Warsinger by James Baldwin (most important books of all time txt) 📕

As we piled on, Istvan rubbed his eyes and grimaced. “Fine… I'll be back in ten minutes.”

“Should be all we need.” Provided Vash didn’t have a heart attack.

They left together, and when they were out of earshot, Vash grunted and lifted his eyebrows as he looked to us. “It's not good, is it?”

“No. You've got a serious case of blood poisoning. The infection's headed toward your heart and you’re about five minutes away from it seizing up,” I said. “I'm surprised you're not dead.”

[You gain 5 Skill EXP: Field Medicine!]

“It’s coming.” Vash scrunched his eyes up and settled back against the pillows. “I can feel Burna's shadow starting to slide over me. Maybe I got too cocky, eh?”

“Ai yai yai, why did you not use a Bloodscour potion: or even better, medicine to regrow the limb?” Masha asked, turning between me and Lazar.

“None of us know how to make those,” I replied. “I'd planned to go to the university and pick up more recipes, but the Demon slaughtered most of the academics and physicians there.”

“No! Even Masterhealer Porov?” Masha gasped.

“Yes. The vampire targeted the university specifically,” Lazar said, pushing his glasses up his nose. “I was trained at the college, but we never covered alchemical medicines...”

“Alchemical?” Vash scowled. “Mana?”

“Perhaps.” Masha poked me. “Hector, I agree with your diagnosis. You're of a level now where you should be able to see what we might be able to treat his infection with.”

She was right. Now that I'd worked out what was wrong, the Augmented Reality options had changed. The light was now in different colors - black around the dead flesh, and bright glowing red everywhere else. When I focused on each area, tooltips appeared. Some of them were specific, giving me potion suggestions - the fever-reducing Goldenseal Tincture, which looked like it would only temporarily bring his temperature down - and the list of ingredients I would need, but one of the potion recipes and name was obscured, and the surgical tooltip was just a row of question marks. I didn't have enough training in the Herbalism and Surgery to know what they were.

“Goldenseal Tincture first, and then… do we have to remove the implanted parts of the prosthetic and take the arm off?” I asked Masha and Lazar, looking back.

“No. Taking it off now will only make the infection spread faster. You must always treat infections before attempting surgery of any kind.” Masha poked a finger at Vash's arm, not touching him, but close enough that he preemptively winced. “All that exposed bone and blood and muscle, no no no. Garlic and Goldenseal aren’t strong enough for blood poisoning that has reached this advanced stage. We must brew Bloodscour to cure this mess, but there is a problem. It requires two rare ingredients I do not have: Cat's Eye Mushrooms, a fungus that only grows in Hercynia, and a herb called King's Grass.”

“You know what...” Breathless, I checked my Inventory. In among the eighty pounds of old armor and all the other random shit adventurers hoarded - bits of cloth, pelts, string, leather - I still had some of the four herbs I'd collected for the Trial of Marantha. I actually still had a lot of the Cat’s Eye Mushrooms - over fifty of them, because I'd taken extra of everything just in case. “I have both of those. How many do you need?”

Masha blinked in surprise. “Five mushrooms, and five bundles of King's Grass.”

I only had six bundles of King’s Grass. It was an essential ingredient in the Dragon's Blood potion I needed to drink every week, but no way in hell was I going to let Vash die. I pulled both herbs from my Inventory and handed the weird bulbous mushrooms and the blue grass to Masha. “Here.”

“Oh... how kind of you.” She clasped them to her chest, and tottered off out of the room. “Come with me, Lord Tuun. I'll show you how to brew this.”

“Take your time, by all means!” Vash called to her.

“Hush. I have to finish debriding this dead tissue anyway,” Lazar scolded, pulling his mask back on.

Chapter 22

I followed Masha out to a trestle table, where she had her trunk open and was deftly arranging her potion-making tools: glassware, a crucible - a thick metal dish on a burner - and a funny-shaped jar called an alembic. When she was finished, she unrolled a cloth full of clean, extremely sharp knives, set up a rack of ingredients in jars, and then carefully removed a large molded container the size of a small cannonball. She removed the straps and carefully opened it, revealing a small, sealed bottle of glowing blue mana. Even with the seal intact, I could feel the heat and energy emanating from the stuff.

“Other than Karalti’s blood, this is the first time I've seen liquid mana up close,” I said, watching Masha set the bottle into a special stand. It was lighter than it looked, the mana inside swirling like brilliant turquoise mercury.

“Well, feast your eyes. That is almost five hundred olbia sitting there in that bottle.” She snapped on a pair of safety goggles.

“How does anyone afford to be a mage in this game?” I scratched my head, wincing.

“Most new sorcerers only need green-grade mana, and at the more advanced level, sixty-percent bluecrystal is sufficient for all but the most complex magic. This is pure Mastercraft-quality liquid bluecrystal, eh? No adulterants, no copper, refined to ninety-nine percent purity. By comparison, Her Holiness bleeds mana that is about seventy percent, according to manuscripts I have read.”

“Yeesh. It's got to be toxic.” I frowned. “What are Vash's odds?”

“For those who can afford the rare ingredients, Bloodscour is one of the safer alchemical brews,” she said, pulling on a leather filter mask that covered her nose and mouth. “We only use a single drop of mana. Listen well, Tuun, because the ingredients must be mixed in a special order. Firstly, you must chop the