Fates Parallel Chapter 172 - Surgery (Patreon)

Lee Jung was not as Jia remembered her, but neither could she be mistaken for anyone else. Her once-beautiful brown hair had grown thin and patchy, and her hazel eyes had gone dull and gray. Her long rabbit ears drooped miserably, and her skin was sallow, stretched thin across her bones. She looked so fragile—as if she might crumble to dust at the barest touch—and yet to Jia, she was the same strong big sister that had protected her all those years ago. Her low, raspy voice broke Jia from her reverie.

“J-Jia? Is that you?”

For the second time in as many hours, Jia felt her tears flowing freely, and she almost reached out to Eui for support again, but this was something she needed to bear herself. She wiped fruitlessly at her eyes, nodding in the affirmative. She didn’t trust her voice not to break, but she tried to speak anyway.

“Y-Yes. It’s—hic—it’s me. I’m back.”

Lee Jung didn’t know how to respond, her eyes darted to little Narae, who was watching the exchange with an uncertain expression, then back to Jia.

“H-how? They said you were...”

Jia shook her head.

“I survived—alone, for all those years until—”

She couldn’t finish the sentence, breaking down into sobs as she crossed the room and swept Lee Jung up into a gentle embrace. So light, like a piece of precious porcelain, Lee Jung felt almost ephemeral in Jia’s arms. Lee Jung returned the hug, hesitantly at first, then as tightly as her skeletal frame could manage.

“You’re here. You’re really real! I thought you were dead!”

“I’m so sorry big sis—I should never have left—I broke my promise—I...”

Lee Jung stroked Jia’s hair and shushed her.

“Shh, no, don’t apologize, please. I should never have asked that of you. You were too young—we both were. I don’t blame you for running. Actually, for a long time I blamed myself...I thought I had driven you to—”

A coughing fit interrupted Lee Jung—deep, rattling coughs. Jia had heard such coughs before, in people who had turned up dead days or weeks later. Lee Narae hurried over to help her mother lie back down in bed.

“I brought food to help you get better. And Lee Jia says that she might be able to help you.”

Lee Jung shook her head and smiled sadly.

“Don’t waste food on me, sweetheart. I know it’s hard, but you need to take care of yourself first. It’s too late for me—I’ve just run out of time.”

Lee Narae clutched her mother and shook her head, failing to suppress her own tears. ‘Run out of time.’ Jia frowned at that. Though her illness made her look older, Lee Jung was still quite young—only in her mid twenties at the most. That was why Jia thought of her as a big sister rather than a mother—in her earliest memories, Jia had known Lee Jung when she was just Narae’s age. Lee Jung’s condition was not a product of age, but neglect—yet she had accepted her fate as inevitable.

“Not if I have anything to say about it.”

Eui took Jia’s words as her cue to step inside, bowing politely before kneeling down next to Jia. Lee Jung gave her an appraising look before turning back to Jia.

“Who is this?”

“She’s here to help. Big sis, this is An Eui, she’s my...”

Jia faltered a bit, uncertain how best to introduce her. ‘Girlfriend’ and ‘partner’ felt too shallow and trite, and while such introductions were fine for strangers, she felt like she owed her big sister a more complete picture of the relationship she shared with Eui. Luckily, Eui was there to pick up the slack.

“I’m her other half. Her lover and eternal companion. I am also, without bragging, probably the most powerful qi healer in the country right now.”

Lee Jung blinked a few times in surprise, before lighting up in a way that made her natural beauty shine even through the thick veil of sickness ruining her features.

“Oh, Jia, that's wonderful! I’m so happy that you found someo—oh!”

Yoshika had not wasted any time taking Lee Jung’s hand in Eui’s and placing her fingers over the pressure point in her wrist. With the utmost care, Yoshika gently sent a probing thread of wood essence into Lee Jung’s body—the essence of life itself. What she found painted a gruesome picture.

