Richie's brain whirred into action as thousands of possible solutions to the situation he was In flashed by.
They ranged from gently pushing the death energy out of his body, to blowing his body up and praying for survival.
Death energy is an 'element' elements are basically just forces of nature, like earth or fire, but, the life and death energies were also classified as elements.
The life element, as the name suggests, can be used to restore vitality, heal people, or, in special cases, bring the dead back to life.
The 'Wood' element Is a branch of the life element as it is able to restore vitality in plants and even grow plants.
The death element, however was the direct opposite of the life element, anything ot touches would have its vitality corroded away, when a human touches the death element, the death energy will slowly spread around the body whilst simultaneously destroying all of the vitality in the body.
Obviously, this would cause great pain as the body's life is basically being sucked out of it.
However, death energy can also be used to bring the dead back to life, or even raise skeletons, of course this would require great mastery in the death element.
The best way to prevent death energy from corroding your body would be to directly cut of the 'infected' body part, in Richie's case, his arm.
Of course Richie did not know this and the system couldn't be bothered helping him, it would help his mentality grow.
Richie's arm was beginning to wither, this greatly alarmed Richie, if he didn't find a way to neutralise the death energy, or just straight up destroy it, he would die.
" This is all because of my god Damn carelessness, just because I have a system, doesn't mean I'm invincible" Richie shouted to himself whilst making an oath to himself to never let his guard down in unknown places.
The system even warned him about the dangers, yet he was barely even listening, he had the mentality of a naive child who thinks he is invincible.
Suddenly, unbeknownst to Richie, something inside his body stirred, somthing so powerful that even the system couldn't detect it, somthing of primordial origin.
Richie suddenly became extremely clear headed, he felt like he could see everything around him in greater depth and even understand things better.
He remembered, that years ago, his father, told him, along with most of the other clan members about how to survive a death energy encounter, the reason he didn't remember this sooner was because that was the very same day his mother died, he had completely blocked out all memory of that day.
Yet with the sudden increase in mental clarity, that blockade Richie placed in his memorys had faded by quite a bit. He started to accept that his mother had died, instead of denying it and casting it to the deepest place in his memorys.
In summary, his father basically said that if anyone ever came in contact with death energy, the only way to prevent death was to cut of the infected body part.
Upon remembering this, Richie bought a small dagger from the system for an exorbitant price of 100 gold, he then looked at his withered arm, and the dagger in his hands, he didn't want to cut his arm off, but it seemed he had no choice.
He slashed the dagger down on his upper arm, closed his eyes and gritted his teeth, the dagger went through his arm like butter. It seemed the systems prices weren't that exorbitant after all.
" AAAARGH" Richie's whole body trembled in pain as he fell to the floor gasping for pain and just barely covering the wound with his left hand.
The blood was coming out of his body like a burst dam, Richie started to feel dizzy, but then, he got a system notification.
- Task completed-
- you received: minor death energy immunity and wound cauterization-
- bonus reward: 20 alchemy tokens-
Right after that, Richie felt his arm socket sear in pain as the wound was cauterized, the pain was horrible, but having been knocked out a few times over the last few days, he had built a slight resistance to it and barely, just barely managed to retain consciousness.
A few minutes later, when the lingering pain of having your hand withered away stopped, Richie managed to open his eyes, the first thing he saw was his bleeding hand, which was now completely black.
He could feel the death energy coming off of his severed arm.
- Let me get rid of that for you- the system then burnt Richie's severed arm into ash.
After a while, Richie was able to stand up and fully observe what had happened. His wound was completely sealed, with a powerful enough pill, he would be able to regrow his arm.
He then cursed the living hell out of the protruding rock before proceeding onwards very slowly.
He was now being a lot more careful and actually managed to spot some hidden rocks that he wouldn't have noticed of he wasn't moving so slowly.
Then suddenly, after he turned a corner, he saw a sort of blue diamond like stone embedded into the wall, just a single stone, all alone.
" System, do you know what this is?"
-Wow, it seems like you've stumbled upon a spirituality gem-
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