Chapter 639
Chapter 639
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Translator: Ebonarch
Chapter: 639
Chapter Title: Night City (2)
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1.
Si-woo.
The first man in witch history to create self-magic.
A slave who publicly saved an apprentice witch from the Gemernai Count Family out of peril.
Baron Marygold's object of unrequited love.
After becoming a witch, Ye-bin's first patient and first intimate partner.
And soon after, the man with whom she shared a steamy one-night stand.
When it came to a tumultuous life, he had lived one far more eventful than Ye-bin's.
Even amid her busy days at the clinic, he was someone she occasionally longed to see.
She wasn't entirely sure about romantic feelings, but the day they spent holed up in bed from dawn till dusk had felt incredibly good.
Why he was here in this city of crime?
How he had been faring all this time?
None of that piqued her curiosity in the slightest.
She shrugged off the house owner's threat that she'd kill her if she failed to save him.
She was no longer the immature girl who had selfishly indulged in a relationship originally meant for treatment.
Now she was a proper healer, walking the path of salvation with that memory as the greatest lesson never to repeat.
"How did this happen?"
Ye-bin pulled up her mana with a serious expression and examined his condition.
A vast amount of information—even cutting-edge medical devices couldn't detect—seeped into her mind like an infusion.
First off, she was utterly shocked.
Whatever had transpired in the interim, he now wielded self-magic rivaling that of a 21st Hierarchy great witch.
His left hand being a prosthetic suggested his life hadn't been smooth sailing since then either.
She also sensed a slight distortion in the overall harmony of his ether body, but...
It wasn't an immediate crisis.
And it didn't seem like a simple enough issue to diagnose with a cursory spell.
"Slashed by a sword. I stopped the bleeding."
Ye-bin turned her head slightly to inspect the wound.
As Linne had said, it was straightforward excessive bleeding.
A diagonal sword cut across the side of his neck.
The bleeding had stopped, and the artery was at least crudely rejoined.
Whether from the diagnostic results or the sturdiness of his ether body, there was no sign of immediate deterioration.
And since the bleeding had been stanched right away, no irreversible aftereffects seemed likely.
Only then did she let out a deep sigh of relief.
"No threat to his life. But you'll need to prepare something."
"Name it."
"Blood. Human or beast, doesn't matter. We need to replace what he lost—roughly 100mL... Wait! What are you doing?"
Ye-bin's voice cracked, her cool briefing of countermeasures shattering.
The woman had drawn a blade from the sheath always at her waist, rolled up her sleeve without a second thought, and sliced into her own forearm.
"Use it."
So sharp was the edge that a single swipe sent blood gushing from the gaping wound.
It had to hurt, yet the house owner didn't so much as flinch.
Ye-bin had witnessed grotesque corpses on battlefields—sights she'd rather forget for life.
This was nothing to shriek over.
"Chicken blood would have sufficed..."
Flustered by the absurdity yet maintaining her composure, she collected the blood, multiplied it to 600mL, and transfused it.
A crude whole-blood transfusion with no type matching or cell separation, but it posed no issue.
It was basic procedure for Ye-bin.
As the blood began to circulate, Si-woo's complexion visibly improved.
Ye-bin wrapped a light bandage around his wound to conclude the treatment.
His temperature and pulse were on the mend; a day or two of rest, and he'd be fine.
"All done."
"Call me when he wakes. I'll be at the training grounds."
"One moment."
Ye-bin grabbed Linne, who was turning to leave after dropping her curt instructions.
Captive or not, her status was ambiguously in-between, but crossing this brusque house owner could send her plummeting to rock bottom at any moment.
Well aware of that, Ye-bin had always acted with utmost caution.
"Stay still and you're halfway there"—an ancestral proverb encapsulating timeless wisdom.
"Please let me see your wound too, Lady Witch."
How could a healer pretend not to notice a patient's injury?
Even from Linne's retreating back, Ye-bin could tell her physical balance was off-kilter.
The woman always walked ramrod straight without the slightest sway, making the deviation all the more stark.
Probably her right arm.
Linne, her black eyes inscrutably scanning Ye-bin, silently pulled aside one side of her training garb.
Ye-bin's pupils narrowed.
A long laceration across her right triceps.
At first glance, it looked no worse than Si-woo's injury.
