Earth's SSS Pornstar to SSS Combat God in Another World-Chapter 55: Goals for Greater Strength

Joji did not hate queer men. He had friends like that back on Earth.

Still, when anyone started pushing past personal boundaries, that was when irritation woke in him.

He left the knights’ quarters with his jaw tight and his steps measured.

In the corridor, Head Knight Gregorius stood like he had been waiting, posture straight, eyes calm.

Gregorius gave him a small nod.

"Knight Joji. You’ve improved."

"Head Knight Gregorius. Your notes truly enlightened my way," Joji said. He bowed with real gratitude. "I almost died on my previous mission, but I survived because of it."

Gregorius studied him and found no falsehood. He had always fought close and brutal, blade work that lived on the edge of grappling range.

His own heavy short sword forced a man to fight tight, and tight fighting turned into better hands.

This, in turn, was what Joji used in normal close quarter fights when he fought Fourteen.

They traded a few more words, then Joji moved to the point.

"Head Knight Gregorius. I found a mount. He can use aura and magic."

Gregorius’s brow rose.

"Isn’t he a beastman?"

"He’s not," Joji said. "He’s more like a very smart beast."

Gregorius did not look offended by the request. He only followed the line of logic.

"So you want him to learn the Everhart Tempest Arts?"

Joji nodded once.

"A mount is a knight’s trust made flesh," Gregorius said. "If it can learn, then it should."

Soon enough, Gregorius was instructing Rizz.

The donkey stood there in his pants like it was the most natural thing in the world, ears high, nodding along, taking each word with eager focus.

Joji left them to it and went to Duchess Rosalind.

Her office was busy as ever. She did not look up at first.

Then she spoke anyway, cutting straight through the air.

"Joji. When are you going to give my daughter a wedding?"

The question hit him out of nowhere. Joji coughed once, buying a heartbeat, then answered with the same blunt honesty he used on the road.

"When I get stronger than you, I’ll marry her," he said.

Rosalind’s quill paused.

"Times of upheaval are ahead, Duchess," Joji continued, voice steady.

"I wouldn’t stomach myself seeing my children become orphans."

Duchess Rosalind set the quill down and looked him straight in the eye.

It was the first time she had looked at him like this, not as a useful knight, not as her daughter’s obsession, but as a man who might actually understand the size of the world that was coming.

As Duchess Rosalind watched Joji, she saw him in a new light.

Not only a blunt young knight with a dangerous streak.

A man thinking ahead. A man planning for storms.

The thought eased something in her. Maybe Daisy’s feelings were not in vain.

"I would like your help to get there," Joji said, direct as ever.

Rosalind clasped her hands.

"Oh? What help can I give you?" she asked curiously.

"I need an arcane meditation," Joji said. "All your notes on spells. All the spells you’ve learned and haven’t learned."

The demand landed heavy.

Rosalind’s brows rose, then her gaze sharpened. She was not offended. She was measuring.

"You know," she said, voice earnest, "sometimes doing too many things results in conflict. In the end, you finish nothing."

"I understand," Joji said. "But I do have talent in magic."

He gathered mana in his palm. A small tight glow that proved the point without turning it into theater.

Rosalind stared, unimpressed by the display itself.

Talent did not impress her. Growth did. Discipline did.

A monster was not born from a spark. A monster was built.

"We’re family, Joji," she said at last. "I won’t hold it against you if you want to learn the arcane." Her eyes narrowed a fraction.

"I have one request. Show me progress. No formal reports. Just show me a spell now and then."

She reached to her desk and tossed him a badge. It clinked when he caught it.

Engraved on it was an ornate staff with nine stars built around it.

Then she pointed at the wall to her left.

"Left. Right. Right. Center. Left. Right. Left. Center," she said. "Don’t get lost."

Joji nodded and fitted the badge to the stone. The wall shifted.

Stones rose and slid in sequence until a hidden hall opened like a mouth.

"Watch your steps down there," Rosalind added, already turning back to her work. "It’s slippery."

Joji hesitated at the threshold.

"One last thing," he said. "I earned some gold from the Cutlers. We have an auction house. Can I get the list?"

Rosalind looked up, ready to give him whatever help he needed, then sighed and let it go.

"I’ll hand it over later," she said.

Joji went down the corridor. Behind him, the stone doors slid shut with a soft grinding weight.

The staircase descended for five minutes before his boots hit flat ground again.

With the Cave Ogre Eyes, darkness did not bother him.

