Old arch Druid’s POV.

“It won’t work.” The elder warns our healers, but they are relentless. They keep sending a continuous stream of healing energy into him in a simultaneous fashion but after his skin closes over his stump and the shallow pits on his torso all effects from their effort stop in a rather permanent fashion.

The elder however doesn’t stop them, probably hoping against hope that one of them will show a hint of a higher level of skill.

“At least that cursed being is dead now. I lost my hand, but they lost their prime defender. A fully fledged Aether wielder returning on the first month. Never seen that. Even if he is low level.”

“I… the scouts report seeing someone popping back out from “that place” a kilometer away above the water.”

“Damn, in what condition he was?”

“Best estimate, he lost a third of his body mass to the caustic nature of that place.”

His eyes widen, as if I had just told him that the enemy had arrived on the city riding a Komodo dragon or a fire phoenix.

“Damn, how the hell did he avoid becoming goop? Even if he only stayed inside a few seconds… Well, with the type of injuries the caustic void can inflict, he is likely already dead. And if he really is as miraculous as you imply, it will take time for him to heal even to this state.” The Elder says waving the stump that used to be his left hand. “And even then he will have to get used to fighting with whatever prosthetics they can cobble together.”

A grin overtakes both our faces, but hidden in my chest is a fear that I don’t want to feed. A fear that against all odds he will find a higher tier healer, capable of healing permanent injuries of this level.

Then I shake my head and just let the moment take over. Nah, that’s nonsense even for HIM.

The cost for using these instruments was great and it will ask for dividends down the line, but at least we dealt with our most troublesome opponent.

An Inner world… that would have been a nightmare with the restrictions that we have in place.

===============

Nash’s POV.

An overwhelming sense of pain and distress awakens me even as a heavy presence sits around me. Pando’s attention fills the air like the system sometimes does and it is so thick that anyone would notice it.

I try to get up even as my perception field extends to cover all my surroundings and I find I’m already back at the village.

“Damn. I was really out of it. I lost … twelve hours at least.”

Then I register my own body and horror strikes me.

I move the stump where my arm used to be in front of my face.

I have Life and even if I had to wait for the system to do its thing I wouldn’t be this way permanently, but the possibility still strikes me.

Not letting it build, I pull the logs and my message buffer to read anything in my inbox but a few seconds later after I read the highlights I’m left with more questions than answers and so I call out for Pando and Aspen even as my second half goes deep in our memory to dig out anything he can.

I failed to heal you

Pando tried really hard.

They simultaneously reply.

“Do not worry, I can take care of that myself. You two kept me alive and that is all that matters in the end. From what little I remember, I was in bad shape.”

Yes. You required full connection from the seed and Aspen to sustain you while I bumbled my way into healing you with Life.

“Yeah, I saw the dip in the stores,” I say wincing at the thousands of points used just for some very basic healing. If I took my time, I would have used a small fraction of this to recover entirely. But if I had died, then there would be no more Life, so it was a nearly moot point.

I keep up the conversation trying to get a sense of how things went after I fell from the sky only to discover that we immediately retreated and they didn’t contest our retreat.

After a few more reports and calling for a human that would obviously have another perspective comes the news I most wanted to hear. Minutes later, Paul arrives.

“That strange staff in his hand coughed up a weaker version of the same thing that hit you and it ate away his hand. That seems to have damaged it, and took the new Arch druid’s hand.”

“Good. I had no idea they could bring something like that out. But I don’t know if we would have a chance against them if they started using it indiscriminately.”

“That’s beside the likely existence of a steep cost to their utilization. If it was cheap, they would have used it earlier in the battle.”

“Maybe they will next time. They might have held back today because they wanted to catch me by surprise.”

“You were out of it for some 36 hours, not twelve.” Paul corrects my misconception.

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“Ohh, I… didn’t check,” I say looking at my stumps even as roots cover them and act as temporary replacements. “I think. I’m ok enough to try healing.”

“Ok, I will leave you alone.”

“Just one last thing, how did it go with the other half of the army?”

“Abut as good as our attack, though the ones we attacked with greater numbers scattered and made their way back to their island and most of them returned before we managed to engage to any meaningful degree. Really good kill to loss ratio all things considered. I mean you were out of commission and that meant no healing, but I stand by my assessment. ”

I wince again and then he leaves as I say to his back:

“Call for the attack to go through on the other camps, if they are still up to it.”

After a simple nod back he hastens out, intent on making the most of our time now that I’m back.

I probably shouldn’t keep taking these risks, especially during critical times when my healing capabilities make such a difference. Even the other attacks around the world were delayed to give me time to recover and just one more day asleep might have forced everyone to scrap their plans this month. Those twenty four hours would mean reinforcements along with another slightly loosening on their restrictions while we got a bunch of people disorganized and spread all over without any equipment or information we developed.

Instead of wallowing in pity at my former limbs, I start to cycle Life through myself using the same ‘song’ that was used on the healer.

