Zadiris’s age was at a point where she might last as little as a few days, or a month at most. The only way to continue learning magic from her was to extend her lifespan.

「Alright. But what are you doing?」

Zadiris laid down, face up. This reminded Vandalieu of the first time he met her. Just like now, he was trying to save her life back then.

「I’m going to make you a little younger.」

「Eh?! Make me younger? There is no way such a thing is possible…!」

With a bizarre sensation, Zadiris watched as Vandalieu’s hands and arms sank into her stomach, all the way up to his forearms.

「Kah…! Haah?!」

Zadiris opened her eyes wide in surprise and was rendered breathless by the foreign sensation of having her internal organs being stroked by a pair of cold hands.

「Right now, I have used【Spirit Form Transformation】on my hands to directly examine your body’s situation. I know it is a little painful, but please bear with it.」

Cold sweat formed on Zadiris’s face as she looked up at Vandalieu to complain to him with her eyes, but he didn’t notice as he was focused on what he was doing. It was actually his first time examining someone else’s body using【Spirit Form Transformation】, so he didn’t know just how painful it would be for the subject.

However, he had a good understanding of how to do it correctly. Like a veteran surgeon.

When he was being toyed around with by the researchers of Origin, they had forced him to use【Spirit Form Transformation】to examine various things. This included other living subjects like himself and lead containers of nuclear waste. The Mana produced by Vandalieu had been used to create Magic Items that allowed the use of【Spirit Form Transformation】and greatly advanced medicine and science in Origin.

Putting that aside, he was examining Zadiris’s body right now. The【Spirit Form Transformation】had taken Vandalieu’s arms out of physical existence and they were now plunged into her abdomen. He imagined his arms dissolving into a liquid-like state and getting carried away by Zadiris’s circulatory system, flowing into every corner of her body.

And then Vandalieu’s arms melted smoothly, just as he had imagined. His Spirit Form was directly linked to his mind, so this kind of thing was possible when using【Spirit Form Transformation.】

『… I feel like it’s easier than it was in Origin; is that because my mental strength has increased? Or is it because doing this of my own will is different from being forced to do it?』

Vandalieu was surprised that it was so simple, but this wasn’t the time to lose himself in his thoughts.

「Guh, agh… Haah… Haah…」

He had noticed the agony that Zadiris was in. He cut unnecessary thoughts from his mind in order to get the treatment finished as quickly as possible.

Blood, blood vessels, brain, heart, nerves, stomach, liver, kidneys, pancreas, small intestine, large intestine, ovaries, uterus, bones, muscles, lymph, skin. Their locations and shapes were mostly identical to humans. The only difference Vandalieu could see in Zadiris’s body was that there were glands that produced the paralyzing venom that was secreted from her claws.

Other than the fact that the function of her organs were weakened, her condition was satisfactory. In short, there were no loose blood vessels, aneurysms, cancer or anything like that that might be a cause of death, and no sign of any viral of fungal infection.

It seemed that the cause of her impending death was old age after all.

Since the cause was old age, the methods of dealing with it were difficult but simple to understand. First, Vandalieu had to choose from one of three methods. The first was using death-attribute magic to halt the breakdown of Zadiris’s cells while having another mage use life-attribute magic to revitalize her organs to restore their declining function. This technique had been used in Origin, but there were no life-attribute mages available, so this method was impossible.

Since Vandalieu could only use death-attribute magic, he was only capable of speeding up or slowing down cell death. Unlike life-attribute magic that controlled life itself, he couldn’t grant vitality to another.

『If it were a wound, I would stop cell death while applying a Potion, but surely even Potions aren’t powerful enough to cure old age. Well then, on to the second method.』

The second method was to take measures to support her life – using a spell to directly preventing her from getting closer to death. That was a simple, sure method that would work. At the very least, as long as Vandalieu cast the spell on her regularly, Zadiris could continue living in her current state.

『But I reject that method.』

Looking at it another way, that method would only maintain her current situation. If he was treating a hemorrhage or an allergic reaction, he could postpone her death and let her body’s natural recovery mechanisms get her through it, but in the case of dealing with old age, it was simply delaying the inevitable. Zadiris would never recover and forever be in her weakened state.

And since Vandalieu would need to cast the spell regularly, Zadiris would die soon after he left the village.

