Slime Evolution

Chapter 445 - You Wore Me Out

Lohan felt, with growing clarity, his own internal reserve of biomass plummeting as the flow kept leaving him and heading into Lisa’s body.

It wasn’t a feeling of pain, nothing like that, but there was an uncomfortable weight to it, something close to what he imagined the feeling of emptying your own pockets down to the last cent would be like.

’Less, less, less,’ he thought, mentally tracking every fraction leaving him.

Unlike Elysium, where the game’s system clearly displayed the exact number of Biomass accumulated, in the real world Lohan had no conveniently available interface to check. But after so much time handling that energy in both worlds, he had already developed an almost instinctive sense for quantifying it just from the intensity of his own internal reserve, like someone who learns to estimate an object’s weight just from the effort needed to lift it.

Despite that small pang of worry over his own stock shrinking so fast, Lohan also felt a growing, undeniable excitement.

’Her body is reacting exactly like it does in Elysium,’ he thought, pleased. ’This is really working.’

It was only when he noticed his accumulated reserve had dropped to less than the equivalent of 1 Unit that he decided, with genuine reluctance, that he needed to stop there.

’I can’t spend it all at once,’ he thought, reluctant. ’If I completely empty it out now, who knows how long it would take to build that back up in the real world.’

Carefully retracting his hands, Lohan cut off the flow entirely, resisting, without even needing much conscious effort, any temptation to make use of that moment of physical closeness to prolong the contact with Isabella’s body beyond what was necessary.

’That would be weird.’ He thought, and that definitely wasn’t the point here.

He just watched, silently, waiting to see her reaction.

A few seconds passed before Isabella slowly opened her eyes, still a little lost in the comfortable haze that process had left in her.

"Why did you stop?" she asked, confused, turning her face toward him. "I didn’t even feel the pain yet."

Lohan laughed, a light, genuine sound escaping him.

"Because I’m already practically out of biomass," he explained. "You wore me out completely."

The silence that followed lasted only a moment, but it was enough time for Isabella to process that sentence and realize, with a mix of horror and embarrassment, just how absurdly suggestive that sounded out of context.

’I wore him out...’ She repeated mentally, feeling her face catch fire again.

Quickly looking away and staring straight ahead, desperately trying to think of anything else besides that sentence, Isabella raised her own hands in front of her face, studying her fingers with a forced curiosity, trying to disguise her own embarrassment.

The white ears still visible on top of her head trembled subtly, giving away the nervousness her facial expression was trying to hide.

Lohan, realizing she was fine despite that awkward moment, decided to quickly change the subject.

"Hey, since we’re here," he said, "how about we test your gains on the gym equipment? That way we can get some actual comparison numbers, instead of just relying on how you feel like we do in Elysium."

"Man, if I’d thought of that earlier, we could’ve even done a workout before this test session to set a baseline so we could calculate more precisely how much you’ve progressed." He said, a bit frustrated.

Isabella, still a little dazed, sat up on the couch and shook her head, reassuring him.

"Don’t worry about that," she said. "My ocular device already logs everything in my weekly workouts, both the weight limits, the reps, the duration of each exercise, and how my body responds to those exercises. I was already using that even before Elysium existed, but after I got part of the Spirit Fox’s power, it became even more essential for me to track my own physical development precisely."

Lohan was momentarily surprised by that.

"Wait, the ocular device does that?" he asked. "I didn’t even know that feature existed."

"You probably never had a reason to find out," Isabella remarked, a playful smile forming on her face. "You spend so much time inside Elysium that I doubt you’ve explored even 10% of that device’s features."

Lohan laughed, conceding defeat without any resistance.

"You’re probably right."

Getting up from the couch with a bit more steadiness now, Isabella followed Lohan to the apartment’s private gym, a spacious area equipped with state of the art machines, a padded mat in one corner, and an entire wall covered by a giant mirror.

Lohan even offered to let her change clothes, but Isabella refused. The tests would be quick, and with her fox physique improving her body, those tests wouldn’t even be enough to make her break a sweat.

So she wouldn’t need to worry about getting the dress dirty. The only thing she needed to watch out for was not doing a more compromising exercise and ending up showing more than she should to him.

Lohan on the other hand, hearing her say she’d do the exercises in the dress, was shocked and even a little excited.

Isabella was beautiful, and watching her like that performing different movements would be an image he would never forget.

She started an organized series of exercises, first testing raw strength on a resistance machine, then moving on to agility tests through a small course of suspended obstacles, and finally, sitting down in the center of the mat, she closed her eyes and began to meditate, trying to clearly feel her own spiritual energy circulating inside her.

In the middle of that sequence of exercises, as she positioned herself in front of a suspended bar to test her own pulling strength, Isabella happened to glance at the large mirror on the wall, and it was only at that moment that she really noticed.

The two white, furry ears, still perfectly visible on top of her own head.

’Oh my God,’ she thought, her face heating up instantly. ’Are they still here? Since when?!’

Her first instinct was to quickly raise her hands to cover them, an almost automatic gesture of pure embarrassment, but then a specific memory surfaced in her mind, halting that impulse midway.

She remembered the time she had sent Lohan a photo showing those same ears, and how he had reacted, saying without any hesitation how cute he thought they were.

Sneaking a glance at him, she noticed he was watching her do the exercises with interest, clearly enjoying the sight of her doing exercises like that in a beautiful white dress, not the least bit bothered by the ears she’d been showing since who knows when.

Taking a deep breath, Isabella lowered her hands back down, forcing her own expression to stay neutral, simply pretending she hadn’t noticed anything, and kept going with the exercise as if it were completely normal.

’You know what? If he finds it cute, there’s no reason for me to force myself to actively hide it. It’s already such a hassle constantly forcing these ears not to show up in public, at least with him I can let it be free like when I’m alone in my room.’ Thinking about that, Isabella felt much more at ease, even feeling as if a weight had lifted off her chest.