Chapter 244: Strong Regeneration

Not even a minute after Lucius had injected the hell energy into the body of the legless man named Jacob, his body started to show the usual changes. His skin changed colors and his body started to twitch as well.

Lucius continued the process and poured more and more hell energy into the body of the man. He realized that the process this time was about thirty percent faster and also did not take as much hell energy as the other lost.

Having converted around twelve Lost, Lucius had gained a rather good idea of all the changes that happened during the process, the hell energy required and the finer intricacies that laid within.

Thus he was very efficient and in less than an hour, the man was already in the second stage of the process. 

"Now to see if the legs can be reused or not…" Lucius muttered as he placed the legs against the stumps of the legless man.

Ideally, the legs should have been kept on ice to keep them intact and prevent any cell death that might happen, but Lucius did not have that option back then. Besides, this was going to be a bare-bones experiment and Lucius simply wanted to see if hell energy could save someone who was this close to death.

It was an opportunity that he would not usually get and he would have to deal with live subjects sometimes. Beating them close to death was also not a viable option as it meant intentionally damaging to test out sometimes that may simply not work in the end.

Lucius's end goal was to make more lost, thus it did not seem worth the risk to damage his test subject. But now that he had an already injured subject… albeit injured by Lucius himself, it was still the perfect subject.

~shua~

Lucius saw a rather unique change this time.

"Oh? The angiogenesis is starting already?" Lucius muttered.

On the stumps of Jacob, the cauterized layer of the flesh had already sloughed off, and replacing it was a fresh layer of flesh. It was a dark red in color and throbbed with vitality. The only difference was that the blood did not leak from it.

Jacob's body had adapted accordingly to the lost legs. But when Lucius placed the legs against the exposed stumps of Jacob, they reacted aromatically and created blood vessels that started to come out of the stumps.

If one looked at it at this moment, one would find the entire thing rather eerie. Like some kind of an alien, blood vessels came out like tendrils and touched the raw surface of the cut-off legs.

Once they sensed the blood within the leg and recognized it, they quickly turned into sharp tips that dug into the legs before pulling them close. The proliferation of new cells happened rather quickly after it and the legs that looked like normal human legs also became the same as the rest of the body.

After about another hour, Lucius could virtually see no difference between the cut off legs and normal legs. It looked like they were always there and now they were attached perfectly.

It was at this point that Lucius noticed a change.

"Hmm… the hell energy needed to heal and rejoin his legs spiked significantly… it's almost the same as the amount needed to make an entirely new lost." Lucius noted it down in his mind.

He had already known that in the second stage of the transformation, the body of the person would undergo a healing stage. In this stage, all the previous and hidden injuries of the person would be healed by the hell energy as part of the transformation.

Though it was a process that could only happen at this moment and could not be triggered separately. It was more of a cellular process that only happened during the transformation.

But still, once the transformation was complete a lost had a great regeneration ability. Plus, as long as they had hell energy and nutrients, they could keep on healing on their own. It was one of the terrifying features of the Lost.

The only way to stop their regeneration was to destroy their brains or to use holy magic on them to neutralize the hell energy. Or if one had enough power… they could simply blast them into small enough pieces that they could simply not regenerate.

If their mouths and jaws were destroyed, they would be unable to eat to heal, but they could still absorb hell energy to do the same. Thus, destroying their heads was needed. Decapitation could only work if the head was kept separate for a while.

Otherwise the lost would just let it reattach it. Since their bodies could stay alive for a while more after their heads were removed. One must remember, they weren't just any normal creatures; they were creatures that were corrupted by hell energy and were magical in the end.

That was also what Lucius wanted to test out and see how far it could be taken in this world. Seeing the body transform first and then detached limbs was a novel process. He got to observe some of the finer intricacies that he normally wouldn't have.

~Splick~

But at the same time, Lucius saw something else happen. Most of the lost that he had made till now had slightly different body types depending on the kind of gift they had, and it was the same for this one too.

It was just that the change that happened in the case of Jacob was quite mild. His body didn't grow as big as the others but instead developed hundreds of small holes all over his limbs and even torso.

If one looked at them, they would feel very disgusted and uncomfortable while the weak hearted might just vomit all together. Only when Lucius saw the information about the new corrupted gift of Jacob did, he realized why it was different.

"Now this is interesting… haha." Lucius chuckled.