The wounds healed.
Not instantly. Not painlessly. But they healed.
Flesh stitched itself back over broken bone. The torn sinews of his shoulder wriggled like worms beneath the skin, pulling taut, sealing the crater left by the monster's fangs. He vomited halfway through it. Not from the pain—but the wrongness of it. The sensation of being undone and remade, like clay shaped by blind hands.
Eudora lay in the mud for hours after the fight, staring up at the bruised sky. The corpses of the beasts around him stank of iron and rot. Their blood had cooled. His was still warm.
Eventually, he stood.
He had no strength. No aura. No refined skill. Just this... curse. This slow-blooming, whispering gift of flesh that refused to die.
The walk back to the Guild was long. Every step bled pain. But every step also made something clear:
He was not the same boy who walked out this morning.
He was something else now.
Inside the Bound Path Guild – Mission Debrief Room
Marx raised an eyebrow as Eudora staggered through the doors, half-covered in blood, his shirt in ribbons and his right hand still twitching.
"You look like shit," Marx said. "But... you're breathing."
Eudora dropped the monster tags on the counter without a word.
The clerk glanced at him, then at the tags, then back at the boy who shouldn't be standing upright. "...All six? Alone?"
"Yes."
He was sent to a cot in the medical wing. He didn't sleep. His body repaired itself while he stared at the ceiling, listening to the groans of the dying around him.
He wondered if he belonged with them.
No. He didn't.
Because he wasn't dying.
Not anymore.
Weeks Passed
The missions came one after another. Some solo. Some in groups. Most ended in blood. A few ended in burial. Eudora kept walking.
His swordsmanship didn't improve much. His technique was sloppy. His body often failed under pressure.
But each time he was injured... something inside him grew sharper.
He began to feel it—a crawl beneath the skin. A spark in the bone. The regeneration wasn't just repairing him.
It was adapting.
He could take more hits now. Wounds that once made him limp for days faded in hours. His skin grew tougher, his grip stronger, his balance more stable.
Like his body remembered the injuries. And decided not to suffer them again.
But it wasn't just physical.
Sometimes he saw flashes—moments just before a strike. A twitch in an opponent's shoulder. A shadow's weight in the corner of his vision. His instincts sharpened with each close brush with death.
It wasn't fast.
It was maddeningly slow.
But it was happening.
One Night in the Barracks
Marx sat sharpening a dagger across the room. The candlelight flickered between them.
"You don't scream when you get hit," Marx said without looking up. "Most rookies scream."
Eudora was silent.
"You heal faster than you should, too. I've seen it."
Still, Eudora didn't speak.
Marx continued, quieter, "You don't sleep, do you?"
Eudora looked up.
"I've seen you sit through the night, eyes open. Like something's waiting for you to blink."
"...I don't like dreams," Eudora said.
Marx nodded. "Yeah. Me neither."
They sat in silence after that.
Later That Week – A Training Pit
He faced off against an older recruit—twice his size, twice his weight.
The man grinned. "You're the creepy kid that won't die."
He lunged.
Eudora took the hit. Deliberately. A gash opened across his side.
The man stumbled back when he saw the wound close mid-step.
Eudora swung and knocked him unconscious with one clean blow.
Everyone watching fell silent.
He wasn't strong. But now, they feared him.
Not because he could kill them.
Because they couldn't kill him.
And that was worse.