31 Healing Atid

Elizabeth walked up to Atid and said "Hey uh… could you sit down with your back facing me, so I can heal you?"

"Wh… what do you intend to do?" Skepticism was plastered all over Atid's expression as the situation was plenty ridiculous. Here he being told by some kid that she'd heal him. Some kid who's probably still in high school — secondary education. Did she think she was some sort of doctor? Or… what?

"Acupuncture..." As always, Elizabeth remained as taciturn as the conversation called for.

Atid already guessed as much, given how she didn't take any measures to hide the needles in her hand from sight. But, how exactly would acupuncture help with cuts, bruises, and burns? Atid had his reservations for how this would go down, but given that he wasn't really in critical condition, he held his suspicions and complied with Elizabeth's request. Though he complied mostly for his curiosity, Atid resolved to separate at the first sign of anything but healing being done by Elizabeth or her needles.

He sat down and waited for Elizabeth to do whatever acupuncture she thought would heal his injuries. Elizabeth, upon seeing him sit down followed suit and start accurately poking her needles at the top of Atids back, opting to work from top to bottom. She didn't have to wait for Atid to take off a shirt as he never wore one since the day they met. Given the intensity of both the training people in the dojo conducted and the heat of a summering Miami, it was very common for the men to go shirtless while in the dojo.

As Elizabeth placed needle after needle accurately into Atid's accupoints, the man actually started to feel doubt as he couldn't feel anything at all. It was inconceivable to him that he could be stabbed without noticing, especially considering his status as a skilled Martial Practitioner. He was much more in tune with his body than the average person, so if even he couldn't feel the needles poking into him, there probably wouldn't be anyone who could.

Eventually, Elizabeth finished drawing the accupoint route she wished to work with first before starting to channel her energy into the needles. She was already whispering curses in her heart for how hard it was for her to poke through Atid's lead-dense skin and muscles and now that horrors of having to match her Inner Strength frequency with another's was coming to fruition at last.

Healing Atid would be quite literally dozens if not hundreds of times harder to heal when compared to Sun. Sure his injuries couldn't compare with those of the near-dead Sun of yesternight. But solely by virtue of him having Inner Strength and Martial Qi, the difficulty in healing his degree of injury was offset by having to repair Inner Strength and Martial Qi enhanced body parts.

Elizabeth wasted quite a bit of time matching the frequency of her Inner Strength with Atid as it was her first time going through the procedure. But after she achieved resonance, her Inner Strength started to disperse as it had when she healed Sun. At the same moment the real healing began, Atid could feel it even though he had his back towards Elizabeth and could thus not see the white glow of Inner Strength on the needles that were affixed to his back.

Even though the process would not yield any noticeable result to the naked eye for minutes, Atid could almost instantly deduce that his wounded back was indeed being healed at an posthaste rate after Elizabeth introduced that energy into his system. He went through a myriad of emotions as he understood more and more about what was happening to him. First being shock that the healing was working, then confusion with how Elizabeth learned this strange technique, then it was doubt as he drew a connection to Sun's Dantian being healed, and finally enlightenment followed immediately by even more shock as he came to the same conclusion as Sun; that this was Martial Accupoint.

By the time that shock had manifested into a gaping face with wide eyes, Elizabeth's shallow bucket-like reserves of Inner Strength had dried up. She had to stop and meditate to get more fuel for the generator that was her Accupoint Skill. Having gone through this cycle of resting followed by immediate resumption of healing after the ordeal with Sun, Elizabeth went back to that now familiar cycle a couple times.

Twenty minutes after she started the first round of healing, as she was finishing up the last round of channeling her energy, she asked "Say… what was that explosion earlier?" Her sudden act of talking surprised Atid as he just assumed she couldn't speak as all her focus would be on that miraculous Accupoint skill.

Atid said "We were testing Sun's affinity for Martial Qi, but the results were unstable as you no doubt noticed." His voice stopped before he remembered that Elizabeth was just a "normal" person, who probably didn't know what affinity was. Thus he added in "As for affinity, that's in reference to the type of energy one is compatible with…"

He would have gone into further detail, but he realized that Elizabeth was using energy on him right then and there. Atid said "We weren't planning on introducing the concept of energy to you until you became more experienced with Muay Thai as the real application of energy only becomes useful after generated Qi… But I guess you already know about it… and my assessment that Inner Strength isn't useful is wrong..."

