Chapter 688: Nothing But A Waste
"Hopefully this can keep me going for the rest of the assessment," Liam muttered under his breath as he pressed a clump of mashed leaves deeper into the wound on his thigh.
During the earlier clash, when he had been struck and sent tearing through the forest like a projectile, a jagged tree branch had punched straight through the muscle of his right thigh. The wood had snapped off inside for a moment before being forced out by the impact that followed, leaving behind a deep, uneven puncture that still bled steadily despite everything he had done so far.
Now that the fight was over, if it could even be called "over" in a place like this, Liam had no choice but to address it properly.
Normally, magic would have taken care of something like this almost instantly. A competent healer, or even someone with a moderate affinity, would have closed the wound, restored the torn tissue, and left behind little more than a scar at worst.
But Liam wasn't built for that.
He had no healing affinity.
And the one basic spell he did know, Mend, was barely enough to keep the damage from worsening. He had already used it once, forcing the spell to seal the smallest ruptures within the wound, but that only slowed the bleeding.
The rest… was on him.
That was why he had turned to something far older and simpler. Something far more reliable in a place like this.
Liam pressed the crushed mixture deeper into the wound, his jaw tightening slightly as the paste made contact with raw flesh. The sting was immediate; sharp and burning, but expected. The leaves he had gathered weren't random. They were selected deliberately, based on fragments of knowledge he had inherited.
Memories that weren't entirely his.
Back when Aesmiruis had granted him access to Marcus's memories, there had been moments where his father had not yet mastered dark magic, where he had survived on something far more grounded.