Lee Jung’s body was failing more rapidly than Yoshika had expected. She had been putting on a brave face, but if they had arrived even a day later, she might have been beyond saving. As it stood, it was already a daunting task. Lee Jung’s essence was horribly out of balance, and her sickness had advanced to the point that she was starting to produce elemental corrosion—the essence of death and decay. It wasn’t enough to affect a cultivator, but mortals exposed to it had a very real risk of being infected.

“You are already experiencing multiple organ failure. We need to start healing you right away if you’re going to have any chance of survival.”

Lee Jung’s brows furrowed in confusion, then for the first time she really looked at Yoshika, the fine mage’s robes she was wearing, and the war mage standing at the threshold with her back politely turned. Yoshika could practically see her mind catching up to the words she’d either ignored or simply refused to believe. ‘Lee Jia says she might be able to help you ... the most powerful qi healer in the country right now.’ Her eyes widened with shock.

“You—you were serious?”

Yoshika nodded both heads at once—she didn’t care about hiding her nature, not from Lee Jung.

“We can heal you, but we have to start right away. Please lie back and relax.”

As Lee Jung complied, Yoshika linked hands between both her bodies and Lee Jung, forming a circuit between them as she closed her eyes in meditation. Healing Lee Jung was a long and arduous process. The Tranquility of the Verdant Marsh technique was not enough by itself—she was too far gone for that. While Eui’s technique might restore Lee Jung’s flesh, the imbalance of energy and the roots of the sickness would remain, and she would simply begin wasting away again as soon as the healing stopped. Yoshika needed something longer lasting, if not permanent.

The first step was to purify her aura. While most mortals had statically neutral auras, Lee Jung’s was infected by the corrosive essence leaking from her body, which then circulated back into her in a deadly feedback loop. Yoshika knew how to alter the mana within her own aura, but influencing someone else’s was a different task. Luckily, as a mortal, Lee Jung had no control over her own aura whatsoever, which made it simple enough for her to just forcibly infuse it with essence. Yoshika drew lightning essence from Jia’s body and fed it into the comforting aura of Eui’s Tranquility. The entire room crackled with static, but it did the job—Lee Jung’s aura was back to a neutral balance. Despite the solemn atmosphere, Lee Narae giggled a bit as her hair started to stand on end.

With the external balance resolved, next was the internal essence. In a perfect world, Yoshika would have Lee Jung exercise to purge her bodily ki, then replenish it with the balanced mana in her aura. Obviously, she was in no shape to do anything of the sort, so a more forceful method was needed. Paradoxically, it was Lee Jia’s Corruption of the Fetid Bog that Yoshika used to solve the problem. Though it was one of the more rare applications of the technique—she’d used it only once, in a gruesome duel with Hayakawa Kaede—with prolonged contact, Yoshika could use Fetid Bog to infect another person’s body with her own qi. Normally she would use corrosion essence, but obviously that was out of the question here.

Yoshika frowned, hesitating for a moment. Flooding Lee Jung’s body with foreign essence would be dangerous, and though her command over the elements was quite flexible, Yoshika had to think carefully before she proceeded. There wouldn’t be a second chance if she made a mistake. Lightning would cancel out the corrosion, but almost certainly kill Lee Jung in the process. Wood could theoretically work, but at that point she’d just be using Tranquility—it’s sister technique—which as she previously had noted would heal the flesh without fixing the core of the problem. She wished she had learned a technique to command the element of purity, which would have been absolutely perfect for the task. Instead, she would have to make do with its opposite.

Lee Jung’s body stiffened terribly as Yoshika began, crying out in pain and sweating profusely as her body was flooded with dragonfire—the element of plasma. It was a rough process—while Lee Jung’s physical flesh was safe from the magical fire, the metaphysical representation of it within the soul was not so lucky. Yoshika’s technique was the spiritual equivalent of cutting the sickness out with a knife. Heavy beads of sweat began to form on Lee Jung’s body, colored dark by flecks of blood and corrupt essence as Yoshika purged the essence of death from her.

