Chapter 144 – Aegis of Infinity (II)

Chapter 144

Aegis of Infinity (II)

To Wan Lan’s credit, she kept getting up.

And kept getting up.

She’d rush in, fists and feet flying about, and would get rebuffed within a breath and sent flying backward. The saddest bit? Long Tao never drew his sword.

No, scratch that–he never even used an actual art.

Within two minutes, there were about a few dozen scratches and gashes that were bleeding; within four, her left eye had swollen so badly I’m pretty sure she didn’t see a thing through it; by the fifth minute, she couldn’t get up any longer.

Again, to give her credit, no other kid could last remotely as long against Tao–then again, he did just use his arms rather randomly, so…

“You saw enough?” Long Tao said more so as a comment while he passed me by than as an actual question. I silently rolled my eyes and walked over to Wan Lan, who was lying sprawled on her back, limbs splayed, breathing heavily, covered in wounds.

Crouching next to her, I could see confusion still reeling in her gaze.

“Don’t think too deeply about it,” I said, fetching a few healing pills from a spatial ring and handing them over. Realizing, though, that she could not use her arms, I gently put them on her mouth, and she swallowed them hungrily–all three of them.

Speaking of healing pills, one of these days I’ll have to figure out the magic of the pills. Look, despite being an anti-doping sort of lad back on Earth when it came to sports, this world isn’t really about sports. And, from what little I do know about the pills (and pastes), they aren’t just ‘helpers’; they outright become a necessity.

I mean, you can see their magic just based off of this body alone–a complete waste, utter trash, was somehow raised into a Spirit Manifestation Realm cultivator. Yes, it was a false realm by all accounts, but still… the magic of the pills is very much real.

It’s just that I barely knew any–in fact, the way Elder Qin arranged the pills in the ring was by categories and not names.

‘For healing external wounds’, ‘For healing internal wounds’, ‘For supplementing cultivation’, ‘For breaking through X realm’…

He knew that I knew nothing.

But I’ll have to learn. Or… well, maybe not? If I fetch myself a nice kid with some crazy alchemy potential, I can still just keep being a bank for the monsters and their resources.

… haah. What does it say about me that I’m so willing to offload any remotely ‘annoying’ task on some random, imaginary kid?

Anyway, I could actually see her wounds regenerating in real time. It was… well, terrifying. To think that even with the best treatment on modern Earth, she’d still probably be hospitalized for at least a week and wouldn’t heal for months, and here… it’s just a pill. Or, well, a few of them.

“He’s strong,” she said.

“Hm.”

“No,” she repeated. “He’s… strong. Not just for this area. Madame told me about the larger world,” she continued. “Places where kids break through into Demigodhood before they turn ten. She told the stories to me as a form of a warning–to always recognize that there are mountains far taller than I. I… I never really considered myself any worse than those monsters. They just got lucky, that’s all. Lucky that they were born in a place where they could be discovered young.

If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it’s taken without permission from the author. Report it.

“But he… he wasn’t.” There was anger in her voice, but there was also… bitterness. And hatred. But that hatred… it wasn’t aimed externally. “He was born in the same rut that I was. And he’s younger than me, too. And he… he barely even did anything.”