Book 5: Chapter 42 (325): A Makeshift Healer (Patreon)

Of course, Rieren’s sudden appearance had staggered everyone present who didn’t know that she was the help that Avathene had been talking about.

The old healer spluttered and fell back from Rykion’s bed, the Karlosyne Clanmaster stared agog, and the guards and cultivators outside the tent all began quickly pulling out weapons, preparing techniques, and sounding alarms.

Things might have spiralled out of control had it not been for the sheer might that the Karlosyne Clanmaster possessed.

He didn’t move. Displayed no change in his demeanour whatsoever. But one blink, and everyone in the entire encampment was now surrounded by a spear of burning, sizzling light. It wasn’t just Rieren. Her group with the Clanmistress, Rykion, Rollo, the old healer, and even all the guards and cultivators outside by the sounds of it.

Rasmond Karlosyne had petrified everyone in place with the instantaneous summoning of his Domain.

“What is the meaning of this, Clanmistress?” His quiet voice eschewed the use of Avathene’s name. He had been angry before, but now, he was simply deadly. Clinical. This wasn’t an insult that a cultivator responded to with a slap. He was taking this as a legitimate threat to be ended then and there. “Speak, before I end you all where you stand.”

He meant it too. His skin and hair had begun glowing, turning into light, slowly becoming more and more difficult to look at directly. He was channelling the true power of a cultivator well into the Ascendant realm, not a new one like his eldest son.

Clanmistress Avathene remained calm in the face of danger. “It is as it appears, Clanmaster. I have brought someone with relevant experience in the matter.” Mercion coughed into his hand at the back, which made Avathene amend her statement. “More than one someones.”

“You’ve brought a monster on my ill son’s doorstep,” the Karlosyne Clanmaster said. “The sheer audacity—”

Rollo tried to get past the spears before him, but they sizzled with too much power. “Father, this is what I meant.”

“Think for a moment about what is at stake here, Rasmond,” Avathene said. “Do you not value your son’s life enough to give this an attempt?”

The Karlosyne Clanmaster’s face twisted. Despite the dampened state of her emotions, a small part of Rieren wanted to shake the man. She realized it was as much because he was acting too much on his prejudices as the fact that he was blocking her from experimenting. From finding out the truth about monstrous corruption and if she could do something against it.

If she could do something for herself.

Thankfully, Rykion came to the rescue. “Enough, father. I wish to try this. My laughter, if you must know, was a symbol of approval.”

For some reason, that broke Rasmond. He blinked rapidly, all anger draining out of his face to leave a coat of fear over his expressions. Of tragic loss. The spears disappeared and he sank heavily back onto his little chair.

“Do as you will. I don’t… want an Aryoventos… I don’t want to lose my son.” He rubbed a hand over his face, then shot Rieren a short glare. “But be warned—even a single sign of ill intention will not go well for you. Understood?”

Rieren shrugged off the whole cloak she was wearing. Finally. She could get on with it. “Understood.”

She knelt by Rykion’s bed. Batcat skipped off her shoulder to settle beside Rykion’s pillow. He smiled dazedly at the cat. His body twitched, but Rieren smiled. Something told her that he was stopping himself from reaching out to pet the furry little Spirit Beast.

Rykion looked at Rieren inquisitively, not flinching when she gently pulled the blanket off his body. Not even when it got close to his modesty. She spared him the indignity of revealing all of himself. There was enough to work with on his upper half.

Rieren’s mouth twisted despite herself. An upper, corrupted half.

Clearly, the whatever-the-Stifling-Nebula-had-done had reached Rykion’s elixir field already. The seat of his soul had been malformed, and thus, his body was following along with the transformation.

It had resulted in the growth of black pustules all across his figure. His skin had turned nearly translucently pale as well, revealing the dark veins crawling over his flesh. Only now that Rieren had gotten close could she see that all his hair had turned dead white. Rykion resembled more a corpse than a living being.

Was the Arisen trying to turn Rykion into a monster too, or had it just afflicted him with some sort of rot that was killing him from within? There was an easy way to find out.

“Are you ready?” Rieren asked, looking into Rykion’s eyes.

He held her gaze, focused for once. “What are you going to do?”

“Probe into your soul.”

“That… sounds like a deplorable experience.”

