Chp.20: Stopping a tumor

Haku grit his teeth. He was flattered to know that his brother placed so much trust in him, but he didn't have the faintest idea what to do. A snake that caused tumors? He had never heard of such a thing! And he also had no idea how to cure that! The only thing that came to his mind was to destroy the affected part before the tumor expanded, but if by now it had already taken root in the rest of the body, this could no longer be done! Haku didn't even know where to start to save Carlos. He knew that Rhaegal, Serengal, and Corgorin were friends with that human, or at least that they had great affection for each other, and that therefore they would be very sad if he died, and he didn't want that... but his will alone wouldn't allow him to work miracles.

Zamor was worried too, but for other reasons. "What kind of snake is it? Is there a chance it can get out of the hole?". Obviously his priority, before the life of one man, was to make sure that everyone else was in no danger. If that snake had been able to reach the camp it could have made a massacre.

Rhaegal shook his head. "No, I don't think so. It's small and doesn't seem to have the ability to fly, it could never climb a vertical tunnel. And it also seemed to have no interest in doing so since it acts like a parasite towards another animal..."

Haku looked at Isaac. "Do you know how to fight a tumor?"

The mage's face tightened into a mask of tension. "The best way to counter a tumor is to kill it by using mana to block all connections with the rest of the body, depriving it of nourishment... but I've never heard of a tumor growing so fast... I don't think the normal method may work..."

Haku's eyes widened. "Wait... you're right... it's expanding too fast"

The other three looked at him confused. "Um… yeah, that's what I've been saying all along" Rhaegal said.

Haku ignored him. "Brother, can you show me the part you cut off?"

"Huh? Yes, this is it" Rhaegal said showing his severed arm completely covered in purulent purulent pustules. Now the growth of the tumor had completely stopped. "It was an arm until five minutes ago..."

"How much does it weight?" Haku asked.

Rhaegal was dumbfounded. "Um... what?"

"I asked you how much that arm weighs!" Haku repeated. "Give me an estimate"

Rhaegal didn't understand, but he was by now used to the fact that when Haku started to think it was impossible to keep up with him and that asking for explanations would be of little use, so he satisfied him and waved his severed arm a bit to estimate how heavy it was. "I would say... at least seven kilos. Maybe seven and a half"

Haku's eyes narrowed to two slits. The average weight of a male human arm was just four and a half kilos, given that an average human male weighed seventy kilos and the arm was equivalent to just 6.5% of the body mass. And the part of the arm cut off by Carlos was even smaller than the full arm, which meant it shouldn't have weighed more than three kilos. Yet, the weight of the arm had more than doubled in a relatively short period of time. Too short for it to be natural.

According to the principle that Haku had just theorized, nothing was created and nothing was destroyed. Matter could only transform itself. Which meant that if the arm had gone from ten pounds to seventy pounds, something must have added more mass. In a normal tumor or cancer, that mass would have been supplied by food that the body normally ingested, because the tumor was expanding slowly enough that it could absorb that food and convert it into tumor mass, or something like that… but in this case the situation was different. The tumor had expanded at breakneck speed throughout Carlos' body. But while in the rest of the body it was slowly increasing, in the affected area it had converted everything into a tumor mass in an instant. All the clues let assume only one explanation. "The mana. That's the problem"

The others looked at him dumbfounded. "Um... what do you mean?" Rhaegal asked.

Haku looked at Isaac. "Remember what you told me? To change an object's mass, the only way is to convert mana into matter. At first I thought that Carlos' arm had simply been converted into a tumor mass, but this can't be the case because its weight has changed. And if his arm's weight has changed that fast, something must have contributed to the creation of new mass. And since no metabolic process that I know of can create that much in such a short time, the only solution is that it's mana". Haku let out a snort. "My hypothesis is that that snake injected an abnormal amount of mana into Carlos, which then converted into a tumor mass and began to spread using the energy of the host body. For this reason it is expanding more slowly elsewhere: even if some pieces of the tumor were dragged into the body by the blood and took part of the mana with them, the amount located in the arm was much higher since the bite had taken place there, while elsewhere there is little mana and therefore the tumor expands more And for the same reason now the tumor on his arm has stopped spreading: no connection with the body, no energy that can change the mana into matter"

The other three were speechless. "Actually... as a hypothesis it seems realistic" Isaac murmured doing the math in his head. "Although I've never heard of an animal that had so much mana on it..."

"It's not important now!" Rhaegal said. "Haku, you have discovered the cause of the tumor. Now please tell me how to eradicate it!"

Rhaegal's request was a bit selfish: most of the time, finding the cause of a disease didn't automatically mean knowing the cure. Luckily, Haku could think fast. "Put me in contact with your adventurer friends"

"Uh... sure! Guys, Haku wants to talk to you!" Rhaegal said approaching the rest of the group, who were still surrounding Carlos and assisting him as best they could. From the expressions on their faces, it seemed they were already ready to accept the inevitable. When they saw the dragon's face through the images of the communication device, they probably expected him to tell them there was nothing they could do.

