The Ogre Strength Fairy and the Eldest 'Son'-Chapter 486 - Detours Are Sometimes Good Destinations, pt2
They used Hevri’s home instead of trying to get the man moved anywhere. A structure that his hands had crafted twelve years ago for his wife... as not everyone could be satisfied with a raised loft above the workshop itself - even if the inside of the home still got as much sawdust in it as anywhere else. Having it all cleaned thoroughly and creating enough of an open space for them to work was important.
For that reason, Yatrel had sent someone ahead before she took Nohre and Zyris there. The three women came again a week after she met with the woodworker and his son the first time. Both of the ’healers’ wore clothing that covered them entirely, and in that regard they looked no different from the workers that were classically involved in dealing with mortal plague situations. Including hardened leather masks over their faces - well-crafted pieces that covered from forehead to chin, with eye holes and breathing vents but no other features.
"It isn’t exactly contagious. Why not simple cloth?"
Zyris asked with a muffled voice before they entered. She hadn’t thought much about it when first handed to her, but walking around with it on the train all day had grown mildly uncomfortable. Mostly because she could only smell leather for the last long while! Nohre, who was going through a bit of a growth spurt these last years, looked over directly into the woman’s eyes and gave a very certain response.
"For good luck."
The reddish-blonde went in first, though the man looked at the masked individuals behind her with no apparent fear. Just a desperate hope barely restrained, delicately creating a tension in the others despite the already high stakes. If it worked, it would be a boundary pushed successfully towards filling the cliff of fear that remained for those living with the cycle of threat to their lives. It would be relief to mortals who could only look at cultivators shrugging off the same ’sickness’ with envy.
"Thank you for coming. Thank you... for trying."
"Your son? Where is he?"
"With an older neighbor. She’s been good to us since his mother was taken. It will keep him distracted instead of worrying. If it takes too long or... if-"
"I’ll make sure, Hevri. Don’t worry. No, I guess that’s not what to say. Just know that all of us are wishing for success."
Neither of the other two women spoke, having practiced necessary handsigns to help keep their identities hidden - though in emergencies they had already agreed to forgo that to communicate needed information. They simply moved to either side of the pallet made on the floor, helping the patient down to it and beginning their examination. The Mend wielder took the left and the Void took the right as both settled their own minds.
Yatrel observed from near the window after barring the doorway, giving them space to work while remaining present just in case anything was needed. She watched the younger woman’s gloved fingers tremble as she tried to keep her focus. Mortals were as different from cultivators in some ways as a bear was to a fish. It could be said that they did not have the ’gills’ to breath the life water of physical energy - however it existed in them, because it existed in most anything organic.
’It just wasn’t meant to be nudged to an effect like my Mend is meant to do... yanking it from its place, even just by trying to guide healing, could be disastrous for his body. And my own energy cannot just take its place. I have to keep everything stable. That’s my only purpose today.’
The problem was that poor Hevri had almost nothing left to stabilize. His natural healing had been suppressed in areas by the year and a half of Void corruption... and that created a slow, depressing cascade of failures for her to witness in person. His heart was weak, his liver decaying... so many signs that he may not live a full life even after this was successful. Because she could not coax a mortal into regenerating like she could a cultivator - she’d have to be working at it for weeks at a time for a single patient.
She’d made sure to put herself through this before now, taking Elua’s advice to heart. That the braided haired girl was ’too good’ of a person. The green eyed cultivator had needed the time to cope with impossibility, so visiting those while knowing she could never help them *alone* was an injurious but necessary spiritual step. As was attending their funerals in between research and experiments. Because if she failed this time, she didn’t want to break from seeing the loss of someone that she ’could’ have helped.
But Mend alone couldn’t address the source of the continued deterioration, which is why Zyris worked with the truly necessary part in all of this. Her essence field pulsed, guided by the Synergy of her daughter-in-law... hunting for tiny concentrations of lingering Void essence that conventional senses looking for ’something’ couldn’t finely detect. Even if they could, no one could do anything about it. Historically, healers had tried excising the damaged parts they assumed the problem was in, only to realize they had not actually gotten out the primary grouping of ’nothing’.
When the Sixth Echelon Enchanter found the first small patch of Void, her hand settled over the location to direct her focus. Her cultivation mentee and partner in this endeavor could feel the inverted wrongness of the essence through the spiritual link. It had settled in his gut where the wound on his stomach had initially been during the attack and had since split and traveled to a few other places where tumors were forming.
Slowly, methodically, Zyris drew it out from underneath his lung - sliver by sliver minuscule sliver as Nohre made sure the surrounding tissue would not burst and bleed. The overall method was quite simple in explanation, but more strenuous in practice. Manipulating the essence inside a cultivator was nearly impossible unless they intentionally retracted their field... but a mortal had no such thing. Even still they were a living being with a whole messy complex of tinged essence within their body.
If it were any other Element, what she was doing would be considered drastic at best or intentional torture at worst. That was even before the second step, which involved accumulating it into her own essence field - harvesting energy from another living being was as frightening a prospect as anything that ancient cultivators ever got up to. Even if it could be excused as removing a toxin from a body, it still had disturbing connotations and applications... which is why they did their research in secret so far.
Yatrel had been told the specifics, but had no qualms at all in trusting them. She knew it was the right choice when she saw what felt like the man’s breath easing as the first of the problem was removed from his chest. It didn’t fix the damage, but clearly the body knew quickly that it had the potential to get better. The young healer immediately pivoted to help flow her inserted energy to the next area at her partner’s hand signal... and they worked like this for over an hour.
That was when everything going right went wrong. The largest concentration from the original wound was saved for last - and it should have been saved for even later. Slightest slips of concentration fractured the Void along the microscopic sigilry, complex three dimensional script chains that acted as the pseudo nucleic acid that guided the eldritch constructs. Rather quickly, that ’detonation’ further frazzled the new Void Element user’s control and caused the nothingness to spread.
Like it was a grenade dispersing, the Mend wielder had to trace far too many paths. It felt impossible to stabilize all of them - and Nohre had to make quick choices about what could be ignored in the direction they moved and what had to be protected. She prioritized the direction of critical organs, allowing her mother-in-law to rally and slow them. In those seconds, Hevri cried out in agony as the parts moving toward his leg *pushed* and rent physical reality away.
A small army of unstoppable nothing shredded good tissue by spreading fibers in wrong directions, widened porous sections of bone, and generally caused havoc in the man’s lower extremity. By the time they’d dealt with the critical areas, things would grow worse... so Zyris made the decision she didn’t want her mentee to have to make. Instead of carefully guiding out and letting her field consume the rest they’d stalled, she instead channeled it all down as close to those same damaging paths as possible. As *quickly* as possible.
Nohre made a small noise as understanding hit, for it was like a bucket of ice water. They would have to save his life by abandoning the leg - by *letting* damage happen to it because they had messed up. All she could do was try and contain the internal bleeding and hope she could do something she hadn’t done before. Elua, who had studied the rare person with congenital insensitivity to pain, had taught her how to theoretically manipulate the nociceptors intentionally with physical energy to achieve the same result... and advised her never to do it to *herself*.
’She must have known I’d need this some day. For a situation like this.’
