The Systemic Lands

Chapter 438: Day 863 (3) – A Much Needed Restoration

Chapter 438: Day 863 (3) – A Much Needed Restoration

One thing I knew was that a higher Spirit stat allowed a person to more easily control and choose what they wanted from the store. I focused on just my limbs with none of the Astrologer nonsense included. I wasn’t sure if it would help, but if it did have an effect, I couldn’t ignore it.

With how long the Divine Empress had been holed up dealing with what the Astrologer did to her, I had no doubt, I would be holed up for just as long trying to get rid of his super cancer. It was an insidious attack. Who gives people cancer as an attack?

It was the kind of thing that was completely insane for combat, but incredibly useful for getting and maintaining leverage. Regardless of the Astrologer, it was time to focus. I purchased my restoration while focusing on what I wanted to happen.

My left arm and feet came back. I slowly got my feet under me, happy to just stand on my own. The cost of my restoration had been 12,429,298 points. With my health insurance, point reserve, around half a billion, it wasn’t that expensive to get healed up.

The cost was high, but the damage I had taken during my climb and the chase beforehand was compounded by the time. I had guessed, and the numbers that Clarissa had showed me mostly confirmed this, that for every 1 stat in Body, there was around 1,000 points worth of damage that could be sustained and restored at the store.

That meant with 20,000 stats in Body, I had about 20,000,000 points worth of healing that could be done. With the cost of the restoration, I had about 62% damage. It was a lot. But it was surprising to me, how much more I could actually take based on the restoration cost.

I held up my left hand in front of me. It felt a bit off, like the previous times I had gotten a limb. My guess was that my energy was adjusting to my physical arm, the reverse, or both.

It was hard to say exactly, but as I flexed each of my fingers, there was a slight stiffness that I noticed. I kept moving my hand, and it felt off. The best way to describe it was like the times I had cut off blood flow to a limb as a kid and then it flopped about for a bit and then I got pins and needles.

My left hand was a bit floppy and the senses I could feel from my hand were dulled. I compared my left hand to my right hand. There were differences in the energy. Very minute differences and trying to fix them would be a challenge. I focused for a minute and my energy corrected in some places, but the moment I stopped focusing my energy quickly reversed.

I let out a long sigh at that. To fix curse damage, I would need to hold the energy inside my body mentally. Working on my left hand was easy, since I had an example. My feet hadn’t been missing for that long to suffer curse damage, so they were fine.

Patting my gut, it wasn’t ballooned out at least, but that didn’t mean anything. I could have a ticking bomb inside there once again. I would need to deal with that. I also needed to speak with Clarissa about my victory, so she could stabilize things and come out of hiding.

I purchased a new set of clothes and a flask of water. I washed myself off. Purchasing more water as I needed it, right at the store. After drying myself off with a towel, I put on some brown shorts, a gray t-shirt, socks, and a pair of boots.

That was much better than just wearing ruined bloody shorts everywhere. Having actual clothes and getting clean made me feel human again. It was amazing what a good shower could do for my mentality. Next was purchasing a lot of food.

While I wasn’t hungry at the moment, I wanted something to eat while I rested. It was evening, and I planned to rest for the night before searching out Clarissa. I picked up my rags as I left the plaza, no need to leave a mess behind, tossed them in an empty building and made my way to the second floor.

There had been no one near the plaza and no one had come to investigate. The Divine Empress most likely killed anyone she could find after I had gone into the tower and then the airship would scare people off. Since she had stayed at the tower, it would make no sense to assign more people to the city or the nearby areas.

I wasn’t that worried either. While the Divine Empress had been a grave threat, everyone else wasn’t that big of a concern. As I sat in the corner of a building I reflected on everything that had happened and my conversation with the Avatar.

It was probably foolish to let her go, maybe. I was unsure about that. Her additional comments near the end of our conversation were concerning, since she didn’t say them right at the start. It was hard to know where her lines were compared to the limits that the Almighty System placed on her. With her limbs missing and other body parts missing, it made it impossible to read her body language.

Well, it was done, and she had left. She was alive and scheming with her three cities. The one thing she hadn’t talked about were boarders. It would take time. Getting people up to the number of stats and skills needed to grind level 3 and level 4 zones required a lot of investment.

