Chapter 21 #3
His friend blanched, her beautiful almond eyes filling with fear and desperate hope and what he now recognized was hunger as well.
She swallowed and forced a nod. “Yes, but… not until they’re better.”
Alex smiled. “Of course,” he said, gently touching Rachel’s brow.
He didn’t have to, of course, but he sensed that with skin contact, outside the immediate perils of combat, it would be even more efficient and cheaper to use.
And of course, the fewer cards he revealed, the better.
But after all the cards he had exposed already just to pull them safely through that last battle…
He shook his head as if to dispel Lao Tie’s too-intent stare as his fingers gently brushed Rachel’s brow.
Do you wish to restore Party Member Rachel Lu to full health? This will cost you 513 experience points!
You have chosen… YES!
Alex blinked, surprised to hear the potency so neatly quantized. Yet his startlement was nothing compared to the gasps and awed curses when Rachel wounds vanished before their eyes.
To Alex, it didn’t even look like she healed so much as the clock of her existence had wound back a couple precious moments, even the blood leaking from her eyes and ears flowing in reverse, and he could sense, much to his profound relief, that the dangerous internal hemorrhaging, even if it had only been a trickle, had been healed in full.
Lao Tie stared at Alex for long moments as he solemnly approached the man, too tired even to hide what he was capable of.
“Alex…”
“Please give me Linnea,” he said, gently lifting the woman slumped in the wujen’s arms.
Lao Tie swallowed, opened his mouth as if to say something, and kept it open in shock when he saw firsthand the results of Ruidian potency healing.
“The wounds utterly reverse themselves. In just seconds!” an awed Wu Xien declared. “Have you ever seen anything like that in all your travels, Tang?”
Tang, to his party’s surprise, nodded. “I have. A Ruidian couple serving as caravan mercenaries. After bandits hit, the husband was injured. The wife had gone berserk and had slaughtered every last bandit, and not even the captain had dared to say a word. Then she pressed her palm against what should have been a fatal gut wound—we having no healer or herbalist on that trip—and wouldn’t you know it?
His own intestines slurped back into the rent in his belly before it sealed itself shut!
” He shook his head in awe. “Just like the wounds on those girls closed. And and there was no sign of fever or infection the following day, either. In fact, the husband didn’t even remember the fight! ”
And as if on cue, Linnea’s eyes bulged open and she gasped. Though her look of shocked surprise became a warm smile when she saw Alex gazing down at her with such concern.
“Alex, what happen—” Her words cut off as their gestalt instantly filled her in.
She flashed a rueful smile. “I have no defense against… how do you put it? Psionic Shrieks. That’s a Spirit Qi attack, right?
” She chuckled. “Clearly a flaw in my Fire Ward, and I fear it’s one that will never be corrected.
Thank goodness I fell in love with an actual half-blood Mindlord… ”
Alex winced at those words, then gently squeezed her hand, as if to allay her own flash of embarrassment and shame, before turning to Ya Ling and refusing to even address the odd looks the others were giving them as he gently approached the girl now floating a foot off the ground in a lotus position.
She flashed him an anxious smile, then closed her eyes.
“I’m ready,” she whispered.
Alex gently placed his hands upon her shoulder and forehead, allowing for the gentle release of potency and potential that Ya Ling was able to channel into herself.
“What are they doing?” Kuaisu whispered.
“Did that boy actually hybridize a Ruidian technique such that a cultivator could use it?” Wu Xien whispered with a certain amount of awe, earning a snort from Tang.
“That much should be obvious after the supernatural party sense that he instilled within all of us.”
Alex tuned out their words, all his focus on sensing the gentle interplay of potency and recovery occurring within his friend, awed by the rate at which she was healing, her cells able to claim and rapidly recover with what was effectively neutral Qi, free of any particular alignment, and thus absolutely ideal for healing.
He couldn’t help quirking a grin at the unexpected interface messages as several of his own skills improved, even if he knew that there had been a bitter cost to unleashing certain arts in the desperate heat of combat.
A cost that revealed itself in Kuaisu and Tang’s frustrated curses and groans.
“Damn thing shattered. And it would have been worth a fortune!”
“After all that effort—nearly cost us our lives.” Tang sighed before giving a rueful chuckle. “But really, who are we to complain? At least we still have our lives. And I don’t know about you, but I feel on the cusp of a breakthrough.”
Kuaisu scowled, glaring Alex’s way as she held up a handful of core slivers.
His heart quailed to see what looked like crystalline Ice… intermixed with Earth and several other elements. But still.
“Whatever you did, it cost us the core!”