Transmigrated Into A Women Dominated World

Chapter 288

Daphne tried the regenerator a fourth time, adjusting the settings, and the reading refused to change no matter what she did to the machine feeding it. The device’s hum droned on uselessly, throwing a faint, mocking light against his skin that had no business looking so confident about work it clearly wasn’t doing.Zaeryn watched her work for a moment, then let his focus drift inward instead, calling up the same translucent interface he’d used earlier in the fight. If nothing outside him could explain what was happening to his own body, maybe the system could.

*Why can’t I be healed?* he asked it, silently, the question feeling strange even as he formed it.

The screen answered without hesitation, cold and precise and entirely uninterested in how any of it landed on him.

► [System Query: Diagnostic — Regenerative Failure]

► Cause: Core resonance shift detected, correlating with recent Rank-Up event (Hyper-Cognition: Class B).

► Status: Host baseline Vitae signature has escalated beyond the range accessible to standard healing input.

► Mechanism: External healing Vitae requires resonance parity to interface with Host tissue. Current parity threshold: Tier 2 and above.

► Warning: Healing disciplines operating below Tier 2 lack sufficient output to establish connection, independent of wound severity.

► Recommendation: Seek a Tier 2 or higher healing specialist.

He read it twice, and it made a grim kind of sense to him. His Vitae had changed after the last rank-up, and his new baseline was now too strong for most healing Vitae to reach him at all. Only a Tier 1 or Tier 2 healer put out enough force to actually affect him. Anything weaker simply would not work, no matter how small the injury actually was.

Zaeryn looked at Daphne.

"Is there a Tier 2 healer here?" he asked, cutting across whatever she’d been about to try next. "At the Citadel. Right now."

Daphne looked up from the regenerator’s display, one eyebrow lifting. "A Tier 2 healer." She said it slowly, testing the shape of the question rather than answering it outright. "For a shallow cut and a bruised rib?"

"I don’t think it’s about the cut anymore." He held her gaze. "I think it’s about me."

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah." He exhaled, trying to turn cold system text into something he could actually say out loud. "My Vitae doesn’t grow the way everyone else’s does. It doesn’t creep up slowly. It jumps, all at once, usually right after I’ve been pushed further than I should’ve survived. It happened after the fight with—" The name Viora nearly slipped past his teeth before he caught it, a mistake he understood immediately would have been a massive one to make out loud in this room. He pivoted, smooth enough that he hoped she hadn’t noticed the gap. "—with Leia. It’s probably happened again since, more than once, without me even noticing." He nodded at the regenerator still humming uselessly against his ribs. "I think whatever that last jump did made my own output too strong for anything weaker to get past it. Like trying to push a small flame into a much bigger one. It’s not that Cyra’s healing doesn’t reach me. It reaches me fine. It just doesn’t have enough behind it to actually do anything once it gets there."

Daphne went quiet, and for a moment the only sound in the room was the regenerator’s idle hum.

Then something shifted behind her eyes, the particular focus that only ever surfaced when a problem had just become genuinely interesting to her.

"An output imbalance," she said, mostly to herself. "Tied to a rank-up." She looked at him properly now, whatever concern had been on her face a second ago already sharing room with something closer to fascination. "You have no idea how much I want to run every test I own on you right now."

Zaeryn frowned. He hated tests. "Comforting," he said, dry enough that it barely counted as a complaint anymore.

"It wasn’t meant to be." She straightened, already several steps ahead of him. "Let’s go. I believe we have a Tier 2 healer available on this level. Let’s see if she’s willing to look at you."

Zaeryn followed her out, Annalise keeping stride on his other side.

They walked toward the Vanguard Pavilion, a sweeping, terraced lounge where high-ranking officers and off-duty personnel gathered to unwind between shifts, the atmosphere lively but structured, low murmurs of tactical discussion threading between the occasional clink of glassware.

They hadn’t cleared the main concourse before a voice cut through it toward them.

