Volume 1, Chapter 21 – Things Really Took a Turn for the Worse

Things really had taken a turn for the worse.

But despair was despair. Stella was absolutely not the kind of Saintess who would sit around waiting for death.

Since she couldn’t avoid it, she could only find a way to face it.

The more dire things became, the calmer she had to be.

“Declaration of war… duel… weekend…” Stella murmured to herself.

Inspiration flashed through her mind like lightning, and her newly regained rationality immediately began mocking her earlier stupidity.

‘Got it!’

She shot to her feet, stumbling slightly in her haste. Her gaze swept rapidly around the dorm room before finally locking onto the potion materials Patolize had left behind when she skipped out on the bill.

The Inquisitor’s elixir was only the basic version, suitable solely for the initial stage of infiltration.

But Stella clearly remembered the Inquisitor mentioning that the upper limit of a succubus elixir’s effects depended on the rank of the succubus sample used as its catalyst.

What if she used the tears of Cheryl Valentine, the Tyrannical Queen, as the main ingredient and refined a higher-ranking succubus elixir?

Although it couldn’t replicate Cheryl’s innate combat experience, Stella would at least gain an enormous boost in physical strength, racial talent, and magical power reserves.

At the moment, this was her only viable option.

There were no other choices.

Stella immediately got to work.

She locked the doors and windows, drew the curtains, then brought out the Academy-issued beginner potion cauldron and ignited the flame stone.

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Pale blue flames licked the bottom of the cauldron.

Stella did her best to recall the steps the Inquisitor had taught her before while spreading the crumpled parchment recipe beside her.

‘Use spiritually infused ice water as the base, mix in 15 grams of moonlight grass powder, then supplement it with a liquid sample from a succubus, such as sweat, tears, or other fluids. Brew in a potion cauldron for one hour, then consume orally.’

The procedure was almost absurdly simple.

She poured in the spiritually infused ice water. Under the licking flames, the surface began to simmer slightly, releasing wisps of cold white mist.

She sprinkled in three qian of moonlight grass powder, and the originally clear liquid instantly turned deep violet.

Finally, she dripped in those few tears from the eldest daughter of the Valentine family.

Blurb…

An intense reaction instantly erupted inside the cauldron. The purple liquid began to churn, its color gradually shifting to crimson, while a rich, cloyingly sweet fragrance immediately filled the entire room.

Stella stared fixedly at the cauldron, continuously stirring it with a glass rod, feeling more than a little nervous.

This was her first attempt at making a higher-ranking elixir. If she failed, wasting the ingredients would be the least of her problems.

She really would end up as a corpse this weekend.

Fifty minutes… fifty-five minutes… one hour.

“It worked.”

Looking at the crystal-clear medicinal liquid inside the cauldron, gleaming like a ruby, Stella let out a long breath of relief.

Although this was her first attempt, her experience brewing holy water at the monastery had actually allowed her to succeed on the first try.

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Stella ladled it out and poured it into a small vial she had prepared. Feeling the surging power contained within it, she finally felt a little more at ease.

With this, at least…

Once she stepped into the arena, perhaps she could withstand a few blows instead of being instantly killed.

As for combat experience, technique, precise control of magical power… the gaps in those areas could only be left to fate or made up for with quick thinking on the spot.

Stella tucked the little vial securely against her body, hurriedly cleaned up the cauldron, and was about to put away the Primordial Doctrine, which she had been using all this time to prop up one of the cauldron’s legs, when a strange glimmer caught her attention.

It came from the silver-foiled border on the book’s cover.

Stella paused.

She remembered that before, no matter how hard she tried, this book had been like a brick welded shut. It simply could not be opened. The only method of unlocking it was the faith of others that the Inquisitor had mentioned in her letter.

“Faith?”

Stella was a little stunned.

Had she just done anything related to faith?

Other than… listening to the completely ridiculous confessions of a few succubi?

“No way…”

The corner of Stella’s mouth twitched.

Could it be that those succubi had treated her as some kind of emotional support, and the book had judged even that twisted sort of feeling as faith?

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Wasn’t this book’s standard just a little too indiscriminate?

‘Come to think of it, the Inquisitor had mentioned before that this book contained quite a few Holy Light spells and said they could be of considerable help with her current situation.

Driven by curiosity, Stella reached out and gently lifted the cover.

This time, there was no resistance, but she could only turn a single page. The pages after it still refused to budge.

The page had yellowed with age. There were no lengthy doctrinal passages written on it, only several lines of intricate, ancient golden runes, along with a simple annotation beneath them written in an ancient script.

♥════════♥

♡ Holy Art: Holy Radiance Extraction

♡ Effect: Forcibly strips and absorbs the divine energy within a lower-ranking target, converting it into the caster’s own magical power or reserves.

♡ Incantation: “All light returns as one, grace flows back.”

♥════════♥

Stella: “…”

She stared at those lines three times, then expressionlessly closed the book.

She had finally managed to open the first page, only for it to contain such a useless spell.

Absorb someone else’s divine energy?

Where was she right now?

This was Succubus Academy. Within five hundred li, aside from Stella herself being a Saintess, everyone else was some variety of bizarre succubus.

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Never mind whether the spell itself was useful or not. The real question was, where was she supposed to find any divine energy to absorb?

However, amid her disappointment, another even more terrifying thought suddenly crept into her mind.

Since faith was the source of power that allowed the pages to open…

Didn’t that mean that if she wanted to unseal the later pages and obtain truly powerful life-saving spells, she would have to become the emotional support of even more succubi?

Just imagine the scene. One day in the future, she would be standing atop a raised platform, while below her a group of succubi knelt in worship with crazed fanaticism filling their eyes, loudly proclaiming her their spiritual leader…

What was that supposed to make her?

A Succubus Godmother?

A Hell Saintess?

Stella shuddered, feeling that her future was utterly bleak.

‘…Is this kind of faith really okay?’

Translator Note

Succubus Godmother HAHAHA XD