"Mhmm? Unstable? How exactly could a test of affinity even cause that level of explosion in the first place? Didn't you just use neutral Mag… Qi to fuel his Inner Strength?" Elizabeth caught herself before following through with that slip of the tongue. She already knew about testing affinity as it was a clearly explained as a basic application of Magic and Qi within both her meditation techniques. But, given that she could view her status, there wasn't a need to check her affinity; it was guaranteed that she only had Time affinity for now, and shitty sub-trash tier Time affinity for that matter…

"So you know about the test as well?" Atid grew confused the more he interacted with Elizabeth. First she had come to him as a complete newbie with no experience or knowledge of martial arts even though she had quite the reserve of Inner Strenght built up, and now she was using presumably ancient and lost godly skills and talking about advanced concepts such as affinity testing as if she were a total expert. That kind of dichotomy was staggering to say the least.

"Well, we kind of knew what my affinity was from the get go as I was evaluated to have a superior fire affinity back before my family disowned me… But after we tested it again, the fire affinity changed somehow and the normal red flames of fire affinity became golden and unstable." Sun, who had been just guarding the door this whole time spoke up.

His words stunned Atid, as Atid knew for a fact how painful and uncomfortable it was for Sun to bring up his terrible past.

'Gold flames?' Elizabeth thought to herself in wonder of what kind of element it was. She didn't really know much of anything that wasn't related to Space or Time so, she could only guess that it was an exotic flame of some sort of Phoenix Exalt or something; totally guessing something so absurd, based on the games she was familiar with .

However, it didn't take long for P to speak up, as the good little guide she had thus been acting as. P said "Gold Flames? Gee, I wish you had some sort of ability that would give you accurate evaluations of everything around you~"

Elizabeth squinted her eyes at the sarcasm as she called for Sun's Status to appear before her.

[Status Updating…

Status

Name: Sun

*New) Innate Skills

*New) Fire Affinity

Tier: Bad

Description: Born with a pretty good talent for fire affinity. At least, for the Mortal Realm it's pretty good; it could even be considered superior. But for higher Realm and states of being, it's as common as everyday trash.

*New) Space Affinity

Tier: Sub Trash-tier

Description: The user's restoration of Sun's Dantian led to him developing an extremely weak affinity for the spatial element.

**********: What a waste! Stupid Elizabeth! If only you had alternated between gathering time type Inner Strength and space type Inner Strength while you fixed Sun's Dantian. Maybe then he would have also developed Time Affinity as well! *Sigh* Whatever, I guess getting Space affinity is more than enough for Sun to focus on anyways...]

The look on Elizabeth's face as she read through the casual comments of that unidentifiable deity could only be described to be priceless. How was she supposed to know that restoring Sun's Dantian would lead to him being influenced by her energy in this way? The [Introduction To The Path Of Medicine] didn't mention this side effect in the procedure for Dantian restoration.

At the time, she was just getting used to meditating with the [Spatial Meditation] technique as practice for going into a real meditation for the generation of Inner Strength later. Never did she expect that because she mostly space type Inner Strength, Sun would get a new affinity.

Still, now that she understood that Sun's new affinity was of aligned with space, it didn't really make sense for his fire to just turn gold and "unstable" as Sun put it. As someone with understanding of space herself, Elizabeth knew that the outcome for positive space affinity in the affinity test would just lead to the air lightly warping as if in a mirage. Even if it manifested alongside other elements, it wouldn't cause an explosion. Not unless… someone was dumb enough to give it enough juice.

Dark lines of apprehension manifested on Elizabeth's face as she asked "How much Qi did you guys use to fuel Sun's affinity test?"

Atid said "How much Qi? I don't know, like something comparable to someone near the Soldier level. Why? Do you know what element Sun has affinity with?"

"What?! Why would you use some much energy for a mere affinity test! Holy shit!"

Atid was kind of put down by Elizabeth's overt supercilious exclamation, so Sun was the one to say "Uh… We kind of wanted to see the properties of the new element better..."

"And you still couldn't tell what the element was?" Elizabeth got worked up at the thought of their insanity. So much so, that she had to take a deep breath before saying "Good thing the explosion happened before any more fuel was added..." She knew that Atid was way stronger than just the Martial Soldier level, else his position as head of the dojo would be a joke. If he had added enough Qi to reach the next stage or the stage after that and then the explosion occurred… Elizabeth shuddered as she thought of the whole dojo blowing up.

She calmed down before saying "Sun has affinity for Space..."

"Space?" Sun wasn't convinced, but before Elizabeth, Atid took on the face of understanding as he thought back to the flame converging into a single point before exploding.