“Hopefully, I can mitigate the deplorableness.”

He laughed mirthlessly again. “Then do as you will.”

Rieren brought her hand over his chest, letting those golden threads of hers materialize again. The more she did it, the more she began to think they were less a technique or anything of the sort and more just a strange extension of her being. A physical manifestation of her spirit, an appendage of her soul, such as she possessed in her current form.

They had the desired effect, thankfully. Right when Rieren brought them close enough to Rykion’s body, they latched onto those dark pustules.

Rieren kept an eye on Rykion’s face for a moment. He looked partly curious, partly circumspect, but not discomforted or anything like that. Not yet. Seeing that he was fine, she focused properly on what her threads were doing. Not in a physical sense, but in a spiritual one. Which necessitated her closing her eyes so she could visualize the strange sensations.

It was exactly as she had said to her patient. The golden threads were inserting themselves into his spirit, to the very outer layers of it represented by his meridians.

His clogged meridians.

Rieren kept her eyes closed. The thread made her feel as though they were connecting her meridians with Rykion’s. Both sets of Essence channels felt the same. Hers were blocked, frozen in time as that manual had stated, and it was starting to feel as though Rykion’s were the same now too.

But not completely. The golden threads were made of Essence, and they could squeeze themselves through the thinnest of gaps inside his meridians, progress deeper and deeper, bypassing the blockage.

The blockage. That was part of what was causing his condition. Rieren needed a way to remove it. But how to do so when she couldn’t channel herself?

She knew it in the very core of her spirit that if she could move Essence freely, she could begin helping him. Simply channeling Essence externally like how she might do for techniques wasn’t going to work. She had to pull the blockage and corruption out of him and give it a place to go. A different seat for it to settle itself upon.

A seat that was her own soul. That meant channeling Essence within herself too. Something she couldn’t do any longer. Unless…

Rieren opened her eyes, breaking her concentration. She found Batcat moving towards her already, like the kitten had read her mind. Smart cat.

“Can you localize it?” she asked the kitten.

“What are you attempting to perform?” The question came from the old healer, who had repositioned himself on the other side of Rykion’s bed and took an obviously avid interest in what was going on.

“He is indeed corrupted by a monster’s influence,” Rieren said. “My suspicions lie on the last opponent he faced in the Trials of Ascendance. It has gotten deep, but I believe there is something I can do to remove it. But not just yet.”

“What exactly are you going to attempt to perform? I assume you’ve noticed his meridians are blocked by… something.”

“Yes. That is the corruption I speak of. It would not be interactable via normal means.”

“There are powerful rituals we can perform—”

“But I am not certain you have the time to prepare them. That is why these corruptions are so dangerous. They act too quickly. Once they set in past a certain point, they are impossible to remove.” She paused for a moment. “I would know.”

The healer didn’t argue or interrogate her any further.

With that little conversation done, Batcat meowed to return her attention to the kitten. She could see the affirmation in its eyes.

“Do it,” she whispered.

The little Spirit Beast glowed for a moment, then disappeared. Rieren froze, waiting for the sensation to arrive. To return. Nothing happened. Maybe the localization meant that Call of the Past couldn’t affect her emotional state as it had done last time. After all, it wasn’t her head that had returned to the past. Just the elixir field deep within her.

Rieren had controlled the temporal throwback enough to take it to an exact point in time. She needed it to go to where she could control and drive her elixir field again while still holding the monstrous corruption within herself. There was only one instant that afforded such a state.

It was at that moment Demargo had begun twisting her meridians to unleash the Abyss-borne corruption she had trapped within a separate meridian network inside her spirit.

Rieren focused. When she tried to channel Essence within herself, the spiritual energy did move. She smiled. It was working. And with Batcat’s ability, she could hold this state of being for more than long enough to perform her task, even if the state itself had been transitory in the past.

When Rieren dove back into Rykion’s soul, she found she could move the corruption within his channels now. It was a pain, though.

He started twitching, twisting a little, despite very obvious efforts to not do so.

“You need to channel your Essence, Rykion,” she said. “It will make this easier on us both.”

“Are you injecting your Essence into him?” the healer asked, slightly alarmed.

“It is necessary. A connection between our meridians has been established. Now, we need a medium to move the corruption from one body to another. And that medium must be Essence. Two sources of Essence together will be faster, more efficient than one. Plus, it will ensure that I pull out all the corruption if I can establish direct contact with it all with my Essence.”

