章 30: Chirurgia; Aegritudo
Rigel gazed down at the unconscious body in his arms with a deep melancholy trickling down his eyes. His rough, ragged breathing illuminating his ire and frustration particularly well, Rigel set off to save Eureka himself.
"You're not even a proper body of water. You're nothing, so do what I want you pitiful creature!" he barked at the surrounding water. Illustrious streams of mana seeped from the cavern water into Rigel, and then back out again. The water formed a whirlpool around the duo and gently lowered Rigel to the cavern floor. The swirling tides calmly rotated around them.
Rigel set Eureka down and took up another domineering attitude towards the earth as well, creating a crude stone knife out of the stone floor with only a basic control of his own mana. While he didn't realize what he was doing, he was actually asserting his will over the mana far more than he had ever done before, and thus the mana aided him in his spells.
Rigel took no particular note to this, however, and continued to try and save Eureka. First, he took the crude knife and tried to cut her face open. Her tough exterior, contrary to appearances, was kept unmarked by the knife, though, stumping Rigel quite quickly in his master plan.
Rigel took a deep breath and thought out how, exactly, he would go about this. There were 2 options, both of which involved healing magic- something Rigel didn't know much about other than first hand experiences from Eureka herself.
The first was to try and remove the blood itself due to internal bleeding through healing magic and then focus on mending some of the possibly ruptured organs and broken or cracked bones. The second was to drain the blood by hand and then go through healing everything. Rigel wasn't sure which to choose since, while the latter seems far more rash at a glance, he doubted that the removal of blood itself could be considered a healing magic.
Rigel did know that the process of making blood was carried out through the bone marrow.
Although, in his untrustworthy and lackluster memories, he wasn't sure which it was- yellow, or red- that made the blood.
The process of creating blood was similar to healing a wound as far as he could remember, so perhaps the creation of blood could be done through healing magic. However, conversely, the deletion of blood was also a natural phenomena in the body to keep the blood fresh, so perhaps that was also achievable through healing magic.
Rigel racked his head for a while before ruthlessly turning to Eureka with a distant look in his eyes. He pulled out his stone knife and laced it with raw magical power. It crumpled and wilted like a dying flower, but it stayed solid just long enough for Rigel to make a clean incision on the side of Eureka's head. Upon doing so, the knife melted in Rigel's hand and flopped onto the ground in a molten pile of rock.
Rigel glanced down and noticed that the molten rock had severely burnt his one working hand. Strangely enough, he didn't even feel the pain, however, and continued working as if it had never happened.
Next, despite his 2 crippled hands, Rigel opened up the newly made cut with his fingers and tried to inspect the situation. There was a profuse gush of blood constantly oozing out of the cut, obscuring Rigel's line of sight. Frowning, he tilted Eureka's head to the side and let it drain out for a while.
After the blood flow lessened considerably, Rigel once again tried to inspect the situation at hand. Eureka's impacted skin was now clearly unsalvagable, but the cut itself was looking good. The surrounding tissue was of an off-white color and wasn't bleeding, so Rigel could clearly look at bone tissue. It seemed like, luckily, her skull was not fractured at all, so Rigel did not have to worry about hurting her more on that front. He did, however, have to open up the skull more to see the possible internal bleeding.
The reason why Rigel suspected that it was internal bleeding that was the proprietary issue was because of Eureka being unconscious and not waking up. This signaled that there was an issue with her brain, and Rigel merely hoped that it was internal bleeding. If not… Rigel didn't even think about what he would need to do.
Rigel formed another knife out of the ground and infused it with mana once more. The burning pain from a mana overload felt like it was stabbing his internals viciously, but Rigel steeled his will and ignored it.
The knife, powered by raw mana, cleanly slit Eureka's skull. Immediately, a viscous, black pus squirted out, sullying Rigel's knife and hands. Shocked by this strange substance, Rigel once again tilted the patient's head to the side and let the pus gush out onto the ground.
He was quite curious as to the nature of this strange gloop, so Rigel decided to sniff his hand which was still covered in the stuff.
