Reborn Healer Chapter 61

Soul magic, as it turned out, was not very easy to learn.

There were certain fields of magic that I knew I was just worse at. Any form of offensive magic was substantially more difficult for me to grasp even from a textbook. Spell formations just wouldn’t stick in my head, and even after years of practice, I only had three fire spells and one water spell in my repertoire, and the latter wasn’t even meant for real combat.

I didn’t feel that same innate discord with soul magic as I did with the offensive spells that Locke had tried to teach me via rote memorization, but the spell formations themselves were ridiculously complicated.

Teaching me soul magic hadn’t been the first thing I had asked of my father, of course. I’d had a number of questions, not all of which I could ask given our current location, but some of them had been pretty important.

Cale’s mercenary group had lost at least three more members, at least one of whom I’d healed during the frenzy earlier this week. Locke was out of town, likely going further down south where active plague outbreaks continued decimating populations. The clinic had been broken into, likely by the Federation, but not much other than a toolbox had been taken.

That last bit was what finally made me put two and two together. The only missing link I’d been looking for was just how the Federation could have had the weapon, but they must have gotten the plagued limbs I’d cut off. I had no real clue as to how the hell they could’ve known to look there, but I suspected it had something to do with Sebastian’s slimy ass.

Mizuki wasn’t very happy about being here, but she wasn’t quite sure what developments were in store for her. She had met with the Lord Prince with Vallis and a number of guards supervising her, and whatever had transpired there had seemed to mollified her enough that she was content with staying here for a while.

She sat to the side, watching with interest as my father spoke to me of the arcane arts regarding the soul.

“Why are you here?” I asked her while Vallis went off to retrieve a set of tools he’d said would assist with his explanation. “You’re not a mage, are you?”

“I can do magic.” She stuck her tongue out at me.

“Everyone can,” I said. “But you don’t have the kind of mana manipulation necessary to properly cast it, which is necessary for all of this.”

“That’s true.” The half-elf adjusted the plain white shift she’d changed into, frowning as she picked a thread off. “I like magic. I’m interested in seeing all sorts.”

“This have something to do with that whole great adventurer thing you wanted to do with your life?”

“You could say that.” Mizuki shrugged. “I want to see more of the world, and I mean that in a sense that goes beyond just seeing more of its locations. I want to taste the blood of every monster in the deepest level of the World Dungeon, learn the name of every demon in their burning hells, know what lives in the bottom of the endless oceans. I want to know the true shape of magic.”

She got a far-off look in her eyes that told me this wasn’t the first time she’d considered this question by a long shot.

I didn’t quite know how to respond to that, but Vallis saved me from having to think up a response by returning with something that looked like a stethoscope with mana crystals embedded into it at regular intervals.

“If you reach an advanced enough level, soul magic requires nothing but your own magic,” he said. “This is a useful tool for when you have yet to properly understand the weave of your soul.”

Vallis showed me how to use the tool. By passing mana through it and placing it in the rough area where the metaphysical core corresponded to a real biological location, it could convey certain aspects of the soul. It was nothing like Body Scan in how detailed it was, but it was a kind of detail I’d never seen before even when intentionally trying to peer into my own soul.

“This is a precise art, which makes it more difficult to manage when you have to do this much by feel,” Vallis said. “Try not to get frustrated if you can’t immediately get it. It took me months before I could sense my own soul properly.”

“There’s no formalized exercises for this?” I asked. “I thought you had textbooks.”

“The textbooks list bits and pieces,” he explained. “Soul magic is a tricky domain. There are a very, very scant few spells that have been well-recorded and passed through diabolists and court soul magicians throughout the centuries. Most of the field, unfortunately, is outright excluded.”

There it was again. Exclusion. Not being able to produce or read written records of the magic I wanted to use was starting to get really annoying. “I’m noticing a bit of a trend here. Do any of us not use excluded magic?”

Mizuki raised her hand. “Blood is only banned for being a dark art by kingdoms, not by divine word.”

“Most soul magic, including even fundamental exercises for soul cycling and awareness, are excluded,” Vallis explained. “With your soul currently in a flux state, you may have a better chance at growing aware of it now, in fact. Let’s run through some basic exercises and keep your soul under control for the time being.”

“It still has problems?” I asked. “I thought that advancing to Adept fully would be enough to deal with those.”

“I don’t know what problems you were dealing with before, but you let yourself get hit by the nucleus of a plague bomb,” Mizuki interjected. “I’m more surprised that your soul is still functional.”

“Some healing is in order,” Vallis said. “Then we can begin training proper.”

Having my soul healed was not an unfamiliar sensation, but it wasn’t Rebind Soul that my father cast on me today. I did my best to memorize what the mana felt like traveling through my veins and break down the spell formation he was using to cast it, but it was ridiculously complex even though he intentionally slowed it down for me.

The first day progressed mostly as Vallis had assumed—getting a grasp on my soul was difficult, and trying to perceive my soul in the same magical way that the stethoscope had provided was a near impossibility.

