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Chapter 357: Chapter 357: Comatose Spirits

Now that the immediate distraction of Kira and Zeyra bickering over him was gone, he had a quiet moment to actually figure out how broken he was. He took a slow, shallow breath, wincing as the thick, lightning scar across his stomach pulled tight, and shifted his focus entirely inward.

He sank his consciousness down into his solar plexus.

Usually, looking into his Sun Core was like staring at a raging, golden furnace. It was always loud, always moving, pumping thick, volatile dawn essence through his meridians like a high-pressure engine.

Right now? It looked like a dried-up crater.

The pathways were completely scorched. The walls of his core felt brittle, like dried clay left out in the sun too long. But worse than the empty core was the absolute, dead silence coming from his spirits.

Sol mentally reached out to the Dreadwing. The predatory, fast-twitch Insect was usually a bundle of crackling, high-tension static resting in the back of his mind. Always eager, always ready to flood his nerves with impossible speed. Now, he couldn’t feel a single spark. It was completely, entirely dormant. Comatose.

He shifted his focus to the Lord Great Badger. The massive, terrestrial spirit that usually felt like a heavy, immovable anchor in his chest was just as dead to the world. The tectonic hum was gone.

Sol let out a harsh, dry exhale. He wasn’t surprised. Honestly, it was a damn miracle they hadn’t completely shattered.

During those last few frantic seconds under the Rockhorn Beetle, he hadn’t just drained his own reserves. When his core ran dry, he had ruthlessly turned inward. He had reached into the foundational anchors of the spirits themselves and forcibly wrung them out like wet rags, cannibalizing their latent, residual energy just to fuel that last attack.

If he had pushed them even a fraction of a percent harder, the spiritual anchors would have snapped. The spirits would have dissipated, and his foundation would have permanently collapsed. He would have been crippled for life, assuming the beetle didn’t kill him first.

Guess I owe them a massive meal when they wake up, Sol thought grimly.

He pulled his focus back to his physical flesh.

He was “almost” alright. The bleeding was stopped. The puncture wound hadn’t hit any vital organs. His bones weren’t broken.

And for that, he had to give absolute, profound credit to his past self. When he first formed his core, he could have picked some flashy, highly offensive spirit. But he picked up Dreadwing and the Great Badger. He picked the ultimate reflexes and ugly, heavy, defensive tank.

If he hadn’t leveled up the Great Badger to Layer 1 right in the middle of that siege, he would be a rotting corpse. Period. The sheer, absurd physical density and the overdrive cellular recovery the earth-aspected beast provided had kept his ribs from snapping like twigs under the beetle’s spike. It was the only reason his body hadn’t just given up and died from the shock.

But there was a big, glaring reason he used the word “almost.”

As the adrenaline completely washed out of his system, a wave of profound, suffocating emptiness crashed down on him. It wasn’t just being tired. It was a bone-deep, hollow weakness. Without the constant, humming pressure of essence in his veins to support his heavy muscle density, his own body felt like a lead prison.

He tried to shift his legs under the furs. They barely twitched. A cold sweat broke out across his forehead. He couldn’t even sit up straight for more than a few minutes without his spine feeling like it was going to fold in half.

He was completely, utterly drained. A helpless sack of meat lying in a bed.

And honestly, Sol hated it. He hated feeling vulnerable. In the Great Orrath, weakness was an open invitation to get eaten, whether by beasts or by ambitious tribesmen.

Just as he was contemplating forcing himself out of bed anyway through sheer spite, the heavy wooden door to his room creaked open.

Sol tensed instinctively, his eyes snapping to the doorway.

Thankfully, it wasn’t Kira or Zeyra coming back for round two, seems like they were feeling too embarrassed to come. He couldn’t help almost laugh imagining their sulking faces.

Anyways, three figures stepped into the dim room. They weren’t wearing armor of the Spirit Warriors. They wore loose, draped robes made of woven gray fibers, heavily decorated with small animal skulls, dried roots, and intricate bone piercings. Their faces were painted with sharp, angular white lines, and the smell of bitter herbs and burning sage rolled off them in thick, suffocating waves.

He didn’t even have to guess and knew that they were shamans. The Veynar tribe’s resident mystics and healers. And now that he knew what kind of powers High Shaman Zephyra possessed he didn’t take them lightly.

The lead shaman, an older woman with a face like a dried apple and eyes that looked absurdly sharp, compared to her soft demeanor, stepped up to the side of the bed. She didn’t ask for permission. She just reached out a bony, ash-stained hand and firmly grabbed Sol’s wrist, pressing two fingers against his pulse point.

Sol didn’t pull away, mostly because he didn’t have the strength to do it without looking pathetic, but he kept his silver-crimson eyes locked on the old woman’s face.

A pulse of weird, cold energy shot from the shaman’s fingers straight up Sol’s arm. It felt like freezing water trickling through his dry veins. The shaman closed her eyes, mapping out the damage inside Sol’s body.

He tensed up for a moment but then he noticed that despite her efforts, she could only look at the peripheral veins, not deep inside his body. He didn’t know the reason, but it was greatly welcome.

A few seconds later, the old woman’s eyes snapped open, she frowned a bit, because as earlier she couldn’t look deep in his body, like some mysterious force was preventing it, not like she wanted to investigate, as it was a major taboo.