A pungent, acrid odor invaded Rigel's nostrils immediately and caused him to wince in discomfort. He quickly felt his eyes wet, but figuring it was just some tearing, he ignored it. However, the blockage of vision soon led Rigel to inspecting what was coming out of his eyes only to find blood. The fact that the blood was a normal shade of red and not black came to some respite for Rigel, at least.
Rigel was also suddenly hit by a wave of nausea and dizziness, struggling to even stay afoot. Hance, when Rigel took a seat, the ever-looming pull of gravity grappled him by the neck and dragged him to the ground. Gagging uncontrollably, much like a spasm of the throat, Rigel started profusely vomiting over himself, so he rolled over and focused his efforts on the floor.
More blood started dripping from his eyes, blood started oozing from his nose in gross quantities, and the regurgitation wouldn't stop. Rigel thought that he was dying from poisoning it was so intense.
After a horrendous couple of minutes, the symptoms finally started dying down and let Rigel lay on the floor in peace, albeit covered in his own vomit and blood. He gasped some deep breaths and closed his eyes, completely overrun by exhaustion. However, he groaned and loyally got back up onto his knees and crawled over to Eureka. The dizziness still affected him quite a bit, as he swayed back and forth while crawling on his knees over to her.
Rigel approached Eureka, who was still completely unconscious, and sat down. He grabbed his eyes and sighed to himself, just barely keeping the levels of concentration needed to perform magic. He shifted her head around and looked inside of the incision, where the black pus came from. Eureka's skin and tissue was still stained black from the stuff, but the actual substance seemed to be completely drained out.
"Then why isn't she waking up…?" Rigel murmured aloud.
Perplexed and mildly worried, Rigel laid her down against his lap and thought about possible solutions. It could be that the other injuries she had were simply too grievous and needed to be mended using healing magic first, then she'd wake up. If that was the case, then ideally she could just fix herself up and patch Rigel's most likely butchered job.
Rigel then realized that the pair was still surrounded by his whirlpool that he created just earlier. Even though he had completely broken his connection to it, the water was still serenely swirling around, almost like it was protecting them.
Rigel's pitiful understanding of magic and the world at large left him astonished by the free will displayed by the whirlpool.
However, he quickly shook off these irrelevant and distracting thoughts and refocused his gaze on Eureka, who still laid tranquil across his lap. The aching pain emitted by his 2 hands took that attention away, though, quite quickly.
Rigel had burned up all of his concentration and willpower at this point, so the wounds of which he could have previously ignored started to burn and gnaw at his soul.
"Arngh," he growled. Rigel picked up Eureka and gently laid her back down onto the ground and focused his attention of the burnt hand. While the burn was very bad, as he had further burned it upon cutting into Eureka's skull, it still looked more salvageable than his busted hand. One of the fingers had even come off of it at some point.
Rigel fiercely glared at his hand, inspecting what was discernibly wrong with it, and then commanded the surrounding mana to fix it. He had no clue what this would do or if it would even work, but he had a feeling that it would, judging by the whirlpool.
The humongous amount of mana required to mend such a burn, however, strained the rest of Rigel's body horribly. He started coughing up blood and once again started having an attack of sorts. Unlike the prior one, however, Rigel merely started feeling nauseous and dizzy alongside of the relatively negligible amount of blood he hacked up.
Rigel was still barely at his limit and stayed just conscious enough to see the spell through before passing out.
Just as his vision faded, Rigel noticed a gleaming emblem start to form on his burnt hand.
クリエイターの想い 
kaminism
kaminism Chirurgia literally means "hand work" but is currently used as the Latin word for surgery (see the title "Master of Surgery")
Aegritudo has a fun double meaning of illness and grief. I think it fits quite well here.
My winter break is now over so I once again have a schedule, of sorts, and will salvage my release rate.
Volume 1 is closing up soon. It should end within the next few chapters, and we'll move on most likely without delay since I was so bad over this break.
週次パワーステータス
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