A New Kind Of Grind

"Everyone, I would like to thank you for the hard work you've all been putting in," I said, looking around at my more usual stable of lovers. "I have, in fact, been noticing the big uptick in sex you've all been having this past month or so, and I appreciate the effort you've put in to grinding yourselves up to your current level-cap. And, as you may have guessed, I have finally hit Incubus Level 5, and could read the next volume of the Emperor's books."

"So, what was in it?" Akane asked, obligingly.

"Well, as it turns out, at Level 5, there is something of a fork in the road," I said. "A fork that, thankfully, reconvenes at Level 7, where I get to take the other option I initially neglected, so it really doesn't matter that much. But yes, I now get to choose between two new options for growing my Incubus powers even further: option one is the Concubus, and option two is the Imp."

"...The what?" Elendar asked.

"Concubus sounds like a middle ground between Incubus and Succubus," Nicky said. "Imp, meanwhile... is that a lesser Succubus of some sort?"

"That is exactly correct, yes," I said, nodding. "The Concubus is a fairly straightforward option: if I choose that, then I have the option of upgrading one of my Succubi to have the Concubus class instead. They maintain the same level they had in Succubus, and gain the ability to give other people the Succubus class themselves, the same way I do, and using their own Succubus Capacity. Now for the limiting factors. A Concubus still counts towards my own Succubus Capacity, so I can only have so many, and a Concubus counts as one level lower for the purposes of Incubus-specific abilities, so if I were to fill my capacity with 32 Level 5 Concubi, none of them would be able to make their own Concubi, and they'd only have a capacity of 16 Succubi each, who'd all be level-capped at 4."

"That's still more than five hundred Succubi generating Reified Lust for you," Anzerath pointed out. "What the hell could Imps possibly have going for them that's even remotely competitive?"

"An Imp is a silent and long-term- not permanent, and can also be dismissed early- status effect that makes someone generate Reified Lust like a Level 1 Succubus, but it automatically transfers to their master, and grants them no special abilities," I said. "It is solely a way for someone like me to, say, fuck a bunch of random people and then get energy from any sex they go on to have, without having any impact on their lives. The thing that makes Imps worthwhile, and not just a severely downgraded Succubus, is that there is no such thing as Imp Capacity, and the only limit is how many Imps you can bring yourself to make."

"...Okay, that could be pretty big," Anzerath admitted.

"Well, yes but no," Nel said, frowning. "You have to make all of those Imps yourself, and you're the bottleneck. Even if you make five new Imps a day, you're still not getting as good a return on the time invested as you would be with thirty two Concubi who maybe only make one Succubus a day each."

"You're assuming that I have to fuck someone to make them an Imp," I said. "Which is a reasonable assumption to make, as that's the default method, but it's not actually true. This is a class feature, which means its effects can be replicated with Mage spellcasting, and as it so happens, the translation work has already been done for me- there's a spell formula for marking people as Imps already in the book. From there, translating that into enchantment is easy, and where I am, ultimately, going with this is pretty simple: with the right enchanted items, I can set up a self-managing ranch full of unawakened monstergirls constantly sucking and fucking and generating a steady trickle of Reified Lust."

"Only a trickle?" Nicky asked.

"Unawakened monstergirls don't have much going on upstairs, and Reified Lust is about psychology," I said. "Also, Imps only make as much Reified Lust as a Level 1 Succubus, and there's the fact that I do still have limiting factors with unawakened cowgirls- I need to store them somewhere safe and secure, and I can't really automate the part of the process where I physically expand my ranch, I can only hire someone else to do that for me, which would be the sort of tedious that someone who's powerful enough to do that would refuse to do that."

"Roxy? Acknowledging there's some kind of ongoing work she can't automate away?" Nel asked. "Someone look out the window, the world must be ending."

"Well now I'm gonna have to treat that as a challenge," I said. "But, at any rate... I'm pretty sure that going the Imp route is gonna be better right now, simply because the Concubus thing is for, like... making a big ol' nested vassalage system where I cum inside a fellow dominant so that she can go out and claim a bunch of Succubi for herself, and in exchange for that power, I get to harvest the energy she makes, and all that, and it's just, it's a dynamic that we can't really use, right now. It... I mean, maybe with the Red Forest, and or possibly with Vega, but... well, right now, the best option is Imps, because I already have a bunch of unawakened monstergirls I can use."

"Good luck," Ariel said.

