While most considered surgery to be a learned art, the technique Yarii used to remove the dead and rotten limb was more comparable to a butcher's shop than the high academies of learning. She dipped the worn bone saw in a bath of boiling water and then through a flame to 'sterilize'. The fire licked up hot and yellow - more alive than the figure on the bed.

She started the cut a few centimeters below the end of the rotting flesh, sawing through the biomatter with relative ease. Although she looked small and weak, the sleeves of her lab coat concealed competent muscles. The saw stopped when it hit solid bone. Bracing herself on the young lord's slack torso, she started the first grinding scrapes across the bone.

The sound alone was enough to make the dead shiver and it was only long experience that helped Yarii to block it out. Behind his screen, the elder Lord made a nonchalent exit. The patient on the bed moaned slightly, apparently not as far gone as he seemed. She would have offered him some more of the brandy - to dull the sense if nothing else - but the maid appeared to have no interest in returning and she did not want to cease her current activities now.

Lord Mong-Ryong shuddered again then slumped backwards into the pillows, succumbing to the haze of alcohol and anaesthetics ingested earlier. The practice of operating on unconscious patients was a still a little experimental, but Yarii thought it more comfortable for both of them. With a last heaving shrill, the saw separated his femur and she was back to cutting through flesh. All in all the remainder of the leg proved much easier to separate and soon there were two pieces lying on the bed.