BXBX NOVEL Chapter 180 The Crow's Nest
"We really need [this] to dual cultivate?" Evalyn asked, her anxiety-stricken trust raging a biblical war against every scruple of common sense and rationality she had accumulated that far.
"In our current states, yes." Kaze smiled, "With Qi reserves, I could create a spatial barrier to block out the noise and reinforce everything in a room with a thick layer of Soul Qi. However, both would be exceedingly wasteful."
The blonde blinked twice in disbelief, her jaw relaxed, staring into dead space. "Just… to confirm. Did you just say a [thick] layer of Soul Qi?"
"Correct." He smiled genially.
"I\'m going to regret asking this question." Evalyn prefaced, taking a deep breath.
"Then I\'d recommend you not ask it." Kaze replied hypnotically.
"What does [thick] mean relative to what you put on fences?" She asked, ignoring his charming, mocking smile. While the topic sounded amusing—it wasn\'t amusing!
She watched Malta\'s weapons shoot his lightly reinforced fences and have bullets bounce off them. So if something required a thick layer of Soul Qi, it meant that the expected damage was of a different caliber. It was a serious issue!
"Hmmm…." Kaze hummed, putting his knuckle to his chin, "It took around 200 Mortal Realm souls to put a minor layer of Soul Qi over everything on the campus, including two miles to the east.
If I had to place a number on my bedroom, I\'d say it\'d take at least five—"
"Five mortal realm cultivators!?" She cried in bewilderment, "For your bedroom!?"
"—Earth Realm cultivators." He finished with an amused smile, "That\'d be the minimum, and it\'d still be offensively uncomfortable and unsatisfying for the costs."
"Then… this?" Evalyn opened and closed her mouth multiple times in disbelief. "What exactly am I standing in?"
"I call it the Crows Nest." Kaze smiled, "It\'s a one-bed, two-bath bunker with a full study.
It has a full bar, filled with the most egregiously expensive spirits Daniel could procure on short notice. They taste awful, but their bottles are charming, don\'t you think?"
As if in a trance, Evalyn turned to the bottle racks behind the bar right before Kaze hit a switch, backlighting the battle shelves with green light. "No…."
"You don\'t think so?" He mused in magnetic disappointment, "I thought you\'d like them."
"No, it\'s not that…." She whispered in disbelief, looking around the room, "It\'s just… wait... is that an official occupancy sign?"
Kaze followed her gaze and found a Fire Health and Safety regulation occupancy sign with a large 120 on it. "Oh, yes.
Even though Daniel registered this as a single room, Malta\'s quest for mandatory taxation led them to this doomsday bunker, guided by our installation of its commercial cooking hood.
Alas, faced between registering this humble bunker as a restaurant with a liquor license and having a thousand fewer bottles of spirits and no cooking hood, I chose the former."
Evalyn shook her head into dead space, trying to comprehend what she had just heard. She wanted to ask how he registered the bunker as a restaurant while violating the fire code regulations. After all, she didn\'t see hatches, let alone fire stairs!
However, they didn\'t have time to waste on such ridiculous matters.
"No…." She muttered, "I\'m asking you what\'s different about this place than your bedroom? I assume that you built this bunker for dual cultivation… right?"
"Oh, that\'s what you meant." Kaze gasped sarcastically, charmingly, "We\'re in a bunker 100 feet below ground preventing sound acoustics from traveling.
The walls and ceilings are made from eight-inch thick steel, which requires less Soul Qi reinforcement.
However, the main feature is the six king-sized mattresses. Such is the minimum requirement for Heaven Realm dual cultivation [for beginners]."
"I give up." She said after a deep breath, turning to him with an intense gaze, "Is there something about sex I didn\'t learn in sex ed that would justify something like this being necessary for [beginners]? Or am I just lacking creativity?"
Increasing one\'s strength through cultivation could make regular sex more aggressive or rough sex more destructive. However, she failed to see how any amount of stats would increase the need for bed size to six times that of a king-sized bed!
"Oh, yes, that." Kaze replied briskly, smiling strangely, "Thus far, I have guided people through basic dual cultivation.
However, I\'m certain you will attempt to keep pace to maximize our gains yet lack the experience to do so. As a result of you being a beginner, we can expect backlash from uneven Qi release."
Her eyes trembled, and she looked into his eyes, searching for clues to the severity of the issue.
"Here, let\'s get started." He smiled slightly, touching her forehead and transferring the full Spiritual Connection technique, something he had yet to do.
