Pyrexian Gem
Aspect: Fire Rating: ••• Manses: Bearers: Sesus Kenruyo, ? Source: Portions adapted from the original Bloodstone in Oadenol’s Codex.
The Pyrexian Gem is a thin, cylindrical gem of fiery red, hot enough to the touch to be slightly uncomfortable without afflicting burns. It carries the purifying power of fire, burning away sickness from the body of its bearer and causing wounds to cauterize shut near as soon as they are inflicted.
While carrying such a stone, the bearer becomes immune to diseases and effects with the Sickness keyword (though such immunity to the sickness on a Charm-diseased blade conveys no immunity to the strike of the blade itself!), save for the most potent of magical illnesses such as the Great Contagion. The bearer also never bleeds, even if a limb is severed. Although all wounds produce normal damage, the character never loses blood from their body and so never need worry about bleeding to death, nor about their wounds becoming infected.
The Pyrexian Gem is considered one of the Stones of the Immaculate Body, and while it was quickly proven first-hand that such stones alone could not protect against the Contagion it was still sought by the people of the Shogunate who hoped a way might be found to use it in developing a cure. There is an apocryphal tale that a daimyo in the South attempted to use the forge of a Manufactory Cathedral to liquefy the stone so it might be injected directly into their veins, though modern geomancers scoff at the impossibility of such a feat.
The Pyrexian Gem’s purifying influence has another power, though it was not well known even in the days of the Golden Age: if the bearer dies while holding the stone, the Gem purifies the soul, sending it passing directly on to Lethe without ghostly remnant or memories of past life. This purification extends not only to the soul itself but to its attachments, including the shard of Exaltation. It is this fact which saw the god Lytek work diligently to suppress knowledge of this power, as it impinged upon his divine purview (and, some more revolutionary voices might say, pointed that there might be no need for such a divine purview at all).
