Although Li Xingkong had been doing his utmost to recover and had struggled to retreat,
by the time he dumped Mike, who was unconscious as a dead pig, into the car, half an hour had already passed.
After half an hour of recovery, his right hand could already make small movements. At least he could now raise and lower it with ease, and he could open and close his hand.
That was enough.
With those simple functions, he could already drive away.
Sitting in the driver's seat, Li Xingkong took one last look in the prison's direction.
The solitary city still stood on a desolate plain, looking as bleak as ever. So many people had died inside it, yet they had hardly changed it at all.
This place had left a deep impression on him. It was the first place he had ever escaped death by a hair's breadth.
He had no desire to come here a second time in this life.
Li Xingkong started the engine, set off, and rolled up the window. The car roared several times, puffed out a few clouds of white smoke, then surged away into the distance.
Li Xingkong did not plan to go straight to the airport; his physical condition would not allow it. He needed to return to Freedom City for a short rest.
As for somewhere to stay, Mike's place would do nicely.
He drove into the city.
Freedom City had returned to its usual languor today. The heightened security from the hunt for Li Xingkong over the past few days had vanished too. It was as though they thought they had him in the bag and no longer needed to mobilize the entire city and make such a great show of force.
That saved Li Xingkong a great deal of trouble. At least he could move freely around Freedom City again.
Although Li Xingkong found the wildly uninhibited spirit of Freedom City hard to accept, after several days of being relentlessly hunted, he was even beginning to enjoy that freedom.
Once in the city, Li Xingkong hurried to buy some food. He needed a large amount of supplies to repair his body, which meant he would have to eat a great deal.
He might recover faster if he went to a hospital, but Li Xingkong had already ruled that option out.
First of all, his body, transformed by Qi Refining, was already different from an ordinary person's. All the physical indicators that applied to ordinary people were most likely no longer applicable to him.
Heart rate, blood pressure, electrocardiograms, and so on-the standards for all that information were based on those of a healthy ordinary human.
But Li Xingkong already differed greatly from ordinary people in those indicators.
That also meant he could no longer be treated according to conventional modern medical methods.
Forcing all his physical indicators into the range of a normal person would only affect his bodily functions.
That was also a limitation of modern medicine. All its medical experience, techniques, and indicators were meant to help you live as close to the state of a completely healthy person as possible.
But if you had already gone beyond the bounds of a normal person, then you had stepped into territory modern medicine had yet to explore.
Without a large number of experiments and samples, existing medical methods were no longer applicable to Li Xingkong.
If Li Xingkong went to a hospital in his normal physical condition, an examination would probably find that he had super-high blood pressure, and the treatment a doctor could offer would be to prescribe him some blood pressure medication.
So, for Li Xingkong, a hospital really was of little use.
If he wanted to heal and recover, he still had to rely on himself.
After buying what he needed, he drove straight to Mike's house.
Mike still had not woken up. Li Xingkong took a moment to check on him again; nothing was seriously wrong with him, and he had only minor injuries. He should recover after a few days of rest.
After checking on his host, Li Xingkong began treating his own injuries further.
He put all the food he had bought into a box, stripped off all his clothes, and dragged the box into the bathroom.
Treating his remaining injuries would inevitably involve replacing damaged bodily tissue, which would produce and expel a great deal of waste blood and tissue. It would be relatively easier to deal with it in the bathroom.
The treatment he had given himself on the road had only kept him alive; the damage to his body was still there. Now, he would use external supplies to fully treat the injuries throughout his body.
Treating one's own bodily structure was actually a considerable test of one's knowledge. Without a clear understanding of one's anatomy and a systematic grasp of all the tissue systems, repairing oneself by intuition alone was truly a fool's dream.
Everyone's body was different, from something as obvious as their appearance down to their genes. No one could teach him about this, which made the body's own ability to heal itself truly remarkable: it could remember what each part of you was supposed to look like and restore it through a slow process of healing.
That was already extraordinary, and Li Xingkong could use Spiritual Qi to accelerate the body's natural recovery.
By manually intervening in the healing process, he could get it done in one step.
For this full-body treatment, the first step was to clear out the pooled blood and bruised areas within his body, dispersing the blood that had accumulated inside him.
At present, internal bleeding in the human body could only be drained through surgery. If it was not too severe, the body's self-repair process could gradually relieve it, but if it was especially severe, surgery was the only option.
But Li Xingkong had a way. He could guide the pooled blood to flow and expel it through sweat.
Of course, the process was inevitably somewhat painful.
There was no helping it. To ensure that all the pooled blood was expelled, he had to keep using his consciousness to inspect the injured areas.
Pain was the feedback the body gave the mind when it was injured. To see whether an area had recovered, he had to touch it with his consciousness and see whether it hurt.
As Li Xingkong worked, his body gradually began to change color. His skin, which had been somewhat pale, immediately turned a murky black wherever his consciousness passed. Then the color in that patch of skin grew darker and darker, until it became a deep red.
A faint mist then began to rise from Li Xingkong's body. As it appeared, blood began to seep from the surface of his deep-red skin. As the blood flowed out, his skin grew lighter and lighter, finally returning to its original color.
Li Xingkong was practically covered in blood. Bloodstains were everywhere on his body, and the stickiness was uncomfortable, so he hurriedly turned on the shower and rinsed himself off.
The dark blood mingled with the cold water and trickled down the drain, leaving Li Xingkong much cleaner.
Standing under the shower, Li Xingkong began to eat and drink.
With the pooled blood cleared from his body, the next step was to repair his bones. He had to put all the broken bones inside his body back together.
Healing bones required a great deal of calcium, and what Li Xingkong was swallowing was bottle after bottle of calcium tablets.
An ordinary person could not absorb them so directly, but he could.
The calcium tablets he swallowed were mercilessly ground down and absorbed by his stomach fluids. Then, under the effect of Spiritual Qi, they were applied directly to the fractures in his bones, restoring each broken bone in turn like glue.
Rather than someone putting a toy together, he felt more like a cultural relic restorer.
Repairing his bones took a very long time. During the process, he even fell unconscious from exhaustion twice.
It took approximately two full days before Li Xingkong finished repairing the injuries to every bone in his body.
Mike had woken up well before then, but he had not made a fuss. He still did not know how powerful Li Xingkong was, but he knew that someone who could have rescued him under those circumstances was certainly no ordinary person.