Lifestealer: Cursed Healer [A LITRPG Isekai Survival]

Owie, Symon thought to himself, my everything hurts.

<I bet it does, you godsdamned fool! What were you thinking!? You threw me off a RATSFUCKED MOUNTAIN!> Keelgrave shouted into his mind.

Symon rested in the comforting embrace of darkness. There wasn't a single part of his body he could point to and say it wasn't in pain, which made assessing himself quite difficult. It was much easier to just lie down and rest, anyway. Great, this guy again. Can't he just leave me alone?

<I can hear you, you brain-damaged idiot!>

Wow, I thought he was getting nicer in his old age, but maybe not…

<No, godsdamnit, you cracked your skull open and gave yourself brain damage!>

Oh.

Something about the tone of Keelgrave's words got through Symon's clouded consciousness, enough to make him direct the vitality pulsing through his abused body upwards, once he remembered how to do so. It felt like he was wearing oven mittens and trying to sew up a wound on an ant, but he managed to push a tiny trickle in the right direction. After a few motes reached his head and began seeping into his brain, the process quickly became easier.

"Gurghhhh," he groaned aloud, suddenly realising that his face was in no condition to form proper words. Now that his mind was as clear as it could reasonably get given the circumstances, the full, unrestricted pain of his shattered body slammed into him, forcing him to relinquish his targeted control over his healing.

Pain Resistance mercilessly kept him conscious, allowing him to experience every nerve screaming at him in some unholy choir. Most pain ebbed and flowed, coming in waves and receding for a time, but not this. It was constant, pressing on his mind and threatening to drag him back into blissful numbness.

It would be so easy to make it stop, too. His Anatomy passive was trying to cram so many different warnings into his brain that he couldn't make sense of a single one, but he knew he was close to the edge. All it would take was a few seconds of holding the vitality in his vessel, and all the pain would go away.

Numbly, he realised he'd forgotten to breathe. He sucked in a gurgling breath through a ruined jaw, filling his lungs with frothy blood and enough oxygen to push the cobwebs around his mind back a little further.

It gave him enough clarity to start panicking properly, but most medical emergencies were merely controlled panic, and he was plenty familiar with those.

As his magical Skills weren't able to assess his condition properly, he used his more mundane ones. First, he opened his eyes — or at least, he tried to. The left one didn't respond at all, while the right one only twitched slightly.

It was the heaviest thing he had ever lifted, but he slowly prised his eye open through will alone.

What he saw made him want to shut it.

He'd seen plenty of horrible injuries over his life, even before coming to Cathar, but this took first place by a long shot. His legs looked like they had been folded behind his head, twisted around a few times, then straightened back out with a hammer. There were so many splinters of bone poking out in so many different directions that he couldn't be sure where they were even meant to be. One of his legs was completely missing from halfway down the calf, for some fucking reason.

He had both his arms, at least, but they were also shattered. The bones were in larger pieces, too, and he had a good view of them as they protruded from his cleanly broken wrists. Judging by the differences in damage, he reasoned he'd landed feet first, then his arms had absorbed the rest of the momentum. He would have hit his head somewhere along the way, too, but he still couldn't remember anything past that initial impact, even after pouring a good amount of vitality into his brain.

Relative to the rest of him, his torso was in the best condition. If left to act on its own, his vessel tended to heal injuries closest to it the most, with his extremities receiving far less vitality. Considering his chest was where his most important organs were — excluding the brain, but Keelgrave would probably say he didn't use that anyway — he considered this a blessing.

Even still, he was hardly healthy. His upper back was all sore from some impact, all the ribs on his left side were broken — plus a couple on the right — and were now introducing themselves to the inside of his lungs.

"Welgch…" he gurgled, reminding himself that he'd smacked his face on something too. It was probably for the best that he couldn't see that. Wait a second, didn't he remember what he hit his head on? Wasn't it… the spider?

"Ogh thuck, da shpider!" he burbled again, his whole body twitching in a panicked frenzy. He had to fix his legs and get the hell out of here before the spider found him and finished him off! Everything else could wait, he just needed to—

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Symon flopped over bonelessly, going from a slumped-over leaning position to lying on his side. He let out a soft oof and a little blood from, well, basically everywhere, as he landed.

His one good eye slowly drifted to what he'd been leaning against.

The giant spider.

Oh.

Its many rage-filled eyes had cooled, though, and their soft glow had dimmed. Blood and acid slowly dripped from its slack, lifeless mouth.

"Yeschhh!" he purled excitedly before devolving into a coughing fit, his lungs squeezing around bits of broken rib with every exhalation.

<Yeah, yeah, you bridged a Step, congratulations,> Keelgrave sighed, sounding not at all congratulatory. <Now, hurry up and heal yourself before something comes along and snacks on us. Oh, and your brain is still fucked up.>

Symon felt fine, at least mentally speaking, but he still listened. This time, he swished the vitality all around the inside of his head until it stopped getting absorbed, then directed it to the crack in his skull that still wept blood.

