Outworld Liberators-Chapter 195: Rising Reputation through the Recovery District

Chapter 195: Rising Reputation through the Recovery District

While the participants schemed on the arena, scraping for the best benefits, the Prescriptions and Recovery District bloomed in quiet.

Towering pagodas rose here. The halls looked like luxury meant for the rich and the wounded at once.

Soft carpets. Polished railings. Lamps that did not flicker.

The sharp cleanliness of a top tier hospital laid over the comfort of a high rated hotel.

In a room that felt like a presidential suite, an old man sighed.

Heron lay on the bed with a linen screen angled so he could watch the fighting outside without leaving the sheets.

Master of Jalin. Once the best alchemist in the Northern Emperia, until he tried to make a pill meant to ruin a cultivator from the inside, meridians and blood alike.

A weapon in a porcelain coat. The cauldron had rumbled. His qi flared as he tried to stabilize it. Too late.

He woke without arms and legs. His meridians were mangled. Nearly ninety percent of his fire meridian had turned to dust.

That was when he had cried, real tears of men. It had felt like the end of everything.

If Jalin had not clutched him and sworn that if he killed himself she would follow, he would have bitten through his own tongue and finished it.

Since Eldric arrived, Jalin would not shut up about him. She even joked that she ought to marry a rich old man, and the limbless Heron had coughed and blushed at his disciple’s shameless mouth.

Still, he agreed to come. So far, he found himself enjoying the stay.

With a necklace bearing a small control array pendant, he could open the window, adjust the linen screen, and watch the clouds and the people moving below, instead of staring at incense-stained walls and listening to silence pretend it was peace.

A knock came at the door.

"Come in."

The ghost attendants entered. This was the fourth time. They were coming here as Heron wanted to get a clearer idea on what treatment he was getting into.

The ghost attendant began to read aloud, voice even as stone.

"What I am about to read is an agreement between you, Alchemist Heron, as an individual, and Radeon Terraces as an entity."

"Heed these words, Alchemist Heron. We have determined you can be cured with certainty. However, there are proper expectations you must understand before proceeding."

"The procedure you will undergo is extremely secretive to our organization. You are advised to refrain from probing, or attempting to reverse engineer the method."

"You will not be able to keep your Spirit Transfiguration realm. You will need to cultivate again from the beginning." 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

"As you recultivate, we advise you to remain on Radeon Terraces for safety. Once you reach the Nascent Soul stage after recultivation, you may leave if you wish."

"During recuperation, you will also be tasked with teaching the basics of alchemy. We will observe for side effects that may occur in comprehension. Hard discussion will help us measure any changes in your understanding."

"Lastly, you originally possessed high fire aptitude. The fire aptitude you gain after treatment may be lower than what you had in youth. Be advised."

"End of contract between Alchemist Heron and Radeon Terraces."

Heron did not answer at once. It felt too good, even with the price written in spirit stones and years.

Jalin’s payments to keep him in the Prescriptions and Recovery District were not small.

Five hundred high grade spirit stones each month, a steady bleed that could have funded a small sect’s pride.

He knew what that sum meant. On ordinary days, it was a quarter of Blessedgrove Fortunecrest’s profit, money turned into bandages and clean sheets for a man who could not even lift a cup.

Jalin had used an emergency communication talisman to force the matter, shameless as love.

The Divine Jade Court had agreed to the treatment and folded much of the cost into the tribute they already demanded.

The same righteous sect Calixtus claimed as his own.

Heron stared at the scroll as if it might bite. He wanted to refuse out of decency.

He wanted to accept out of hunger. In the end he asked the only question that mattered.

"How long will I be staying here?"

The ghost attendant answered without blinking.

"Twenty years to fifty years."

The numbers hit like cold water. Heron felt the old urge rise, the one that whispered burden, burden, burden.

Then another thought followed it. Back then, before the accident, he had paid his place by creating recipes for the sect, even pills meant for low cultivation.

