The brick dropped onto my lap again and I fought off the urge to wince once more. As it turned out, emptying out my reserves of blue energy was more difficult than I thought. Not only because my body was physically repulsed by the action of doing so, but because the conversion rate from my long-term storage to short-term storage was not particularly quick. Koyl sat in the corner, looking bored and occasionally looking over when I finally got enough energy back to move the brick again. He had already clipped down the nails and now had nothing left to do. Maybe I should have just found a corpse rat, I mused, the bacteria on it would have drained me very quickly if I let them.
“How much more?” Koyl asked.
“Five more times,” I said. I had been watching my bars carefully as I worked and managed to determine that by long-term storage had approximately thirty times the capacity of the short-term storage, though I had now emptied out close to thirty-five times the amount because my nutrition and presumably vitamins were being depleted to replenish my energy. I wonder how it works, I thought, if only the bars were labeled, I might be able to gain some insight into what's happening.
I had also been experimenting more with force casting while draining myself. It was possible to create two imaginary lever arms which were attached, much like the shape of an arm, to create linear motion. How exactly I managed to do it the first time I wasn't quite sure, but every time after it succeeded. More interestingly, I found that the amount of energy required to produce a given motion was constant even if the length of the lever arm and position of its pivot was not, and that it required no more effort either. This was a stark contrast to my normal understanding of lever mechanics, wherein adjusting how long an arm was and changing where it pivoted certainly changed the efficiency of producing motion.
It's almost like it's not a lever, I considered, but my visualization still worked and I couldn't conceive of what else would model what I was seeing more accurately. Attempting to change the way I was imagining the casting generally just resulted in it not working at all. I lifted the brick again, dropping it back into my lap and emptying out another fraction of my remaining energy.
“How do you plan to heal after you're cut open?” Koyl asked.
“I'll just-” I started, but then I froze. “Can you go down and get some bread and vegetables?” I asked.
“Thought so,” Koyl smiled, and he left the room. A few minutes later I squeezed out the last of my energy, then propped myself up against one of the walls and kept a small drain on my power by continuously heating up the brick. Koyl stepped back into the room with a platter of bread and veggies, set them down on the floor after closing the door, then turned to me. “Okay, you done?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I grunted, “so there are two ways we can do this. Either you use the knife, or I use the knife and you hold the mirror.”
“I still don't know what you're planning to do,” Koyl sighed.
“I'm going to cut around the edges of my face, at the hair line, then pull all of my skin away to expose the bone underneath,” I explained. “There will also be muscle and ligament tissue which needs to be considered, but those ivory pieces will be added to the bone. Then I'll put the skin back on and heal.” I expected Koyl to look at me with disbelief or protest, but instead he just sighed and shook his head.
“I'll hold the mirror,” he said, pulling up the piece of bronze and centering my reflection in it. I reached over and picked up the obsidian knife, then brought it up to my face.
“You will need to attach the ivory,” I said, “I don't think I can do it properly from this angle.” Koyl nodded, then visibly steeled himself.
I began under my left ear, carefully drawing the obsidian along my skin and then turning it to follow the hairline along my face. Warm blood oozed out of the cut I was making, but I felt almost nothing because the crude stone edge I had made was so sharp. The now-familiar sting of instant recovery was absent, and to keep it that way I pushed energy out into the obsidian knife, increasing its temperature minutely. Once I crossed my forehead blood started to drip past my eyes, so I hurried and brought the knife down the right side of my face, then completed the cut beneath my right ear. I looked at Koyl, who was cringing, then set the knife down.
“Are you sure this is going to work?” he asked.
“It'll have to,” I said, then I reached up and gripped the flap of skin at the top of my face with my right hand and began to pull. The pain was extreme, so much so that my other senses blanked out multiple times as I moved, but I remained silent as I skinned myself. When my eyelids came away, I found that being unable to close my eyes made focusing on my task more difficult. When I had to use my left hand to slice my inner cheeks and lips away from the insides of my mouth I cursed myself for not thinking far enough ahead. Koyl's face was a mask of abject horror, and he avoided meeting my lidless gaze directly. Eventually, I managed to pull the entire flap of skin away enough that the key points were exposed. In the mirror, I saw a fleshy skull staring back at me. “Attach the ivory,” I said liplessly, breaking Koyl out of a trance.
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“R-right,” he stuttered, setting down the mirror and picking up the ivory pieces, hammer, and nails. Every second that I spent without skin was agonizing, and it was nearly impossible to remain still due to my body's impulses. The pain had long since become so extreme that I barely felt it, but the entirety of my face began to itch as it dried. The itch was worse than the pain because the itch's compulsion was many times stronger. Koyl was hesitant, but then selected the piece for the left cheekbone and got to work.
