“Hmmm… she is stuck on their good.” Pait rubbed his chin as he looked at the little monster on my hand.

“My hand is throbbing! Moderate Heal!” I sighed, healing myself even while I was still being bit.

“We could try cutting it off.” Pait offered.

“I already tried that, Alysia wouldn’t let me.”

“I meant you hand.”

“Absolutely not!”

“Can you heal a missing limb yet? I heard there are top tier healers in the Imperial Cloud Meadow with that ability.”

“No…” I responded. “And I will not cut it off now, hoping my next level will drop that skill either. I might have been fortunate in the past unlocking skills as I needed them, but my hand isn’t a risk I’m willing to take.”

Just for good measure, I made my position on losing limbs perfectly clear. I wasn’t exactly clear on how dangerous limb loss was in this world. In theory, you should be able to die, and when you were resurrected, you’d return with all of your limbs, but that meant you had to go through the experience of dying, which gave your soul trauma every time. It also wasn’t just dying, as you’d need to annihilate the body so that it was recreated.

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If your soul was the lore of you as a person, then it was possible that losing a limb was an integrated part of your lore. What was a pirate without his hook and eyepatch? In the event your body was destroyed, your soul would recreate your body. I was once resurrected in the body of a female because of this. My current appearance was different too. If I lost a hand, and my lack of a hand became an integrated part of my lore, then I wouldn’t resurrect with my hand back. That was my impression of how it all worked.

While it was true that if someone became extremely ill or suffered an ongoing sickness that heals didn’t fix, death and resurrection could be an answer. In a world where bodily diseases could be cured with a spell, it turned out most diseases that mattered were the kind that would damage the soul, mana, or the connection between the soul, mana, and your body. Like with Miki, resurrection wouldn’t have been able to cure her in the long run, because the damage to her body was being done by the soul. Without learning spiritualist, she would have inevitably died.

To summarize it, I absolutely under no circumstances was going to chop off my hand because of this little feral beast, and risk the chance of becoming the one-handed hero or the stump hero or something like that. We needed to come up with another solution.

I had pulled the zombie queen into my soul world, and her zombies had all gone dormant, standing vacant-eyed. However, I had found that I couldn’t pull her into my world without entering it myself, and when we appeared, her teeth were clamped into my hand. When I returned to the real world… her teeth were still clamped into my hand. I also attempted phase-shift… and this also didn’t work.

There was only one other time when I experienced such a thing. It was when Demon Lord Aberis had grabbed my throat. He had locked me into place, keeping me from using Return, and my only choice had been to cut off a piece of my soul to escape. However, this wasn’t a powerful demon seeking my life, but a loli who was latched onto my hand!