Distantly, Yoshika sensed Lee Narae objecting, trying to pull Yoshika away from Lee Jung, and crying—but she had to maintain her focus. One wrong move—even to stop prematurely—would mean Lee Jung’s death. Once the plasma essence had run its course, Yoshika switched immediately to Eui’s healing. All the wood essence she could muster went straight to repairing Lee Jung’s failing body. Without the natural ki of a half-spirit sustaining it, her heart had almost immediately started to give out after the purge.

Though it was theoretically the simplest part of the process, healing Lee Jung’s body was the most exhausting part of the entire ordeal. The lack of organ function was causing constant damage to other organs in a cascading reaction that left Yoshika scrambling to resolve each imminent threat to Lee Jung’s life before it could trigger another. If she hadn’t had the ability to split her focus between tasks, she might not have been able to manage it. Finally, after what had felt like hours, Lee Jung’s condition began to stabilize, and Yoshika could relax a bit. Soon after, Lee Jung’s health had been restored—for the most part.

Her hair and eyes had regained their former luster, but the hair was still thin, and would need time to grow back properly. Similarly, Lee Jung’s skin had recovered from its sickly, sallow condition, but her cheeks were still sunken, and her flesh emaciated—there was nothing Yoshika’s techniques could do about that. Most concerning of all, there was still a trickle of corrosion essence leaking into her body from somewhere, indicating that the sickness had taken root in Lee Jung’s very soul. Yoshika didn’t dare even attempt to purge that with magical fire. She muttered irritably under her breath when she realized what she needed.

“Tsk, if only we had Xin Wei here. Or Fujikawa...”

That earned her a strange look from Lee Narae—Yoshika hadn’t meant to speak in chorus—but she ignored it. Ultimately, she was missing the essence of purity—the specialty of one of her few friends from Qin. He was inaccessible, given the current political climate, but Fujikawa Ayumi had worked closely with him to learn her own qi healing techniques, and as a subordinate of Hayakawa, she would be much easier to track down. Yoshika was already making plans, but forced herself to set them aside for later when Lee Jung addressed her.

“I—I can’t believe it. You cured me? Just like that?”

Yoshika nodded with both heads, speaking in Jia’s voice as she responded.

“Yes—well, not exactly. You’re healed, but not cured. The sickness has taken root pretty deeply and we need more specialized healers to cure you entirely. It...wasn’t really easy, but it was worth it. For you.”

It really hadn’t been easy and yet—it hadn’t really been costly either. A few months of meditation at most to recover their spent essence, and even then only because Yoshika’s methods were improvised and inefficient. A more dedicated healer would have had much fewer problems. It rankled Yoshika that such healers were rare mainly because of power politics in Qin and the secret hoarding of all three great nations. Lee Jung’s smile wiped those thoughts away in an instant, as she swept Yoshika—both bodies—up in a tight embrace.

“Thank you so much! I don’t know how I can ever repay you for this.”

Yoshika blushed, waving her hands urgently.

“I-It’s fine! It was the least we could do. We—I owe you so much for taking care of me as a child. For breaking my promise to take care of Narae—actually, about that...”

Sensing the change in Yoshika’s tone, Lee Jung sat back in her bed and looked askance at her.

“About what? Is something wrong with Narae? I didn’t transmit my illness to her did I? Oh sweetie, I told you not to—”

Yoshika cut her off with a sharp shake of her head.

“No! Nothing like that. Lee Narae is perfectly healthy, if a little underfed. Speaking of which, why don’t we sit down and discuss things over a meal? You must be starving after your recovery.”

As if on cue, Lee Jung’s stomach grumbled loudly, causing her to blush. Even on her sunken cheeks, the rosy flush brought out her natural beauty—she was truly wasted in a place like this.

“Um, that would be nice, yes. Although—I hate to impose but—”

Yoshika chuckled.

“Don’t worry, we’ll provide everything. In fact, you’re coming back to our place. Right now, no arguments, let’s go!”