The Divine Jade Court had valued them anyway. He could do that again. If they wanted sincerity, he could give them that. He could give them work.

He drew a slow breath.

"Alright. I agree."

He was not the only one being asked.

Across the Prescriptions and Recovery District, the same terms were offered to thousands of high value patients, names that mattered to somebody, bodies that could still be turned into profit if repaired.

Most signed. The demand to teach was not what frightened them. The warning about comprehension was.

Aptitude could be raised by fortuitous encounters, by pills, by rare flames, by luck and violence.

A dull mind had no clean cure. If their understanding slipped, they would train twice as hard for half the result, staring at qi patterns that would never make sense again.

So they agreed.

And the ones who hesitated were given reasons that sounded reasonable enough to swallow.

Any dip in comprehension could be blamed on stagnation, on heart demons, on years of rot, on anything but the treatment itself.

It was said gently, like a kindness, and it left very few places to say no.

Beneath Radeon Terraces, those who dared offend Radeon hung tied in rows like cured meat.

Their eyes stayed open but empty, consciousness dulled to a smear while rotating arrays pushed cultivation through them on a schedule they did not choose.

Deeper still, the younger cultivators taken from underground forces lay in a colder hall.

Roots had ruptured their backs and crawled outward, not the thin roots of plants, but swollen meridians grown too large.

When the growth reached its limit, the wraiths used specialized blades.

The ghosts carefully cut away the meridian overgrowth like delicate bonsai, taking care not to tear the rest.

The men being harvested felt only numbness, cold steel kissing skin, not the ripping agony that came when a meridian was torn out by force.

They could stitch those harvested lines together into new meridians again and again, as if the body were only a loom.

Farther into the chasm, stitched meridians shaped like the map of a human body circulated through racks of arrays.

Ewan and Maeron oversaw that work, standing on either side of the lines they meant to monitor.

Beside each bare meridian lay samples of the damaged one, taken from across the patient’s body.

Every person carried a different flow.

Stuff the wrong meridian into the wrong body and the best outcome was qi poisoning.

The worst was decay, or death so fast the soul rejected it before the mind understood why.

Ewan and Maeron wore a legendary grade artifact as they inspected the channels, an energy reading lens that hummed against their brows.

A thousand tiny arrays inside it tasted everything, heat shifts, natural qi deviations, input and output, the faint stutter where a line would fail under stress.

They checked each segment twice, then ten times, then again, while the main array kept the meridians running like living cords.

Tonight, their focus was Heron’s fire meridian.

On the frame it looked like a human nervous system laid bare, threads of ember light flowing through pale strands.

Fine work. Sensitive work. One mistake and the whole system would be wasted.

"Slow the flow into this wrist line," Maeron said, finger hovering above a narrow branch.

Ewan flipped through the manual interface and frowned.

Even at the Peak of Spirit Transfiguration, Ewan looked lost.

The book was a monster, hundreds of thousands of pages, each one packed tight with tiny script.

"Erm. Solution seven three one," he said at last. "That one matches the deviation."

Hard work, ugly work, and both of them wore it like a hunger.

At first, Radeon had done it alone.

They had pestered and begged until he threw them the manual through the system.

[Meridian Fundamentals] [Part 1]

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Now their eyes burned with the same frantic shine.

Their mouths never stopped chewing the sin stones harvested from the arena, black tubes that left a ghost green and blue grit on their teeth.

Calyx was a leader, and that made the envy taste worse. He could only watch the two hooligan wraiths and want what they were chewing.

He was not tasked with anything truly hard. He was an array master, useful, yes, but not the kind of useful that earned extra black tubes.

His salary was a thousand tubes. Even that felt obscene.

With each stone he felt his mind expand a little, permanently, as if the world grew extra edges he could finally see.

Once, the thought came to him. ’Deceive Radeon. Skim more. Hide a handful.’

He shoved it away at once and let out a dry, wry smile.

If he tried, Radeon would have sold him while he counted the money he was sold for.