The nailing created new waves of suffering that I hadn't anticipated. The sheer density of pain-sensing nerves in my body was extraordinary, and I was being subjected to their full ire. My eyes would have teared up if possible, but instead went dry because I couldn't blink or seal my tear ducts to them. An eternity later my left cheekbone piece was installed, and Koyl went to my right. I just need to keep calm and ignore all sensory data, I told myself, this should only take about half an hour.
An indeterminate amount of time later the last piece, the nose attachment, was finally nailed in. Koyl had to say something to get my attention because I had become so focused on remaining still and silent that I had drowned even the sensation of the hammering out. I wasn't sure what he said, but he gestured at me to raise my skin back into position and I did so. None of it attached, and the flap hung loosely across my face like a badly-fitting mask.
“You're not healing,” Koyl said.
“Need food,” I grunted, tilting my head back so the skin would stay on and gesturing with my hand to the platter. Koyl quickly grabbed some vegetables and put them in my hands. I stuffed them into my mouth, chewing them awkwardly and spilling bits into my wounds. With effort, my parched throat ingested them, and Koyl pushed a mug of water up to me and tilted it into my mouth gently, helping me swallow. I spilled more of the water than I got down, but I got some down regardless.
My heads-up display was a mess. At some point, I had stopped casting heat on things, but it seemed like whatever my healing was doing was so slow that it didn't matter much. The green nutrition bars were all below half, far less than where they were when I had started draining myself. It uses all of them? I wondered, What could it possibly be doing? Surprisingly my red bar was above ninety percent, and my purple bar was nearly full as well. I suppose I didn't lose a lot of blood, even if it looked bloody, I thought.
Koyl continued to help me eat and drink for another few minutes, then I felt the familiar pain of rapid healing beginning at the edges of my face and along the top and bottom edges of my mouth. I focused on the feeling, willing it to work more quickly so that the process would be over. I had no idea if it worked or not, but within five minutes I could tilt my head to a normal angle and not have to fear my skin falling off. I still couldn't blink though, and I had to use my fingers to close my eyelids.
“Are you going to be alright?” Koyl asked.
“I'll ve fine,” I said back, not able to move my lips to enunciate a “b” sound properly. I opened my right eye with my hand and looked at Koyl, who shrunk back under my gaze. “Just leave the stuff here,” I continued, “I can handle the rest.” Koyl didn't need to be told twice and practically ran out of my room before I could remind him not to tell anyone.
With a sigh, I crawled over to the food and continued eating it. The process was immensely painful, but nothing compared to what I had endured just minutes before. At least now I could keep it all in my mouth properly, I grunted. I finished all the food and water, then I sat back up against the wall and waited. A strange fatigue fell over me, and a quick check of my heads-up display showed that the purple bar was now much more empty than before. I guess I could take a nap, I thought groggily, nothing to do now but wait anyway.
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I awoke from a nondescript nightmare to a feeling like my face had been doused in accelerant and set ablaze, lurching forwards and clutching my eyes while fighting my body's urge to scream. Am I being attacked? I groaned, but I couldn't get my senses to give me any information on account of the screaming pain under my skin. I managed to stand, stumbled around my room with my hand out feeling for any impacts on person-shaped objects, then tripped and fell into the bed where the mirror had been laid down, banging my nose on it. I felt blood drip out somehow, then vague visual information flooded into me as I blinked rapidly.
The first thing I saw was that it was nighttime. My window had been opened at some point, probably by Koyl, and the night air was seeping in slowly. The second thing I noticed was the sheer amount of blood that had caked itself not only on my armor, but on the floor where I had been sitting. All in all, it probably wasn't a lot, exactly, but it had been spread out in such a way as to make the stains very large. The third thing I noticed was the face staring back at me in the mirror.
Oh, this is going to work, I thought as I looked at the parody of a face before me. Instead of average, my appearance was now bordering on deformed. My cheekbones were high and my jaw was so square that it looked too large for my face. My chin had a deep cleft in the center, and my nose had a large bump on it giving it a hooked appearance instead of its normal straightness. I smiled, wincing from the residual pain, and a new man smiled back at me. The single long scar which revealed where I had cut myself with the obsidian was so faint that the only place it would be spotted by a stranger was under my ears.
“Yuwniht!” Koyl called out as he entered the room. “Are you alr-” Koyl paused as I looked at him, and he looked back at me. I dropped the smile on my face and set my expression back to its normal neutral, then cleared my throat.
“I believe this is an acceptable result, do you agree?” I asked. Koyl had no reply to give.