They spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening wandering Skazka Illyuzia.
The streets were still busy but the people started heading home, to dinner or to bars. Veneri, Biolumine and Parasphlen moved through the city with no real urgency, checking the streets and looking at the shops. There were masks in the windows, painted signs, rehearsal tents tucked behind larger buildings and little plazas built for acrobatics or stage acts. The season system was still odd to him, but the longer he heard, the more it made sense.
The circuses here didn't tour constantly. They moved with the seasons, with winter acting as the true performance cycle. Right now it was autumn and winter was still two weeks away so the city had all the buildup without the main event. That gave them time, which was convenient.
They had already booked a hotel so when the light began to thin and the lamps around the streets started to wake up, there was no reason to keep wandering aimlessly. They were on their way back when the smell of blood hit him.
Bio and Paran noticed immediately. They both looked at him, at the alley ahead and then back at him again.
"That's her."
Paran frowned. "The woman from the restaurant?"
"Yes."
They walked towards the alley.
The smell got worse with every step. When they reached the mouth of the alley, the first thing Veneri saw was the body. Or rather, the remains of a body that had been left in a state no ordinary attack would have produced unless the attacker wanted to be remembered.
The young noblewoman lay unconscious in the dimness between the buildings. Her arms were gone. Her legs were gone. Her eyes had been removed. Her tongue had been cut out. The body was covered in stab wounds that the blood had soaked into the alley floor and started to dry around her. The scene was so violent that even Paran went still. Veneri, however, knelt beside her immediately and checked the pulse first.
"She's alive. Now I'm interested. I don't know who would do this to a woman like her unless they were either trying to hide something, destroy something specific, or both."
That was the first useful clue.
He placed one hand over the ruin of her torso and cast Body Reconstruction immediately, not to heal everything yet but to stop the bleeding and stabilize the body enough for proper repair. The effect spread through the damaged flesh. The open wounds closed just enough to keep her from dying while he worked. He looked at Paran and Biolumine.
"We're taking her back to the hotel."
"You're serious."
"Completely, Bio. Thankfully, my Codex will get us back without problems."
That part was true. There was no reason to drag a mutilated woman through the city in public if he could avoid it. He had access to invisibility. He had the means to move without notice.
A few minutes later, the three of them were back in his room.
Biolumine and Paran had their own rooms now that they were both in humanoid form, but they had come with him anyway, which was only sensible. He placed the woman carefully on his bed, then closed the door and rolled his shoulders once before focusing completely.
He looked down at her and let his Body Reconstruction work. The damage was worse when he looked closer.
The body had been deliberately stripped down to vulnerability. Arms were removed at the shoulder line. Her legs were cut off high enough that she would barely have stubs. There were signs of blood loss severe enough to have killed a lesser being several times over. The wounds were not random either. Whoever did it understood anatomy. They had attacked the parts that would prevent speech, movement and sight, then left the rest to drain out. That was a professional sort of cruelty.
He exhaled and placed both hands over the torso.
For Veneri, this was never just "healing" but a reconstruction of what had been lost according to the original body's blueprint, which he could read through his understanding of the soul. He started with the bleeding first, then the internal tears. The tissue around her spine, abdomen and chest began to knit together under his control. Bone regenerated before muscle, muscle before skin and skin before surface color. He didn't rush it. Rushed reconstruction caused sloppy recovery and he had no interest in giving her a body that would fail later.
The stumps where her arms had been were the next focus.
He worked from the skeleton, growing the humerus first, then the elbow structure, then forearm bones, wrist bones, finger frames, tendons, muscle bundles, connective tissue, blood vessels, and finally skin. The process was barely an issue. Each limb had to be rebuilt with proper length, symmetry, balance and energy flow. If he made one side stronger than the other by mistake, she'd spend weeks relearning coordination. He corrected the shoulder sockets too, making sure the musculature and joint density matched the original body's frame rather than some generic immortal template.
After all, Body Reconstruction wasn't just something he could do without practice. He had to analyse the soul structure and use it to heal and reconstruct. Normally, this would have taken hours for healers but it was mere seconds for him due to his high experience with Body and Soul Reconstruction.
Then the legs were next.
Those were worse because the removal had gone high enough that the reconstruction had to account for balance and the complex weight distribution that came with standing and running. He rebuilt the lower body piece by piece, restoring the framework before reconstructing bones, muscle and skin.
The eyes came next. That part always required more precision.
A healed body without proper eyes could see again, but eyes had to be reconstructed with the right shape. The woman's eyelids twitched once as the new organs settled in place. The tongue was simpler but still delicate.
He rebuilt the muscle structure of the mouth and the throat control needed for speech and swallowing. Once the tongue formed again, he adjusted everything. That was one of the things people underestimated about Body Reconstruction. It wasn't enough to make body parts exist again. They had to function and not just make body parts that would be lifeless.
The stab wounds closed one by one as he worked through the torso. He looked at the strange energy inside her. That was the part that still bothered him.
It was not purely divine, not purely mortal and not purely immortal energy either. It had a presence that felt out of place in the Immortal Anchor, like a thread from somewhere else had tangled itself into her body. He paused, concentrated and inspected the flow carefully. Whatever it was, it had been disturbed badly by the attack. He did not know yet whether she was a genuine noble, a hidden divine-adjacent being or something stranger. If he let that energy remain unstable, the body might reject the reconstruction later.
So he stabilized that too.
He fed Body Reconstruction into the energy pathways. The effect was subtle but important. The woman's skin tone evened out. Her breathing changed from shallow and fading to deep and steady. Her pulse strengthened. Her soul stopped leaking pressure through the damaged body and began settling back into itself.
All of this took fifteen seconds, by the way.
Biolumine and Paran watched from the side in silence.
This was the kind of work Veneri always made look too easy even though it wasn't. The reality was that he was doing all of this all at once. He kept going.
Skin closed over the new limbs. Blood vessels linked themselves. Nerve endings were sealed. The face regained balance. Even the hollow where the tongue had been was fully restored. The woman's chest rose and fell normally now and her body had stopped looking like a wreck and started looking like a sleeping person instead.
When he finally finished, he let his hands drop and sat back with a quiet breath. The woman lay on the bed whole again.
He had rebuilt her so completely that it would be difficult for an outside observer to tell she had ever been mutilated at all, except for the fact that she was still unconscious from the trauma. That was the best result Body Reconstruction could give when it was done at full precision and tonight he had done it properly.
He glanced at Biolumine.
"She'll live."
Biolumine, who had been staring with open seriousness the whole time, gave a small nod.
"You make that look easy."
"It isn't easy but it's manageable."
Paran crossed her arms and looked at the restored woman on the bed.
"Whoever did this is going to be a problem."
Veneri stood and stretched his shoulders once.
"Yeah."
He looked down at the woman again.
"Now, we wait for her to wake up. Though I should cost the place with sapphire just in case she decides to scream when she wakes up."