it safe... but you’re also not becoming one if you get knocked out on day one.’

Unfortunately, inspiration refused to cooperate.

So, lacking both courage and a workable plan, Max did the only thing he could do for now—

He buried himself in books.

Zerena’s personal library, to be precise.

What surprised Max the most was the content of the books themselves.

They were far deeper than anything he’d seen at the hospital. Those had focused almost entirely on the human body—healing, reinforcement, survival. Useful, sure. But these? These were foundations. Pure rune theory.

Elemental runes. Fire, water, air, earth, electricity. How to generate them, how to combine them, how to layer meanings and chain effects without everything blowing up in your face. Pages upon pages explaining interactions, conflicts, balance rules—stuff most people never even touched unless they were officially licensed.

Not that Max really needed it.

Being the main character came with perks, and one of them was the irritatingly unfair ability to understand runes just by looking at them. Still, he read everything anyway. Knowledge stacked, and stacked power stacked even higher.

Rune theory. Arrays. Enhancement structures. Material compatibility.

The kind of knowledge most people never even saw—let alone understood.

And yet.

None of that helped him. Not even a little.

Because no matter how much planning, scheming, or mental gymnastics Max did, it didn’t magically result in either of the two women suddenly deciding to open up thier legs for him. If anything, it felt like a quiet kind of torture—especially now, as he focused on finishing another delicate engraving on a narrow pipe, only to be constantly distracted by Analisa slumped nearby, absorbed in her daily soap opera.

It wasn’t the soap opera that distracted him. They could’ve hired a full marching band, drums and trumpets included, and Max would still be engraving clean lines.

No, the real problem was Annalisa.

More specifically—the way her skirt had ridden up as she lazily scratched at her thigh, completely unbothered, munching fruit like some shameless old man at a roadside stall. Casual. Careless. Criminally distracting.

And the worst part?

It wasn’t even disgusting.

Her legs were pale and full, undeniably healthy—well-fed, unlike his own undernourished frame. Every time she shifted, Max’s focus slipped just a little, his imagination doing laps it had no business running. He caught glimpses of her blue panty, and his penis reacted like an idiot traitor that had never heard of self-control.

Useless. Absolutely useless.

He’d already wasted more brainpower than he liked imagining impossible scenarios of both women laying under him—running them through his head, discarding them, then somehow circling right back again. None of it helped. None of it was actionable. Just distraction piled on frustration.

And as he was lost in thoughts his hands stopping engraving "Something on your mind, Max?" Zerena’s voice cut in.

"Nothing," Max said with a smile, shaking his head as he went back to engraving.

Zerena returned to her own work as well—and to Max’s mild surprise, she’d actually improved. Her lines were steadier, cleaner than before. Watching his process had clearly rubbed off on her, and judging by the faint satisfaction on her face, she knew it too.

Good.

But it wasn’t enough. Max needed more. He needed an absolute reason. He couldn’t just say he would only work if they have sex with him—even if they weren’t blood family, they had been living together for a long time. He needed a reasonable excuse.

And what was a reasonable excuse for having sex with women more then thrice his age?

He didn’t have one.

’Fuck God... a sex skill would’ve been great...’ Max thought.

He would have liked one where he got some skill as a welcome gift, but well, he already had a skill in the form of understanding the runes and writing them, so he wasn’t completely out of options.

He’d already searched for runes that could induce arousal or hypnosis, but he hadn’t found a single one. His ability didn’t let him invent runes from nothing; it only allowed him to understand and use runes he had already seen. That was the one real limitation he had.

As for everything else—mana capacity, control, endurance—he had more than enough. At least, that’s what it felt like.

Still, what was the point of all that power if he couldn’t even get these two beautiful, losser milfs to sleep with him?

So yeah, he’d been right earlier. A sex skill would’ve been perfect.

As he was stewing in that frustration, a thought suddenly popped into his head.

’Can’t I just... make one up?’

He wasn’t talking about creating an actual system from scratch. That would be insane. No—he just needed a story. A believable excuse. Something official-sounding enough to justify things happening the way he wanted.

And why wouldn’t they believe him?

He was a genius. A newly awakened nobody shouldn’t be able to engrave runes the way he did—neither the quantity nor the quality. Hell, Zerena’s work wasn’t even half as good as his.

If anyone could sell a lie like that?

It was him.

As a plan slowly took shape in his mind, Max spoke up, his voice deliberately mild.

"Aunt Zerena?"

She lifted her head from the pipe she was engraving and looked at him. "Hmm?"

"There’s something I need to tell you," Max said. Then his eyes drifted—briefly, unintentionally—to Annalisa, who was sprawled out nearby, lazily scratching at the small of her curvy waist. His focus wavered for just a second before he added quickly, "Can we talk outside?"