Chapter 436 – A Plea from Their Own

Fortunately, Sylph’s recent focus in plant cultivation had been entirely on the Animated Blackdeath Trees and the mutant Animated Blackdeath Trees.

Neither of these two plant species were affected here—in fact, they adapted quite well to the environment.

Sylph placed two large planting pots beside the tent and began inspecting their condition.

Mo Lan, Vasida, and Lilith all hurried back to their own tents to attend to their respective tasks.

Mo Lan had a relatively lighter workload for the moment. With Zhizhi keeping watch over the little skeleton’s soul fire, she used the time to refine her management and development strategy for Sorceress Magic contractors.

When it was her turn to prepare dinner, she wasn’t in the mood to cook, so she simply materialized several completed Food Cards to treat everyone.

“Whoa!” Vasida exclaimed in pleasant surprise. “This is way too extravagant!”

For the four sorceresses, Mo Lan had prepared a table full of dishes—wide in variety, generous in portion, with a bit of everything.

“I wasn’t in the mood to think about what to make today, but I can’t let my stomach down either!” Mo Lan said. “Dig in!”

The moment she finished speaking, the camp’s defensive magic formation was triggered, emitting warning magic waves.

Mo Lan used Teleportation to reach the triggered section of the defensive magic formation first. Lilith arrived a step behind using Super Speed, with Vasida and Sylph trailing slightly further.

But within three seconds, all of them were already outside the camp’s defensive magic formation.

Beyond the energy barrier of the defensive magic formation stood zombies missing arms and legs, clutching corpse materials.

They looked like they had just suffered a defeat in battle.

Their triggering of the defensive magic formation seemed to have been solely to find them, and now they simply stood quietly outside the formation.

Mo Lan, Lilith, and Sylph all turned to look at Vasida.

Vasida immediately ran back to the tent and dug out the letter her mother had sent her.

Finally, in the gaps between the text that read “Say ‘Ginia’ to them in Witch language, and they’ll treat you as one of their own,” she discovered a line of tiny writing in ink nearly the same color as the letter paper.

“Oh right, I told them they can provide help to their own people, and they can also ask their own people for help!”

The four sorceresses who had already enlisted the zombies to guard their camp: “…”

“So they’ve come to us for help?” Mo Lan asked.

Vasida nodded. “It seems so.”

“They want us to fix their bodies?” Lilith raised an eyebrow. This was a prime practice opportunity! But: “If we mess them up, they won’t make us pay for it, right?”

“We’re all ‘one of their own’ now, so they should be forgiving… right?” Mo Lan said.

The group looked at the zombies outside, their eyes gradually burning with excitement.

“Let’s eat first. We’ll come back after we’re full—it looks like there’s quite a bit of work ahead!” Vasida said.

Every zombie with body problems had come. There were at least a hundred of them.

And since the sorceresses were all beginners, their efficiency surely wouldn’t be high.

Mo Lan and Lilith agreed.

Sylph watched them raring to go and shook her head. “I’ll sit this one out.”

She had firmly made up her mind not to learn Necromancy Magic.

“Perfect, that means each of us gets a few more,” Mo Lan said.

Although she had chosen to create a skeletal death servant, she had still learned quite a lot about corpse dissection, suturing, and preservation. She just hadn’t had a chance to try it hands-on yet.

The three of them wolfed down their food and headed outside the camp to receive the zombies.

Lilith and Vasida used the Cleaning spell to clean all the zombies, removing the dirt and grime that would have hindered their examination of the zombies’ conditions. When they turned around, they saw that Mo Lan had used the Petrification Spell to transform the dirt in the open area outside the camp into stone slabs, then used Stone Shaping to raise three stone beds.

“There we go—a simple ‘Zombie Patient Reception Center’ is all set up,” Mo Lan said with satisfaction.

“Zombie… patients?” Vasida was bewildered. Could those two words even go together?

“Maintaining and repairing these zombies’ bodies—isn’t that the same as a Healing Witch treating patients?” Mo Lan said.

“Now that you put it that way, it does have a certain ring to it. So these stone beds are hospital beds?” Lilith asked.

“Exactly! We need the zombies lying on them so we can work properly!”

Mo Lan rubbed her hands together and said eagerly:

“Next up is the fun part—selecting our ‘patients’! I’ll go first as a courtesy!”

With that, she dove headfirst into the crowd of zombies.

Grabbing the nearest zombie whose “elbow was bending the wrong way,” Mo Lan gave it a squeeze:

“Not bad—the bone isn’t broken, just dislocated. No need to replace the whole arm. I’ll set the bone for you later. Go wait in line by that bed over there. Let me pick a few more patients, and I’ll treat you all together!”

The zombie walked over to the first stone bed.

Mo Lan searched for her second target: “Did you reattach your own broken leg? Just crudely fused it with Death Force? That’s not going to hold up! See? The flesh on your leg has already rotted away, hasn’t it? And the Death Force consumption is huge!

Did you bring a new leg? Let me see!

Oh dear, the size isn’t right at all. You’re a big, burly fellow—you can’t walk properly on such a skinny leg.

No other good legs available? No worries, I’ve got some!

You go line up too. I’ll swap you out for a nice new leg later!”

The second zombie shuffled over to the queue.

“Oh my! Your stomach got punctured and all the preservative materials inside fell out? Your belly skin has rotted away too—how awful!

Don’t worry, I’ll give you a fresh new belly skin later and sew it up nice and tight!”

“Good heavens! Did you go and ambush a lumberjack skeleton? Your skull is surprisingly hard though! You got their work tool stuck in your skull seam and brought it back with you.

Skull seams are tricky to deal with. I’ll take a look later—you might need a whole head replacement!

Don’t touch that axe for now. Go line up over there!”

…

Mo Lan weaved through the crowd of zombies, muttering the whole time. Before long, quite a few zombies had lined up by her stone bed.

She had specifically selected zombies with different types of injuries.

Mo Lan’s manner of speaking—as if she were genuinely examining patients—had mesmerized Lilith and Vasida. They watched her go through the whole routine before it finally dawned on them: Mo Lan was snatching up zombies!

There were only so many zombies that had come to them for help. If they all lined up at Mo Lan’s station, who would the other two have left to practice on?

“Moira! Slow down!” Lilith called out as she too charged into the zombie crowd.

For every zombie she encountered, she had only one line: “Go wait by that stone bed!”

Vasida was even more outrageous, directly pointing: “You, you, you, you… all of you go wait over there!”

“Hey, hey, hey! Have you two no sense of fair play?”

Now it was Mo Lan’s turn to be displeased: “You don’t even check what the injury is first, or whether you can actually treat it!”

“As long as we don’t kill them, it’s fine!” Lilith said.

“They’re already dead,” Vasida said. “Things can’t get any worse than they already are.”

Mo Lan had no choice but to join the scramble herself, giving each zombie a quick once-over and pulling any interesting cases to her side.