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Hahaha fuuuuck I forgot about that…  How could I -- I mean, brainwashing, obviously, but how could I forget about the dangers of that song?!

I lost a full week of time serving an imaginary ghost mistress in that ruined manor!

And even when I was released, it took me a month to stop obeying every single order that came my way!

It was hot, sure, but I prefer the tension of trying to resist, and finding myself unable to.  Compared to the empty pleasure of mindless, drone-like servitude -- I mean, sure, it feels amazing, but there’s no friction to it, you know?

At least I got a decent blessing out of it… thank you Leola, goddess of submission~

[Blessing:  Sub’s Fun]
[Requirements:  Have spent eight or more subsequent time slots enjoying the mindless bliss of servitude.  Do not have the Dom’s Fun blessing.]
[Effects:  The more arousing an order is, the more likely your body is to obey before you can process it.  Once you obey an order, it gets much more difficult to disobey, with the difficulty increasing the longer your obedience lasts.  It is now easy to train you to cum, or not cum, on command.]

Leola and Daria are a fun pair of goddesses.  Ruling over Submission and Dominance, they’re the longest lasting couple in the world, and have themed their potential blessings with that in mind.  Leolo can offer [Sub’s Fun] or [Sub’s Toy], depending on if a person is a submissive and enjoyed it or a dom that awakened several submissives ‘true bliss’.  By the same token, Daria offers [Dom’s Fun] or [Dom’s Toy], depending on if a person is a dominant and enjoyed it or is a sub that awakened several doms into delving into their true nature.

By that same token, having one of the ‘sub’ or ‘dom’ set of blessings blocks you out of obtaining the other… because the two share a belief that a person can be either a submissive or a dominant.  They’re both too warped to understand that ‘switches’ exist.

Of course, that doesn’t stop switches from existing, they just don’t get either pair of blessings.

Regardless, Shimizu had a lot of fun with me once she learned I had that blessing~  I became more addicted to her cock than ever when she could simply order me to cum while sucking her off.

But if I shared literally every sexual encounter I had, we’d never get anywhere.  Right now it’s time for Ghost Town!

---

We managed to get to the Assemblage of Apparitions with an absolutely blistering speed of one month.  Normally it would take two or three, but with the power of flagrant cheating and some knowledge we had no right of having, we managed it in only thirty days.  …Roughly speaking, at least.

Ghost Town is one of the more interesting areas in the game.  It’s similar to the minotaur village in the first landmass; A relatively more peaceful area with a proper civilization, full of potential for sexy lewd funtimes.

Now that I owned land adjacent to it, they would listen to my pleas for a treaty.  I needed their assistance in the upcoming battle at the end of the fifth year; a battalion of ghosts needed to try to possess the Evil God of Chastity and Purity to keep it from just wiping us out with a thought.

It’s a god.  You can't win with just gumption and the power of friendship.

Annoyingly.

Now that alone would be fine.  Ghosts don’t want much other than their land fixed up; they have a hard time moving physical objects, and their small town is as ruined as the rest of the second landmass.  

The problem is Countess Callisto.  The nominal ruler of the Assemblage of Apparitions by dint of, ‘nobody else wanted the fucking job’.

Ghosts aren’t people, see.  They have habits.  Strong ones.  Breaking out of those habits is next to impossible for them.  That combines with their tunnel vision to make them fairly… static.  Even if we got them to agree to a treaty?  They might not follow through when we called on them, because it would have been a change.

Unless they have a ‘noble ghost’ in charge.

This actually came up earlier in the series, in Alchemical Corruption 4, when an evil Ghost Queen decided to turn the rest of the world undead -- but that’s not relevant right now.

The point is that Countess Callisto was the highest ranking noble ghost on the continent.  The other ghosts would obey her, as she was a noble and they were not, but as a ghost… she had her own fixations we had to work around.

Fortunately, there’s a very easy way to deal with her!

Chuck Takeo at her once a week with some rare Wilted Roses for two months.  Then he fucks her.  And then she does whatever he says.

Unfortunately, when I suggested that to Takeo, he just laughed and said “No, I’m not dealing with that bitch again.  She stalks me every time.”

