I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 916: A Sudden Turn
The battle ended quickly, and it ended brutally.
The spatial passage was blown apart at the last moment, and those octopus-like creatures that had come pouring out of it, cut off from their source, were swiftly cleared away by the military.
But even with the military’s troops supporting them at the end, the price was still enormous.
More than half the vanguard unit were dead or wounded, and Jack himself had taken no light injury.
His chest had been run through by a huge stone spike, his left arm was broken, and a number of the organs inside him were ruptured.
Had the armour he had once enhanced with the System not taken a fatal blow in his place at the crucial moment, and had that life force of his, far beyond any ordinary man’s, not held out against the wounds, he might not have had so much as the chance to withdraw.
Once back at the rear base, he was seen to by the healers at once.
The healers repaired his ruptured organs with regeneration serum and biological repair fluid, and strapped his bones into fixed braces.
Lying on the hospital bed, teeth clenched against the aching tingle of broken bone growing back, he suddenly remembered something.
“What about Gavin?” He sat bolt upright, and the pull of it sent a stab of pain through his chest.
A logistics soldier beside him started in fright and stammered out an answer. “You mean Colonel Gavin? He… he was badly hurt in that battle as well. They are still fighting for him in the treatment room.”
Jack’s face changed, and he rolled over to get out of bed.
For a man to have been wheeled into the emergency room at all, one could well imagine how badly he was hurt.
Jack’s first thought was that if Gavin’s injuries were too severe, he could use the System to heal him.
But he had barely made to rise when two medics rushed over from the side and blocked him.
“You cannot get out of bed yet! Your bones have not knitted!”
“Move.” Jack’s voice went cold. “I am fine. I have to go and see him.”
“Colonel, your own injuries are serious as well. If you force yourself to move now, the bones could slip out of place…”
“I said, move.”
But the medics would not give way for anything.
Jack would have liked nothing better than to shove them aside, yet his own wounds were no small thing, and beyond that he could not truly raise a hand against these doctors, so for the moment the two sides simply came to a deadlock.
He stood in the corridor, his chest heaving violently, and in the end could only freeze where he was, both fists clenched, his lips pressed into a line.
Jack knew perfectly well that so long as he did not expose his System, then even if he broke free of these doctors he had no way of getting into the emergency room.
All he could do was stand at this end of the corridor, stare at that shut treatment-room door, and pray silently in his heart.
Pray that the fellow who had fought at his shoulder ever since the graduation trial could pull through.
Several months later, Jack’s body had recovered completely.
In that time he had not let himself slack off again; he had put very nearly all his energy into training and into System enhancements.
In the training room the figures on the testing instrument climbed a little every day, and finally, one morning, a line came up on the screen that even he could hardly believe.
Extraordinary ability: 81. Life force: 95.
Eighth stage.
He had become an eighth-stage transcendent.
Set against this city, that already made him one of the small handful at the very top.
Jack stared at that line of figures for a good while, then shut off the testing instrument, turned, and set off in the direction of the hospital.
He was going to see Gavin.
But when he reached the hospital, he was told that Gavin had already left.
“Left?” Jack was stunned. “When did he go? Are his injuries healed? Where has he gone?”
“Colonel Gavin was discharged a week ago.” The nurse leafed through the records. “His injuries had stabilised, though he was not fully recovered. After his discharge he went to the western front. I hear he applied for a long-term garrison posting of his own accord.”
Jack stood where he was, silent for a long time.
He had the faint feeling that Gavin had changed.
The fellow he had known before, cheerful, quick to laugh, fond of trading barbs with him, had seemed like another man entirely after he was wounded; on the earlier visits he had been withdrawn and sparing of words.
Jack could understand it. The man had, after all, come back with his life by the narrowest margin.
But for Gavin to go off like this without a word still left Jack feeling that something was odd.
Not that he had much time for letting his thoughts run away with him, since a new assignment had already come down.
He received military orders to go to the eastern district in support.
Sia saw him to the gate and told him with a smile to take care.
Jack nodded and turned to go, just as he always did.
But when he came back a month later, what met him was a bolt from a clear sky.
“Sia is dying. She has already been taken to the hospital.”
Jack felt something go off with a hum inside his skull.
He could spare no thought for anything else; he took to his heels and flew for the hospital.
On the way he glanced down at the brief that had come through on his communicator.
Sia had been brought to the point of death by a sudden failure of her life force, and the cause remained unknown to this day.
A sudden failure of her life force…
Jack’s heart sank hard, and a thought came surging up from the depths of his mind and drowned him in an instant.
Back in those days, at the school’s graduation trial, Sia had had her heart run through by that black shadow.
That time, it was he who had brought her back with the power of the System.
She had indeed been healed then, and everything about her had seemed perfectly normal.
Yet several years on, her life force had abruptly begun to fail.
“…Could that be an after-effect left behind by that healing all those years ago?”
He did not dare think it through, and put on still more speed.
The hospital doors he all but knocked off their hinges; he charged into the corridor, seized hold of a nurse and demanded, “Where is Sia?”
After no small commotion, a doctor at last recognised Jack.
“She is in the intensive care unit on the third floor…”
Jack took the stairs three at a time and made straight for the ward at the far end of the third floor.
Through the glass window he saw Sia lying on the hospital bed.
Her face was as white as paper, her lips tinged an unnatural grey-blue, the rise and fall of her chest so faint as to be almost invisible.
On the instrument beside her, the waveform of her vital signs was frighteningly low.
He pushed the door open, walked to the bedside, and took her hand.
Sia’s hand was as cold as a dead branch that had lost all its warmth.
Jack could feel it: something inside her was draining away, little by little, as though she might die at any moment.
That feeling, of standing to lose someone who mattered at any moment, set Jack’s hands shaking beyond all control.
But very soon he lowered his head and looked at that black block of metal at his chest.
That was it!
The only thing that could save Sia now was this!
And at that same moment, on the other side, on the Infernal Sulfur Plane.
Jie Ming was sitting at the workbench in the main laboratory when the auxiliary control crystal in his hand suddenly grew faintly hot.
He glanced down, and the crystal was displaying a set of fluctuating data.
Jack’s emotions were violently agitated, the frequency of the energy very nearly a dozen times what it usually was.
He looked back through the footage the auxiliary control crystal had recorded automatically, and soon pieced together how the matter had come about.
Sia’s life force was failing, and she had been brought to the point of death.
“…Oh?”
Jie Ming’s fingers traced lightly across the surface of the crystal.
His mental energy swept unconsciously over Sia’s body through the medium, and as he felt the state of things inside her frame, Jie Ming’s expression turned rather strange.