“It’s alright,” he told me. “The exercises will slowly deepen your awareness until you are actively able to perceive it.”

I nodded, though there was one thing that had been itching at the back of the mind across the couple of hours he’d spent tutoring me in a form of magic esoteric enough that even I had to ask for him to repeat himself a number of times.

“Can you just let me try one thing really quickly?” I asked. “I’m not sure if it’ll work, but I want you to see if there’s anything I can glean with my soul doing this.”

“Of course.” He spread his hands. “Do whatever you’d like.”

I tapped a finger gun to my forehead and mimed pulling the trigger, casting Anesthesia as I did.

This was an interaction where I actually wasn’t sure what would happen. Anesthesia was a concentration spell, and falling unconscious definitely counted for those conditions.

The activation phase worked fine. Mana flooded my brain, and I didn’t throw up barriers to stop it. My waking mind snapped silent instantly.

Before my body could even hit the floor, though, I dove into my soul as thoroughly as I could.

Sure enough, I found myself in a vast, dark expanse, winding paths splitting off in every direction. Even here, my balance was unstable, as if I was about to fall off those paths and into the infinite black at any moment.

One of those paths tugged at me, urging me towards it. Somehow, it invoked a strong sense of familiarity in me. I followed it, finding myself much more stable when what passed for my feet in this representation of my soul made contact with the path, but I paused as I moved, turning back.

A blurry vision of the real world waited behind me, away from all the paths. My unconscious body was falling, a concerned Vallis and an amused Mizuki watching. Neither of them, I noted, were making a move to catch me.

Well, that’s kind of rude.

I continued along the path I’d chosen, trying to focus as much as I could on my soul here and now.

Sometimes, when I slept, I dreamt the same dream I’d had since I was a kid. Admittedly, I was still a kid, but I’d been even younger before.

One thing I’d noticed was that I consistently accidentally wandered out of my body when I fell unconscious due to unnatural means. Passing out from exhaustion, getting knocked out by spider venom and dragged into the World Dungeon, and all sorts of other situations had led me to these dreams.

Doing it intentionally, as it turned out, kept me much more aware of the entire process.

Following the path further until it emerged into a real space in an unrecognizable section of the World Dungeon confirmed my suspicions.

Aria Kane rested on a makeshift stone bench, eating a ration bar while twirling a knife in her off hand.

“It’s not often I see you not surrounded by bodies,” I said.

“And this is my first time seeing you intentionally wander out of your body,” Aria replied, stashing her food into a storage ring. “You figured it out?”

“To some extent,” I hedged. “I was trying to get a better look at my soul because Vallis is trying to teach me magic related to it right now but I can’t get quite the right grasp on perception of it.”

“Then wandering will certainly help you,” she replied with a soft smile. “I can’t help you with the kind of soul magic your father does, I’m afraid.”

“That’s fine.” I looked around. “Honestly, if I could learn to control this soul walk better, I’d be happy enough for that as a starting point.”

“That is more than possible to do,” Aria said. “You don’t have very long, but I can explain a few things while we’re here.”

“Where is here, by the way?” I asked.

“World Dungeon,” she said, like that explained anything. “I pulled myself off the main elf issue because there’s a lot of attention on it. I’m closer to Leyeril than anything else.”

“Huh. Is there anything to be worried about in that aspect?”

“Probably, but you should focus on your surroundings for the time being,” Aria said. “The soul is the part of magic you can reason with the least. Your goal is not to focus. Become one with the way of the world around you and you will understand what is necessary to replicate it. For some, this means meditation. For others, it means doing this often.”

“Am I safe to do this often?” I asked. “You told me about how dangerous this was before.”

“It’s safer when you know you’re doing it,” she said. “You see the paths, correct?”

So that was the normal state of the Nightmare. “I do.”

“Follow your instincts, but do not follow any that entice you,” she said. “You will always recognize my mark because your blood is my blood and thus your mana is my mana, but there will be others who seek to imitate me. Double-check everything. Trust only yourself. If you can understand that, then you can do as you please.”

“That’s comforting,” I said drily. “I appreciate the advice.”

“Of course,” she said. “And don’t overstay your time. You’re starting to flicker. Trying to stay for too long in a place where your soul is not meant to be will lead only to disaster for you.”

“How can I tell?”

“Your own judgment. If you can feel that something is off, it’s already too late. Err on the side of leaving too early.”

“In that case, I think I’ll take my leave now,” I said. “Uh, if I can figure out how to.”

Aria just smiled again. “You already know how to.”

I frowned, trying to parse what that meant, but I realized she was right. Just as the manner in which I was supposed to use many of my skills had come to me through intuition alone, so too could I simply find the path I had taken to get in.

None of that had been present before. Did intent really matter so much? Had it been this easy the entire time, or had I actually been incapable of this before?

I backtracked through the paths until I was back at the crossroads where I started. Already, I could see the stability of each individual path getting worse, some of them even wholesale falling into the void around me.

From there, I willed myself to leap back towards reality.

