Alina brought Flandre to the temporary Medical Department of Rhodes Island to visit Yelena.
The young FrostNova had already awoken from her deep coma, but due to her highly volatile physical condition, the medical staff strictly forbade her from getting out of bed. She was placed within a specialized intensive care isolation unit, where advanced medical equipment continuously supplied a precise, metered dosage of suppressive medication directly into her bloodstream to keep her rampant Oripathy from flaring up.
When Flandre and Alina arrived outside the heavy glass viewport, they saw Doctor Anto diligently recording Yelena's current physiological data on a clipboard.
"Doctor Anto," Alina called out softly as they walked over. "How is Yelena doing right now?"
"The situation is actually quite stable," Doctor Anto replied, turning around with a tired but reassuring smile. "Ms. Yelena is being incredibly cooperative with our intensive treatment regimen, and her acute condition is currently completely under control."
"But..." Anto's expression darkened slightly as she looked through the glass at the complex humming machinery inside. "This is the absolute extent of what we at Rhodes Island can currently achieve with our standard medical science. Whether Ms. Yelena can ultimately be truly saved and cured... all hope lies entirely with Ms. Eirin Yagokoro."
Alina did not show any signs of disappointment upon hearing this assessment. She knew very well that Doctor Anto had already done her absolute best for the girl. If this were the old, fragmented Reunion Movement of the past, someone in Yelena's advanced state of infection would have had no choice but to lay in a tent and quietly wait for a painful death. To even have a tangible sliver of hope for a future right now was already an extraordinary miracle.
"Let's go in and see her together!" Alina said, gently taking Flandre's small hand as they cycled through the decontamination airlock.
Upon entering the pristine room, Yelena heard the soft mechanical hiss of the door and turned her pale face toward them. Seeing Alina enter alongside Flandre, who was peeking out from behind her with a genuinely worried expression, a faint, apologetic smile touched the FrostNova's lips.
"I'm sorry," Yelena said softly, her voice raspy as she addressed the young vampire. "I made you worry."
"I can completely understand Sister Yelena's wish to become stronger to protect everyone," Flandre said sincerely, stepping out from behind Alina and looking up at the bed. "It's not your fault that you fell ill. When you are all better and out of bed, let's train and play together!"
Yelena nodded gently, her white hair shifting against the pillow. In truth, she understood the terminal nature of her own body better than anyone else. If Ms. Eirin Yagokoro hadn't explicitly insisted that she possessed absolute confidence in helping her permanently halt and control the crystal crystallization, she might have completely abandoned all hope long ago. However, Oripathy had plagued the denizens of Terra for thousands of years, and those whose conditions genuinely improved were few and far between. Deep down, she still didn't dare to hold too much hope, preparing herself for the worst.
Noticing that the ambient temperature inside this specialized room was easily more than ten degrees lower than the corridors outside, Flandre looked up at Doctor Anto and asked innocently if she needed help using a little magic to raise the indoor temperature.
Doctor Anto quickly shook her head, explaining patiently to Flandre that Yelena's physiological situation was highly unique.
Due to the extreme nature of her ice-based Originium Arts, her body could no longer maintain a normal internal temperature like a regular person. Instead, to avoid dangerously stimulating the active Originium nodules embedded in her chest and causing an immediate fatal onset of Oripathy, she structurally required a constantly freezing environment to live in.
This specific room was an experimental, custom-built isolation ward. It had been jointly constructed by Logos and Ms. Patchouli Knowledge, utilizing a complex synthesis of Sarkaz Incantations and Western Magic to maintain the ambient temperature at a constant, unyielding ten degrees. Through careful analysis, they had discovered that at this specific temperature, the active Originium crystals within Yelena's body received the absolute least amount of external stimulation, remaining entirely inert and dormant.
Flandre nodded her head in sudden realization. No wonder she had felt a distinct chill the moment they stepped through the threshold; she had originally assumed it was merely a passive leak of Yelena's runaway Originium Arts, but it was actually a carefully engineered microclimate crafted specifically to prolong her life.
After their brief visit, the two walked out of the sterile ward and immediately spotted the towering form of Buldrokkas'tee standing vigil in the corridor outside.
"Lord Patriot!" Alina greeted warmly.
"Old Stubborn!" Flandre chirped cheerfully at the exact same time.
Hearing Flandre's unique nickname for him, the massive Wendigo paused in his tracks. He turned his heavily armored head down, reaching out a massive, gauntleted hand to gently pat Flandre's cap.
"I heard about what transpired in the northern forests yesterday," the old general spoke, his vocal synthesizers rumbling deep within his chest plate. "You fought bravely. You did very well."
"Flandre is super good at beating up bad guys!" she declared proudly, puffing out her chest while her crystal wings jingled.
"How is Yelena faring?" Buldrokkas'tee asked, turning his gaze toward Alina.
Because his physical stature was simply too massive and wide to safely fit through the standard decontamination doors of the medical ward without damaging the equipment, he could only stand watch outside, relying entirely on the updates brought to him by those who went inside.
"She is doing quite well," Alina reassured him with a lighthearted, comforting tone. "She seemed quite energetic to me, and she even managed to eat most of the nutritious food packed in the lunchbox next to her bed. When I was chatting with her just now, she even complained that if she keeps being pampered and nursed like this every day, she's worried she'll get so fat that you won't even recognize her when she finally gets discharged."