As I sat there munching on salted cucumber, I thought about the balance between investing in growth, the economy, and investing in myself. There was probably an optimal number to encourage people to level 4 zones. Also pushing people into level 2 zones was a good source of attrition.

There was also the risk of corruption and troublemakers. If I had the tax rate too high, people would get upset. Then there was the need to regulate various zones and dungeons. Perhaps a permitting system? People could pay for the permits, to grind a zone. But that would just encourage people to steal permits from others and enforcing such a thing would be a pain.

A tax rate before people could cash in at the store was the best option to secure points long term. Then guarded shipments to Purgatory. Half the points for level 1 and level 2 monsters, and a quarter of the points from level 3 monsters. With no tax on level 4 monsters. Get people to push out and grind up higher difficulty monsters.

I finished munching on my cucumber and pulled out a flask of water. I took a long drink, before getting out another cucumber. I slowly bit off one end and then sprinkled some salt on it. I was procrastinating too much. I need to focus and get to work. Not think about things that I had no control over right now. I tossed half of the cucumber away. I was done eating.

Closing my eyes, I steadied my breathing. I focused on the energy inside of me, specifically my left hand. I slowly focused on correcting the energy, bit by bit. It was hard to hold the energy in the correct way to fix the mistakes.

It was like looking at a multi-color tie dyed t-shirt. While the energy moved in weird patterns, I could tell where there were abnormalities and how things should be. Even without my right hand as a guide, I could make out the issues that were present in my left hand. One by one, I focused on how the energy should be, and then moved onto the next issue.

It was performing surgery with my brain and then having to focus to keep the stitches in place. Each defect that I fixed, made the next one harder to fix. There were hundreds of minor defects that needed to be corrected and each of them was slightly different.

I paused once I felt I lost control over my energy on one of the defects. I had gotten to over fifty of the defects. The Astrologer hadn’t shared his trick of tying off energy constructs and I tried to think of a way to make the change permanent.

Nothing came to mind, except holding the corrections in place over a period of time. Eventually, my body would self-correct. It also didn’t escape my notice, that people could modify themselves to some degree, if they could slowly change their energy in a way that would match what they wanted.

It wasn’t enough to think about a hand, there were cells, nerves, muscles, bone, and other tissues. I had fixed the biggest issues in my left hand, but there were countless small issues. It was frustrating, that I couldn’t get an instant fix. But curse damage wasn’t simple to correct.

I was doing my hand first to get a sense for this kind of procedure and to see if I could come up with any novel methods. Unfortunately, just fixing the energy and understanding its flow compared to my right hand was the only thing I had made progress on. I wanted to be able to pinpoint any issue without needing an example.

The high chance of a tumor in my gut and possibly my head, meant that I needed to find the issues first and have some way to deal with them. That was why I was testing my methods on my hand first. A failure or issue on my left hand wasn’t a huge deal, but something happening in my gut could put my life in danger.

That was another reason why my progress was slow. I was my own test subject. I couldn’t use someone else unfortunately. Also, physical surgery was out of the question. That meant my only option was to fix my own energy by being very careful.

The good news was that the same reason something like this was so tedious was also the reason why there was a low risk of a catastrophic mistake. It took time for any changes in my energy to impact my physical body.

Even if I adjusted my energy in a completely different way, it would damage me, but my body would self-correct over time. There was a subconscious effect from a person understanding their body. It was something the Astrologer had mentioned in an off hand manner while we had been talking, but it meant that there was natural healing.

My brain knew how my hand should work, and the restoration fixed up most of the physical issues. The energy would self-correct over a long period of time. What I was doing, was just manually speeding the process up. The goal being to curse myself in a way that replaced the previous curse damage while also not making the injury worse.

I slowly drifted off to sleep. It wasn’t quick in coming, since I kept focusing on my left hand. I wanted a way to maintain what I had done even while I was asleep, but it just wasn’t possible. At least with my stats I could go a couple of nights without sleep.

The only reason why I was sleeping now was pure mental exhaustion after everything that had happened on top of the tower. Having a clear head in the morning would help a lot in figuring out my personal issues. At least that was my hope.