Divorced by Five Beast Wives, I Awakened Godly Powers

Chapter 3

Maxver sat up in bed with his heart hammering and the system's countdown still burning behind his eyes. Twenty three hours. Less now. Every second he wasted sitting here was a second shaved off his remaining life.

"System, how exactly does purification work? Walk me through it like I'm five years old."

[Female beastkin possess mental power that neutralizes male contamination through physical proximity during a purification session. To receive purification, the host must register available slots through the light brain's official Purification application channel. Females with high pollution levels of their own will seek out male purification slots to exchange mutual benefit.]

"So they purify me, and I purify them back?"

[Incorrect. You do not purify them. Your mental power passively lowers their pollution during the session. They actively purify your contamination using their mental energy. Both parties benefit. The system will convert each completed session into life extension and Merit Points based on the female's star rating.]

"Good enough." Maxver opened his light brain and navigated to the Purification channel. The interface was clean, almost like a booking app from back home. He could set how many slots, what star level of beastkin, and what pollution range he preferred.

He thought about it for exactly two seconds.

"Seven slots. One star females. Pollution levels between ninety and ninety five percent." He locked in the settings and submitted.

The screen blinked once. Then the counter started moving.

One slot filled. Two. Three. By the time he blinked, all seven were booked solid. Less than sixty seconds.

"All seven?" He stared at the confirmations scrolling across his vision. "In under a minute?"

[One star females with pollution above ninety percent are in critical need of purification. Available male slots at any rank are extremely scarce. Your listing was absorbed instantly.]

"So I'm not the only one desperate here." Maxver closed the screen and let out a long breath. The sessions were scheduled for the following evening. All he had to do now was survive until then.

He lay back down, pulled the thin thermal blanket over himself, and tried to sleep. It came slowly, in patches, broken by the ticking clock in the back of his mind.

Sometime around three in the morning, the fever hit.

It started as warmth behind his eyes, then spread down through his neck and shoulders like someone had poured hot water under his skin. Sweat broke across his forehead. His teeth chattered even though his body was burning.

"Sir, your core temperature has risen to 39.2 degrees." The butler robot appeared beside his bed, its chrome arms extending a cool compress and a hydration tube. "Shall I administer a standard fever suppressant?"

"Yeah." Maxver's voice came out rough and dry. "Do whatever you need to do."

The robot pressed a small injector against his arm, and within minutes the shaking eased. The heat remained, low and steady, like coals sitting in his chest, but the worst of it passed.

By morning, the fever had broken completely. Maxver sat on the edge of his bed, flexing his fingers, rolling his shoulders. Something felt different. Not wrong. Different. Like his body had been running on four cylinders and overnight a fifth one had quietly switched on.

"System, what was that fever about?"

[Preliminary analysis suggests the host may be experiencing a secondary awakening of mental power. This is an extremely rare phenomenon. Recommend visiting the Matching Center for official testing and confirmation.]

"Secondary awakening?" Maxver frowned. "The original Maxver was C rank. You're telling me that might have changed overnight?"

[Soul fusion between the host's original soul and the vessel's soul strand can trigger dormant potential. Testing will confirm.]

Maxver didn't waste another minute. He washed, dressed, and had the butler robot drive him to the Matching Center by eleven.

The same golden dome. The same polished floors. But today, instead of the divorce counter, the robot receptionist directed him to the testing wing on the third floor.

A tall woman in a white lab coat met him at the door. Dr. Yuna Sato, according to her badge. She had sharp brown eyes and the efficient manner of someone who processed a hundred patients before lunch.

"Mr. Cole, step onto the scanning platform please. Arms at your sides, eyes forward."

Maxver obeyed. A ring of blue light descended from the ceiling and passed over his body three times, humming softly. The light pulsed, flickered, then turned a deep gold.

Dr. Sato looked at her screen. Then looked again. Then tapped it twice like she thought it was broken.

"That can't be right." Her voice lost its professional calm.

"What can't be right?" Maxver stepped off the platform.

"Your mental power rating." She turned the screen toward him, her eyes wide, her composure cracking at the edges. "Mr. Cole, when you were last tested eight months ago, you registered as C rank. Standard. Unremarkable."

"And now?"

"S rank." She whispered it like the words might shatter if she spoke them too loud. "You've jumped from C to S. That's a secondary awakening. Do you understand how rare that is? We see maybe one of these a year across the entire country."

Maxver felt his pulse kick up. "Is there more?"

"There's more." Dr. Sato scrolled down, and her hand was trembling slightly. "You've awakened an elemental ability. One star Wood Element. It's low tier, but the fact that you have any elemental ability at all combined with S rank mental power puts you in a category most men in this country will never touch."

"System," Maxver whispered under his breath. "Explain."

[Soul fusion complete. The original vessel's soul was not a separate entity. It was a fragmented strand of the host's original soul, displaced across dimensional boundaries. Reintegration has unlocked latent potential that the fragment alone could never access.]

So the original Maxver Cole wasn't some stranger whose body he'd stolen. It was him. A broken piece of himself, living a broken life in a broken world, waiting to be made whole again.

Dr. Sato was already on her communicator, speaking rapidly to someone on the other end. "Yes, I'm serious. S rank secondary awakening with elemental manifestation. I need authorization to upload to the Terminal immediately. Yes, right now."

Within ten minutes, his results were verified, stamped, and uploaded to the Terminal. The Terminal synced with StarNet automatically.

Maxver watched it happen in real time through his light brain. His profile, his face, his test results, all of it pushed to the front page of every major StarNet feed in the country.

The comments came like a flood.

[An S rank male? With a superpower? Is this real?]

[WAIT. Isn't this the guy who divorced FIVE beast wives yesterday? FIVE?]

[He dumped five wives and then awakened to S rank the next day. Those women must be screaming right now.]

[I'm single. I'm available. I will relocate to New York tonight. Someone tell me how to apply.]

[Sisters, get in line. This man is about to have ten thousand applications by dinner.]

[Praying to every ancestor I have that the Matching Center puts me in his queue. An S rank male could actually bring my pollution down enough for me to go back to work.]

The numbers kept climbing. Shares, reposts, comments, all of it spiraling upward so fast the trending algorithm couldn't keep up. Maxver Cole, the man who'd been a laughingstock twenty four hours ago, was now the most talked about single male in the country.

And somewhere across the city, in seven different apartments, seven one star beastkin women were staring at their communicators with their purification appointment confirmations glowing on screen, their hands shaking, their eyes wide, their hearts pounding with the kind of desperate, electric hope that only came when a miracle landed in your lap without warning.

An S rank male had seven open purification slots, and they were the ones who'd booked them.