Chapter 33 – Lacking Spiritual Power
“Still no good, huh...”
At the Divine Child Hall, Dylin sat on a bench and sighed.
With the help of the Golden Butterfly Hairpin, he was able to use Divine Appraisal successfully, which made him wonder—could this breakthrough help him unlock other Divine Child skills as well?
Unlocking his Divine Child skills was crucial right now. It would allow him to recruit teammates more effectively. Even though he’d decided to compete in the Freshman Crown Tournament in Teresa’s form, he hadn’t given up on recruiting new allies.
As a Divine Child, he had to think several moves ahead. Banking everything on Teresa undergoing a transformative evolution after her Divine Awakening was a risky gamble—and Dylin wasn’t about to stake his life on a dice roll unless he had no other choice.
And the results? They showed just how naive his assumption had been. The description on the Golden Chalice Butterfly Ornament clearly stated: it only boosted one currently possessed skill. It had improved Divine Appraisal, but the rest of his Divine Child skills remained as inaccessible as ever.
The Divine Child’s role in a team revolved around command and information support.
“Information support” didn’t just mean laying out possibilities and battle plans before a fight. During battle, a Divine Child’s job was to directly analyze the situation in real-time using their specialized skills.
Divine Appraisal was a Divine Child’s “eyes”—a golden finger that allowed them to read the battlefield, process information, and issue commands. It had a low usage threshold but was hard to master—an easy-to-learn, hard-to-master type of skill. Anyone could use it, but those who used it well versus poorly might as well have been using two different abilities.
Aside from some secret techniques passed down through certain Divine Child families, most of their skills were general-use—dependent on the user’s talent, spiritual power, and proficiency. Among them was a skill called Appraisal Sharing.
Unlike the basic Divine Appraisal, Appraisal Sharing had a noticeable casting threshold. Even talented Divine Children might fail to activate it on their first try. Mastery requires one to feel the rhythm of the skill and build familiarity.
Earlier, Dylin had tried to activate exactly this skill—Appraisal Sharing. And, clearly, he had failed.
“Told you,” the spiky-haired boy beside him muttered lazily, head propped on one hand as he yawned.
“You really didn’t see anything?” Dylin asked, clearly not ready to give up.
“Nope. Not a damn thing. Everything looked exactly the same,” the spiky-haired boy waved a hand dismissively.
“I see...”
Staring at the flood of data that filled his vision, Dylin shook his head. “Shame.”
After upgrading Divine Appraisal to Legendary, the world he now saw through his eyes was something every Divine Child probably dreamed of witnessing.
To use an analogy—if a video game world was just lines of code, so too was reality. At the pinnacle of Divine Appraisal, the world appeared broken down into its most fundamental strings of data, floating before the user’s eyes.
“What’s a shame?” the spiky-haired boy asked, confused.
“Nothing.”
Dylin released the butterfly ornament from his hands, and the flowing characters and data vanished from his vision.
Perhaps due to his insufficient spiritual power, staring at the dense information for too long left his eyes sore and burning—his retinas felt like they were on fire, and it was like a thousand needles were stabbing into his brain. At that point, he couldn’t even read anymore, let alone extract usable information.
After obtaining the Golden Butterfly and upgrading Divine Appraisal to legendary level, Dylin quickly realized a critical problem—his skill had advanced, yes, but his mental stamina hadn’t kept up. He couldn’t maintain usage for long before feeling lightheaded and exhausted.
He needed to find a way to increase his spiritual power.
Now that he thought about it—were there any alchemy potions in the Golden Chalice Gacha that could enhance spiritual power?
“I gotta ask though,” said the spiky-haired boy. “Why’d you suddenly decide to try Appraisal Sharing? Weren’t you barely managing with Divine Appraisal itself?”
“I know,” Dylin replied.
The boy with the messy, spiked hair was John, one of the very few people at Coleman Academy whom Dylin could even halfway call a friend.
They had met one sunny afternoon, when John—also a smoker—ran out of cigarettes and followed the scent to find Dylin hiding outside a classroom, smoking alone.
With a shared interest, they’d struck up a friendship. Even now, Dylin didn’t know much about John’s background. He never asked, and didn’t want to—some things were private, after all.
He just knew that John, like himself, was a Divine Child. As for how talented he was—who knew? They hadn’t even been formally placed in classes yet, and no proper evaluations had been done.
John probably had his own team. Dylin often wondered what kind of Divine Princess would be willing to work with a guy this lazy and careless in class.
“By the way, why didn’t you come to class yesterday?” John asked, eyes half-closed.
“Had something I had to deal with.”
Dylin certainly couldn’t say “I used a one-day Divine Princess Experience Card.”
Yesterday, he’d spent the day living as a Divine Princess—but to be honest, the Divine Princess classroom hadn’t left a great impression. Aside from the lessons, what stuck with him most were the cold glares and ostracization from all those noble scions.
The Divine Child Hall was far more comfortable. If nothing else, it had one key trait: quiet.
Nobody came to bother him. Everyone was a Divine Child, and this profession tended to attract people with a strong thirst for knowledge and exploration. Even after class, most students were busy reading, not socializing—perfectly peaceful.
In fact, among all the vocational halls, the Divine Child Hall was the teachers’ favorite, thanks to the students' love of learning and silence.
Well... except for the guy in front of him.
Dylin glanced sideways at the carefree John and mused to himself.
“So, what were you doing, huh? Don’t think you can hide it from me,” John said, studying him.
“Hmm... Hah! I get it. Found yourself a new girlfriend, didn’t you?”
“Girlfriend? Don’t start,” Dylin replied flatly, not even lifting his head.
“Oh, come off it. You think you can fool me? Spill it—did you find a new Divine Princess?” John slapped Dylin heartily on the shoulder.
“Keep it down. This is a classroom.” Dylin glared at him. The Divine Child Hall was so quiet that you could hear a pin drop.
“Man, after what happened, I thought you might get expelled for not finding teammates. Didn’t expect you to turn the tables like that.”
“Whether I turned anything around or not is debatable,” Dylin said. “But how do you know I found a new Divine Princess?”
“Do I even need to know for sure?” John shrugged. “You smell like a woman. Definitely had close contact with one. And unless it’s a female Divine Child—which I doubt—it’s gotta be a Divine Princess.”
“Oh.” Dylin didn’t question further.
He still had no idea what level of Divine Appraisal John had, or what kind of data he could perceive.
But if John didn’t want to explain, Dylin wasn’t going to pry.