a bit to well

Aether worked through them without restraint.

He fucked every woman in the hall hard and long — deep, relentless strokes that should have scrambled their minds completely under Collei’s enhancer. Yet the Akasha terminals did exactly what the plan required. They intercepted the overwhelming flood of raw sensation before it could fully reach the brain, reducing what each woman actually felt to something still extreme, still body-shaking, but ultimately survivable. One after another they came hard, cried out, trembled, and stayed conscious enough to keep going.

Everyone reacted within expected extremes.

Everyone except Faruzan.

The moment he buried himself inside her, the Haravatat scholar convulsed like she had been struck by lightning. Her back arched violently. Her eyes rolled back. She blacked out for a second, snapped awake with a broken scream, then blacked out again — over and over within the span of heartbeats. The cycle of unconsciousness and sudden, shattered awareness was so rapid and violent that Aether immediately pulled back, thinking her terminal had failed to engage properly.

He grabbed the device at her ear and checked it.

It was active.

It was simply not doing its job the way the others were.

Faruzan had altered it herself.

In the short time between receiving the terminal and the start of the session, the lunatic had manually adjusted the interception threshold so that the vast majority of the enhanced pleasure still passed straight through to her own brain. Only a fraction was being recorded and offloaded. She was taking nearly the full, unfiltered force of Collei’s mixture plus Aether’s rough use with almost no protection.

Even while half-conscious and twitching, a dazed, ecstatic smile pulled at her lips.

She had meant it.

When she had talked about being turned into a permanent mindless pocket pussy, it had not been empty kink talk. She had actively sabotaged her own safety net to chase exactly that outcome.

Aether stared down at the scholar who kept flickering between blackout and broken awareness around his cock, equal parts impressed and exasperated.

Aether had a brief, sharp moment of fear when his eyes landed on Collei.

Given how far the little chemist was willing to go for pleasure, it was entirely possible she had sabotaged her own terminal the same way Faruzan had. He checked quickly. The fear proved unnecessary. Collei’s device was still intercepting properly. The thought had clearly crossed her mind — the longing was still visible in her dazed expression — but the conditioning he had burned into her in the jungle held. She had not done anything that would truly endanger her own life.

Relieved, Aether finally stepped back from the nest of trembling, overstimulated bodies.

He was satisfied with the work. Every terminal had done its job. The volume of raw, enhanced sexual data they had poured into the interception layer should have been more than enough.

He opened the door to the hall for a breath of fresh air.

The scene that greeted him was captivating.

The overload had not caused an immediate clean blackout. As the Akasha’s capacity was exceeded, the massive, concentrated load of recorded pleasure had nowhere else to go. It leaked. It flooded backward and sideways through every active connection in the system before the whole network finally began to collapse under its own weight.

Across the visible courtyards, walkways, and open study areas of the Akademiya, people were on the ground.

Men and women alike lay where they had fallen, bodies locked in continuous, uncontrollable climax. Some moaned. Some could only shake in silence. Stacks of books had spilled. Research devices sparked forgotten beside their owners. A few had managed to crawl to benches or walls before the wave took them completely. The entire visible population of the Akademiya campus was lost in the same overwhelming, borrowed pleasure that had just been ripped from Aether’s group and forced through the network.

He stood in the doorway for a long moment, taking it in.

One clear, grateful thought cut through everything else:

He was extremely glad the Akasha was never distributed to non adults.

Aether looked out over the sea of climaxing scholars, researchers, and students, and the full scale of what they had just done settled on him.

He had effectively just fucked an entire nation.

Deep within the Sanctuary of Surasthana, Nahida stirred.

The system that had kept her confined and diminished for five hundred years was fracturing. Connections failed. Load barriers collapsed. The quiet, absolute control the sages had woven through the Akasha began to unravel in cascading waves. She did not yet understand exactly what had delivered the killing blow — the nature of the data spike was unlike anything she had ever felt — but she recognized the opening the instant it appeared.

She pushed.

From the inside, with every remaining fragment of authority still left to her, the Dendro Archon pressed against the weakening walls of her prison and began to reclaim what had been stolen.

On the surface, Aether felt no urgency.

He knew the Akasha could not simply be restarted on a whim. The overload had been too complete, the architectural damage too fundamental. The sages would need time — days, possibly longer — before they could even diagnose the full extent of the failure, let alone attempt a recovery. That bought him all the time he needed.

So he ignored the wider chaos and focused entirely on aftercare.

His women were needy in the aftermath. The enhancer had left them hypersensitive, emotionally open, and physically drained. He moved among them with water, soft cloths, quiet words, and gentle hands, making sure each one came down safely. Rosaria, Lisa, Yelan, Ganyu, Shenhe, Cloud Retainer, Dehya, Collei, even Layla — he tended to all of them while the Akademiya outside continued to twitch and moan through the residual network bleed.

One member of the group, however, was no longer part of the aftercare.

Faruzan’s personal plan had worked perfectly.

To her own long-term detriment.

By deliberately letting nearly the full force of the enhanced overload reach her brain, she had pushed herself past every recoverable limit. When the session ended she was no longer capable of independent function — exactly the mindless, permanently receptive state she had romanticized and chased. Aether stared at the result for a long moment, then accepted the inevitable.

He followed the wish she had repeated so many times.

By the time the others were stable enough to move, Faruzan had been carefully cleaned, positioned, and secured to a sturdy notice board in a high-traffic covered walkway of the Akademiya. A short, clear sign above her explained the new “installation.” She was warm, breathing, continuously wet, and completely vacant — a free-use onahole permanently available to anyone who passed.

The special nutjob had gotten exactly what she asked for.

Aether gave the bound, empty-eyed scholar one last look, then turned back to the living, needy members of his pride.

Aether and his group never met Nahida.

They left the Akademiya the next day, long before the Dendro Archon could fully extract herself from the collapsing remnants of her prison, piece together the exact nature of the overload, or find the people responsible. By the time she understood the full truth — that a Traveler and a handful of devoted, overstimulated women had flooded the Akasha with the one form of data no designer had ever prepared for — the party was already gone. The Archon of Knowledge knew, of course. She simply never got the chance to thank them in person.

Collei stayed behind.

Standing at the gates as the others prepared to leave, the green-haired girl made her choice with clear, manic determination. She wanted to keep refining her tinctures. More than that, she wanted to condition her own body — slowly, carefully, and with obsessive focus — until it could withstand every level of amplification she had ever dreamed of. The height she had not been able to reach that day in the hall would become her new goal. She waved them off with a bright, slightly unhinged smile and returned to her laboratory.

The rest of the pride turned back toward the desert.

Their destination was no longer the deeper ruins in search of Lumine’s immediate trail. The path now pointed farther south and west — toward Natlan. Dehya took the lead once more, guiding them across the sands with the same competence as before.

Even so, the journey took significantly longer this time.