Ilona stood at the edge of one of the pavilion’s raised alcoves, sharp, avian features unmistakable even from a distance, the same assessing look on her face that she’d worn during the emergency session.

"May I borrow you for a moment?" Ilona asked.

Daphne’s brows lifted. "Now?"

"Preferably before the matter I’m dealing with grows teeth."

"That sounds like a you problem."

"Yes, it is. But you have no choice but to help me."

Daphne clicked her tongue, visibly annoyed, and glanced back at Zaeryn.

"Go," Annalise said before Daphne could get the words out herself. "I’ll take him to the healer."

Daphne exhaled through her nose and crossed toward Ilona without further argument, and Annalise steered Zaeryn onward before he had much chance to wonder what that conversation might actually be about.

Separating from Daphne, Annalise led him down a restricted medical corridor branching off the main pavilion. The noise of the lounge faded almost immediately, replaced by the sterile, quiet hush of the upper Citadel laboratories.

They stopped at a heavy frosted-glass door. Annalise pressed the chime beside it, and the panel hissed open to reveal a pristine, brightly lit workspace on the other side.

Inside, a woman in a crisp white lab coat leaned over a holographic data array. Unlike most Citadel staff, she carried a visible flash of individuality, her hair a vivid, deliberate shade of emerald green, cropped short, contrasting sharply against warm brown eyes that missed very little.

She straightened as they walked in, her gaze moving from Annalise to Zaeryn, and genuine astonishment spread across her face.

"Well." A slow, fascinated smile followed the surprise. "I certainly didn’t expect to be visited by Councilor Annalise and the infamous anomaly on the same afternoon."

"Sorry to just show up on you like this," Annalise offered, her usual administrative weight nowhere in her voice.

"No, not at all." Emeline waved a hand to dismiss the thought entirely. "I wasn’t doing anything that couldn’t wait, and it’s an absolute pleasure to be visited by either of you, let alone both at once." Her attention settled fully on Zaeryn, warm and unmistakably curious now. "Especially you."

Zaeryn settled onto the padded exam chair near her console without needing to be told to, the posture familiar enough after the day he’d had.

"We actually need your expertise." Annalise gestured toward his jaw and his side. "I need to walk you through his condition. We’ve run into a healing failure, and not the ordinary kind."

Emeline stepped closer, studying the split skin along his jaw and the darkened bruising along his ribs, her curiosity plainly outrunning her professionalism. "I can see the damage well enough myself." She tilted her head. "What actually caused this? Some kind of deployment incident?"

"A sparring session," Annalise said. "With Mireille." A trace of protective tension crept back into her voice as she went on. "But the injury isn’t really the problem. Cyra tried sealing the cut with her own Vitae, and it didn’t even register. Daphne tried a standard regenerator right afterward, one that’s worked on him plenty of times before, and it wouldn’t calibrate to him at all."

Emeline’s hands went still in the air. She stared at Zaeryn, her jaw slack with open disbelief.

"Heal-resistant." She said it slowly, shaking her head like she was trying to clear a glitch out of her own thinking. "That is genuinely strange." She gestured at the bruising. "Usually, something like this, a small bruise, a shallow cut, a simple tear, isn’t worth calling someone like me for at all. A Tier 5 healer could manage it without much trouble. A Tier 4 could do it cleanly. A Tier 3 could do it half asleep."

"And the things you’d actually need someone like you for?" Zaeryn asked.

"Severe trauma. Organ reconstruction. Core damage. Pulling someone back from the edge of death, if there’s still enough of them left to work with." She glanced at him. "Not a scratch on the jaw."

"Apparently I’m special."

"Yes," Emeline said, a flirty smile tugging at her mouth. "That’s the polite word for it."

Annalise’s gaze didn’t waver. "Can you heal him?"

Emeline didn’t answer right away. She reached out, two fingers hovering a short distance from the cut on his jaw, and a soft green light gathered at her fingertips.

Then she stopped, and looked into his eyes.

"Weird," she said.

"Did it fail too?" Annalise asked.