There would be no point in such a treatment option. Such a method would allow Vandalieu to continue learning magic from her, but leaving aside what he stood to gain from this, he didn’t want Zadiris to die.

That left one option. The most difficult method, something that researchers on Origin had failed to accomplish, the「reversal of age」that mankind always dreamed of.

It was a technique that removed the『age』from the cells and caused『restoration of youth.』In the experiments in Origin, restoring the youth of individual parts of the body such as the skin, blood vessels and bones had succeeded, but there had never been a successful experiment that reversed the aging of the entire body.

But those had been experiments conducted by someone else controlling Vandalieu’s body and mind. And though his ability with magic had decreased since dying in Origin and being reincarnated in Lambda, his Mana pool had grown.

『Let’s try with the usual forceful approach.』

First, he let his transformed Spirit Form arms diffuse throughout Zadiris’s entire body.

「Ugh…!」

Conscious of Zadiris’s moaning, he tried to be as careful as possible as he let his Spirit Form diffuse into her capillaries, her skin cells and the ends of her nerves.

「…【Youth Transformation.】」

And then he began to pull the『death』from her body.

「Ah…?」

Masters of the fire attribute controlled not flames, but heat directly. They are able to freely increase heat to melt a steel bar, or decrease heat and freeze the surface of an ocean.

In the same way, as a user of death-attribute magic, Vandalieu controlled death directly and theoretically should be able to freely control whether a creature lived or died.

「Kuh… fuh…!」

Like gently scooping up dirt that had gathered over time, Vandalieu steadily removed the death caused by old age from Zadiris’s cells.

And slowly but surely, Zadiris’s age began to reverse. The energy returned to her cells and her organs began to work vigorously once more.

「This takes a lot more Mana that I’d thought it would.」

The Mana cost of every other spell that Vandalieu had cast up until now was incomparable to the amount of Mana he was spending on this process. It was costing him ten million Mana for each year of Zadiris’s age that he reversed.

「B-boy, w-wha… What are you… kuh!」

Fortunately, Zadiris seemed to not be in the discomfort that she was in before, but in pleasure. Since Vandalieu had to reverse the aging on her whole body evenly, he had to patiently and calmly maintain the spell properly, which was easier to do knowing that Zadiris wasn’t suffering.

「For now, I’ve made you a little younger.」

「Made me younger?! Such a thing is not… ah, uhyii, aaah!」

「To be more accurate, I’ve simply removed the aging from your body, so you won’t turn back into a child or anything like that.」

It wasn’t as if he had reversed time; even though he had reversed her age, there was no way she would turn into a fetus or anything of the sort. Removing one’s aging was simply the opposite of moving one closer to death.

If Vandalieu did the same to an aged human, the process would likely stop in the mid-teenage years. Though if he studied harder and came up with different methods, he might even be able to turn a human back into a zygote.

「Kuaaaaaaah!」

Unable to contain herself, Zadiris let out a high-pitched voice.

The pleasant feeling of one’s stiff muscles and pain being relieved spread throughout her entire body, not only in her limbs and torso, but even inside her head. She couldn’t keep her mouth closed against this intense pleasure that was greater than being treated by an expert masseuse. And as she let out all the breath from her lungs, that pleasure suddenly stopped.

「Haah… haah… haah… Boy?」

As Zadiris regained control over her breathing and looked over at Vandalieu, he was lying on his back. The arms that had been in Spirit Form inside Zadiris’s abdomen were now back to their normal, physical state.

「… It’s been a while since I used my Mana to its limit. I’ll sleep a little.」

Vandalieu’s Mana pool was completely exhausted from reversing Zadiris’s age by ten years, so he had quickly returned his arms to their physical state and collapsed, and now he was making the noises of a sleeping person.

「… It would not have killed you to explain yourself a little more.」

Zadiris whispered these words as she felt her own eyelids grow heavy as well. The fatigue that she had felt the past few days had disappeared, but a feeling of exhaustion, as if she had just finished some heavy exercise, lingered in her body.

It was a very strange sensation.

The aging of all the cells of her entire body had been reversed, and this exhaustion was the side effect of her body undergoing such a large change in such a short period of time. However, as Ghouls stopped physically aging at the time of their first pregnancy, the process didn’t affect her physical appearance. If Zadiris had been a human, she would have likely passed out on the spot.