Chapter 358: Research
After talking to Sirona, who went into a deep thought at Sam's words, he left to handle the captives.
Sam felt like this war is too large scale for him.
Old one, the former Pharmaceutical association head, is battling the whole world and he seemed to have made sufficient preparations. He is not even considering the empire seriously and sending followers through Space gates at his whim.
As for Sam and his friends, they are just some small fries in Western Continent. It is almost impossible for them to make any difference in war with their battle prowess and cultivation.
But there is one thing Sam felt like he must do. That is not changing the course of war or defeating the enemy by himself. He wanted to secure his territory and defend against all these attacks.
The best way to defend himself is not even letting the opponent attack.
So, now Sam's idea is find a way to influence the war in such a way that Old one, wouldn't have time or followers to concentrate on the Western continent.
With that intent, he took some captives to the laboratory he created within his floor of the Sky scr.a.p.er.
The first thing Sam did is, strap one of the followers to a table and use his observation ability to examine all his body.
When he did that, Sam could see even minute muscle fibres in the body of the follower.
And he noticed many peculiarities. The first one is the high rate of absorption of spiritual energy.
The followers might not be able to use the spiritual energy to fight, but spiritual energy is still the basis of their strength. Sam noticed that their bodies are absorbing the spiritual energy through the pores and the muscle fibres are absorbing that spiritual energy constantly becoming denser and denser.
It is just like the situation when he is tempering his body. His muscles fibres and skin will absorb the spiritual energy to become denser and stronger.
The second peculiarity is the Vitality.
Sam noticed an intense amount of vitality gathered in the body of the follower. At first, he felt like this is not normal and thought that only one follower is peculiar like this, but as he went through the remaining two followers who are captive, he noticed the same phenomenon going on in their bodies.
Their bodies contain a very highly concentrated vitality. Generally, any living organism will have vitality present within their systems, but the vitality of a follower is equal to ten times a normal person.
This is practically impossible, as far as Sam knew this much amount of vitality is only present in either some high-grade pills or some extremely valuable medicinal herbs.
But to see that in one person is something he never would have expected.
Then only he increased his concentration on observation and found out that their bodies are not just absorbing the spiritual energy, but also emitting endless vitality through the pores.
Even with that much Vitality in their bodies, the most peculiar thing is that it kept on increasing with time and there are no signs of stopping.
He noticed that the spiritual energy which was being absorbed by the person is not just being converted into the physical strength, but also into large reservoir of vitality.
The presence of this much vitality explained another, weird phenomenon within their bodies and that is healing.
Their bodies are extremely peculiar such that every strike that landed on them physically will be recovered in an extremely fast pace.
Sam is holding a dagger and making wounds all over the hand of the follower. The follower is not even making a sound of pain and he still has that foolish smile of a cultist.
Even Sam felt a bit weird when he looked at that face.
After making some superficial wounds and some deep cuts, Sam started observing the pace of healing.
When he used his observation skill while the healing is going on, he noticed that the amount of vitality that was being consumed to heal the injuries, is actually a lot more than the vitality it takes to heal the normal people.
But in normal case, a healer has to simulate the vitality and control it. But for these people, there is no need of a healer, the vitality is just overwhelmingly healing the wounds.
But the recovery rate of the vitality is something that astonished him.
After healing the wounds, the vitality reservoir only took half-an-hour to be full again, but in this time, the spiritual energy was not being absorbed by the muscles, it was completely converted to vitality to fill the reservoir back.
Sam wanted to test the limits of healing and he started making various degrees of injuries.
After another half-an-hour, he came to a conclusion that as long as it is a non-vital fleshly wound, the healing is almost instantaneous.
After that, he took out a sword and severed arm of the first follower.
The arm didn't grow back. The stump of the arm healed, but there are not any signs of regrowth of the arm.
He observed the whole process and noticed that the vitality is restricted to heal the whole arm and he felt that there are two reasons.
One of them is that there is no guidance for the vitality to heal the arm. To regrow an arm, it is not just the simulation of the vitality that is needed, there is a need for guiding the vitality in such a way that the cells would grow in a certain way so that the arm will be restructured, here there is a lot of vitality, but there is no guidance to restructure the arm.
Sam checked the theory by severing half of the arm on other side and only severing the wrist for another follower and after that only a finger.
The final conclusion is no matter how small the permanent separation is, it is impossible for them to restructure a severed part of the body.
Now, Sam learned of all the peculiarities and the reasons for those peculiarities within the bodies and now it is time for him to think of something to counter them.
Before that, Sam tried to look into the pills that made these people like that. He wanted to see what are the ingredients but it is not easy to deconstruct the pills and see what those ingredients are.
He tried all kinds of experiments, but was only able to find around two ingredients and those two happened to be the blood of two different beasts.
One of them is a Illusion Snake. Everything regarding this snake and its body is related to illusion, hypnotism and brain washing.
The second one is the blood from a special part of another beast called Black shelled turtle. This sea turtle has extreme amount of vitalities and they live the longest on this planet.
Although, Sam found these ingredients and can relate them to some of the peculiarities in the bodies of the followers, there is no way for him to directly use them to counter them.
But there are still other ways. First thing, Sam did is try to heal one of the followers whose arm was severed. From what he understood, the lack of guidance to the vitality is the only thing that is making it impossible for them to regenerate the arm, so he wanted to see if he can provide the guidance.
But as soon as he started healing, the vitality his light elemental energy generated was being repelled by the rest of the vitality. It is like two fluids not mixing together due to density difference.
What surprised him even more is that the reaction of vitality, it is extremely turbulent and even sentient. It is like a wholly different entity staying within the follower's body.
It is more like a parasite residing in a host and this gave him some ideas.
Sam felt like they could make use of this thing.
He started conducting various experiments to see what this weird behaviour of the vitality is all about and found some details which he ignored before.
The Vitality is not just immense in amount, rather it is dense to the point of visibility. The vitality healing them is also not exactly a part of privilege, it is more like a side effect.
The vitality which is behaving like a parasite is healing the person just because, it wanted to protect the host.
After some time, Sam wanted to confirm one more thing and he killed one of the followers right there on the table.
All this time, he placed his hand and kept his observation ability on full limit.
The lump of the vitality started jumping left and right, it slowly escaped the body and started dancing wildly in the air.
As Sam watched the vitality mass jump around, it reached the nearest follower and started merging with the vitality that is already present in that person.