Chapter 156 - Healing Beyond Alchemy

By the time Ao Wen and Alchemist Ma Xiaohua entered the room where Kui Chong waited for treatment, the sickly man already looked more stable than when he had first arrived at Ao Wen's clinic. The medicinal tea she'd provided him to drink was infused with gentle nurturing energy that did as much to soothe his distressed meridians as it did to return moisture to his parched flesh. Still, the ravages of the Darkweaver Spider Venom on his body were undeniable. 

"Kui Chong, I believe you already know Alchemist Ma," Ao Wen said as she laid out the tools she would need to treat the poisoned Brawler. "She's going to be observing this treatment. While I'm curing you, I may also be answering questions for her. You don't need to concern yourself about it. Now, I'm afraid I'll need you to strip down to your underwear so I can accurately place needles for acupuncture. If needles make you nervous, I can give you a blindfold or even a medicinal tea to force you to sleep. It's harder if you're sleeping and I'd prefer that you're awake, but the option is yours," she explained. 

"I'm not afraid of little needles," the man said, stripping down and laying himself on the cot in the room. Truthfully, he was less bothered by the needles than he was by having a woman in the room seeing him in this miserable condition. He knew it shouldn't matter, that alchemists weren't supposed to see gender when treating patients, but if he'd had the power to do so, he'd have insisted that only Alchemy Novice Ao be allowed to see him in this sorry state. At least another man could appreciate what it meant to have wasted away due to injuries inflicted by a terrifying beast. When the other party was the most senior alchemist in Lantern City however, Kui Chong understood that even Alchemy Novice Ao might not be able to make the woman leave if she wished to observe his treatment so he said nothing. 

"Good that you aren't afraid," Ao Wen praised. "This will be different than acupuncture you may have experienced before," she cautioned. "I'm placing needles as guides for the energy I'll be using to begin the cleansing process. For that to work, I need to soak the needles in a concoction that will allow them to penetrate your flesh and into your soul. It won't be painful, at least at first, but it will feel uncomfortable, like having a heavy bag of rice draped over your body. Remain calm and this will be over soon," she promised. 

"You're going to use acupuncture to treat the soul?" Alchemist Ma asked, surprised at both the technique and Ao Wen's approach to healing Kui Chong. 

"I am," Ao Wen said, grinding the seeds of a Passion Flame Fruit into a fine powder before dissolving the powder in the nectar of a Sunset Trumpet Flower. The nectar had been the most expensive of the ingredients she needed to purchase from Alchemist Ma because it formed the base of many elixirs and pills that could nourish the soul and the quantity of it she needed wasn't small. "The venom of the Darkweaver Spider is insidious and it has gone beyond just invading Kui Chong's body. I think the thing that makes the venom so deadly is that once it spreads through the body, it begins to form a web around the soul. Once it's fully ensnared the soul, there's no escaping the venom until the body dies," she explained. "This method of healing uses a combination of Alchemy and Sorcery to purge sickness from the soul first so we can then purge it from the body. If we tried to purge the venom from his body first, we might succeed but at the price of tearing away parts of his soul." 

"I thought that your secondary path was the Martial path," Ma Xiaohua said in confusion. "How will you perform sorcery?" 

"My cultivation may have regressed a touch," Ao Wen said honestly. "It'll be a year before I think my soul has recovered from the injuries I sustained, but I'm still a middle-stage Drifter, more than enough for this method. Do you have a secondary path you follow, Alchemist Ma?" Ao Wen asked in genuine curiosity. 

"I thought it useful to awaken a second path as an Artist," Ma Xiaohua said honestly. "Though I'm only a late-stage Aesthete, my abilities as a Gardener have been of tremendous use to my practice of alchemy." 

"This method may not be suitable for you then, but you can watch all the same," Ao Wen said as she moved her silver needles into a jar containing the concoction she'd just prepared. "My Master's words were 'Saintess' and 'Dragon' and as a member of the Fire Dragon clan, her soul flames could destroy anything in their path. My soul flames are different from hers but this method works all the same."

Working steadily, Ao Wen placed several of her needles along Kui Chong's injured leg. Her first goal was to isolate the injured leg from the rest of his body so she could attack the original source of the invasive venom. If her cultivation had been greater, she could treat the whole body at once but as it currently stood, despite her confident words, it would be a stretch to cleanse one limb at a time before attacking the infection around his heart and lungs. Once the needles were placed, Ao Wen pulled a black and red silk fan from her waistband and prepared to begin her treatment. 

"You may feel heat and you may hear strange voices," Ao Wen cautioned. "You can ignore both, you won't come to any harm," she added before directly getting to work. She'd placed eighteen needles in Kui Chong's injured leg, half of them on his foot or between his toes, and her fan snapped out in quick movements eighteen times. Each time her fan snapped open and closed, a flick of her wrist sent a green flame butterfly dancing toward one of the needs where it hovered patiently, waiting to be joined by its brethren before following Ao Wen's next command. 

Once the last butterfly had taken its position above a needle, Ao Wen took a deep breath and let her eyes drift closed. "This part is delicate," she said quietly. "No interruptions until it's finished." The most common concept that plagued victims of poisons that attacked the soul was 'Sickness' and when Ao Wen allowed her senses to pass over Kui Chong, she felt the concept of 'Sickness' had wrapped around him like a cocoon. There were others though, beneath the 'Sickness' that she wouldn't be able to treat until she purged the first outer layer of sickness. 

Slowly, she waved her fan back and forth, fanning the flames of her Wind Blown Embers, investing more of her energy in intensifying the emerald purifying flames that flowed through the needles and into Kui Chong's injured soul. 

On the cot, sweat began to seep from the injured man's body, quickly soaking the sheets as he began to feel intensely feverish. The treatment was as Alchemy Novice Ao had described. First, he felt a heaviness weighing him down, followed by increasing heat. Memories swirled through his mind of childhood illnesses where his mother had heaped warm blankets on him to sweat out the toxins making him ill and this felt like an even more intense version of that. At the moment, it wasn't too much to bear but he was sure that it would become more intense as the treatment progressed. 

Alchemist Ma's blinded eye burned with a different kind of heat as she watched the young man employ sorcery against illness. She knew exactly what it meant to suffer an infliction that not only affected the body but the very soul of the injured cultivator. If she'd lost her eye to any normal poison, she'd have been able to cure it long ago. To purge Lord White's ghastly curse, however, was all but impossible for an alchemist who wasn't also a sorcerer. Silently, deep within the hidden recesses of her heart, she began to calculate what it would take to keep this young Novice safe from Lord White's machinations. It likely wasn't possible to keep him from getting involved, he was far too capable and would likely succeed where she herself had failed. To Alchemist Ma, it was no longer a question of whether or not the young man could complete the task Lord White needed done, the question was whether or not he would let either of them go free afterward. 

In the flickering green firelight of Ao Wen's soul flames, Alchemist Ma Xiaohua promised that she'd find a way for both of them to escape. Perhaps, if they could get away from this place of darkness, there might even be a world where she could accompany this young genius on the rest of his journey. Before she could think too much about it though, she reminded herself firmly, survival first, then freedom. Everything else would have to wait for the first two before it could be anything more than an idle fantasy.