"Yes. But not because he’s refusing to heal." Emeline’s brow furrowed as she worked through it out loud. "It’s strange. He’s demanding more Vitae than normal."

"Oh," Zaeryn said, like that was a perfectly ordinary thing to learn about his own body.

Emeline didn’t seem to hear him. She settled her palm back over the cut, closed her eyes this time, and let the light gather in earnest, brighter than before. Her other hand came to rest lightly against his chest, steadying herself, or steadying him, he couldn’t tell which.

It felt strange, having her that close, her hand resting flat over his heartbeat while she worked on something a few inches away. Not unwelcome. Just strange, the kind of stillness that didn’t belong in a lab with the lights this bright and Annalise standing three feet away.

The air around them changed.

Zaeryn felt it before it ever touched him. Cyra’s healing, when he thought back on it, had been gentle, almost apologetic, like cool water pressing against a gate that refused to budge. What came off Emeline’s hand now was nothing like that. It carried real weight, pressing into his skin with a quiet, insistent authority, not forcing its way through so much as knocking hard enough that whatever resistance his body had built up couldn’t simply ignore it and wait for it to give up.

The cut on his jaw tingled, faint at first and then unmistakable, and a moment later the sting that had sat there all evening was simply gone, without any flash of light or rush of warmth to mark the change. One second it had been there. The next, it hadn’t.

Emeline’s eyes opened wide.

Zaeryn raised a hand to his jaw and found smooth, unbroken skin where the cut had been.

"Well," he said. "That answers that."

Emeline lowered her hands slowly, and for a second her expression wasn’t alarm at all, it was something closer to wonder, like she was still turning a feeling over and hadn’t decided yet what to make of it.

"It does," she said. She drew a slow breath before going on. "My healing connected, but only after I used far more Vitae than I should ever need for something this minor." Her gaze returned to his jaw, where the cut had been a moment ago. "The strange part is that once I crossed whatever threshold your body was demanding, it stopped resisting almost completely."

Zaeryn frowned. "What does that mean?"

"It means your body isn’t rejecting healing." Emeline’s voice had gone quieter, more thoughtful. "It’s screening it."

Annalise’s expression sharpened. "Screening?"

"Yes." Emeline looked down at her own fingers, as though she could still feel the echo of what had passed through them. "Most external Vitae simply isn’t strong enough to be acknowledged by him anymore. It touches the surface and fails to establish contact. But once enough force is applied, once the healing reaches the right resonance..."

She paused.

For the first time since they’d entered the room, she looked genuinely unsettled.

"It becomes easy. Too easy."

Zaeryn’s stomach sank.

Emeline lifted her eyes to his. "Your body didn’t feel damaged once I was inside. It felt calm. Almost peaceful. Like the injury was waiting for something worthy enough to fix it."

The room went quiet.

That somehow sounded worse than rejection.

Annalise’s gaze didn’t move from Emeline. "You’re saying his body refuses weaker healing input, but accepts higher-grade Vitae without any conflict at all."

"I’m saying it accepts it beautifully," Emeline said, and there was something almost unwilling in her voice. "That’s the disturbing part."

"So it’s not that I broke," Zaeryn said. "I just got picky."

"That’s one way to put it." A faint, distracted smile crossed her face. "An extremely inconvenient way, but accurate."

She hesitated before going on, like she was deciding whether the next part was worth saying out loud. "It also felt strange. Peaceful, almost, in a way healing has never once felt for me, and I’ve healed hundreds of people." A short laugh, more embarrassed than amused. "I’m going to set that aside and pretend I didn’t say it."

Zaeryn filed it away instead of pretending anything.

The words weren’t far off from what the system itself had told him less than an hour ago, cold text on a screen only he could see. Hearing them confirmed by an actual person, someone who’d just felt it firsthand, landed heavier than the readout ever had.

Emeline moved her hand toward his ribs next, then paused just short of touching him. "Healing this one’s going to take more out of both of us. The jaw was small. This isn’t."