Which is fair.  She has that annoying anime-noblewoman laugh, the ‘Oooooho ho ho ho ho’ thing, and she does it constantly.  I wouldn’t want to be stalked by an entity that can turn invisible and walk through walls that has that laugh, either.

That meant that we had to deal with her the hard way.

Which meant we had to deal with her personal fixation.

In this case, it was an obsession with beauty.

Countess Callisto was the most beautiful person in the realm when she was alive… according to her.  Thus, she can only work with the most beautiful people around… according to her.  So long as, of course, they are not more beautiful than she is… according to her.

I hope you can see why I find her so fucking annoying.

But still, she was the one we had to deal with.  Thankfully, if we got the treaty?  She’d obey it.  She wouldn’t backtrack or cancel it.  I could get that treaty and then ignore her until the Evil God of Chastity and Purity showed up, and that was what I fully intended on doing.

So there I was, with a plastic smile on my face, sitting on a torn and tattered pillow on a chair that had lost one of its legs, sipping ectoplasmic goop that was pretending to be tea out of fine china that was more cracks than porcelain, trying to not blow up at this dead ghost that we needed on our side as she nitpicked everything about my body.

“Oh darling, your breasts are -- fine, for a commoner, but true nobility is used to ones a bit… bigger.”

“You know, dear, your hips are a touch wide.  They indicate you’re to be used for breeding instead of pleasure.  Is that really the kind of message I want in one of my attendants?”

“Oh sweetie… your ass is excellent, but… how to put this… it’s the rear end of a slave.  Not somebody respectable.  Now if you wanted to change your position, that would make more sense, but as a potential attendant of mine…”

It.  Was.  Infuriating.  Hearing her nitpick about every single part of my body like I even had a choice about it!

…Well, I mean, I kind of did, but the choices were both one-way and a touch too drastic for me at the time.

I was fairly confident in my looks by then, but hearing this ghost bitch nag about every little thing for hours on end was driving me up the wall.  All the while I was trying to get her to nail down what we needed to do for the treaty.

Fix the library, ensure the houses had roofs, get her a new set of fine china that wasn’t going to fall apart in a stiff breeze, things like that.

But for every term I managed to get from her, I had to listen to another inane complaint about my appearance.

“Oh, you know, I didn’t notice, but your hair… my oh my… you really should put more effort into it; it’s not luxurious enough to get away with being lazy, dear.”

“Oh, you’re wearing makeup?  I didn’t realize.  You should keep practicing.  I thought your face was just naturally unappealing!”

AAARGH

Just thinking about it drives me crazy.

Now, see, there’s an event that always happens in Alchemical Corruption 12 when you try to recruit Countess Callisto the hard way.  The girl you send to negotiate with her -- because sending Takeo results in a wasted time slot of flirting -- will always, and I mean always, get possessed by Callisto.  Which always struck me as strange when I played the game.

It’s fairly well established that you can only get possessed by a ghost if you invite them to do so.  It’s akin to inviting a vampire into your house; it’s a limit on them, not one based on your intent.  So the wording matters.

So when I snapped and said, “I’d like to see you do any better!”

She just smiled at me and said, “Well, if you insist.”

And then she entered my body, and I was possessed by Countess Callisto.

---

Possession by a ghost in Alchemical Corruption is… weird.  One moment you’re one, the next, you’re two.  Sometimes, if the ghost is powerful enough to completely subsume the will of the host, they gain full control of the body until their will weakens.  If it ever does.

Usually, however, you end up with a spiritual ‘tug of war’.  Both sides try to exert their influence, and over time a middle ground is slowly reached, only to snap back to ‘normal’ once the ghost leaves.

…Mostly.

Ghosts are mostly static.  They usually return right back to how they were upon the possession's end.

Humans are not.  They are altered in ways small to drastic depending on the length of the possession.

This actually relates to why Callisto wanted to possess me.  She wanted to both change me for ‘the better’, and use this as a chance to change herself.  It’s easier for a ghost to change it if they’re sharing a body’s rent with a living person; they can learn and adapt to the person's personality and traits.  If they’re stubborn or lucky, they can keep some of those traits when the possession ends.

