20 Healing Sun, An Ember Burns

Sitting down in meditation at a time so critical... To Elizabeth every second felt like minutes. The only reason she managed to handle lasting through the three minutes it took for her Inner Strength to recover was due to her inner clock. If it weren't for that, she probably would have left meditation several times just to check up on Sun and make sure he hadn't died.

Now, that all her energy was back to peak condition though, a whole new set of fears and anxiety driven emotions overwhelmed her. This would be her first time actually using the Accupoint Skill, and though she had all the knowledge necessary to succeed and act proficiently, it was hard to say whether or not she would be successful acting the part of a healer in this critical time.

Elizabeth stood up from her meditative position and crawled over to Sun as he was only a couple feet away. She would treat him on the floor, thus it would be ridiculous to stand up anyways. After approaching Sun, she took off what was left of his shirt as well as his pants. Elizabeth also had to roll up the left side of Sun's underwear up, as one of the bullets was actually lodged rather high up on his left thigh.

With Sun's body almost completely exposed, only the rags of his shirt covering his bullet wounds and his underwear covering his nether regions, Elizabeth began the first phase in healing Sun. She picked up one acupoint needle and had her eyes, hands, and the needle coated with her Inner Strength. Thereafter, one by one the bullets still inside Sun's body were literally picked out.

The Inner Strength coating Elizabeth's eyes gave her more perceptive look at the reactions Sun's body gave her as she poked and prodded around his body with her needle. Her Inner Strength covered hands became ultra-sensitive allowing her to virtually tell what material she was touching just from hitting it with her needle. And the needle itself was coated in Inner Strength to instantly cauterize any negative or false probes she conducted; essentially healing any piercing wounds her needles would have left, should she make mistakes.

Her first attempt at picking out a bullet and its fragmentary pieces was truly abysmal, wherein she made seventeen total mistakes as it was her first time, and also because of how odd the transmission sensation from her needles to her mind worked. Elizabeth also had to review her memories of the[Introduction To The Path Of Medicine] several times over to check if the sensations she was feeling was part of Sun's natural body or a pieces of fragmentary metal from a bullet. Come more time, and with more experience, Elizabeth would probably be much faster and less inaccurate after she gets used to the different sensations her needles transmitted.

Her second and third tries in pulling out bullet pieces were considerably better but definitely not to a ridiculous extent. She only failed a combined 23 more times before all the bullet pieces were out of Sun's body. Her Accupoint Skill was making insane progress with this intense round of makeshift surgery, but Elizabeth was more concerned with continuing to heal Sun.

After she finished removing the foreign entities within Sun's body, next came stitching his skin to close the bullet holes; if only as a temporary patch. She used her Inner Strength as sutures and her needles to stitch him back up. Given how weak her current Inner Strength was, it would only take a minimal amount of movement to break the stitches she gave Sun, but those were her only options.

With the bullet wounds for the most part stable, Elizabeth turned to face the rest of Sun's torso and even with her uncaring attitude towards other's lifes, it was hard to face the purple and reddish marks of battle Sun sustained, without at least frowning in discontent.

Apart from the bullets Sun took in his effort to rescue her, he also had to defend against a Peak Martial Pawn for a solid minute and a half, as well as take a direct hit from lightning-type Inner Strength from a Peak Mortal. All these hits were taken without a hint of Inner Strength or Qi of his own to dampen their potential, and consequently resulted in Sun's body being covered in wounds that resembled being burned.

His arms and legs, torso and fists, everything the made contact with the enemy was at the very least somewhat moderately burned. And as Elizabeth looked at these wounds she finally started to see Sun as someone less distant. This guy… he had been beaten to such a degree, and for what? To stop her from being kidnapped? Why? They barely even knew each other, and while she might be good looking as a girl, she wouldn't dare assume something as ridiculous as love at first sight had possessed her benefactor.

It was a question that might receive and answer later… if she managed to save him before he succumbed to his wounds. Thus, Elizabeth stopped her mopping and whining at the sight of his wounds and took out a couple dozen more acupoint needles. The time for real magic-like healing had come, as Elizabeth moved with her eyes still engulfed in a flame like coating of her Inner Strength to accurately dig her needles right into various acupoints around Sun's body.

She started off with the most critically wounded area in Sun's whole body, his lungs. To treat that area, a whole 21 acupoints were embedded onto Sun's body, before Elizabeth started cycling her Inner Strength, like a current through a wire. She was using up dozens of points in Inner Strength units every minute as the chain of acupoints she had set up were in desperate need of healing power, and by the time her Inner Strength source ran out again, not even 1/10th the total damage to his lungs was healed.

Elizabeth was starting to feel woozy as she had gone through a whole day of training at the dojo, followed by that scary encounter leading up to being rescued by Sun. She had already exhausted and recovered her energy over seven times throughout the day, and her mental fortitude had been challenged on several fronts. Alas, Sun's current body condition was at least a dozen times worse of than her pitiful little exhaustion. So, against her body's wishes to just go to sleep and deal with the situation tomorrow, her mind told her body to "go fuck itself" as Sun would probably not make it to tomorrow in his current condition.

This time Elizabeth didn't move away from Sun's body to meditate, she just opted to sit back within arm length of his body. Now that she was starting to feel exhaustion encroach on her and her adrenaline levels were being flushed out Elizabeth had an easier time entering meditation for the second time after she returned to her home. Alas, the moment she left meditation, for that very same reason, the damage she herself had sustained while hitting the Lightning-Wielding Peak phase Mortal was at last starting to sink in.

Elizabeth took a look a her arms and legs and she finally noticed their charcoaled color. Pain would shoot down her spine as she tried touching the burn marks, only making the act of falling asleep seem all the more enticing. But, for the first time in her life, Elizabeth found something deserving of resolve which wasn't the act of gaming until oblivion. All the promises of feeling better her body preached were turned a cold shoulder, as Elizabeth stumbled back up to her knees and continued cycling her Inner Strength through Sun's body.

Her act of complete defiance towards her limits was actually starting to do miraculous changes to her stats as they were being broken through sheer willpower, yet Elizabeth had no clue. It would seem as though P, her partner in her new game-like world, regulated when and if messages of her game interface surfaced. When it was beneficial for Elizabeth to not know the increases to her power or the arrival of a quest, notifications seemed to just not register in Elizabeth's mind at all. But other times, like right before she capitulated to the enemy during this night's endeavor, a notification might supersede any other information Elizabeth found comprehendable.

In any case, Elizabeth had entered a special state of being most Mage and Martial Practitioners sought to enter if ever possible. Not many would be able to ignore basic limitation of their body's capabilities, even if they knew that all that was required was to fuel the body with willpower. Willpower is not something one could just spur at their leisure, it was something that could only be attained through experiences, trials, calamities, and tribulations. And right now, the back to back experiences Elizabeth had experienced with Sun had led up to her willpower turning into an undying ember that fueled her every action. Nothing, absolutely nothing, was present in her mind except for the thought of getting Sun to survive.

And through the use of that undying ember of willpower, Elizabeth managed to pump out five more meditations and heal all of Sun's internal organs back down to only a moderately wounded state. She had full intentions to keep going until Sun was back to normal, but even willpower could only do so much. Her willpower might have led her in continuing to breaking her body's limits, but even the act of breaking one's limits had limit onto itself. Anymore reckless shattering of bodily needs and Elizabeth might just die from exhaustion herself. Thus, after running out of Inner Strength for the fifth time, Elizabeth collapsed right next to Sun's body.