"Thank you..." Buldrokkas'tee murmured softly. He knew very well that Alina was intentionally using a cheerful narrative to put his anxious mind at ease, but hearing that his adoptive daughter possessed a healthy appetite indeed lifted an immense, crushing weight from his old heart.
A day later, while Flandre was out wandering and playing along the lower structural decks of the mobile module, a highly unusual figure suddenly materialized out of thin air right in front of her.
"Little Flandre! Hey, where did your sister and the rest of the crew run off to?"
A little girl with massive, sweeping oni horns asked loudly, letting out a heavy, satisfied hiccup that reeked strongly of premium sake. She was holding a large, purple gourd in her hands, swaying slightly on her feet.
"Sister and the others already went back to the mansion days ago!" Flandre replied, blinking in surprise at the sudden appearance.
"Ah?! What do you mean they went back?!" Suika Ibuki's eyes widened in absolute, comical disbelief as she gripped her gourd. "I haven't even gotten a chance to ride on the carriage yet! How could they just leave me behind all alone in this world?!"
On the other side of the dimensional boundary, back in the Scarlet Devil Mansion, the entire group from Gensokyo currently observing the situation through the magical television screen collectively rolled their eyes in unison.
Why didn't they wait for her? Does this stupid oni not possess even a single shred of self-awareness? It was one thing for her to randomly run off to the distant land of Higashi entirely by herself to look for exotic liquor, but she hadn't left a single message or note behind explaining her whereabouts. Even if they had dispatched Aya Shameimaru to fly across the skies of Terra to track her down, it would have taken several days of searching. The key issue was that the expeditionary team simply couldn't afford to wait around that long for a drunkard.
Seeing her distress, Flandre patiently recounted everything that had transpired over the past few days, from the rescue of the refugees to Yelena's critical hospitalization.
Suika Ibuki rubbed her smooth chin thoughtfully after listening to the summary, her golden eyes flashing with a rare hint of sobriety. "Tsk, those guys all ran off so fast. Hey, little girl, take me to see this Yelena person you're talking about."
"What are you planning to do?" Flandre asked, looking at her with a highly wary and suspicious expression. She remembered her older sister explicitly warning her that this particular strength-gathering oni was incredibly unreliable when intoxicated.
"What else would I be doing? I'm gonna give you guys a helpful hand, of course!" Suika scoffed, taking another swig from her Ibuki Gourd. "I'll admit I'm not good at the delicate stuff like saving people's lives, but manipulating things to make her feel a bit better physically shouldn't be a problem at all for me."
"Then I'll take you to see Doctor Anto first to see what she says about it," Flandre decided after a moment of thought.
"That works perfectly. Since I've already dragged myself all the way to this moving iron box, I can't just turn around and leave empty-handed." Suika waved her free hand dismissively, indicating that she was finally in the mood to do some community service, so no one should dare spoil her rare interest.
The mismatched duo quickly navigated the steel corridors of the medical department, eventually locating Doctor Anto in the central laboratory.
Predictably, Doctor Anto didn't believe a single word when she heard this strange, horn-bearing child claim that she could effortlessly alleviate the advanced, terminal cell crystallization of an Oripathy patient. It defied all known laws of modern infection science.
In response to the skepticism, Suika smirked. She reached out her small hand directly in front of the gathered medical staff, turning her palm upward toward the ceiling.
Then, right before everyone's shocked, protruding eyes, a tiny, solid black grain of pure Originium—roughly the exact size of a rice kernel—spontaneously condensed and materialized directly out of thin air, floating half an inch above her palm.
Meanwhile, Pith, who was standing nearby preparing a chemical solution, suddenly froze. She waved her hands frantically through the air, her internal Arts receptors triggering an incredible, logic-defying alarm: the omnipresent, ambient Originium particles in the immediate environment had completely vanished.
One had to understand that in the unique atmosphere of Terra, active Originium particles were entirely omnipresent, drifting through the air like invisible dust. It was just that because the standard background concentration was exceptionally low, the daily physical impact on healthy individuals was entirely negligible. However, as an elite, high-tier Caster, Pith fundamentally relied on drawing upon those very ambient particles to naturally amplify and enhance the destructive effects of her Magic whenever she cast a spell.
Now, those baseline particles had completely vanished from the room, meaning this specific laboratory had suddenly become an absolute, perfect Originium-free void.
Suika closed her hand, crushing the condensed grain into nothingness as she spoke up cheerfully. "My ability... ahem, what you guys call 'Originium Arts' around here, is fundamentally related to the manipulation of Density."
"I can freely increase or decrease the spatial density of any given substance in a specific, localized place. Just now, I simply gathered all the scattered, invisible Originium particles drifting around this room and compressed them into my hand. This way, hasn't the concentration of the poison in the immediate surroundings effectively dropped to zero?"
Suika flashed a sharp, fanged grin at the stunned doctors. "By utilizing the exact same logic, this specific density ability can also be applied directly to the fluids and tissues inside a living person's body."
"But I should warn you, I've experimented with this kind of thing before back home; I can only extract a portion of a foreign substance at a time. If I try to force out too much of something that has already fused with their life force all at once, that person's internal organs will likely collapse, and they'll die on the spot."