Ar'Kendrithyst

Rat Master Toix left Ezekiel in a side room with a sleeping rat and plenty of potion. He warned Ezekiel to switch to a different rat after half an hour, but other than that, Toix left the room, allowing Ezekiel to do as he wanted.

Erick cast a [Sealed Privacy Ward] into the space, making it even more private, and then he discarded all magenta affectations. He flared the mana projection of [Healing Word] in one hand, producing a cacophony of divine sounds and an accompanying staccato beat. He stopped the channel, then he restarted the white flare in his lightform, hovering the spell in front of him like a white glow in the world.

Tiffany and Paul watched; one on the door, the other with eyes on Erick.

Erick stretched the spell like putty, pulling it left and right and through itself. He quickly discarded the staccato sound, leaving behind a holy sound of Healing and direction. Erick didn’t understand the direction yet, but he would. With practice. He let that flare go. He focused on the task at hand. These were all happy, fat rats, and Erick was not going to cause unnecessary pain, but he was going to learn this Healing Magic as fast and as properly as he could.

With a separate swipe of his lightform, a red line appeared on the white rat’s thick stomach. Erick didn’t cut too deep, but he did get past the epidermis, the dermis, and into the fat beneath. This would be fatal without treatment, but the rat would get treatment, and soon.

Erick held that wound shut with his light, joining it together as seamlessly as he could, holding severed blood vessels to each other and everything else in its place, to prepare for the magic to come.

He hummed a [Healing Word] to a purity of Healing and guidance, and held that spell into his light, directly into the wound. White light glowed, then faded. The directed healing was done in a flashing second. Erick released his lightform from the rat and cast a controlled [Cleanse] over the space.

The wound partially separated, just as it had before.

… Hmm.

Erick inspected the wound, and found nothing too obvious. What was the problem, here?

… He let the wound remain open, not holding the sides together, and cast his directed [Healing Word] again.

The wound scarred over.

A [Cleanse] removed half of the scar.

He was obviously doing something wrong. Something that neither Ari nor Xue concerned themselves enough to speak on, and which wasn’t covered in the books they had given him. He didn’t think they were lying to him, but neither of them were telling him the full story, either, because the full story was massive.

… But Xue did mention that Healing Magic was difficult and only possible through the gifts of the gods, and the Script. Maybe this was true.

Honestly, it was a little presumptuous of him to think he could do this in two days, with little training beforehand. And yet, it made sense that he could. This was just repairing the body to what it had been before it was damag—

Ah.

Time Magic, repairing damage? Made sense for [Treat Wounds], as that often reversed wound damage. But…

Time Magic made no sense for spells like [Regeneration], which actually sucked up the body’s resources in order to regenerate lost flesh. No. There was no Time Magic here. Besides.

Looking back…

Though Erick had only found out about it after the fact, Rats had had some soul problems, which caused his body to heal incorrectly, and caused his eyesight problems.

If Time Magic was the only thing involved in this healing, then Rats’ healing issues would not be solved by [Greater Treat Wounds], for the body healed itself according to the soul, and if all healing magic did was restore the flesh through time-based actions, based on the blueprint of the soul, then Rats would have not been able to survive through his soul problems. Healing Magic would have killed him, not healed him.

So Healing Magic was not linked to the soul, and it was therefore not linked to Time Magic or to any previous incarnation of the body. If Time Magic was involved here, then wouldn’t constant healing reverse the effects of aging? It did not, therefore Healing Magic wasn’t Time Magic.

… Erick wasn’t 100% on that, but it felt right.

He continued.

So what was Healing Magic actually doing? Xue had said it best that Healing Magic was the restoration of the body through the application of Elemental Healing, through the controlled power of the gods, who could accurately heal like no other. And Elemental Healing was life force…

Maybe…

He needed to get rid of all of the broken and damaged body parts? The cells that were broken in the initial strike that wounded the rat? That made some sense. Imbuing broken DNA with life force seemed like a surefire way to cause cancers, which was what he was seeing.

Maybe this was the real reason why [Inflict Wounds] was a natural occurrence of learning proper Healing Magic? Maybe he needed to erase the broken body parts from the equation, before he could restore what had been lost… Except.

Except [Treat Wounds] was not ‘powering up’ the cells to the sides of the wound into healing over the wound, was it?

Well.

Actually.

Maybe that’s exactly what he was doing.

He had already considered that this was exactly what he was doing, but—

If that were the case, then resources would be taken from the body in order to cause this healing. Oh. Wait. Right.

Resources were not taken from the body to repair this damage because the spell provided the mana which provided the material to restore the body to full.

… Except in the cases where resources were taken from the body, as was the case in [Regeneration].

And [Greater Treat Wounds] was the absorption of [Regeneration] into [Treat Wounds], but [Greater Treat Wounds] didn’t take resources from the body.

Was there a [Greater Regeneration] that took greater resources from the body, in order to restore the body? That seemed like it would kill a person if their injury was great enough. Was that why Erick had never heard of such a spell before?

It was all kinda odd, now wasn’t it?

Anyway.

Let’s try it with an understanding of [Inflict Wounds] and [Treat Wounds] at the same time. Or. In a more simple way: Only [Treat Wounds] the cells and flesh which is not going to turn cancerous. Just… Simply don’t heal that which can heal wrong? Hmm.

Barely three seconds had passed while Erick thought through his few complicated thoughts.

He tried to heal the rat again, but slightly differently. This time he held the rat’s wound mostly closed, allowing for a tiny scar, and more importantly, for the cells in the area to grow and rearrange themselves as needed upon a scaffold of light.

He cast, and the rat’s scattered wound closed, knitting together into bumpy flesh. Erick tensed. And then he cast [Cleanse].

The [Cleanse] did not disturb the scar.

Success?

He succeeded in healing over the wound. But...

… No blue box.

Something was wrong.

The problem likely lay in that there was scar tissue at all. Normally, healing magic caused little scarring, and even caused scars to fade. Ari had even made a scarred wound on her forearm before erasing that with her [Inflict Wo—

Ah. [Inflict Wounds] was a part of the process, here. Right. Ari had mentioned that he would pick up [Inflict Wounds] somewhere along his journey into Healing Magic.

[Inflict Wounds] was still an aspect of Healing Magic, though? Eh. It had to be an application of Elemental Healing tied to Destruction. The Healing part would be to target the living tissue, and the Destruction would be to invert that power.

Hmm. Or…

He didn’t want to [Inflict Wounds] on a rat. With his modifiers, the rat would probably explode into red mist. He did not need to do that. What he could do, though, was incorporate some Destruction intent into his [Healing Word] and cast that spell ten times in a row, to both destroy every bit of scar tissue that forms, as it forms, and also to heal what remains to perfection.

Yes.

A perfect plan.

Erick harmonized a tiny sound of Mana Altering for Destruction into his directed [Healing Word], and held that gathering of power in his lightform. He almost applied the magic to the wound, but then he felt the need to speak, to further direct the mana. And so he did,

“Cull the broken, heal the hurt; with power spoken, death avert.”

Five bursts of white light coalesced into the body of the white rat. Flesh repaired in a flashing instant; perfect and without scar.

… That worked? He cast a [Cleanse] on the wound, and flesh did not disappear; it was a good healing. The blue liquid surrounding the rat dropped a bit, but this was an easy fix. Erick reached over and grabbed the blue bottle to refill the bowl—

A drop of red splashed onto the counter. Erick sniffed and rubbed his nose, coming away with a bloody hand for his efforts.

As he cast a [Cleanse] again, four blue boxes appeared.