Instead, Haku surprised them with happy news. "Maybe we can save your friend, but I'll need your help" he said. "As wizards you are mages, so you can gather mana around you to use for spells, right? You can do that even if that mana belongs to a living being?"

Efren, Sarah, Martha and Lisah looked at each other confused. "Um... I'm afraid not. We mages can only harvest mana that hasn't already been harvested within a living body" Efren answered. "When it is in a living body, the mana becomes part of it. Extracting it would be no different from extracting blood or an organ. Not only would it be impossible to do it in a painless way, but it would seriously damage the body"

Haku let out a snort. "However, if the mana in question wasn't part of the body, but was only deposited inside it, could you extract it?"

Efren considered the possibility. "Well, that would be an extraneous body... it shouldn't be any different than extracting a poison or toxin, since it wouldn't be part of the body"

"That's enough for me. Listen to me, you have to concentrate on drawing mana from the spots affected by the tumor, understand?" Haku said. "I'm sure if you try to check you'll find an abnormal amount there, it's what's causing the tumor to grow. You need to track down every bit of foreign mana and remove it. Then you isolate the part affected by the tumor by plugging all contact with the rest of the body, every blood vessel, every neuron; do that and wait for the tumor to die. As soon as it's dead, treat the affected parts as best you can and then let the body heal on its own"

The four wizards didn't seem convinced, but decided to give it a try anyway. They stood behind Carlos and touched his back. When they tried to sense mana, they could clearly feel an anomalous amount contained within their friend. But it wasn't mana bound to the body, it was as if that mana was an infection; and as such they could extract it easily. As soon as they began to do so, the tumor immediately stopped growing, as if it could no longer find a new mass to create. "I-It's working!" Sarah exclaimed in a relieved voice. "Let's continue like this!"

It took almost an hour to extract all the mana contained in the tumor from all affected body parts, but they finally succeeded; by the time they were done, the tumor had stopped growing uncontrollably and seemed to just infect the affected part, like a normal tumor. At that point following Haku's directives they plugged all the connections with the rest of the body, leaving those parts of the body without nourishment. Carlos never complained, and in fact concentrated exclusively on regrowing his severed arm, even though he had said that it almost seemed to him that some parts of his body were atrophying. Eventually, all the purplish pustules seemed to dry up and the affected parts became wrinkled and immobile, and some even began to peel off as if they were scabs. At that point Carlos drank some healing potions again; since the affected parts were now in all respects dead, the potion hastened to act and split the tumor mass causing it to fall, while new flesh grew on the affected point. In the end Carlos's body was like new again, with his arm completely stitched up and all signs of the tumor gone, and with only several parts of his body bleached from the presence of new skin that wasn't tanned, making him look almost speckled. To solve that problem he would have to wait for the body to fix on its own. He didn't care: even if he looked like a cow, the important thing was to have survived that experience! "I feel like I've been reborn!" he exclaimed, getting back on his feet. "Thanks for..."

Before he could finish his sentence, his companions grabbed him and hugged him tightly. The dragons also joined them. "If you try to put your hand inside the mouth of an unknown animal again, I swear to whatever you want that I'll kill you" Corgorin whispered to him. Carlos shivered slightly at that menacing tone, but he knew that the dragoness had been very scared and worried about him, and that she wasn't serious… maybe. Perhaps. At least he hoped about it.

Haku's voice through the communication device interrupted their happy moment. "Okay, now go back. You've been down there for too long now and it's no longer safe to continue. Come back here, you'll tell us what you've discovered as soon as you're out of there"

"Okay, brother. We'll arrive soon" Rhaegal replied, then switched off the communication device. Inside his head he had been exulting for several minutes: he knew that Haku would have found a solution even to an impossible problem, but until the last moment he hadn't completely believed it. It was a relief to know that Carlos would be fine. "Come on, did you hear that? Let's get out of this place!"

"Thank goodness. I don't want to stay in this cave a minute longer" Carlos said. Even though there had been only one accident, he believed he had risked his life enough for that day.

All the members of the group quickly gathered their belongings, then Rhaegal, Corgorin, Serengal, Atelas and Dyana grabbed the now fully tethered frog-lizard and lifted it above their heads. Thanks to their combined strength and just the right weight distribution, it wasn't too difficult. The five wizards offered to help them, but Rhaegal declined stating that it would be better for them to conserve energy to be able to lift them all and bring them out of the tunnel, an argument in fact more than valid. Thus, the group walked back towards the hole created by the sand worm, this time with the intention of retracing the path and exiting the cave.