I was just fortunate I had thought to warn Shimizu and the others about this possibility before going to negotiate with Callisto.

There was one silver lining, however; I managed to wrangle her into agreeing that after we managed to achieve her list of demands for ‘her county’, she would leave my body and not come back.  Took some time to get her to agree to that, given she was already in my body, but I managed to not only get her to agree, but to agree to be bound to it.

Unfortunately… that meant I was stuck with her until then.

How to describe the sensation of being possessed… it’s different from a parasite taking over part of your nervous system.  Parasites and symbiotes feel more like an internal intrusion.  A change of thoughts coming from somewhere inside of yourself.  Possession, on the other hand, feels like an external intrusion.  Like something is muffling your thoughts, pushing them down, and trying to shout its own loud enough you can’t help but accept them.

Parasites result in confusion, possession results in headaches.  …Typically.  There are always exceptions.

Now, it’s important to note that one of the things I’ve learned, that helped me survive up to that point, is that you can’t be too rigid.  You have to accept that, sometimes, it’s not worth resisting.  At the same time, you can’t get too hung up on what changes you go through -- that would make it harder to accept changing back once you have the opportunity.

There are always some things you should remain vigilant and strict for, but beyond that?  Be flexible.  Know the core of who you are and let the surface get muddied.

At least that’s how it worked best for me.

So when Callisto possessed me and immediately pushed me to update my makeup, almost screaming in my head thoughts about how I needed to look perfect, I put up a token resistance and otherwise let her thoughts take over.

It was weird, being in control of half of my mind, but that’s the best way to describe it.

I felt myself stand up and go over to an ancient vanity table, and sat down.  ‘I’ already knew where all the makeup was, and ‘I’ knew how to apply it perfectly.  So ‘I’ took out a cloth from my bag to clear up the makeup I had put on earlier, and ‘I’ started a fresh application… with Callisto’s makeup.

Callisto, a noble obsessed with beauty.

Yeah, the makeup was magic.

I really should have realized that before and put up a bigger fight… but by the time ‘I’ was putting on some bright red lipstick, and feeling ‘my’ lips plump as I pursed them in the mirror?  By then it was already too late.

Eyelashes were elongated, eyebrows were redefined, a subtle smokey look was applied and all flaws were covered up or outright erased using the magic makeup.

Naturally, I didn’t take this lying down.  I was shouting in my mind, my hands freezing as the two of us struggled, trying to get her to stop.

It didn’t work.

Obviously.

She managed to shock me when she pointed out a little fact about the makeup she was applying.

It just so happened to be magically enhanced for durability.

…This stuff wouldn’t wash off for months, if not years.

But she wasn’t done there.

‘I’ couldn’t stand the outfit ‘I’ was wearing at the time.  It was a practical one, for hiking and exploring, and I was trying to shout that out, but ‘I’ couldn’t stand the embarrassment of being seen in it.

So ‘I’ removed it, for a much more practical outfit.

Lacy stockings and garter, with a subtle red tint, were put on first.  Both of us were distracted by the sensation, as we were too busy fighting for control over the body to resist how sultry it felt.

It was soon followed by a tight minidress with a corset top.  The corset was a vivid red, with black, purple, and gold highlights, propping up my breasts like they were an option at a buffet.  The bottom half was short in front -- short enough that even just standing you could just barely see my garters -- with it only being twice as long in the back, spilling out with lacy frills.

My hair was let down, and ‘I’ put on some matching sleeves.  They somehow stuck to my skin without being connected to an actual shirt, which was quite impressive.

Oh, and of course, a matching pair of heels.

That was the one thing that we agreed upon.  Heels were a must.

Of course ‘I’ chose ones that weren’t suited for hiking or adventure, but I could live with that.

It was then I heard Callisto murmur to herself, in the back of my -- well, our -- mind, “And I have the perfect plan to deal with Shimizu while we have our fun, little doll~”

That was a hot sign.

…Also a bad one.

But mostly a hot one.