The Dao of Magic

106 - Reconstruct

Red faces scream at me. Blood splash-

"...IN DIE. DREW! WAK..."

That sneer. That incredible sneer. Those bored eyes devoid of-

"...INK I WON'T KICK THE SHI..."

And the pain. The pain that's every... Not everywhere. Just my gut?

"...SHOLE YOU BETTER F..."

Wrong nightmare? Yeah, I think so. The shouting sounds oddly sexy though, that's new.

"...TREE DON'T JUST STAND THERE DO..."

So not the beginning of my second childhood then. This is similar to the many times I got my cultivation base crippled. A small alarm goes off somewhere and I feel my arm shoot out as it catches something.

I crack open an eye and am blinded by the intense golden glow everywhere. I feel like I am slowly being grated down into a fine paste and my legs and crotch are already a fine mush. My stomach is pure torture but I feel nothing below my belly button.

Focusing on other sensation than the pain, I feel I am holding something soft but firm. Two solid rods surrounded by muscle and skin? An arm, I am holding an arm. Why am I holding an arm?

Memories trickle back. Then I remember that I have qi. I summon it and swirl it through my head. I look at my surroundings and smile at a furious face.

"Hey Rhea."

She freezes as I try to sit up. Yep, that is not happening anytime soon. I separate a strand of augur from my brain and poke at my heartcore. It should still have compartments for each cell and fibre I lost. A bit of poking later and I have found a small section of the core that seems dull. I start prodding it a bit more and sense the lost connections. I can still only detect a minuscule part of the core before my braincore can't handle it, so I set up a process to rebuild my lost parts, connecting each new cell to the heartcore compartment as it goes.

"No need to worry, you should know that this happened to me a lot in the past, right?" I speak by channelling a stream of air past my vocal chords and into my lungs. No need to do more damage by breathing manually. I slowly let go of her hand as I feel my cells being rebuilt one by one. I really should do something about my organs though, they are... spilling.

Should I call my qi clone over? No, absorbing that amount of qi won't do me a lot of good now. The step I just took in cultivation power is a power increase of several factors. I absorbed absolutely massive amounts of mana in the last parts of my breakthrough. It all seems a bit far away though, I feel lightheaded for some reason. Concentrating is hard even with braincore qi going through my head.

I start going through my processes one by one. One downside of automating a lot of functions is that prioritising them in a rigid system is not smart. One detecting danger, let's say a dagger shooting towards my kidneys, could take up all my attention, causing me to miss the arrow being shot from far away. When shit goes down I simply sort through all the alarms one by one in battle mode. All of my alarms are going off now, though. I sort through dozens before I find the blood-loss alert. That might explain a lot, yeah.

I recall a scan of my body and overlay it on my current form. I am missing nearly all of my small intestines, my large intestine is cut in half, my bladder is shredded. My stomach muscles are just shards of flesh and I am missing several vertebrae. Let's patch everything up first.

I spin a fine web of qi threads, piercing through flesh where needed. I spend a bit of time calculating the best way to pull all the loose bits back together. Then I slowly tighten the threads.