To his surprise, Keelgrave hadn't just been implying that his brain was in need of fixing by default. "Ugh, thanks. I guess I missed a spot," Symon said mentally after realising he shouldn't be trying to speak aloud. He took the return of such self-preservation to be a good thing.

With his mind now actually back to normal, he had to fix himself up, find Entisse, then… well, one step at a time.

He wasn't sure how long he'd been unconscious for, but judging by the amount of healing he'd gone through, it would only be around a minute or so. He had a full vessel, so the giant spider must have finally died just before he woke up, but that wouldn't last forever.

For the first time, he noticed something odd about the ceiling above him, specifically, the fact that he couldn't see it. Instead, a thick canopy of green leaves blocked his vision. It explained why his vessel was only slowly trending downward, even as the vitality within poured out and into his broken body. They must have bounced or rolled into the edge of the forest.

The extra vitality was nice, but it also meant he was an easy snack for anything living here.

With that in mind, he focused on getting himself just well enough to be mobile. His broken ribs shifted mostly back into place, but he didn't bother fully reconnecting them. More than a few pieces had drifted too far from where they were supposed to be, enough that his magic decided to regrow from the existing pieces instead of connecting the severed bits. It made him question exactly how his magic determined which choice was the best, but he'd have time to think about that later. Hopefully.

Right as he started working on his legs, he was interrupted by the arrival of a deadly predator.

"Hello, Lifebringer. I… am impressed that you survived," Entisse hissed. She did sound impressed, and maybe also a little relieved.

Symon wheezed back at her in a way he hoped was reassuring, not bothering to try forming proper words. His throat and jaw hadn't been declared necessary for movement.

"You must hurry, I am sure worse monsters will investigate the disturbance you caused," she ordered.

Symon rolled his one good eye. What did she think he was doing? Before he could consider voicing his complaints, his knee snapped back into place.

"Ughhhhh," he groaned through suddenly watery eyes. This sucked, but at least it was looking like he'd be able to get most of the way there before needing to move and find more vitality. The plants weren't quite as vitality-rich as the black roses around the manor, but they were still far better than any other plant he'd drained.

There was no point wasting vitality on things that could be helped along more traditionally, so he pushed a little vitality to his throat and mouth and asked for help. "Can 'ew… straigh'en muy legsch?"

She stared at him, and he noticed for the first time that she was coated, head to toe, in blood. It was even in her long hair, and the only clean part was a suspicious oval shape around her mouth. It must have been mostly spider blood, which he was pretty sure wasn't actually a thing, but the giant spider hadn't been a one-to-one match with the familiar Earth arachnids. The clawed, venom-injecting feet were one such unwelcome addition, though he was sure Entisse appreciated the blood.

The translation ring seemed to struggle with Symon's still mushy face, but a quick round of healing cleared things up enough that his second attempt got the point across.

To Entisse's credit, she didn't hesitate to perform the gruesome task. In fact, Symon would have preferred if she had given a countdown, but she immediately knelt at his side, grabbed a hold of the femur protruding from his thigh, and forced it back in.

He clenched his teeth as white hot pain lanced up his leg. A tooth cracked from how hard he gnashed his teeth, but the only noise that escaped his lips was a low groan.

As soon as Entisse had pushed the bone mostly back into place, he flooded the area with vitality. The break glued together quickly, and she was on to the next one before it was even finished healing. Like that, they worked their way all the way down one leg, patching it up to the point it could support his weight without snapping again. His foot had needed to be twisted back around, but all the bones were small enough that they righted themselves quickly.

It was a horribly painful and unsanitary process, but it sure beat lying there until something stumbled across him and gobbled him up. She couldn't retract her claws — they were more like long nails than something a cat would have — so he got a couple of painful pokes inside his legs, but it was still both faster and more vitality efficient to heal that than to have to heal all his bones manually.

After they finished on his right leg, she immediately started on the left, but Symon stopped her.

"Foot's gone," he groaned as he slowly pushed himself to his feet. She watched him struggle impassively for a few moments before offering a hand, which he gladly took. "Thanshks." He cleared his throat, sending something red splattering to the ground. "Ahem, thanks. Uh, what now? We can't stay here."

"Indeed. The impact was loud, and all the bleeding is sure to attract predators. We must set a false trail, stem the bleeding, and double back to somewhere safe."

Symon nodded. It sounded like a good plan. "But… where's somewhere safe?"

The two looked around. At their backs was the cavern wall, and ahead of them was the forest. It was a remarkably mundane-looking forest for being in an underground dungeon, though occasional growths of purple crystal sprouted from trees or the dirt like mushrooms. Something let out an echoing screech from further within its depths.

"Not in there," she said wisely.