Emilio arrived at the door of the hospital a few minutes before six in the morning and found Noel waiting for him.

  “Hi Emi, how did you sleep?”

  “Quite well, what about you?”

  “I’m still getting used to the new working schedule.”

  “Ohh, yeah. How does it work? The times I am working are way too harsh for a workshift.”

  “I can’t really complain. They reduced my working hours to six to compensate for the split hours and I don’t live far from the office. I work from 21:30 to 00:30 and from 5:30 to 8:30. It might be weird but it is much better than a normal night shift.”

  “If it works for you… Let me know if it is not working and we can see if we can make something manageable.”

  “I have no complaints so far, I’ll just be a bit sleepy until I can get used to the new shift.”

  “Talking about the shift, It is time to start mine,” Emilio said after checking the time, “How is the drill here?”

  “You will have a fully equipped private room and there will be a doctor with you to verify what you are doing. You will also have your face and body fully covered. We are not working with people that have been cleared and we do not want to expose you.”

  “Who am I going to be healing?”

  “Anyone that accepts to sign our contracts. You are not to be held liable and this is experimental.”

  “Please tell me you added a clause about the pain.”

  “Of course I did, who do you think had to suffer it the last time? Though I doubt anyone would take it as seriously as they need to.”

  Emilio entered the hospital, where he was given a robe to cover his entire body and a face mask, not the medical one, but one to cover his identity.

  He was assigned a room and he met Mario, the head doctor in the hospital. He was not going to be there the whole time, and the doctor on site would change regularly, but Mario was the only one who really knew his identity. He wanted to be there at the beginning to check what was really going on before he left another doctor in charge.

  He had received the information about what the System Skills could do, but he was still doubtful about the expected results.

  With the head doctor checking everything, the first patient entered the room. He had a nasty cut on his arm that was heavily bandaged and with fresh sutures.

  “Let me guess, another one who asked for a weapon they don’t know how to use?” The doctor asked, making Emilio feel ashamed. He had done exactly that and if it wasn’t for his Skills he would have gone to the hospital on the very first day.

  “I thought a sword would be cool and I was able to practice up until now! It was just a slip up.” The patient defended himself.

  “Yeah, that is what everyone says. We even had someone who severed their whole arm and we had to reattach it. I just wish more people asked for guns. I can’t believe it has come to the point where I have to ask for people to have guns, but we have had no incidents related to System guns.”

  Emilio thought about Amelia’s gun and couldn’t help but to disagree with the doctor. It was just that everyone’s Energy was too low, but every week more people were taking the Energy trial and they were going to be wounded sooner or later.

  Either way he focused on the patient and couldn’t help but to defend him, especially since it had been more than a week and he had been fine before. “I don’t blame him, it can happen to everyone.”

  “You say that, but I don’t see you with an open cut in your arm.”

  “There might or might not have been several. It is just that I can heal.”

  The patient was quite revindicated by the masked person who was supposed to heal him. It was good to know that other people were wounded and still stood fine.

  “Please do not say things like that in front of patients, we don’t want them to keep coming back with more wounds.”

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “I will not. But just for the record, the guns are just as dangerous. You just have to have a higher Energy Stat for them to show their worth.”

  “Then it is a good thing we all have 1 in that Stat.”

  Emilio decided to finish the conversation and focused on the patient. “You do know this will hurt like hell don’t you?”

  “Yes, but I was told it will heal me on spot too.”

  “Hopefully I will. We are testing things here, so there is no assurance.”

  “I know, but you did say you healed.”

  “It is not the same to heal others. Are you sure you want to try?”

  “Yes.”

  Emilio saw that there was no doubt on the young man’s face and started to work. He had had a lot of wounds like the one he was seeing and could estimate the amount of Vitality it needed.

  He spent a few minutes compressing it and sent the ball of Vitality into the wound. One instant the patient was watching him curious about what he was going to do and on the next one he was screaming and thrashing around with his body. He had convulsions for over 5 minutes before he calmed down and passed out in the bed.

