Preshe helped Corvayne with Little Wing, clearing off a sturdy coffee table, much to the annoyance of her bespectacled roommate.
"Hey!"
She then dumped the bloody and on fire boy onto the table.
“Hey AGAIN!”
Her roomate looked around, then quickly got on her hands and knees facing Lepin. “Senior, this disciple begs forgive-”
Preshe snapped her fingers. “She's with Corvayne, get me some towels and sharpen a kitchen knife...” She looked behind Corvayne at the.
“Is that blood root?! I could... Is that mo- Lady?”
Corvayne promised himself once they unscrewed this they would sit down and formally form a family with Preshe. “Yes to both.”
Preshe opened Little Wing's robes and spent a moment looking at his chest. “He works out...”
Bayou looked daggers at her, while Little Wing wheezed. “Thaaaanks.”
“Don't encourage her Little Spur.” Corvayne said while using mend to address hemmoraging. Her roommate came back with the knife and Preshe enchanted it for sharpness, then started cutting into Little Wing's abdomen.
“Preshe your getting blood all over my homework! You better not kill that stud in here!”
“Get me clean bandages!” She rolled up her sleeves and with her fingers dipping into his meat she started moving essence. There was a hiss and Bayou sit by Little Wing and held his hand.
“It's going to be okay. Pain is fleeting. There will be bull to shovel tomorrow. Pain is fleeting. The sun will yet rise and fall. Pain is fleeting.”
On the other hand, Corvayne was following Preshe now, sometimes washing his fingers with healing potion. His shadow hands too reached out, leaving bits of black goo that acted as stitches, soaking into the wounds that Preshe was making to heal them. To Corvayne's vision, she was working frantically, trying to create pipes to contain and direct what looked like a fireball of essence in Little Spurs body.
Corvayne was seeing that it was a losing battle, even though Preshe was doing an incredible job repairing those pathways. There was just too much energy, and Little Wing was getting hotter. Lepin took out a scythe that dripped frost to help keep the room cool. Preshe's roommate brought bandages and Corvayne used them to aid his mending...
“There's too much power.” Lepin said, shaking her head. “He should have given up on cultivating. You can keep his body alive but even with a rare treasure to recover his roots, with the energy in him he's going to explode.”
“What if we had something physical to bind it?”
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“Like, what? A pound of high purity crystal?”
“Yes.”
“If you had a pound of that, I'd say pay someone to put him in stasis and hire an expert to keep him alive while he burns himself out. Hopefully he has enough Vitality his mind isn't stored in his brain cells.”
Preshe was breathing heavily, focused on trying to create a sort of pipe in his guts to keep the energy looping, but a moment after it was made it failed, rupturing his guts for a moment before Corvayne used greater mend.
“I got an idea. Keep her alive... Bayou I want you to pour these potions down his throat.”
Little Spur tried to protest, his mouth steaming as the potion drowned his plea to give up.
Corvayne meanwhile took a deep breath and reached out to Lady Blood Claw, and her cursed vines. It was a power he had been helping her use without her knowing it and now he took a vine from her back, and aimed it at a spot where he concentrated Vitality in his own arm. He saw essence start to flock there as her urged the vine to grow hair thin, and thread through him. As he did, he visualized the crystals wrapping around the branch, soaking into it.
“Use this to start threading his essence channels.” Corvayne said, and Preshe only looked horrified at him before starting to tug it and once again cut. She used her tail to hold the knife while she carefully used her fingers and started wrapping and fine tuning as she directed a flow then connected the vine to it, the plant digging deep into Little Wing's flesh and forming a stable pipe.
“We can do this!” Preshe said, excited, then forced herself to look away and back to her work. Corvayne tried not to notice Preshe pause when she had to take off Little Wings damaged pants, instead pushing through [[Unity]] to keep focus on saving him.
“We can worry about who embarrassed who at breakfast.” Corvayne said as he reached into his pack and pulled out the Quintessence potion and downed it. Lepin gave him a look. “Gut feeling. Take this and get us more healing potions.” He paused a moment and maneuvered a black crystal knife-sized shard out of his neck.
“Oh. You print essence and money and have the devil's own luck with items. Not to mention a good looking wife and daughter! Pah. No wonder you have a monk's temperament.”
“Lady and Corvayne are not married, but we don't know the future either.” Preshe said, then paused, and suddenly started working a little faster. Corvayne painfully had to start a second line as she was picking up pace, both hands working while her tail started to do cuts on it's own, opening places where she laid down lines. There was a snap as the his legs formed a complete loop, essence no longer burning.
Corvayne saw her working and though about his own teachers. Did Waves-Within feel the same pride when he did the spear dance? Maybe more how Spaces-Torn-Asunder did watching him put together an engine. Or perhaps his father... there was something missing in his mind and he suspected it had to do with the memory orb revealing parts of his past. He shook it away from his mind. Little Wing was starting to recover, but his broken essence paths were still frying parts of him.
They flipped Little Wing over, Bayou helping and pleading with her eyes at Corvayne, even as the back of the man's head was smoking. They were down to one spool, Preshe's blood covered hands gently easing the line into an incision in the neck as she fixed pathways. The plant and crystal meshed, bonded, and suddenly the room stilled as tranquility filled the space. Corvayne saw the pathways shift and push and grow and break and reform now, with Preshe using her hands to correct and aid and unblock.
Someone turned on a light, Corvayne had to blink as he'd been looking at essence so long, and then the energy compressed into the black crystal orb at the center of Little Wing's chest, then exploded in red essence that flooded his veins and rebuilt him, mixing with teal essence that Corvayne suspected was Lythandies hand in this.
Preshe stepped back, sweating, her robe covered in blood. She kicked a leg of the table and an array started, cleaning up the blood and burnt gore. Corvayne guessed there was about thirty pounds they had used mend to replace, but Little Wing looked now restored and pristine. Bayou put her outer robe over him for decency, while Preshe used her tail to take a pitcher of ice water and start gulping it down.
It had felt like minutes in the flow of moment to moment, watching and reacting and close calls trying to keep energy from popping Little Wing's head, but as it ended Corvayne realized he had been standing for hours, and even sleeping beauty on his back was radiating exhaustion. The only person who seemed perfectly rested and composed was Little Wing himself, whom had went from pain to passed out to now peacefully snoring on the coffee table.
On the other hand, Preshe was looking down at her hand, and with a hmm did something....
Corvayne didn't know for sure what it looked like when someone else spontaneously advanced their class, but given that Preshe seemed to grow an inch and her essence was now torpedoing through her at hundreds of miles an hour, forming runic patterns... he was fairly sure that was a class evolution.
“I ordered dinner.” her roommate offered, hanging up the phone. A moment later, there was a knock on the door.
“That was fast.” Bayou said.
Preshe nodded. “Too fast...” She walked to the door and opened it. Rio Blackfist Cumberlin, Acting Sect Leader of the Fistful of Dao was waiting there, three pizzas balanced on one hand.
“Just the people I wanted to talk to.” She mused as she strolled in.