Chapter : 789
Sumaiya, standing against the far wall, felt her own breath catch in her throat. The intellectual understanding of what was about to happen was a world away from the brutal, visceral reality of it. This was not the gentle, bloodless healing she had witnessed in the clinic. This was a violation, an act of controlled, necessary violence, and it was terrifying.
The physicians and the alchemist, however, leaned forward, their professional instincts overriding their fear. Their faces were a mixture of horror and a rapt, almost religious fascination. They were witnessing a procedure that was not just outside their experience, but outside their very conception of what was possible.
Lloyd was oblivious to them all. His world had shrunk to the small, illuminated circle of the boy’s chest, the gleaming tip of his scalpel, and the constant, luminous, three-dimensional map of the anatomy that was projected in his mind’s eye. He was no longer a lord, no longer a doctor. He was a machine, a being of pure, dispassionate focus.
His hands moved with a speed and a precision that was simply not human. He worked through the layers of skin, fat, and muscle, each incision impossibly clean, each movement economical and precise. He used forceps to part the tissue, his [All-Seeing Eye] guiding his every action, allowing him to navigate the intricate web of blood vessels and nerves without severing a single one that was not absolutely necessary. The bleeding was minimal, almost non-existent, as he used a subtle, focused pulse of his own internal heat to cauterize the tiny capillaries as he cut.
He parted the ribcage, not by cracking the bone, but by finding the cartilaginous joints and disarticulating them with a surgeon’s delicate touch. The chest cavity was open. The heart, a small, valiant muscle, continued to beat in its steady, golden-light-supported rhythm. And there, nestled beside it, was the enemy.
The tumor was an ugly, dark, misshapen thing, a knot of corrupted flesh that pulsed with a faint, malevolent energy. It was even larger than his initial scan had suggested, its tendrils more deeply enmeshed in the surrounding tissue than he had realized.
This was the true test. Removing it would be like trying to untangle a knot of thorny vines from a delicate silk tapestry without tearing a single thread.
One part of his mind remained a fortress, holding the healing frequency of the Lilith Stone perfectly steady. The other part, the surgeon, went to work. He switched from the scalpel to a finer, more delicate set of tools. With a patience that was almost divine, he began the painstaking process of separating the tumor from the healthy tissue.
Millimeter by millimeter, he worked. His diagnostic vision allowed him to see the boundary between the healthy cells and the cancerous ones, a line that would have been invisible to the naked eye. He snipped the tiny, thread-like blood vessels that fed the growth, cauterizing each one as he went. He carefully, gently, peeled the tendrils of the tumor away from the wall of the heart and the delicate, precious tissue of the lung.
The room was so quiet that the only sounds were the soft, wet snipping of his instruments and the steady, rhythmic beat of the boy’s heart. Time seemed to stop. The sun climbed higher in the sky, its light moving slowly across the floor, but no one in the room noticed. They were all held captive by the impossible, sacred, and terrifying act of butchery and healing that was unfolding before them.
The final phase was a simple, mechanical process. He re-articulated the ribs, sutured the muscle and the skin with a needle and thread, his stitches so fine and precise they were almost invisible.
He then took his hand from the boy, and with a final, mental command, he severed the connection to the Lilith Stone. The golden light faded, the harmonic hum ceased. The boy’s Spirit Core, now free of its oppressor and fortified by the healing ritual, took over, pulsing with its own strong, steady, natural rhythm.
Lloyd stepped back from the table, his work complete. He was drenched in sweat, his body trembling with the sheer, monumental effort of it all. But he was done.
He looked at the boy. The child’s breathing was now deep, even, and untroubled. The pale, waxy pallor of his skin was already being replaced by a healthy, pinkish hue. The invisible sickness had been seen, confronted, and utterly, completely vanquished.
He had promised them a miracle. And, against all odds, against all logic, against the very laws of this world, he had delivered one.
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The aftermath of the surgery was a profound, ringing silence. The air in the room, which had been stretched taut with an almost unbearable tension, seemed to collectively exhale. The five observers—the parents, Sumaiya, the physicians, and the alchemist—stood as if frozen in time, their minds struggling to process the impossible sequence of events they had just witnessed. They had watched a man slice open a child, remove a piece of his insides, and then magically knit him back together as if he were a torn piece of cloth. It was a thing of nightmares and fairy tales, a brutal, beautiful miracle that had shattered their understanding of reality.
Lloyd himself felt a profound, almost dizzying sense of detachment. He stood by the side table, his hands trembling with a combination of exhaustion and a lingering, residual hum of power. He felt like a conduit through which a great and terrible storm had just passed. He had been the surgeon, the healer, the god in the machine, but now, he was just a man again, a very, very tired man in a blood-spattered scholar’s robe.
It was Lady Elara who moved first. She took a single, hesitant step towards the operating table, her eyes, wide with a mixture of terror and a dawning, disbelieving joy, fixed on her son. She reached out a trembling hand, not to touch him, but to hover her palm just above his chest, as if to feel the warmth, the life, the simple, miraculous reality of his steady breathing.
“He… he is…” she whispered, her voice a fragile, cracking thing.
“He is sleeping a true, healing sleep,” Lloyd said, his own voice a low, weary rasp. “The shadow is gone. His body is his own again. He will be weak for a time. But he will live.”
The words, so simple and so absolute, were the key that unlocked the dam of their emotions. Lady Elara let out a sob, a sound of such pure, overwhelming, cathartic relief that it seemed to shake the very foundations of the room. She sank to her knees, burying her face in the clean linen sheets beside her son, her body wracked with the force of her weeping.
Lord Timur Qadir, the iron man, the Master of the Armories, finally broke. His granite-like composure crumbled into dust. A single, thick tear traced a path through the grizzled hair of his beard, followed by another, and another. He made no sound, but his massive shoulders shook with the silent, agonizing force of a grief that was finally, blessedly, being transformed into joy. He went to his wife, kneeling beside her, wrapping his powerful arms around her, the two of them a silent, weeping island of a family reborn.