NOVEL NEXT Chapter 9: Recovery
The next few days were spent on my recovery. Ann was allowed to stay in my room. They brought a second bed for her to sleep on, small enough to fit into the room just so.
Out of respect for the goddess, we didn’t ask to sleep in the same one. This was still a place of healing, after all. If we wanted that kind of treatment, some of the other temples might be better suited.
But that was besides the point. Since I’d recovered enough to spend my days awake, I’d been stuffing myself with food. I had to hold back tears every time I bit into dessert. I wasn’t eating rats, and it was wonderful.
Apparently, a little over a month had passed since I disappeared. I’d spent that long trekking through the underground. It was… reasonable. Two weeks crawling, living off my supplies, another week and a half walking. A couple days, four or five, before I’d started eating rats. The memory made me shudder.
I focused my mind again. There was hot water running down my back, almost scalding. I’d been getting treatment with Divinity, and my leg, while not healed, was well enough for me to shower again. I had to clean everything properly before a splint and such would be added.
It probably wasn’t necessary, given the shifting glass underneath my skin, but I didn’t exactly want to mention that until I was healthy. So I stayed silent.
There were a few questions on how my bones hadn’t shifted more, on how the fragments hadn’t carved my insides apart more. They were honestly pretty morbid, but I suppose it was in the nature of healers to ask them. I gave half-hearted answers, and they wrote it off as a mix of luck and the effect of metal Qi.
When I was done showering, I finally felt human again. Weeks of caked dirt and sweat and blood falling off. It hurt, of course. My entire body was still sore, and there were more than a couple torn muscles yet on the mend. The water also touched some of the wounds that reopened when I took off my clothes.
My feet looked especially bad. There had been blisters everywhere, my socks completely stuck to them, and they had reopened when I took off everything. Now, finally, I was getting rid of the last bits of fuzz clung to the scabs. It had been a painful procedure, but necessary if I wanted to have everything heal properly.
Also, I’d been through worse. Both in the last months, and when I fractured my shoulder before then. Though this was still pretty high up on the “fucking sucks” list.
Taking a deep breath, I dried myself off. The towel started off as white, but had more than a couple red splotches when I was done. I grimaced at it, then threw it into the provided basket for washing.
Hopefully the goddess provided something to the clerics against bad stains. I gave a very short prayer, preparing for the longer one I wanted to give at the statue. Lurelia had more than earned my thanks for this.
I spared the tattered remains of my armor a glance and gave a small sigh. Definitely needed a replacement for that one. The leather barely held itself together anymore. A single washing was probably enough to completely wreck it.
Instead, I put on some clothes Ann brought over. She’d even gone so far as to take ones from the other side. It cost her a bit of experience, but it was still just clothes. Some underwear, a shirt, sweater, pants, and fluffy socks. It was unbelievably comfortable, and I by far preferred it to the otherwise offered robes.
White just really didn’t suit me very well. Made me look like some kind of ghost. I smirked and shook my head at the thought.
Slowly, I made my way back to my room, using the crutches I was provided to help make walking easier. One of them was just lodged under my shoulder, my left arm still broken, but I held onto the other one more and stabilized myself.
It sure as hell didn’t look very graceful, but it got the job done. Step by step, I hobbled back towards my room. There was a plate of food already waiting for me, and a smiling Ann sitting on the bed. She’d insisted on feeding me the past couple days.
I grinned, and sat down next to her, earning myself a peck on the cheek. We chatted. She told me some more about what had happened while I was gone. Matt had been so distraught about it, and while I’d already teased him for it on the last visit, I had to make sure to be more obnoxious about it when I got back to the guild.
The time passed quickly with good company. One after another, I was visited by my friends from the team, even the new twins. Reya just gave me a wave, though she wrote a little. I’d been told she was mute a while ago, so Eric filled the room with chatter instead of her.
It was nice. The two of them were nice, as well. They’d been of some help in having me recover, too, apparently, for which I was thankful.
Days flew by quickly, and with both Divinity to help treat me, and Qi to aid my recovery, I found myself back on my feet within a week. Trusting my leg again took another few hours, but I was back to peak condition.
Usually, I would have been taken to a gateway for this kind of injury, but it was barely within the realm of recoverable. Only thanks to the fact that my muscles weren’t too mangled. Divinity could cause issues with soft tissue if used too much, but I was lucky to be in a position where I could recover with it.
Going to the gatekeepers… Sure, I would have survived. Maybe even healed. But not seeing Ann for a few months again would’ve been more painful than dealing with the injuries. So this was preferred.
When I was finally released, I stopped at the goddess’ statue to leave a prayer. I could have expended my exp to deal with the mission I’d gotten, but it was not the time yet. Maybe I didn't want to start it yet.
Instead of dealing with the ever encroaching future in which I dealt with being a fucking gateway, I instead chose to just be thankful for what I’d gotten.
‘Dear Lurelia, I know I’m not usually the most pious person. But thank you for housing me and nursing me to health. Rest assured that all debt will be repaid. I hope to make the time your servants spent on me worth it.’
What I did not expect was to hear a message back.
The voice of the goddess was usually only heard by believers, or those whose classes were based on them. Yet, here she was, right inside my head. Her voice was… flowery. And bright, as well as motherly.
‘Very welcome, child. You will need as much help as you can come by. I wish you good luck with your future. Be true to yourself. Be careful of the unknown.’
I paused for a second at that. First, because I heard her voice at all, and I froze up. Then, because of the message.
It was incredibly ominous. Which had me kneeling in front of the statue for a little longer than I was originally expecting to.
After a few moments of stunned silence, I sent half a thought back. ‘Thank you, I will do my best.’ It was about as respectful as I could manage in the moment, which wasn’t very, before I stumbled up and walked out of the temple.
The sun felt nice on my skin, but the feeling was now eclipsed by the growing dread of what Lurelia had meant by those words.
To be careful of the unknown. Surely that couldn’t mean much except my fancy new inner gateway. Then again, there was also very little known about the gatekeepers in general.
I sighed. She’d ruined my mood quite a bit with that, but whatever. I guessed it was time to finally go and get this over with. I’d been in Eden for a little over a month now, which meant that around twice that much time had passed on the other side. Was my family worried? Maybe. At the very least I should take the time to see them before they started getting hissy.
Which, incidentally, meant confronting the gatekeepers. So dealing with the whole mirror shit had to come first. Then I could spend another week breathing in crappy air and being miserable. The excitement felt palpable.
Before all that, I at the very least paid another visit to the guild. Ann practically hung around my neck the entire time. I smiled about it. Emilia laughed a less tired laugh, Marie grinned at us. Matt smiled, engaging in the mood for once, which made teasing him much harder. Liam gave me a hug, even, as well as a slightly slurred speech on how glad he was I lived. Eric and Reya partied alongside us.
We drank more than what was generally healthy, and when people were getting close to passing out, I kissed Ann goodbye. Then waved at everyone, gave a few hugs, and began to walk off.
A few deep breaths and circulating my Qi dealt with the tipsiness. It was evening, then, the lilac sky turning darker as the sun set, casting golden rays over the city. The view was gorgeous, and I was sure to miss it. I sighed at the thought, then banished it as I straightened my back and headed to the gateway.
The walk took a little longer than it needed to, since I didn’t use any Qi. The feeling of the cobblestone against my new shoes was nice. Well, just the feeling of having intact skin under my socks was also really nice, so there was that.
I sighed. I was procrastinating.
Gathering myself, I finally stepped through the arch, into the gateway hall.