15

When Dax woke up for the third time he was tightly rolled up in a ball of blankets and it took him a while to realise why he felt so uncomfortable.

He was cold, so cold that his arms were shaking and his teeth were chattering. It was so bad that he couldn't support himself enough to sit up and he fell back down into the mountain of pillows with a loud flump.

The temple fire was still burning away as strongly as it had before but he could no longer feel its warmth.

Dax reached out a hand and touched the blanket that he was wrapped so tightly in. His hand came back wet.

Cold and wet.

The blanket was soaked, so wet that the liquid dripped heavily from his hands back onto the fabric where it pooled on the surface. The fabric could no longer absorb any more fluid.

His first thought was that it had rained and the roof had leaked but then he remembered where he was. There had been no source of water in the cave other than the lake, if rain on the surface was able to penetrate the rock enough to cause a roof to leak or the lake was rising enough to flood the temple, he had bigger problems to be dealing with.

His second thought was that his bladder had given out on him during his sleep. It was embarrassing but everyone has wet the bed at least once. Cleaning it was going to be a nightmare though there was only the lake water to wash it in and even with the fire it would take hours to dry. The entire time he had been here so far, he hadn't felt the need to use the bathroom but maybe eating those mushrooms had done something to him.

A sudden wave of pain punched its way through his thoughts, leaving him rolling around on the floor in an attempt to find relief.

He almost threw up. It was so intense. The effort that he put into not throwing up immediately had him breaking out into a cold sweat. Every breath out he took felt like it could trigger a vomiting episode and the only thing that brought any relief was to continuously breathe in.

His shaking increased at the realisation that it wasn't urine he was soaked with but blood.

The dried blood on the bandages had glittered but Dax had just assumed that he had contaminated them with leaf dust at some point. It hadn't really crossed his mind till now that the blood was blood, even though he had seen it earlier when he had first burst open the scab.

The weird gold tinted blood that the body of Dythos the God of Wheat possessed shined back at him in the dim light from the fire.

Once the initial intensity of the pain had passed Dax found himself better able to sense the location of the wound that caused all of this mayhem.

It was on his back.

One of the wounds that had reopened slightly when he was trying to clean earlier had completely popped open. At least that is what it felt like when his hand found the edge of it.

Careful not to stick his dirty fingers into the open wound and mindful that it would probably open further if he strained too much to reach it there was little that he could do.

Dax scrambled to find the dry bandages and then struggled desperately to tie them tight enough to stop the bleeding. Straining to wrap it in any way that could put compression on the area was putting all the other barely knitted together wounds at risk of reopening too.

He had fleeting thoughts about how badly it was going to get infected but that was superseded by the accompanying thought that it could only get infected if he didn't bleed to death first.

The eighteenth wrap of the bandage, now so tight he could barely breathe reduced the flow of golden blood.

It was more a gentle seep than the gush it had been before Dax's heart was beating so rapidly it almost felt like it wasn't at all.

He felt dizzy so he made sure to lie down face first on a dry and relatively clean part of the floor. It wouldn't do to faint and give himself a concussion as well as bleed to death.

Dax's whole world began shrinking around him. The pain ate away at his thoughts, until he fell into a void of nothing but the pain. He could still see and hear but his brain was so overstimulated that he could not take any of it in. Logically he could have said that he was seeing the flames of the temple fire, hearing it crackle and feeling the texture of the floor against his cheek but his brain was too busy screaming at him that there was something terribly wrong with the rest of the body.

He couldn't even tell exactly where the pain was coming from anymore.

Dax just laid on the floor and prayed that it would go away so he wouldn't have to feel like this anymore.

And then he fainted... again.

System chimed in an almost annoyed fashion. "It would of course be nice if the protagonist was conscious for more than five minutes, but what are you gonna do about it?"

It circled around him, scanning his body, checking to see if there was anything that it could do to help but it was unfortunately not fitted with any medical functions.

For now Dax was on his own.

The System checked the alarm it had set for the arrival of help and sighed. The rescue party was still an hour away.

Mini Theatre

Dax: I'm unconscious again?!! (；⌣̀_⌣́)

Author: You lost a lot of blood.

Dax: And why didn't you do anything to help?

System: I don't have any medical functions.

Author: Why did you forget that the body you're in is covered in wounds?

Dax: (-_-)

Author: I promise that this is the last time... I think

Dax: You think? ↑_(ΦwΦ)Ψ