So, I Transmigrated Into The Heavenly Realm

21. Fever Dream

21

The first day in the healing halls wasn't very memorable aside from his awakening and the short conversation Dax had with The God of War. Various different healers had bustled in and out jabbing him with needles and scanning him with various different types of equipment. All he had been able to do was lie there and let it happen, too tired to protest.

They had fed him some soup though. It wasn't even as bland as he had thought it would be looking into the almost clear broth. Three quarters of his way through the bowl his arm had begun to shake uncontrollably. Soup sloshed out of the spoon as he attempted to lift it to his lips.

Dax swapped hands but the result was still the same.

His stomach still felt empty and it growled loudly in protest as another new person in purple robes arrived. The sheer loudness of it must have shocked her as she reached to take his temperature.

Dax looked at her pleadingly, he didn't even have the energy to speak anymore. She smiled at him before taking a seat at the side of his bed and picking up the spoon for him. Being fed by someone else could feel infantilising and extremely embarrassing but she talked to him as she fed him about the weather and her family and it made things feel okay.

She was someone he would remember the kindness of.

Dax made a mental note to write her a card before he was discharged. If he was ever allowed to leave the hospital.

On the second day he was strong enough to feed himself but two young healers had to help him change the bandages crisscrossing his torso. Dax was too scared he would accidentally hurt himself again to do it on his own.

Things took a turn for the worse on the third day.

Despite the almost constant attention of what felt like an army of healers, his wounds began to become increasingly inflamed. At first they had thought the swelling was a sign his body was healing at a more normal rate but it became apparent on the fourth day that they were infected when his fever spiked.

His fever peaked so high that if he was still a human he would have died. As a God it wouldn't have normally been life threatening but then the immortal beings of the Heavenly Realm and the Underworld almost never experienced them. Dax just had the luck to currently be possessing a body that was doing it's very best to stay alive when there were next to no resources for it to draw upon.

He had nightmares of giant spiders coming to eat him whilst he was stuck in their webs unable to get away. His mother and father stood over him ageing rapidly in front of his eyes until they were just a pile of bones that turned to ash and floated away. He drowned in the local swimming pool he'd grown up going to. Only instead of chlorinated pool water and foam floaties there was blood and severed limbs.

There were moments when he could swear he was awake and the God of War was sitting beside him holding a basin of water in one of his huge hands and a cloth in the other. Something wet and cold wiped his face and neck then he would be able to sleep again, undisturbed by nightmares for a few minutes before he awoke screaming again chased by some nightmare vision.

Dax had no idea how many days had passed like this but when his fever broke,  the basin and the man were nowhere to be seen.

The System was unable to answer any of his questions, replying only that it did not have any medical functions and that its calendar was malfunctioning.

Even the healers wouldn't answer his question of whether the God of War had been here, always trying to divert his attention away onto some other topic.