He saw every edge and seam as if the place were lit, and the underground swallowed him without complaint.

Joji followed the winding corridor down until the air changed.

"Left. Right. Right. Center. Left. Right. Left. Center," Joji kept murmuring.

It grew colder and drier, stone breathing out a stale chill that never saw sun.

He expected a vault. He found a study.

It hung over a chasm like a swallow nest, a room carved into the rock with nothing beneath it but black drop and silence.

A narrow pathway led to it, barely wide enough for one man’s boots. No railing. No mercy.

Joji stepped onto it anyway. One hand brushed the wall for balance, fingers reading the rock.

The study welcomed him with the smell of old leather and dried ink.

Candles sat ready, tucked into niches. He lit one and the flame bent in a soft draft that came from nowhere.

Five tall bookshelves rose in rows. Not a few hidden manuals like the Cutlers had.

Joji’s first hunger was simple. He needed more magic reserves. More mana. More capacity.

A larger pool meant easier access to portals, more armor summoning, more room to make mistakes without dying for them.

He started flipping through titles, pulling books out and skimming with a speed that would have earned him a slap from any scholar.

Starfire Mana Meditation.

Five Elemental Congregation Meditation.

True Arcane Meditation.

Each one looked like a treasure. Not the kind you bought with gold, the kind you bought with blood and a lifetime.

Every page held structure and patience and rules that turned a mortal mind into a better vessel.

And every page demanded time.

Elemental stones. Magic circles. Auxiliary tools. Long sessions.

Repetition until the body stopped fighting the flow.

They promised power, yes, but they promised it the way mountains promised peaks, slow and brutal and measured in years.

Joji exhaled through his nose. He could not pretend he was a man with years to burn.

Not with Fourteen. Not with Melchor. Not with the world shifting under Everhart’s feet.

’There has to be a faster way,’ he thought.

He wandered to another section and found aura meditations.

This shelf was thicker, deeper, loaded with methods meant for knights who believed steel and will could solve any problem.

He did not come here for aura, not first. Still, curiosity took him by the throat.

Aura fed survivability. Aura fed speed. Aura made a man harder to kill.

Minutes turned into hours. Joji looked up and realized time had moved without asking him.

He checked the remaining candle and felt the pinch in his belly.

Dinner was close, an hour at most.

The walk back would take fifteen minutes if he kept a steady pace.

Joji rubbed his face and forced himself to close the book in his hands. He turned to put it back.

That was when he saw the thin leather spine tucked behind the row.

Old leather. Dusty edges. The kind of book that did not get borrowed by polite people.

He pried it out. The cover creaked like a knee.

Tempered Through the Abyss.

Joji frowned. He had seen hybrid methods before, aura braided with magic, a few scattered pages in old collections.

Most of those methods promised faster progress, but they demanded extremely expensive consumption.

Still, he opened it.

The first pages read like a warning disguised as instruction.

No flowery praise. No grand lineage. Just requirements.

A magic circle. Sit. Endure.

Sacrificial blood. Thirteen blood stones. Six hundred sixty six mana crystals.

"Quite demonic with those numbers, eh?" Joji chuckled.

Joji’s gaze sharpened. He kept reading, slower now.

The blood fed the circle. The strength of the blood shaped the Abyssal Winds that came through.

Those winds struck the body like invisible blades, cutting, stripping, tearing at weakness the way a storm tore leaves from branches.

Then the key line hit him.

The winds carried energy. Mana. Prana. Aura. All of it.

The method did not ask you to gather power drop by drop through meditation. 𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦

It shoved power into you through suffering, tempered you like metal in a forge.

The downsides were plain. Armor reduced the effect. Protection dulled the tempering.

Every gust felt like blades. Sit wrong, brace wrong, and you would pay in flesh.

Joji stared at the page until the words stopped being ink and became a picture.

A circle. A room. A man sitting in the middle while abyss winds carved him down.

His pulse kicked.

This was dangerous. This was stupid. This was exactly the kind of shortcut that killed arrogant men.

Joji shut the book halfway, thumb holding his place. The candle flame shivered, as if the room itself had listened and approved.

He glanced toward the path back, toward dinner, toward Daisy and Rosalind and obligations that wanted him clean and calm.

Then he looked back down at the title.

’Tempered Through the Abyss,’ he thought. ’If I can survive this, I won’t need to beg time for strength. I’ll fucking take it.’

Joji slid the book under his arm and stood there a moment longer, feeling the weight of the choice settling into him like a second heartbeat.