  Mario approached the patient and checked the wound on his arm. It was not fully healed, but it was much better than before. He turned to look at Emilio and focused on the man with a different perspective on what he could do.

  “This might have cut the healing time by half. I can’t believe it really worked.”

  “That is weird, it should have fully healed him. It also should have lasted more time. Maybe it was too compressed? I will have to try to do smaller doses next time.”

  “Yeah, about that. I can’t ethically let you do this. What he felt was no simple pain and it was way too much for anyone.”

  “Why not? He accepted it and I told him several times about the pain.”

  Mario sighed, he hated to admit that Emilio was right with that. The man had been warned several times and had signed quite a few contracts before he was even allowed in the room. Even inside Emilio warned him again. Even like that, he could not allow it in his hospital.

  “It doesn't matter, no one will expect this amount of pain. I would only let this happen in a live or death scenario.” Mario could see that Emilio had not given up on still trying and tried to reach a compromise. “Do you need them to be conscious?”

  “I don’t think so, why?”

  “Then, why the hell are we not sedating them? This is like doing surgery without anesthesia!”

  Emilio had no answer for that question, he hadn’t even considered the fact that they could sedate the patient. Mario sighed and realized that the truth was that neither Emilio nor anyone who interacted with him were a medical professional.

  These kinds of things were his responsibility and no one else's. He could only silently apologize with the unconscious patient who had to suffer unnecessarily. At the very least he got the healing he wanted, didn’t he?

  “We will try to sedate them. We might even try local anesthesia, it will be much cheaper if it works.”

  It was no longer a question, this was Mario’s call and the main reason why they needed a doctor with Emilio when he healed. For Emilio, the man was in pain, but the doctor had studied what different pains were and knew where to stop what they were doing.

  He left the room and proceeded to look for an anesthesiologist. Luckily there was one available and they moved to a new room, leaving the poor first trial patient to sleep. He was going to spend the night in the hospital for sure.

  On the next patient they decided to first try with local anesthesia. This time the wound was not System related, but a cooking incident where the patient ended up with a deep cut in the hand.

  They applied the anesthesia and asked Emilio to use the same amount of Vitality. He might need to change it to optimize the healing process, but they were testing the effectiveness of the anesthesia and not his healing. They had already proved that he could heal patients on the previous test.

  The anesthesia worked, but not as much as they expected. The patient still shouted for the whole duration of the healing. At least he was able to stay seated and did not pass out. Given this result, they decided that it was better to have any future patient fully unconscious unless it was an emergency.

  After these Trials the healing became much easier. The patients came to the room fully unconscious and Emilio could focus on healing them. He focused on optimizing his healing method and found that the best way was to compress little balls of Vitality that would last for about a minute before applying them again.

  He tried to push two balls in a row without waiting, but it was almost the same as making one ball with double the vitality.

  One good thing they had was that once they changed the pain for anesthesia, many more people accepted to try. The doctors even say that the next day he should be expecting even more patients. There were going to be rumors about what happened in the hospital. After all the patients entered the room unconscious and left fully healed.

  Emilio also started to discover some limits to his Skills. There was a patient with a gunshot wound. When he healed it, the bullet stayed inside and they had to have a surgeon open the patient again to extract it, and then close him back up.

  There was also a patient that had a mangled finger, it looked like he put it in a blender, but Emilio decided not to ask how it happened. After all of the miracles, the doctors were hoping for a full recovery with his healing ability, but he was only able to close the wound in the same way that it would have been healed if he had not used it.

  At least he could stop any chance of infection, but they discovered that he couldn’t regenerate limbs. Emilio’s theory was that it only healed things that could heal naturally. It was a huge restriction, and he would have to take care to not wound himself in a way he couldn’t heal.

  Thank god I am trying this out here and not in my body. He was definitely happy to be at the hospital trying things out, but it was still kind of traumatic to see so many wounds. He had been there only for a few hours and had seen so much. Emilio couldn't help to have a new respect for the doctors.

  Thanks for reading!

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