It wasn’t fire that consumed my flesh and bone, but it is close enough that I shouldn’t experience too much of a drop in efficiency. As my flesh starts to regrow, I’m glad to see that use 30 percent less Life than normal. Not quite full efficiency from my best ‘song’, but better than any other alternative.

As I push it though, the healing comes in spurts, recreating tissue at a different pace than usual, but making it as strong as it had ever been and without any defects. Then the strangeness builds as I input more and more to approach full healing and then it stops.

Well short of full healing, I just go back to a ‘perfect’ state of limblessness. From having half of my Ulmer, now I’m back to my elbow, but that is where the healing stops.

One of my actual fears actually proves to be true. In a different way to my expectations, but true nonetheless. I keep cycling my Qi, trying to prompt my body to change and become whole again, but something is holding me back.

I look within, trying to find the pattern that I’m using to heal. What is the most ideal state that my Life assumes it must help me return to. The desire for my body to regenerate.

I never explored it very much because until now, all that had been handled on the back end by the system. All I did was to accelerate that process, but this changes the equation.

If I’m no longer whole and this is what the system considers my normal state, then I have to change what is ‘normal’. I let Aether flow out to deepen my connection with the world then draw it in looking at my own body. I meditate seeking to understand why my cells aren’t going back to the way they had been.

Memories of the thirty seconds I spent in that place and how it changed me overlap with a sense of completeness as if this is my new form.

“I bloody knew it.”

The system considers me, because of the nature of that place to have ‘completely’ lost my limbs. This simple use of Life, could only take me this far.

Deep underneath, I get a sense of my own healing efforts. Not the one powered by the system, but that connection to my real body. The connection that let me increase my stats and even if ever so slowly could do much more. It was something that I had only explored this single facet of. I only kept the regular practice of physical training and specific meditation for the occasional stat increase and possibly maintenance.

I wonder how long I have left until the attack, but those questions fade from my mind as I go deeper within. That same cycle that I started so long ago, letting the wave into my body and exhaling. Fill with strength and let all the weaknesses wash away, fill with the breath of life and expel all death away.

I concentrate only on my right arm. On a tiny spot on my right arm. It saw slightly less decline but after healing it had grown perfectly to my elbow.

Still, it somehow felt right starting here.

So I push my attention entirely to it, ignoring everything that isn’t automatic and then let my imagination builds. I find a small clump of cells, now as clear to me with my perception field or my bare eyes as when I had played with a toy microscope in my youth.

I prompt them to grow. To return to their old shape to reach deep within their genetic memory and make me whole. They sit there unmoving. The clump of cells understands my wishes well enough, but they react to my pleading with as much enthusiasm as a bag of rocks.

The problem isn’t translation. I knew enough words of the language of the world and this is my own body. I know that something has changed deep in my bones.

I let myself feel the betrayal of my body induced by the system.

I change tactics, just to see how deep this goes and order them to replicate. The change is instantaneous. They explode like a cancer on steroids. At least I haven’t lost all connection. I modify and shape the tiny clump of cells with ease, but ordering them to return to my full state before the system’s alterations is like asking a dog to perform the trick of jumping without using its legs.

It just doesn’t compute.

They have completely forgotten their former shape. My body forgot that it used to be another foot and a half long in ‘all’ directions.

The system erase their memories as it had done with me.

More than that, although I didn’t have proof, I imagine the changes it made to my genes.

And that is unforgivable.

Yes, the system gave me a nice kick in the but to get my act together. To go not in a linear fashion, working hard at one thing in a particular way and simply letting the steady improvements accumulate but to aim high, much higher than I ever dreamed in my youth. But it is also infuriating, always poking its nose where it didn’t belong and more often than not simply making things worse all the while forcing as many people as it can to dead ends.

I keep experimenting and trying to get the cells to move according to my wishes. But whenever I ask the cells to remember in a myriad of ways, there is only a blank slate and they keep themselves as the system ordered them to as if my new normal is to have stumps for arms.

I know I could slowly craft limbs on my own. Especially given that Life isn’t a system resource and no further interference should arrive on that front. I would probably be able to get very close to a fully functioning limb but any time I had to heal it by the smallest amount, even the muscle tears of normal exercise, the system’s changes to my ‘normal’ state would interfere requiring meticulous action.

A thousand thoughts fleet through my head and I use Qi to grow better limbs in line with what my avatar skill taught me while letting only my right arm untouched.

This is going to be a long effort and the one chance to start work now that would result in something unacceptable.

What I need is to reclaim my body.

Sure it’s convenient to let the system upgrade it and help me heal it along with a thousand other things but that came with unacceptable drawbacks. So far it seemingly hadn’t made much of a difference to let it alter myself as I increased in stats, but I could longer do this willy nilly, not after a betrayal like this.

I have to find a balance. To extract everything that is good from the system and reject the anchors it tries to tie around my neck. I need to fully claim back my body. To be capable of living entirely without its interference and that is going to be a nightmare.

I let the meditation go deeper and a few seconds later, a point in willpower and another in soul show up nearly together.

“It seems I found the right state of mind.”