There was a saying I once heard somewhere, though I couldn't remember where. It was simple, yet profoundly wise:
[If someone tells you something can kill cancer, remember that a handgun can, too.]
It emphasized an unavoidable core dilemma: killing cancerous cells or other pathogens was only part of treatment. More important was preserving as much of the body's original function as possible—or, at the very least, saving the patient's life.
That was the difficulty in dealing with Yvonne's current problem. It was also an issue that had plagued medicine since its earliest days and would continue to do so for a long time: how to strike the pathogen hard with treatment without also landing a couple of blows on the patient.
Now this problem stood before Kraft, in a special variant no one had ever solved.
Whatever had attached itself to Yvonne's Spiritual Entity seemed to prove that the Fungal Spirit really was, as Kraft had suspected, similar in nature to a human Spiritual Entity.
It had integrated perfectly into the area of the Spiritual Entity that roughly corresponded to the left shoulder and neck, trailing down to the upper arm like an inverted teardrop—or a meningioma, one with a distinct dural tail sign. Its fuzzy, radiating shape blended with the cloudlike Spiritual Entity until the two were indistinguishable; even the texture at their broad-based point of attachment had become nearly identical.
Kraft's Spiritual Senses could act on it, but without being able to clearly define the boundary, any damage caused by tearing it away would affect both of them.
The effects of damage to a Spiritual Entity were completely unknown. Judging by the pronounced reaction that began as soon as he started, it was no less serious than compression of the central nervous system. Something that already looked