Rykion was beginning to struggle a little, but he was complying with Rieren’s request too. Since he could still channel through the tiny seepages between the blockage in his meridians, he could push all the corruption closer to the outer layers of his spirit. That was where Rieren’s meridians connected with his own, where she could pull the corruption into herself.

It was a long, painstaking process. She didn’t know how long she knelt there, how long the others stood by to await the results of her efforts.

At least they were patient. The longer it went on, the more it turned into a struggle for Rykion, though he of course never complained. Neither did his father, nor the healer. Perhaps it helped that Rieren had tried to be open with what she was attempting.

Things took a turn for the difficult when they finally came to his elixir field. The corruption was mired the deepest there. If they wished to bring out everything blocking the very core of his soul from functioning, they would need to expend even greater effort.

Rykion could no longer push it out himself. Either he had exhausted himself, or the blockage there was simply too strong. Too entrenched for him to drive it out in the same way.

In other words, Rieren would have to insert her golden threads and her own Essence deeper within his spirit. This of course made him struggle more.

Rieren focused on her efforts. Rykion wouldn’t suffer too badly, no matter how deep she went. One of the nice things about water-Aspected Essence was that she could control its abrasiveness. In fact, she modulated it so that its smooth stream felt the opposite of abrading.

Still. This was foreign Essence entering deep into Rykion’s body. Of course he was not dealing with it well. She just hoped he could limit his struggles until they had completed their objective of excising the corruption from within him. Clearing the elixir field was the most important part of the process. Without it, his soul would just end up corrupted again.

But as his tousling grew, the patience of others wore thin. The healer was trying to stabilize Rykion and soothe him, all the while asking Rieren how long her attempts had to continue. Her answers were short and curt. This would go on as long as needed.

Even the Karlosyne Clanmaster got involved after a little while. Heavy steps approached Rieren. She was almost certain he would grab her and throw her back, perhaps even taking this as a sign that she was actively harming his son. But the steps stopped all of a sudden. Were stopped. Rieren didn’t dare look back, but a brief sprout of gratitude rose up for whoever held him back.

“End it,” Rasmond Karlosyne said. “He cannot take any more of this.”

At least he hadn’t called the entire operation worthless. Probably because he was already seeing the positive effects. But his son’s pain had grown too great now.

Rieren didn’t stop. She could have, but that would be letting that bastard Stifling Nebula win. That would be surrendering and allowing Rykion to remain cursed. What recovery she had granted him would return and he would start becoming a monster again, if not worse. Rieren couldn’t stop yet. Wouldn’t.

“You can do this, Rykion,” she said. “You can return to yourself. You will not lose.”

And then Rieren reached the very depth of Rykion’s elixir field. The central point, the node from which his entire spiritual being sprung forth. Her Essence formed a connection to the blockage there and immediately began pulling it all out.

Rykion’s body arched over the bed. It made Rieren open her eyes, but she maintained her concentration and her connection to his spirit. She almost thought he was going to scream, but he masterfully controlled himself. Then he slumped back as Rieren finished, his whole form going limp as she removed the last of the vile corruption. Done. Finally done.

Rieren staggered back. Her connection with Rykion severed itself as the threads pulled free. She could barely see the effect of her attempts to free him from the corruption.

Rasmond, Rollo, and the healer had all pushed in to get to Rykion. They were yelling something about him having fainted, about not being sure if he was even alive any longer. The Karlosyne Clanmaster even whirled around to face Rieren with growing anger, like she was hiding away his son’s consciousness or something.

The others gathered close around Rieren as though to protect her from any unruly attention. Avathene stood next to her, while Amalyse and Oromin had both stepped in front of her to face down Rasmond Karlosyne.

“He’s breathing!” the healer said, dispelling the tension. “He’s alright. He’s alright!”

Rasmond forgot all about Rieren and the others as he turned back to his son. Rieren felt her shoulders relax. She took a peek past the relieved father to actually look at Rykion.

He did indeed look as though he was doing better. His skin had cleared up, the pustules drying and detaching from his body—in a rather disgusting manner, Rieren had to admit. Even his hair was slowly regaining its colour.

Rieren really had succeeded.