It was a glorious feeling to save a person from the brink of death. The hitherto unnamed plague (epidemic, disease, what-have-you) was a guaranteed death warrant the moment it was contracted, and its symptoms became apparent. However, this was debunked within seconds of the "cure" entering the bloodstream of the man who exhibited symptoms recently and retched all over Kili.
After Josie, performed the ritual (which Jean could barely follow), the half-litre container of crimson-red blood was reduced to a mere droplet of highly luminescent, but clear, liquid. This liquid was carefully diluted with an inert solvent and injected incrementally into the infected man's veins. Within seconds of the medicine reaching the man's heart, his body started to exhibit changes at an unbelievable pace. First came the brightening of the skin - the paleness grew more saturated as if the colour was suddenly injected into it. The boils and rashes that were forming exploded, and the pus boiled away completely. The emaciation, however, started to grow direr which implied that the body was eating itself to sustain its healing. This was solved by dissolving a bar of concentrated nutrition into the water and feeding it to the man by spoonfuls. The bar was developed to maximise metabolism in the short term, so there was no concern about the rate of healing outpacing the body's ability to replenish itself.
At the sight of this recovery, Jean should be feeling elated, exuberant, positively drowning in euphoric satisfaction. Yet none of those emotions surfaced in her mien, partly because she was physically unable to portray them, and partly because she couldn't find herself feeling positive about the situation at all. Not when there was a pale, anaemic girl laying on a bed two tents away. This recovery came with a steep cost of blood.
Even with the special physique, Jean was certain that constantly draining blood from a growing child would not be helpful, especially since she was mortal and the full extent of the physique had yet to rear itself. Sure, she could feed her placebos and convince the girl that it was blood-replenishing draughts, but every power had limits, overdrawing which would come back to hurt the individual either immediately or years down the line.
Death now, or in the future. This was the problem Jean had to face when considering the alternatives to Kili's current predicament. The disease needed to be cured, and people needed to be saved. This was a foregone conclusion. Yet the "how" of the process was out of Jean's hands. Kili was the solution, but Jean was apprehensive about exploiting the girl as she was doing at the moment. She could contract the Rasmus Clan's industrial-level alchemical services to reproduce the cure (which is essentially the girl's blood distilled to only contain her "essence") but this process would put the girl in danger of exploitation by someone more powerful. A safer alternative would be to wait so that Jean could double down on alchemical research and possibly devise a more efficient way to Deconstruct and Synthesise using principles of chemistry, but Jean could not guarantee completion before the illness wiped out an entire swatch of the land of all mortal life.
Jean returned to the tent she designated for personal research and treated the exhausted Kili with an infusion of a potion brewed from crushed petals of the Enduring Lotus. It would replenish her blood quickly in conjunction with the girl's naturally adaptive physiological capacity. And then, as she stared blankly at the girl's chest undulating periodically with each breath passed, she thought about her next step.
The cure didn't just save one person, it reignited the hopes in the hearts of everyone in the camp. This was augmented by the fact that the recovery was immediate and potent (the man had taken a few steps in full view of a small crowd as well). The fact that there was light at the end of the dark tunnel caused a marked increase in morale in the camp - a positive mental attitude went a long way towards healing. But this was also a double-edged sword since hope garnered expectation, and the folks expected Jean to cure the others who were starting to show symptoms. Jean could not burst their bubble and confess that their hope was misplaced and that their real saviour was Kili, who sacrificed a substantial dose of her own vitality to save them.
Jean could not, and would not, offload the burden on that little girl because when people were forced to confront death, face-to-face, they laid bare the inherent selfishness hidden in the deepest recesses of their animal brains. People would do anything for the sake of survival, even going as far as to tap a little girl like a keg. It was natural, and Jean wouldn't blame them for it. But it was her duty to ensure that things didn't devolve to that extent.
Besides, a little girl shouldn't have to choose between her life and that of over a hundred others. How tragically ironic would it be for her to see everyone surviving thanks to her contribution when she couldn't even save the one closest to her?
The silence in the tent was deafening. The unusually muted argument running in her mind between the two voices started to echo out of control into unintelligible drivel. Jean had to make a decision, and she needed to make it fast.
"If I let this continue, she will die by my hands. If I don't she will die in the hands of another. The answer is obvious," a healer does not play with the life of the ones in their care. That was her mother's single most important rule. "How selfish of me..."
Jean revealed a wry smile and tapped the unconscious girl's inner arm once again until a bright blue vein popped into view.
"How am I any different from everyone else? It seems that The Universal Panacea Physique was destined to be exploited."
____
"Fuck!" Klow spat out one curse after another as he tried to grit through the pain radiating out of his left arm. Except, what remained on his left shoulder was a bare stump scarred with a gruesome burn from a hasty cauterisation.
"Fuck!" He knew that his arrogance would someday come back to bite him. He didn't expect the bite to be so ruthless. A warrior without an arm was basically dead meat, worthless, and discardable. And that was exactly what ended up happening. He was told, in no uncertain terms, that his stint manning this quarantine would most likely be his last. The Balen Duchy had cut him off. Any dreams he had of advancing his cultivation on the cusp of breaking into the Core Formation realm were shattered. He tried reasoning that if he could just breakthrough, then he could reforge his body and regrow the limb. But then the captain of his unit sent him to get evaluated by the quartermaster who, after asking him a myriad of questions, concluded that it was unlikely that Klow would reforge the missing limb because, in his heart of hearts, he had already lost it.
What the fuck did that even mean? It's been less than a week since his amputation, how can his heart suddenly decide that "Yeah, there never was a hand there in the first place"?
"It's a matter of mindset," the quartermaster emphasised. "Unless you come to terms with your loss, and accept that you can live a life without that arm, you will never regrow the arm during the reforging process."
Klow was extremely miffed by the quartermaster's contradictory explanations. On one side, he had to accept that he'd lost the limb and move on, and on the other side, he had already accepted the loss and was thus unable to regrow the limb? None of it made any sense. But Klow figured that it was intentional. He was no longer a prospective investment choice for the Balen Duchy and was thus excised. The Balen Duchy was ruthless that way. Heck, they even relinquished a town and a handful of villages to a fate worse than death without thinking twice.
But the plight of mortals mattered little to Klow. What he cared about, at this moment, was his future. What was he going to do? What could he do? No mercenary crew or sect would take him in. He could find some employment with a business just starting out. Even with one less arm, he was a mage in the Foundation Establishment realm's peak. That had value. He could find employment as a trainer too?
He took a break from his roaming thoughts as his phantom limb finally stopped screeching unbearably.
"That bitch!" Klow cursed towards the sky. He begged, and he pleaded, and he crawled on all fours like a common rat. The least she could do was let him off the hook. All he could do was grumble and complain because Klow held no delusion that he would one day meet the arm-taker in single combat and exit victorious.
But a man could dream. And dream he did. He dreamed of ways in which he could return the "favour" that woman dealt him. Ways in which he could defile her the way she did him. He became engrossed in his flights of fantasy. So engrossed that he failed to notice a suspiciously common rat hurtling through the air towards his mouth that was agape as a result of the infrequent (yet disgustingly vivid) lecherous thoughts fleeting past his mind.
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