Lifestealer: Cursed Healer [A LITRPG Isekai Survival]

Symon swallowed past the lump in his throat as he looked at the ground far, far below him. He didn't have a phobia of heights, but you didn't have to be afraid of knives to not want to get stabbed with one. At least he wasn't as bad as Keelgrave.

<Gods below, kid, quit fucking looking!>

Symon took another glance at the ground below. It was a wonder he was still alive with the giant scoop taken out of his chest, so a fall like that would be the end of him.

"Ugh, cut it out, you're just making me more nervous," he complained back as he adjusted his grip on the stone. If he let go, that would be it for his second life. His hands were already sweaty enough without Keelgrave freaking out in his ear.

Climbing down the cavern wall was a risky endeavour, though it wasn't as bad as it would appear at first glance. For one, he only had to get down a dozen or so metres to the cave that hopefully had some vitality in it, not all the way down to the forest far below him.

His destination had a slight ledge as well, so hopefully he'd be able to catch himself if he-

No, Symon, don't think about falling!

Instead, he looked up at where he'd come from, locking eyes with Entisse. She gave him a nod that he chose to interpret as reassuring before skittering down the wall at rapid speed.

Her long but skinny fingers wound their way into the cracks in the wall, her claws filling in where there wasn't a convenient handhold as she came to a stop next to him. "Do you feel anything?" she hissed softly.

"No, not yet," he whispered back equally quietly. If there was something in there like they suspected, they didn't want it to know they were there.

The very end of his thread barely reached the very top of the entrance. It could stretch through physical objects, though, so he could stay on the wall above the entrance and reach a good distance in. That was exactly what he did, taking tiny movements down, waiting a few moments to see if the thread found anything, then repeating the process.

By now, his arms were protesting strongly. The damage to his chest — in particular, his pectoral muscles — made it almost impossible to raise his arms above his head, so he was forced to awkwardly hug the wall and slowly shuffle his way down.

It was slow going, but he did have superhuman endurance, even if only barely. That meant that, before too long, he finally got a hit.

He let out an involuntary sigh of relief as a sudden surge of vitality surged through the thread and into his vessel. It disappeared almost as fast as it entered, like a glass of water poured into the desert sands, but the result was immediate. He maintained the presence of mind to direct the healing to his heart, holding the vitality in place and ensuring it didn't fly off to his more minor injuries. That was relative to his non-functioning heart, as a normal person without any magical help would have died from blood loss ten times over already.

He was familiar with the qualitative difference between vitality from plants and vitality from animals, but this was a whole extra step above. He only maintained the connection for a few seconds before it cut out on its own, but his vessel had already noticeably filled. It emptied out again, much slower than how it had filled, but he'd gotten exactly what he wanted by the time the last of the vitality was used.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Another sigh escaped from his lips. "Oh God, thank you," Symon muttered. He wasn't a religious man, but his current circumstances called for an exception. He hadn't realised how worried he'd been, his mind shunting off the unnecessary emotions to focus on the practical. It was an important skill for a paramedic, but he'd never thought he'd be using it like this.

Perhaps Entisse's magic had done something here as well. After all, panic was a physical response, and he'd been lacking the necessary organ for an important physiological component of it. He still had adrenaline, presumably, but he felt like having no heartbeat could be kind of relaxing, in a twisted sort of way.

Kind of funny, I suppose, Symon thought to himself with a smile. He hadn't realised how oddly muted his emotions had felt until his heart was back. Shouldn't he have been freaking out a bit more?

Either way, the relief of no longer having the hourglass that was Entisse's mana ticking away multiplied with the relief his wounds felt. The pain had been a dull throb, barely worth commenting on in the grand scheme of things, and now it was even slighter. The gaping wound still exposed more of his internal organs than he would have liked, but at least said organs were working properly now.

He looked up at Entisse and gave her a confident nod. She mirrored the action simultaneously. Of course, she would be able to notice when his blood started flowing naturally again without being told.

Symon repeated the entire process several times more, draining three distinct sources of vitality. None of them lasted as long as the first, though the vitality was equally rich and went a long way towards fixing him completely.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

The rib bones, previously creeping out from the edges of the wound like teeth, grew out in their entirety before meeting together and forming his sternum. His muscles slithered along behind, anchoring themselves to the bone and making his climb much more manageable, even if he'd likely never be completely at ease hundreds of metres in the air.

Finally, the missing skin began regrowing over where the wound was, though a small section in the middle was still left bare. It was purely cosmetic, though, and didn't even cause him any pain.

His healing always took more time when it needed to replace missing sections and couldn't simply fuse parts back together, but he was grateful that it only took a minute or so to finish. He still remembered the time it took several minutes just to regrow a few fingers, and now it was a quarter of the time for a more grievous injury. One of the benefits of getting Idealise to the First Step, he supposed.