My body snapped awake, my limbs scattered around me bonelessly in a heap on the floor.

“I didn’t realize you could knock yourself out for so long,” Mizuki said. The half-elf was squatting right above me, peering down at me with her head tilted and a mischievious grin on her face. “I should have thought to draw something on you.”

“What are you, seven?” I muttered, dragging myself back to my feet. “You totally could have caught me.”

“Try saying something next time, then,” she suggested. “I couldn’t react in time.”

It was entirely unnecessary for me to lean on it, but Nightmare’s Call was more than happy to inform me that Mizuki was telling a bald-faced lie.

“You triggered parts of your soul intentionally,” Vallis noted. He sounded ever so slightly taken aback, which was the most surprised I think I’d ever seen him. “That… certainly advances things.”

It was only then that I realized that my mana, which had finally been fully restored after rest and soul healing, had surged into my core and formed another part of it.

Skill learned: Soulwalk [Adept]

Vallis had patients to attend to afterwards, so he left us. The Lord Prince entered the room not long after.

Gerald Halcyon looked like an entirely different man from when he’d been fighting earlier. Now clean-shaven and out of his armor, he wore a simple but regal outfit with a bandolier of knives strapped from shoulder to hip. If he had posed and added a fluffy white wig, he could have passed for an eighteenth-century French monarch.

“I’m glad to see you have made a recovery,” Gerald said. “Most who are affected by the Nightmare never do.”

“I’m well aware,” I said darkly. “I hear that healers who can manage it are in short supply.”

“Indeed they are.” He turned, gesturing for us to follow him. “I would like to speak with both of you about this matter, in fact.”

The words made it sound like a suggestion, but the tone of voice and passive threat he exuded made it clear that it was anything but. We followed the Highmaster to a separate part of the opulent, massive, shockingly quiet palace.

I had never been in this place before since I obviously lacked the status myself, but it struck me how unused it seemed to be. There were no people in the halls, dust was gathering on windowsills, and the entire place was damn near silent.

Gerald led us to a meeting room that at least seemed to have seen some more use. I’d seen ones like it before in a Federation courier’s memories. The air hummed with magic here, and astute eyes like mine caught the enchantments and charms engraved into doorframes, windows, and even the floor itself.

Okay, it wasn’t my eyes that were catching it, but my recently sharply upgraded Harmonic Awareness was such a normal part of my daily life now that it may as well have been sight.

Mizuki and I sat next to each other, though Gerald remained standing.

“Mizuki of the Blood,” he said. “Ren Kane. It’s a pleasure to finally meet the two of you properly.”

“I wish I could say the same, my lord,” I replied. “I have to assume that warranting your direct attention can only be a bad thing for a humble healer like me.”

I was being intentionally dense, but it was true. So far, I had attempted to live a relatively regular, virtuous life despite the decidedly irregular powers I had acquired along the way.

“The term of address is ‘my lord’?” Mizuki asked, frowning. “Why did nobody tell me?”

“Not every commoner gets it right,” the Lord Prince said. “Though there are few who would dare to speak me like this.”

Though he’d been pretty down to earth in our previous interactions, a chill ran down my spine now as he exuded the regal arrogance I would have expected from a noble like him. Nightmare’s Call sent me whispers of his mental state, painting a picture of a very different man than the one who stood before me now.

I shuddered. The skill was getting substantially better, but right now all it was telling me was that if I had met Gerald at an earlier point in his life, it was likely neither Mizuki nor I would be alive right now.

The moment passed, though, and he sighed. “Maybe it’s better to be reminded that I’m still only human. The two of you were on the edge of my awareness, but I did not realize you were this important.”

“You knew us as Red and Blue,” I said. “The shitty aliases we registered with the city.”

“Which means you were the one who sent the message to look for me,” Mizuki concluded quietly. “And that makes you the source of this entire guild war.”

“I had my aide send out a simple request,” Gerald said. Suddenly, he looked very tired. “I should have anticipated that people would use a royal’s word as a political tool. I did not.”

He did not, I noticed, apologize, but I supposed that was too much to ask out of a Lord Prince.

“So?” I asked. “Why were you looking for her in the first place?”

Mizuki turned towards me bashfully, chagrin clear from her body language. “It turns out that news of the conflict involving me spread further than I initially thought it would.”

“An elven princess being forced out of a kingdom preparing to wage war on us is a point of great interest to the security of the kingdom,” Gerald said. “There was a suspicion that two adventurers with obvious aliases punching significantly above their tier could have some connection to that matter. The suspicion was correct.”

“He offered a trade earlier,” Mizuki said. “At least he calls it that. I don’t have any illusions about what happens if I say no.”

“In wartime, I learned to appreciate the illusion of civility,” he said. “I would like to remain the man I think I have become.”

“Nice of you,” I said. “What are the terms?”

“They apply for both of you,” the Lord Prince replied, all business again. “I am not exaggerating when I say you may prove to be Liaren’s best chance at surviving the next five years. Let’s start from the beginning.”