Healing Experiment

**Nazarick's Healing Experiment** is a form of experimentation conducted by Demiurge under Ainz's order.

## Objective

This experiment was meant to test how healing magic operates in the New World compared to the world of YGGDRASIL. The underlying questions behind the healing experiment is if the nutrients derived from the severed arm vanish after the subjects cannibalize it and then healed the wound afterward. Another interesting question to take note of was whether the people who ate the arms starve to death from this process being repeated over and over again continuously. So far, the only known few besides Demiurge who are said to be involved in this experiment were his close aides, Pulcinella and the Torturers who are tasked with skinning them alive.

## Rules

For this sort of experiment, there is apparently a hierarchy established among the prisoners. Demiurge and his subordinates allow participants of the experiment to vote on who should become the others’ food, and who should be the one to cut off the food’s limbs with a blunt axe. According to him, they do so by a registered vote from those who will become food and have their limbs chopped off, to those who will chop the limbs off, and those who will eat those limbs. The intent behind Demiurge doing this was in order to create hatred between participants. Once they are gripped by that hatred, the next thing he and his subordinates will do is gently and encouragingly urge the ones who were used as food to revolt.

When Pulcinella oversees the operation in Demiurge's place, he picks one subject, and chops that person's arm off. Afterwards, he will then have the others compare themselves to the one who was on the chopping block and count themselves fortunate. According to him, in order to make the person whose arm was chopped off happy, they simply chop off someone else’s legs.

Contrary to what the Floor Guardian said, Pulcinella noted how Demiurge was planning to make himself and his fellow demons to be sacrifices as not to make others hate themselves. In the words of Pulcinella, he recalls Demiurge thinking that it would be a shame to let the livestock of their experiment starve without any care given to them. Hence, Demiurge roasted up the children of both sides whole, and served them up to each other. While so, in order to allow the parents of both sides to bid their children farewell with a smile, Demiurge had even invited them to the dinner table one final time before sending them off.

## Procedures

Demiurge noted how he proceeds the experiment according to the subject's age and gender. With time, Demiurge felt that he will need to distinguish whether or not a certain species of a certain age's skin is the most suitable. Before he and his aides apply healing magic on the wounded subject, they merely allow the detached part to undergo a significant change in shape. For starters, mincing the subject's flesh then later on down the line, that fleshy part will thoroughly be preserved.

On the other hand, Ainz noted how they seemed to have done things like chopping arms off and then reattaching them to other creatures. At the same time, cutting open the subjects’ abdomens and exchanging the internal organs within. They started with blood relatives as a control group, and they branched out to combinations of humans and other lifeforms — not just demihumans, but animals too. Afterward, they would then be healed with magic to see what changes occurred from it.

If the subjects ends up turning out dead during their experiment, Demiurge had his subordinates chop up them piece by piece before feeding them to the other subjects who are still alive. Since he and his servants are mincing the torn corpses up first, they will not eat the meat if one feed it to them directly. In other words, the subjects are required to become cannibalistic and eat their own respective kinds. Nonetheless, considering their omnivorous nature, Demiurge still plans to give them grains and the like.

## Results

When a person's arm is cut off and later healed with magic, the severed hand was said to have disappeared along the way during the process. For example, the four limbs that were severed from the subject's body before healing them with magic. It was said that in Demiurge's healing experiments, the severed limbs vanished and grew from the body once more.

Because the spell is cast after the skin has been removed, healing magic will effectively recognize it as a foreign entity. In other words, when the flayed skin has been processed, the healing magic no longer recognizes it as part of the body and it will not vanish even after the source is healed. Hence, the skin cannot disappear despite healing magic being used on it. Once some great change has occurred to the severed body parts through mincing, those parts will continue to remain no matter what. This is the reason why the subjects would not die of starvation when they cannibalize their own meat.

In addition to that, whenever one aspect of healing magic is rejected by another aspect of healing magic, Demiurge noted sometimes that the process conflicts with each other. It is referring to either the healer or the healed one who rejects the healing magic. Particularly, Pulcinella informs Demiurge that some of their test subjects were unwilling to accept healing magic. Nonetheless, they are able to cast healing magic on the subjects within acceptable perimeter regardless of their rejection. Nonetheless, this only causes the healing process on the subject's skin to not operate smoothly, resulting in leaving a scar for it afterward. Likewise, the lower the tier spell cast, the more likely it will leave scars to form as time lapses and passes. The subject's skins are used to produce low-tier Magic Scrolls.

## Trivia

* Demiurge had not used anesthesia or painless methods to remove the skins.
* The subject of this experiment was done on the humans captured by the Great Tomb of Nazarick.
* According to Entoma Vasilissa Zeta, she was given permission by her master Ainz to eat one of the human wrists which had been severed during the healing experiment, taken from a man who had been nabbed from a random village.
* In an alternative timeline different from the mainstream series, there was a similar healing experimentation that have taken place, but with the undead Keno Fasris Invern as the subject. When Suzuki Satoru utilizes a scissor to trim her long hair, the severed hair that were cut ended up immediately aged and degraded under a very short span of time as though several hundred years had already passed for it. In the end, the hair strand became a puff of ash, vanishing cleanly just like the undead did when they were destroyed. Shortly after, Suzuki would then go on to cast the attack spell, [Ray of Negative Energy] on Keno to restore her trimmed hair back to its original length before it was cut. According to Suzuki, cutting an undead's hair is considered as having minimum damage to someone like Keno.

## References

1. ↑ *Overlord Volume 04 Chapter 3: Army of Death*
2. ↑ *Overlord Volume 08 Side Story 2: A Day in Nazarick*
3. ↑ *Overlord Volume 12 Chapter 3: Beginning the Counterattack*
4. ↑ *Overlord Volume 06 Chapter 6: Prelude to the Royal Capital's Disturbance*
5. ↑ *Overlord Volume 02 Chapter 2: Journey*
6. ↑ *Overlord Volume 03 Chapter 3: Confusion and Understanding*
7. ↑ *Overlord Volume 04 Chapter 4: Dawn of Despair*
8. ↑ *Overlord Volume 06 Chapter 9: Jaldabaoth*
9. ↑ *Overlord Bonus Volume Chapter 2: Encounter in the Lost Country*