Seize had scouted out the cave in the wall as much as it could. He could be sure there was nothing living in the front anymore, but he had no way of knowing if anything existed out of its range without physically checking. They both could have just continued their climb down, but he didn't want to leave a potential threat behind — or above them. Plus, he could only hold onto the wall for so long before his muscles gave out. While he wasn't in any immediate danger of that, he was more than happy to take frequent pit stops now that he didn't have a personal sword of Damocles.

He let out a soft sigh of relief as he lowered himself onto the small ledge outside the cave, rubbing feeling back into his arms. Entisse slid down beside him with sinuous grace, her large eyes already penetrating the gloom of the cave.

While the large crystals on the roof of the main cavern cast a close approximation of daylight onto the cavern walls and forest below, it didn't reach into the caves. This one was barren of any crystals inside it, so he was effectively blind.

Not with all his senses, though. His thread reached out to its full length, poking around inside the cave and coming up empty. He strained his hearing, though it had similar results. He could only hear Entisse's gentle breathing as she stared into the gloom; she wasn't reacting, so there couldn't have been anything dangerous.

The only thing he could notice from the cave was the subtle scent of rot.

"Something dead in there?" Symon asked softly. "Something that I didn't just kill, I mean."

She stared into the dark for a few moments longer before replying. "Yes. There are no threats, follow me." With that, she strode forward confidently, though she had to twist and crouch a little to make it through the entrance.

He followed behind her, though his steps were much more cautious. One hand was held forward, allowing his thread to stretch out, while the other rested on the pommel of his sword. It might have been short, but it was still far too unwieldy for such a cramped space.

And it was cramped.

Even despite sucking his chest and stomach in as far as he was able to, the rough stone of the entrance still pressed painfully against the exposed muscle where his skin hadn't finished regrowing. He made it through, but not without plenty of cursing under his breath.

Much like with heights, Symon wasn't claustrophobic, but it wasn't irrational to be a little worried about getting stuck. His magic could get him out of many situations, but getting buried alive wasn't one of them. In fact, it would be one of the worst possible scenarios he could find himself in, something where raw healing wouldn't be enough to get him out of a sticky situation.

With a shiver at the intrusive thought of drowning in a lightless abyss, Symon popped fully into the cave. It was still dark inside, but his eyes had been given time to adjust by his slow journey through the opening. While there weren't any crystals inside, enough light came in from the ones that glimmered like the Suns to barely see vague outlines.

As expected, it was a narrow hole in the wall, perhaps a dozen metres in total length, though it narrowed to a point where he was unable to continue any further — not that he tried. As he'd also expected, there was something long-dead rotting in the cave. It was a four-legged animal around the same size as him, though the decay was so advanced and the lighting so poor that he couldn't tell exactly what it was. It would have been a tight fit, but the squat creature could have squeezed through the entrance if it really wanted to.

It was skeletal, with only tiny scraps of putrefying flesh and tufts of dull, silvery grey fur clinging to the bones. It was probably a wolf or a small bear, and he imagined the large claws on its front paws would have helped it to climb the cavern walls, but he filed that away as a useless tidbit in the depths of his brain.

Whatever it was, it was far too old to have been killed by Symon. Entisse had immediately spotted the true victims of Symon's need for vitality, but only pointed them out when he was about to step on one.

"Ugh, of course it had to be spiders," Symon sighed. They were small — by the standards of Cathar, which meant they were about as big as his outstretched hand — and were clustered around the larger dead creature, their legs all curled up over their smooth bodies.

At least they don't have those creepy hairs…

Other than their size, they looked like normal enough spiders. Eight legs, a creepy face, and large fangs — exactly what he'd been expecting. He frowned slightly as he considered its mouthparts, a familiar yet foreign sensation nudging his brain. They were chelicerae, not really fangs, it was telling him.

He realised what was happening quickly enough. Anatomy was one of those skills that gave and helped you retain specific knowledge; he wasn't sure which was happening now. Maybe it was something he'd read about years ago, and now the skill was reminding him of it, or maybe it had simply implanted that knowledge into his brain.

The skill seemed more effective on humans and human-ish people like Entisse, though it had still worked on beasts and monsters. This gap in effectiveness was likely due to his existing knowledge base being centred around people, not animals. The skill was suggesting something else to him as well, though it seemed unsure.

"Do you recognise these?" Symon asked.

"They are spiders," Entisse hissed back.

"Yes, yes, I can tell that. What I was getting at was… are they supposed to be this small?"

She shrugged, the motion of her grey skin difficult to make out in the gloom. "Perhaps. Perhaps not."

"I don't think these little spiders could take down a creature this big, not with how quickly my magic killed them. And they couldn't have scavenged it from the forest floor and brought it up; no way they're strong enough. So… what would be powerful enough to either kill that thing, or steal it from something else and drag it hundreds of metres up the cavern wall?"

Entisse bent double and scooped up one of the spiders, causing Symon to shudder. She moved the legs this way and that, bending them to their extremes. "Soft and flexible. They are young."

With a skittering sense of dread, Symon slowly turned to face the cave entrance.