Chapter 588.1: I Did Everything I Could (1)
Roel Ascart hated taking risks.
This fact was known to everyone around him. It was a habit he had cultivated over the years when his sole focus had been to survive his death flags. However, that wasn’t an ironclad law.
When the cost of averting danger was greater than what he could bear, he would turn into a gambler who would stake everything he had even when the chances of success were slim.
Such was the case with Wilhelmina.
He had known from the moment she muttered her final farewell that he couldn’t lose her, so he racked his brain and finally found a solution.
Even Origin Level 1 transcendents couldn’t survive after losing half their hearts, so that was a key problem Roel had to resolve if he wanted to save Wilhelmina. The only feasible solution he could think of was to transfer a portion of his heart to her through the vow.
As long as their constitutions were compatible, there was a chance that his heart, with its tremendous regeneration ability, could fuse with the remaining half of her heart and stimulate her recovery. That was the only way to drag Wilhelmina back from the Death God’s arms.
There was just one small problem: Roel couldn’t be certain that he would survive the transplant.
Half his heart had been stolen by the Deviant Sovereign in the earlier battle, and he hadn’t recovered from that blow yet. Severing a portion of his heart at this juncture was no different from courting death. It was such an insane idea that he was shocked he even thought about it.
But he still chose to go through with it after some thought.
He was willing to undertake any risk as long as he could save Wilhelmina. Besides, he wanted to trust Her and the Indestructible Body She had forged for him.
“Mother, I’m sorry… but please look after me,” he murmured.
He sliced his chest open and severed his remaining half-heart into two. The excruciating pain that followed nearly swept away his consciousness. Blood splattered over the ground and even on his face. His clear mind quickly turned groggy.
His mind began spinning as coldness seeped under his skin. There was a persistent buzz in his ears. His already ailing physical functions swiftly deteriorated, plunging him further into danger. Even so, he determinedly took out his sliced quarter-heart with a trembling hand.
Black spots hindered his vision from his excessive blood loss, but those hardly discouraged him. He first wrapped the quarter-heart with his mana before ripping it out. He then slowly delivered it into Wilhelmina’s chest through her glaring wound.
The two hearts finally touched.
Please beat! Roel fervently prayed with his hazy mind.
As if answering his prayers, Indestructible Body finally activated a short moment later, and his quarter-heart fused with Wilhelmina’s half-heart. Her heart began to heal.
It worked!
The nearly indiscernible heartbeat he felt against his palm brought a faint smile onto Roel’s lips. Then, his hands slipped away from her as he blacked out.
…
Some time later, Roel woke up amidst darkness. He anxiously scanned his surroundings and found that he was still inside that dimly lit stone chamber. A moment later, he belatedly realized that his vision had recovered to normal.
Did I make the correct bet?
Roel’s heart was finally set at ease upon realizing that he was still alive. He earnestly thanked the Mother Goddess he had met in the Witness State.
A mother’s love was truly great.
The Mother Goddess had been thorough in reconstructing the body of Her most beloved child. He had no doubt that he had only survived this ordeal thanks to the Indestructible Body She had forged with the treasures gathered from the other races.
Had it been his past body, he would have been dead the moment the Deviant Sovereign stole half his heart. He wouldn’t have been able to put up a fight, let alone survive till Wilhelmina’s arrival and last till their eventual escape.
I owe Mother half my life and Mina the other half, Roel thought with a smile as he placed his hand on Wilhelmina’s chest and felt her faint heartbeat.
It was already the best-case scenario that the transplant worked and he survived the shock of losing another quarter of his heart, but it would be awfully naive of him to assume that things could only get better from this point onward.
Roel was still alive, but that was all there was to it.
With only a quarter of his heart remaining, it was nigh impossible for him to make a full recovery. As if it wasn’t hard enough for him to maintain his current condition, the side effects of his Crown’s Stones were also starting to settle in.
The side effects from Time Devourer and Silver Devourer weren’t severe, as he hadn’t used them much in the earlier battle, but the same couldn’t be said about Glacial Touch and Magma Core. While he was unconscious, his body had already turned into a battlefield of ice and fire.
Biting chill that froze his blood and blazing heat that seared his organs vied for supremacy in his body, putting him through torture worse than anything he had ever suffered. To make things worse, he couldn’t allow himself to pass out.
He wasn’t the only one facing peril here; Wilhelmina was in the same plight.
While he had alleviated Wilhelmina’s greatest issue—her partially missing heart—her other injuries were fatal enough to take her life too, from the glaring wound that marred her chest, to her burning organs, to the armor splinters piercing through her body. The enhanced physical resilience bestowed on her by her Dragon Bloodline could only do so much to help her.
I have to conduct some emergency treatment to stabilize her condition.
Roel pulled himself together and jogged his memory about the plan he had come up with before he fell unconscious. He slowly propped himself up while hissing in pain. It was hard to tell how much time had passed in this dark chamber, but the blood pool on the ground hadn’t dried yet.
Probably a few hours? he deduced.
Turning his attention to Wilhelmina, the first thing he noticed was that the recovery rate of Wilhelmina’s glaring chest wound was visibly faster than that of other areas, possibly due to the effects of his transplanted quarter-heart.
Roel was surprised, but at the same time, he breathed a sigh of relief.
Wilhelmina had sustained that glaring chest wound while protecting him from the sword-bearing deviant’s attack. The crimson mana imbued in its sword hindered one’s recovery ability, and that was the reason his right arm hadn’t recovered yet.
“Is this the prowess of her Sword Intent?” Roel murmured under his breath.
He wondered if this was a sign that the world was looking after her. If not for her surpassing her limits, there was no way he could have saved her even after transplanting his heart over.
In any case, it was a relief that Wilhelmina’s supreme mastery of swordsmanship had allowed her to overcome the threat of her greatest wound. With that, he turned his attention toward the second problem—her charred organs.
Roel was one of the few all-rounder transcendents, but recovery spells were not in his field of expertise. Weaker recovery spells that were within his means to pull off wouldn’t do a thing to wounds of such severity. Artasia could cast advanced recovery spells, but that option was currently out of the question, since his Crown Origin Attribute was still in an unstable state.
But that didn’t mean that he was out of options yet.
For instance, he could always emulate his previous success with his heart transplant and do the same with his liver, spleen, and other organs; that should resuscitate Wilhelmina’s ailing organs. The problem was that he would be saying goodbye to this world.
The Mother Goddess hadn’t given him ‘Indestructible Body’ for him to slice up his organs and distribute them to others. As much as Wilhelmina was on the verge of death, he barely had a breath left in him too; he would really pass away at this rate.
Heck, even lifting the knife is beyond me right now!
Roel shook his head, knowing that he could never perform a precise cut on his organ with the frail condition he was currently in. At the same time, he was also hesitant to transplant more of his organs into her out of fear of transplant rejection.
While the world recognized them as the same under the effects of the Shadow Warrior Armor and the vow, Roel and Wilhelmina were ultimately separate individuals. In the first place, they weren’t even of the same gender! His earlier success in transplanting his quarter-heart was already a huge stroke of luck; he would be pushing his luck to do the same for the other organs.
It could be possible that Wilhelmina’s body was far too weakened at the moment to reject the transplanted organs, but that might change once she started recovering. Should all her organs suffer transplant rejection all at once, she would simply leap from one danger to another.
With these considerations in mind, Roel had no choice but to refute the simplest but also riskiest organ transplant plan. Instead, he opted for a more conservative means—blood transfusion.
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