=The lack of faith in our lord and his cousin’s abilities to maintain a steady hand while performing a delicate medical procedure is duly noted, Pathos.=
=Mostly. You forgot that our lord and his cousin have a background in aether beast dismantlement. Such skills are transferrable when done properly, because what is surgery but careful butchery?=
=Yes...well, that explains how she hadn’t died on the way here...or on the operating table.=
=Birds of a feather flock together I suppose...=
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"And with that that makes...twenty-two bone shards...by the gods, how is she still alive?," Zhen Hai asked Zhen Liu as he extracted yet another bone shard, this time from the lungs, and placed it into a bowl that his cousin had borrowed and sterilized for this procedure.
Zhen Liu didn’t verbally respond at this question, but simply shook his head at the sight of the bones.
For the past twenty or so minutes, Zhen Hai had been cutting open and removing things from the inside of this poor girl, while Zhen Liu had been stitching up the fresh cuts with threads of aether to prevent blood loss.
As it turns out, Zhen Hai’s(Zhen Liu’s) statement on the condition of the girl was right on the money.
Aside from the obvious bruises, cuts and scrapes that were associated with blunt force trauma, there were signs of internal lacerations.
All of these wounds were bad enough on their own, but combined with hemophilia and you have a recipe for disaster. Or an impending one at least.
Fragments from the girl’s rib cage had broken off because of the stompings, with a majority of the fragments getting embedded into her lungs, while some stray ones somehow managed to poke at various points of her digestive tract. There was even a bone shard that had managed to pierce through her inner workings, the part that would’ve made her a mother.
The only upside though was that none of the bone fragments managed to pierce her liver or kidneys. If they had...this evening could’ve gotten way worst for everyone involved.
It was a rather tedious yet harrowing process, removing the bone fragments one at a time and immediately stitching up the gaping wounds that were left behind.
But little by little, piece by piece, the girl’s insides were picked clean of all of the fragments, with the only evidence of medical intervention being the stitches left inside to stem the bleeding.
Once the last piece of bone was removed, Zhen Hai let out a deep sigh.
"Yeesh...now I know why alchemists and doctors are always acting so fucking screwy," Zhen Hai observed.
"If I had to deal with that kind of thing on a day to day basis, I’d be loopy too. Seriously though, who the fuck does this to a kid?"
"Someone who needs to compensate the holes in their hearts," Zhen Liu nswered a she swapped places with Zhen Hai in order to better position himself and his hands.
"Once I patch up her internals, we can close her up and...huh?"
"The stitches I’ve applied...they’re disappearing."
"I knew using thread aether wouldn’t last! Now-"
"Not what I meant, look."
Zhen Liu guided Zhen Hai’s vision to a spot where the former had placed a stitching very early on in the procedure.
Zhen Hai expected to see the flesh be wide open again, seeing as the threads had disappeared before the healing process could take place.
However, that’s now what he saw.
"Wait a minute..what the fuck?"
Instead, what Zhen Hai saw was that the places he had personally cut up, the places that had been stitched up by Zhen Liu, had already healed themselves back to looking like solid pieces of flesh.
Any evidence that would’ve indicated injury and/or stitching had completely disappeared back into the surrounding aether.
The two cousins were confused at first, surprised that their hard work had suddenly upped and disappeared...until they shifted their gaze to another spot within her body that they had just worked on.
Much to their surprise, they saw Zhen Liu’s threads disappear bit by bit while the girl’s body seemed to be healing itself in a rather slow manner. Making the sight even more shocking, the girl’s broken ribs appeared to be fixing themselves as well, growing to replace what had been removed from her.
"Is...is her body slowly but surely healing itself while we were working in the other places in her body?"
Zhen Liu scratched his chin as if he was deep in thought as to why this moment happen, but was in fact talking to the two beings in existence that Zhen Liu know would have an answer.
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’Aight, so what am I looking at here? How is a slave girl with hemophilia suddenly healing by themselves as if it was miraculous act of...a god?’
=What Pathos is trying to say, is that this girl, while not having any cultivation base or any fantastical ancestry, is what you would call a mutant in scientific terms. She has what we can identify as being a "blessed physique", a body that has a little something extra something to it that can allow a mortal to do something without the help of an aether formula. Which in this case is self-healing.=
’That’s...disturbing. I guess that explains how she didn’t die from her wounds on the way here go the hotel though... y’all know which "blessed physique" it is?’
=We have a list with characteristics to each entry, but we won’t be able to tell unless the girl is here in the library for us to personally examine.=
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"Alright, I think I have a possible idea about why this is happening," Zhen Liu told Zhen Hai after a moment of thought(read: talking to the voices in his head), "however, I suggest we check after we stitch her stomach back up to being a singular whole.
"That’s...fair enough," Zhen Hai agreed.
Seeing as their work was done at this point, Zhen Hai stood off to the side while Zhen Liu did his thing and stitched the girl’s stomach back into being one consistent whole again. To be safe though, they also applied some bandages around the girl’s stomach and part of her limbs.
Just because she could regenerate, didn’t mean it could be used as an excuse for sloppy medical work...mostly.
"Alright, now that she is also stitched up and bandaged, Zhen Hai."
"Mind helping me lift her up so we can examine her back? If she has what I think she has, then it would explain how she was healing herself whilst we were performing surgery."
As gently as they could manage, the two young masters of the Zhen Clan proceeded to lift the girl ever so slightly off of the counter table, so that they could examine a portion of her back.
Zhen Hai wasn’t entirely sure what they were looking for, but Zhen Liu knew and he found exactly what he was looking for.
"Okay, mystery solved," Zhen Liu said a loud so Zhen Hai could understand, "this girl has the Graceful Starfish Body blessing."
"It’s a weird kind of physique that’s found only in Roaring Tide. It basically gives the person who has it incredibly powerful regenerative abilities, to the point that some people swear they’ve met someone who has managed to clone themselves via amputation."
"Yeah...the downside is that this type of physique is extremely rare, about one in ten thousand or so."
"Okay...wait, then how the fuck do you know this girl has it?"
"Because of that," Zhen Liu answered while pointing at a spot on the girl’s back.
"Anyone with this physique can be identified by an incredibly tiny star-shaped birthmark on their back. I’m not sure why, but it’s always there."
"Yeah...anyways! Let’s get ready for clean up."
With the mystery solved, the two young masters went about to cleaning up their surgical area.
Of course there was one other factoid about this physique, but it was something a touch more...kaijin focused.
’Life finds a way I guess.’