Greatest Legacy of the Magus Universe

Chapter 1934 Magical Reasoning

Splash…

The sound of waves.

It was distant. Yet so near.

He could hear it.

The gentle sound of waves crashing against one another.

He could feel it.

The cool spray of water against his skin.

It felt wonderful.

It felt… as if he were at home.

Gasp!

Adam's eyes snapped open. For a brief moment, darkness flooded his vision. Soon, his eyes adapted and he was able to clearly see where he was.

A cramped little space with wooden crates and broken barrels sprawled on the ground.

Two thick limbs above him. Two more below him. Warm, grey fur.

"…Val?"

There was no response for a brief second. Then movement.

"Brother, you're awake!"

Grey light flashed, and Valerian turned into a cat. He jumped over Adam's figure, then fondly started licking his cheeks.

"You're awake! Thank goodness!"

Adam felt disoriented for a few moments. He was having such a pleasant dream of… of…

What was I dreaming about?

He frowned.

Never mind.

He slowly sat up straight, his body aching all over. Weakness washed over him, and he felt a severe fever. Yet, his face remained expressionless, aside from the perpetual smile that covered half of it.

"What… happened?"

Valerian's eyes trembled. "You don't remember?"

"Uhm." Adam closed his eyes.

Soon, memories of pain and agony, him ruthlessly severing his own hand, escaping the sun temple with Valerian, guiding the little fellow into putting the entrails back inside his abdominal cavity resurfaced in his mind.

His eyes slowly opened as he realized what had happened to him.

"Oh."

Valerian blinked.

"Oh? That's it?"

Adam shrugged.

"What else can I say? It was due to my folly that I had to go through all of that torture," he said.

"In hindsight, I should have known something was wrong when I began spacing out, thinking of gods and whatnot."

Valerian blinked again. He narrowed his eyes and carefully worded his reply:

"Brother… after what you just went through, any normal person would have had their mind broken. We're not even considering the torture your physical body has gone through."

Adam smiled warmly. He reached out with his trembling hands and gently brought Valerian closer to him before giving a kiss on the head.

"Little Val," he said. "I've been through much worse. Well, psychologically, at least. At the time, you were hibernating inside my spirit sea, so it's understandable that you don't know much about the days I spent drowning in madness. I had also lost my sight at the time."

Valerian's lips quivered. "You seem very… strange. This was not the reaction I was expecting when you awoke."

"I'm all right, little brother." Adam pulled Valerian into a warm embrace. "Thanks to you, I'm even alive."

"Myu…"

Adam continued to gently stroke Valerian's back as the latter sobbed silently.

When he thought back to the torture he had to endure, waves of unprecedented rage bloomed in his heart. However, none of it showed on his face. A smile rested across his lips, and his eyes were dark pools of stillness.

His body still hurt, and the fever was getting worse. But he kept repeating the same word over and over again inside his mind:

Patience.

He took a deep breath, then spread his senses inward. He had to take note of how his body had recovered in the past…

"Oh, by the way, how long was I asleep?"

"A week, I think," Valerian murmured. He leapt on the ground and cast [Illuminate].

Adam's brows rose in slight surprise. "You didn't step out of the cellar for over a week? What about food? Did you eat anything? And no monsters came anywhere near in the past week?"

Valerian shook his head. His answer to every question was the same. No.

Adam let out a heavy sigh. "We've got to find something for you to eat."

Valerian scowled. "Brother, you should worry about yourself first! I do not like how casual you are about your current state!"

"…Okay." Adam was slightly taken aback, sensing the heat in his little brother's voice.

But given what the two had gone through, and how Valerian had to literally put Adam's intestines back inside his stomach, he could understand why the young dragon would react so fiercely.

"Fine. Fine. You're right," he acquiesced, raising his hands slightly.

He spread his senses inward again, desperately hoping his intestines weren't out of order. They didn't feel like it.

The feedback he received surprised him.

His internal systems were functioning perfectly. Better than that, in fact. It seemed his digestive system had become even more resilient after regenerating from such catastrophic damage.

Aside from the muscle mass he had lost and the fever raging inside his body, he was remarkably in good health. Even the fever was merely his body's natural defence mechanism, reassuring him that everything was functioning as it should.

The wounds had healed, but the scars had remained. There were countless of them. His body was literally a map of scars, big and small. Thankfully, there weren't any on his face. Adam could cover almost every scar in his body, but the ones on his neck and hands would undoubtedly show.

He had almost forgotten about his hand…

When he finally examined his hand, his eyes slowly widened.

It didn't come as a surprise to him that his severed hand was whole again.

After his tongue had miraculously vanished and then reappeared back inside his mouth, he had already suspected the same would also hold true for his hand.

That was why he had been so willing to ruthlessly sever it in the first place.

But it was the current state of his hand that stunned him.

Valerian had done a splendid job of quickly wrapping his right hand with Hannibal's Handwraps, preventing more monsters from converging toward their location.

Adam subconsciously gulped as he felt his right hand.

There was a hole in it.

The very spot where the iron spike had pierced his palm.

If his hand had regenerated from the point where he severed his forearm, then by all magical reasoning, it should have been completely whole by now.

But instead, instead of properly and completely regenerating…

It seemed to have returned from a specific point of time in the past. More precisely, it had returned to the state it was in while Adam was still being tortured, when an iron spike had pinned his right hand to the wall.

Adam circulated the mana from his core, guided it to his right hand, and instinctively willed it to heal.

The flesh and tendons squirmed. Bloody strands of muscles and tissue stretched across the hole, knitting themselves together. Several minutes and a considerable amount of mana later, his hand was whole once more.

That…

That was regeneration.

What happened earlier wasn't.

It felt more like…

Realization struck him, and Adam's eyes slowly widened.

But soon, he shook his head.

No…

Probably not.

Something like that is simply not possible!