And considering how far the shoulder was from the vital carotid, it wasn't particularly grave.
"Why didn't you say anything about this...?"
But things weren't always what they seemed.
Despite the relatively intact exterior, the ether structure in her right shoulder was shattered inside—if struck, it would crumble from within like a cookie.
Ye-bin had never seen an injury of this form before.
It was slowly mending via Linne's regenerative self-magic, resembling exposure to massive radiation.
Still, it didn't look irreparable.
Her natural healing was already underway, so Ye-bin merely set the key alignment points and stabilized it.
"There. An elixir would make recovery far smoother."
"Make one. You remember what I mentioned earlier. Training grounds."
"Avoid intense training or mana use for the time being."
"I'll manage."
Ignoring Ye-bin's plea, Linne straightened her disheveled attire and headed straight for the training grounds.
"Haa..."
No word of thanks.
It confirmed why she'd been kept in the mansion instead of auctioned off since her abduction: as an emergency potion supplier.
Ye-bin exhaled the breath she'd been holding and gazed at Si-woo, who breathed shallowly with a pallid face.
"At least I've got a comrade now."
Though calling it that felt ambiguous.
No one knew the circumstances of his capture or the house owner's true aims.
The fragile balance of her daily life might veer into uncharted chaos.
Yet in this vast, empty old mansion—with only Linne and her—having someone to lean on brought Ye-bin a sliver of comfort.
"Well then... shall we run a full diagnostic?"
Ye-bin briefly stepped away to retrieve her bag.
Inside was a rolled-up white cloth and mana chalk from a Gemernai magic tool shop.
Before tailoring the cloth, she would sketch a situation-specific magic circle for a precise examination.
During the earlier cursory check, Ye-bin had sensed a "twist."
What was it?
An indescribable sense of incongruity? Distortion?
She had tuned ether bodies for civilians and witches alike at the clinic, yet this unique dissonance was unlike anything she'd encountered.
But her instincts screamed that this anomaly posed a greater threat than the carotid hemorrhage.
Still merely 19th Hierarchy, Ye-bin had poured everything into healing magic—her prowess there rivaled that of great witches.
She swiftly inscribed a magic circle on the unfurled cloth, levitated his body telekinetically onto it, and placed a hand on his forehead.
Back then, reconstructing his physically shattered brain had necessitated intimacy, but for a precise diagnostic, this sufficed.
A torrent of information unfolded in an instant.
Dense details about his entire body poured into Ye-bin's perceptual field.
Like data loading, the influx was staggeringly bizarre.
As expected, Si-woo wielded magic commensurate with great witch caliber.
Even more astonishing: he possessed multiple self-magics of disparate systems and natures.
She knew his past high-functioning autism state had let him knead new spells with ease.
But after Duke Keter's intervention, his subconscious had sunk beneath the surface.
When Ye-bin reunited with him, he was scraping 15th Hierarchy at best.
In other words, these were spells he'd newly forged since then.
To construct great witch-level self-magic in under two years?
This transcended mere genius.
Even Duke Keter—the freak of nature—likely hadn't progressed this fast.
But this power was no free gift.
"Poor guy..."
She could see the record of injuries and scars he'd endured.
To sum it up in one word: battered.
No organ had escaped fatal damage.
Injuries that would have killed an ordinary human several times over layered like fallen autumn leaves.
Well, as the world's first male witch, he'd doubtless been hounded by witches of every stripe, enduring all manner of ordeals.
A surge of maternal instinct welled up.
"Nngh..."
Ye-bin concluded the precise examination with utmost care.
Thankfully, no sudden subconscious eruption or lockout rejection like before.
Yet in terms of results, it was a failure.
"What in the world...?"
To Ye-bin's eyes, his condition was unmistakably abnormal.
The root of his prosthetic's malfunction was surely tied to this issue.
But paradoxically, she couldn't pinpoint what was wrong.
Unraveling it further would require highly specialized equipment—impossible in this captured mansion.
"Ugh..."
At that moment, a faint groan escaped as Si-woo opened his eyes.
Ye-bin tensed, fearing a repeat of the prior lunging incident.
But no.
His gaze was far gentler now, his eyes widening the instant they landed on her face.
"Ye-bin...?"
"Long time no see, Si-woo."
It was a reunion after two years, one where she couldn't greet him with a carefree smile.