Most people\'s minds would go crazy processing that level of information.
While Evalyn\'s crazed gaze and chuckling grin certainly met the minimum requirements for insanity, she wasn\'t losing her mind from information overload. Instead—
"How haven\'t you driven women into insanity with this?" She chuckled with madness swirling in her eyes, "This… I feel like you could mentally and physically torture people with this."
"Of course, you can." Kaze replied with nonchalant charmingness, "I imagine this specific technique would be great for interrogation too."
"That\'s not a good thing, Kaze." Evalyn laugh-scoffed, turning away in annoyance, "Why do you sound pleased? Sex should not be capable of interrogation and torture."
"Neither should a standard ballpoint pen." He replied mysteriously, "However, give me one and thirty minutes, and I can achieve satisfactory marks for emotional and physical torture and interrogation.
Instead of looking at something\'s intrinsic capabilities for misuse, think about how marvelously skilled a person must be to misuse them."
Her expression nearly cracked, hearing him. She was confident he was skilled enough to torture people with sex and others weren\'t; she didn\'t know whether that was good or not.
"Let\'s hurry up." Evalyn said, closing her eyes, "We still need to return and help the others."
"Of course." Kaze smiled, "However, you must go into it with a positive mindset. Otherwise, you can lose your mind temporarily, something we cannot afford to do."
The blonde cringed slightly and closed her eyes, summoning the mental blueprint.
"Okay, let\'s get started, then." She said, grabbing the collar of his light-pink button-up he wore that day and pulling him to her lips.
When they connected, she felt like the stressful hell she had experienced only hours before was a dream.
They lived out the Rapture and had warred briefly with upper-plane existences. Yet now, only a couple of hours later, she was in a luxurious bunker with the man she loved, about to have sex and grow in strength and power. It was surreal.
She pushed her tongue into his mouth, making out with him passionately.
Kaze smiled, enjoying the kiss. He hadn\'t felt powerful emotions from a sexual experience since he was in the Transcendent Plane. So returning to such feelings after almost two millennia was refreshing—healing even.
Evalyn moved his collar, so his back was facing the bed and pushed him back, letting him crash onto the luxurious red bedding. She crawled onto his waist, straddling him, looking into his eyes.
Their eyes connected, creating electricity sparking between the two.
"When did you reinforce my clothing, hmmm?" The blonde asked with a strange smile, gazing at him ruthlessly.
She looked down at her white shirt and black legging, still in one piece despite getting hit multiple times with wind blades and hitting the ground rolling.
While the clothing wouldn\'t help her from broken bones, it saved her from bleeding out from the weak wind slashes and was one of the main reasons she was still alive.
"Yesterday, before Marilyn delivered your clothing." He replied shamelessly, not deterred from talking about intercepting her clothing for modification.
"That makes me curious." Evalyn mused with vicious playfulness, "Did you also reinforce your beloved pink striped panties? Hmmm?"
Kaze gave her a mocking smile that made her feel nervous. "I\'m not sure. Pray tell, Evalyn. Have you worn them recently, thus making them require laundering?"
Her face turned beet red, and she turned away. She realized they were the only pair she wore outside of training!
"You\'re lucky I had." She said strangely, "Otherwise, they would\'ve got torn to shreds today because—"
The blonde closed her eyes, groaning internally. She was wearing them; therefore, she admitted to wearing them multiple times that week. "—that lady was extremely jealous of them."
"Oh, she was, was she?" Kaze smiled in amusement, "Did you show her?"
Evalyn gave him a wry smile, turning away and turning a deep breath. "I didn\'t. However, she was obsessed with you.
I\'m confident she\'d ask about your lingerie preferences if I wasn\'t sending daggers into her spine. She needed a legitimate life-threatening experience to stop interrogating me about you.
I\'m sure she would\'ve loved this technique, actually."
"Hoh?" He mused, "She has good taste. Maybe I misjudged her—"
The blonde grabbed a pillow and smashed it into his face. "Joke again, and I\'ll attack you for real."
"That will be involuntary in a moment." He laughed, peeling the pillow off his face, "Now, shall we?"
She closed her eyes in aggravation, realizing how much of a hole she had dug herself in before reaching under her shirt and pulling up.
The shirt moved up her rib cage, moving over her perfectly proportionate c-cup breasts hidden behind a pink-striped bra.
Kaze gave it an appreciative—not mocking—glance that made her heart flutter. She knew by his expression that the experience would be unlike any she had experienced.