Chapter 83: Letter
It was a dark, foggy night outside, and Valens walked with a spring in his step through the deserted streets of Belgrave. His visit to the Magi’s Guild had taken a much different turn than he’d expected, and hence it took him the greater part of the day to conclude his conversation with Master Archibald on an interesting note.
The old man suffered from tuberculosis, a most painful sickness that had the habit of fighting a stubborn battle against any attempts to cleanse it from one’s body. A vile predator, consuming slowly the victim and lending them a most painful death which was no less infectious than that of a plague, and given enough grounds to fertilize, could devour a city’s worth of people in a brutally short time.
Such cases demanded intricate work. You could not, in good conscience, let an Assistant Healer handle a patient suffering from consumption, for the bacteria could feed on the unguided lifemana to strengthen its hold around one’s body. That was why, during his regular visits to the Church’s most respectable Infirmary, the cure he was getting from those Priests only further quickened the pace at which the sickness consumed the Master’s body.
Valens, instead, targeted the bacterial granulomas with minute precision, bursting the cell walls and killing them in quick succession. To not have the lungs suffocate on the resulting dead material of these cells, he opened intricate canals inside his body and washed them off with generous amounts of lifemana.
However, there was not much he could do about the cells that had already died in the long time the Master suffered from the sickness. The scars and cavities across the lungs would remain, but with time and enough stats poured into Endurance and Vitality, Valens promised the Master a complete recovery.
It was something of a dream of his, and to have it realized in this world was perhaps one of the rare good-natured surprises he had experienced. The stats could do the work which would take a Healer months, or possibly years of his precious time. They couldn’t, however, fight off against a bacterial infection that mutated insidiously in a way that left even a man of Master Archibald’s stature helpless.
Once again this showed Valens that the human body remained ever the slave of Mother Nature. A tiny ant in the face of the grand ability to impress its authority upon even the specimen who were beyond what was considered human back in the Empire.
But then, that was a lesson well learned. Master Eldras had told him once that the answer resided in the word ‘nature’. You could fight against the nature of things, but you should, at all times, expect it to fight back in equal measure. Here, Valens could see it with his own eyes how that equal measure translated into real life.
Through the silent streets, he sucked in the dusty air of Melton’s Belgrave, and breathed it out. There was a lightness around his feet. A sense of belonging that wasn’t there since he came to this world. The Golden Cathedral looming from above the brick buildings, the Resni’s Tower that rose in defiance to the monotony of streets around it, and there beyond the squares of the rich-class’ folks of the city, a single apartment building with but two rooms to its name.
Three was a big number, and it just so happened that he had three different places that he could belong should he ever decide to embrace each one of them.
The Church was a dubious choice, of course. Ask any sane Magi in their field, and likely you would get a scoff, or a biting remark about the religious organizations and their way of handling certain things, but Magi Guild… Now that was a different thing. He was given a mark that represented his Master status in the Guild, painted in rich, red color to which Sebastian’s eyes blared, and his face went pale when Valens showed it to him on his way out.
He was free to join the afternoon gatherings in the Chamber of Masters, but was told of all the kingdoms in the world, Melton could be the only one that lacked an actual presence of Magi’s Guild. The visionaries of the field, he was told, didn’t like the oppressive mood of the city, and hated with passion the Sun’s Church’s presence like you would hate a bigoted man’s ever-loud voice.