The enclosure for the unawakened monstergirls was, ultimately, pretty straightforward- a padded box, a hundred meters square, with enough food dispensers to feed a few thousand monstergirls- I'd only be packing them in at a thousand per square, but they'd be able to move freely between squares, so I couldn't assume an even distribution. Throw on a layer or two of spatial expansion enchantments, and I could fit as many monstergirls as I wanted into a goddamn broom closet, once I accounted for spatial expansion working in three dimensions and multi-story buildings existing.

The thing that was more important, however, was the monstergirl stock I'd use to populate the broom closet of destiny. And so, I embarked on an ambitious breeding project based on a simple principle that had somehow simply... never occurred to me until I got Oracle:

Monstergirls develop the Sterile Trait if any Trait they have mutates to three levels above their breed's baseline. However, I had a breeding population of unawakened wood elves, whose baseline level for the Breed Speed Trait is 0; if simply having the Trait that high would cause sterility, then these elves would be sterile. And they aren't.

So, with the aid of high-level Rancher abilities, I spent an obscene amount of magicka to make it all but guaranteed that at least one of the elves made in this big breeding batch had Breed Speed 4, encouraging mutations, in a positive direction, for this one specific Trait. It took a few days for the litters to be birthed, but when they were... I got what I wanted. What I knew had been possible.

With the ability to reliably breed Traits across breed boundaries, I could pass the three-above wall of Trait increases, and raise Traits to as high a level as I damn well pleased. (I could also do that by just eating the cost of a sterilized monstergirl to harvest the other Traits, for manual distribution via spellwork.) And since Breed Speed was a Trait that made litters come out faster, then pumping it up would give me way, way faster turnarounds on these projects, so... Might as well keep doing that, before I moved on to anything else.

"And that," I concluded my explanation, "is how I've brought back the immortality of elves. Funnily enough, the Long Lived Trait caps at Level 5, which should be two thousand years, but is instead simply no longer aging once you reach your mid 20s. Now, I have yet to test this on someone who is visibly older than that, but..."

"But you're about to change that right now, aren't you?" Rachel asked.

Nel had flown back out to the Red Forest once again, to pick up Rachel and a bunch of other high-ranking elves to attend my presentation slash progress report on what else I've done in my capacity as the Red Prince, as well as to petition for a bit of aid.

"How would you like to live forever?" I asked. "And, y'know, same question for the others in the audience."

"Show of hands," Rachel said, raising her hand, just barely before everyone else raised their hands.

"What a surprise," I said, before raising both hands to chest level. "[Mass Immortality]."

When you had a generic spell formula for granting a Trait that you were familiar with, you weren't limited to using that formula exactly as is. It was entirely possible to, say, combine it with a multi-target component that was commonly used in many other Healer spells, to create a spell that granted a certain Trait to a whole room full of people. It did make the spell consume more magicka to cast, but it was overall more efficient this way- the reason you wouldn't do it this way is because you couldn't, on account you could only cast a spell if you had the magicka necessary in your personal pool when you cast it. I might have a bunch of infinite magicka engines, but I was still limited to the magicka pools of a Level 13 Hero.

"Now, this isn't the only thing I've brought you all out here for," I continued. "Soon, I'm to marry Princess Penelope Dorn, who will become the Duchess-Regnant of Shang, with myself as the Duke-Consort. We are both aware this is a political marriage, although we do like each other well enough, and we will be divorcing shortly afterwards. However, this is a big semi-royal wedding, and it'd be rude to not invite my liege and her subjects to attend in whatsoever capacity they so desired."

"Marriage?" one of the elves asked.

"It's a human thing," another said. "You know how our life partners are our Familiars? Well, apparently we're the weird ones for doing that- humans will seek out another human and try to just find one who's compatible like that, and then they'll do a ceremony to symbolically link them together, like we actually are with our Familiars."

"But the Prince already has a Familiar!" that first elf protested.

"Four of them, in fact, and we consider marriage to be a different sort of thing from a Familiar bond," I said. "But, well, we can go over cultural differences later. Right now, I'm going to have to sort out where to put all of you, and how open we can afford to be about wood elves having positive and official contact with Dorn..."

"If Vega found out about it, they'd declare war on Dorn," Rachel warned. "Vega would, of course, lose, because I'm sure you've used your status as the Duke of Shang to build a military on par with our own, but..."

"So, you'll all be secret guests," I said. "Fantastic. I'm going to start handing out the Hero class, and you all can learn how the disguise functionality works from Rachel and my other associates. Good luck."