When the snake’s fresh carcass hit the floor a cloud of mud burst into the sky. The ground around the boy and beast was churned up and torn apart by the energy and impacts of the strikes. Rivulets of rock and debris stood around the battlefield, marking the island in ways that would last long after the crew of Rosie’s Demise left.

Yun, Louisa, Jonas and Sleepy all ran towards Laurence once the dust settled. In their eyes the boy was crazy, and they wondered if he had actually survived. If he had actually been touched by the lightning that had charred the beast from the inside then he would have not survived, but simply falling from a height of around forty meters could still kill the boy.

When they reached Laurence all of them, bar Yun, gasped out in shock. Laurence’s body was a mess. There were cuts and bruises covering his body, several bones sticking out from his flesh and even some of his muscles were warped and twisted in the wrong shape. Even his hair and uncut flesh was singed and blackened. He was a mess of wounds and seriously needed medical attention if he was not dead already.

While the others were standing in shock, Yun lent down and checked for a pulse on his brother. After what felt like an hour he found a weak one. Carefully he touched Laurence’s chest and began injecting strip after strip of mana into his body, forcing it to activate his lungs and the inner flame formation within him. Beads of sweat dripped down his forehead as he worked away at restarting Laurence’s shattered mana paths.

With each pass of Yun’s mana, each cell of the pathways began to strengthen beyond belief. The cells gleamed with vibrance and life in a way they had never done before. Their near destruction had enabled a healing process that made them tens of times tougher than they were before. They were healing themselves and making Laurence stronger to boot. Unfortunately this did not help much with the physical wounds that covered Laurence’s body. He needed mana to regenerate his body quicker, but it would not correct all his body parts that had been shunted out of place.

As it stood Laurence would be hideously deformed if healed in the state that he was currently in, so Yun took the only steps he knew to fix it. He physically straightened and corrected all of Laurence’s bones and muscles himself, stringing them together with bands of mana mere millimetres thick. With each correction the young boy screamed out in pain. He was not conscious, but every time something was reset he woke, screamed and then fell into oblivion again.

With minute long breaks and a large amount of the Malmas Tincture that Laurence had concocted through their journey Yun managed to dull the pain to the point where it did not stop Laurence’s heart. It took him over an hour to fix everything but by the time he was done the young boy’s body was repaired as well as it could be. It was simply up to the reborn mana paths to rejuvenate him now.

Laurence spent the next week recuperating in an effective coma as the crew worked out how to get the ship in usable shape. Almost all the crew had survived, but of the mutineers only Yannis and one other were left alive. Even then they were both heavily injured.

The crew set up camp just outside of the ship and both Sleepy and Yun began setting up array after array to fix the ship up. Both lamented the fact that Laurence was too injured to help them, for while Yun excelled with flexibility and dexterity Laurence was capable of outputting far more raw power in all aspects of cultivation. Like their spirits Yun was the sewing needle while Laurence was the warhammer. If Laurence had taken part in the restoration of the ship they would have simply speed up by almost five times the speed. Instead the chassis of the ship was half complete when Laurence finally rose from his slumber.

He woke to the rising sun. With his full body covered in bandages he momentarily found it difficult to move, but only because his reservoir was nearly empty. Closing his eyes he assessed his body, and to his surprise there was very little wrong with it. In fact his mana reservoir had doubled in size and there was now a small steam of mana pumping through his body and tempering it constantly. Each time the stream of mana passed over a section of Laurence’s body it would pause and infuse every individual cell with mana until it was packed bursting with energy and raw power.

What was happening to his body was the instructions that Tony had told to the new challengers the day Laurence first entered the tower. He had wondered why Tony had lied then, and still he did not know, but he now realised that Tony was telling the truth about infusing the body with mana to make it much stronger. Laurence quickly took off the bandages covering him and gazed at his skin. It was still the almost apricot brown that he had been born with, but now it was as soft and smooth as silk, and many times more durable.

He continued his introspection, scoring his body for any more changes when he noticed something concerning about Jormugand. There was an almost imperceptibly thin fracture going down the middle of his hammer. It was small, but still worrying. His weapon was his soul solidified, so if that broke then he had no doubt that something bad would happen. He simply did not know what. Until the matter of the crack was solved he decided it prudent that he avoid using the hammer. This left him with a predicament, however. Without his hammer he had no weapon to enter combat with, and while he knew he could swing his fists at anyone he needed to fight he also knew that it would be nowhere near as effective as his hammer had been. He needed a spare weapon.

Getting out of the bed he was in he exited the shack he had been sleeping in and entered the camp for the first time. It was a roughshod affair, with shacks and tents hastily erected to cover the crew and their tools from the elements. The entire camp was set up in a semicircle around a fire pit that had some meat slowly roasting over it. The heady stench of cooked meat made Laurence’s stomach growl furiously to remind him that it had been days since he last ate anything, so he walked over to the pit and began devouring as much food as he could.

As he ate, he heard a gasp behind him. He turned and saw Jonas and Sleepy standing, staring at him wide eyed, and open mouthed. To them he looked like a dead man walking, because to them he really was. Jonas recovered first and walked over, grabbed a knife and cut off a small chunk of the haunch that was currently being decimated by Laurence.

“Hell kiddo, remember to breathe between carcases.” He sat down next to the boy and began chewing on the hot strip of meat. Laurence in return simply grinned with a mouth full of snake flesh. “So how are you? You've been dead to the world for a week, and very nearly dead to the world permanently.”

Laurence swallowed his food and then spoke. “I'm fine, better than fine in fact. I think the whole situation may have actually made me stronger. What have I missed?”

“Well, we are rebuilding Rosie and I am thinking of renaming her to ‘Rosie’s Revenge’, we're also building this camp into a port town controlled by the crew. With Dunwu’s help we should be able to set up an array to attach this part of the island to the slipstream. No one goes this way much, but I reckon we could make a pretty penny offering transport to challengers like you.” Jonas took another bite of the meat on his knife, chewing quickly and then swallowing. “Yun is out scouting the area but he said to give you this if you wake up.”

Jonas threw Laurence a pouch, very similar to his own bag of holding but smaller and made of snakeskin. Opening the bag to look inside he saw a massive pocket dimension, filled mostly with the skin, bone and fangs of the maelstrom snake. Laurence smiled and began using his truesight upon the bag an saw that the entire thing was littered with intricate and minuscule arrays. Each array was layered or connected to another array, bolstering everyone they touched. It was a masterpiece, one that Laurence had yet to match, and seeing his brother work so hard to make something got Laurence fired up to make his own creation.

“We want to use the skull of the snake as the centrepiece of the town. We're calling the place Maelstrom, after the skull. I hope you don't mind.”

“Of course not.” Laurence replied. “As long as you don't mind taking me and my friends the rest of the way for free once the town is set up.”