145, 2/2

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.

“Success! It wor— Oh.” Erick was almost thrilled, but then he read [Inflict Wounds] again and looked down at the rat, eyes wide. “You would have exploded. Good thing I didn’t do that.” He asked Poi and Teressa, “Any idea how much damage [Greater Inflict Wounds] does?”

Teressa said, “Something like 20 times Willpower? That spell will fuck you up.”

“This is correct.” Poi said, “Your [Sanguine Charm] would partially protect us from such a spell, but not fully. Healing Magic is not technically Blood Magic.”

Erick turned back toward the sleeping rat, saying, “I’ll need to make [Greater Inflict Wounds] on a monster, then. Wonder if I have to level [Inflict Wounds] first, tho… Eh.” He stared at the rat, and at the long, curling tail, wondering if he should cut off the tip and make the next spell. But… He mumbled, “All Healing Magic is attainable through all other Healing Magics… but what’s the difference between [Treat Wounds] and [Regeneration]? They seem almost the same. But they’re not. A lot of this healing feels the same… like its all just different sides of the same expression of magic— Well. They are, actually. So that makes sense.”

He considered Remaking the next spell, [Regeneration], with [Healing Word].

This seemed like a bad idea. Or at least a sub-optimal one.

Erick held a hand out, and channeled mana through [Treat Wounds].

Then he channeled mana through [Healing Word]. And… Yup! [Treat Wounds] was much closer to his idea of [Regeneration]. Even if the spell was still only at level 1… That shouldn’t matter, right? Right. He cut his channeling of [Healing Word], and focused entirely on [Treat Wounds].

The spell was a gentle, watery glow, that shimmered across his hand, like he had stuck his arm into the light beneath the surface of the edge of the ocean. It carried with it the sound of waves and renewal, and also of constant wear and tear being replaced by the new. It was methodical. Unending. And yet helpful; never harmful. Purposefully helpful, even.

It was the sound of the Mana Ocean, guided into perfect cause.

It was the sound of a beach eroding and renewing at the same time.

It would not be hard to shift that sound into one that would replace lost sand, and renew a missing beach completely to full—

That would be cancerous, though.

No. He needed to guide the renewal of the beach better than that. To find the flow in the waters of life and to bring forth only that which should be there.

So you needed to follow the coastline.

But not the soul.

Ah. You needed to follow the design laid down in the DNA. Souls could go into any body, but DNA was only present in that body…

Oh. So Rats’ soul wasn’t originally in that body, was it? Was that the problem, there?

But back to the problem.

To regenerate lost flesh, you also needed to provide the scaffold for the body to regenerate upon, and to strangle that which was not perfect. This was control on a deep level. This was precise.

Erick snipped off the tip of the rat’s tail. Crimson blood swirled into the water as he moved the two-centimeter section of flesh and bone away, giving his magic room to work.

He cast, as he spoke,

“A bit of flesh has gone away, but here we have a little spell, with power to pull that which’s strayed; an empowerment of new-made cells.”

A few things happened in quick succession.

First, the rat began to deflate a little, as the tip of its tail scabbed over with new flesh, and then grew back to full length.

Second, a pair of blue boxes appeared.

And finally:

Blood began to flow from Erick’s nose, mouth, and his pants started to feel uncomfortably wet. Before he lost consciousness, he hit himself with [Treat Wounds], before falling to a knee, into Poi and Teressa’s concerned embrace. He blinked out blood, focusing on his mana sense, but he barely had a chance to look at himself before he fell unconscious.

His soul had been damaged. A minor explosion had occurred over his heart, and a few bits of his soul were outside of his body, briefly. His soul had rapidly flowed back inside, but now there was a trench where before there had been smooth, white soul.

Was that too much experimentation, too fast?

Ah…

Sleep is good.

– – – –

Ezekiel woke not three seconds later, coming to on the floor. The rat was still on the table above. Odin was hopping on his chest, hitting him with [Treat Wounds]. Paul sat on his knees, right beside him, going from terribly concerned to relieved as Ezekiel looked up.

Above Paul, was Tiffany, and she was still in the concerned phase.

“You fucked up your insides, a lot.” Tiffany frowned at him, saying, “And your soul.”

Uh.

Shit.

Ezekiel checked.

Yup! He hadn’t been seeing things before. There was now a rent in the Shroud of his soul, exposing the ‘meat’ below, along with a crack in that meat.

He realized what he had done and he was slightly embarrassed by it. This was a multilayered problem—they were always multilayered, weren’t they? Whatever the case, he wouldn’t be doing any more magic today. Maybe not tomorrow, either. He would have to beg off tomorrow’s meeting with Kaffi, too.

“Yeah.” Ezekiel groaned. “I fucked up my body and harmed my soul.” He added, “Got cocky.”

Paul sighed out, “Yes.”

Tiffany frowned. “It looks like normal spell creation soul damage, but… Worse, somehow.”

Ezekiel sat up. “I think you got it in one, Tiffany.” He tried to stand, and Tiffany and Paul helped him succeed. “Thank you.” He breathed out and hit himself with another [Treat Wounds], leveling the skill and also… Huh. Odd. He cast the spell again. The rent in his soul filled in at the same time. Maybe he could still make that meeting with Kaffi, actually, if his soul healed with each cast of his new spell. He said, “I tried to force a spell that wasn’t level 10 to make a new spell. Something didn’t like that.” He gestured at the rat, and said, “Let’s clean up and get back up to the room. I’ll explain up there.”

What he had seen had large implications, and he wasn’t sure of all of them, but he knew a few.

“We can talk a little right now.” Tiffany guessed, “When you make a spell, it makes a thing in the soul, and that thing is where you cast from, and as it levels to 10, it becomes settled, and thus you’re able to build upon it. But stressing your unsettled [Treat Wounds] into making a spell was too much stress, and since spell creation already demands a break in the soul in order to grow, you did the equivalent of building on sand, and hurt yourself in the process.”

Ezekiel smiled wide. “Yup! I didn’t understand how spell creation actually worked until just now, and the spotting of my own failure state.” He added, “You’re much better at this [Soul Sight] than I am.” He looked to the sleeping rat and its whole tail, saying, “Thank you for your assistance, mister rat.”

Paul gestured to the extra rat tail piece, and said, “Get rid of that.”

“Ah. Good thinking, Paul,” Ezekiel said.

With a tap of light, the bit of bloody rat tail was [Teleport Object]’d far away.

The rat went back to the handlers.

Ezekiel thanked Rat Master Toix for his assistance in gaining both [Treat Wounds] and [Regeneration], but that he was done for the day. He would have to resume his work tomorrow, or maybe the day after. Toix smiled wide, then patted the stomach of the sleeping rat, calling him a good boy.

As Ezekiel walked away, he heard Toix whisper to the little guy about how much good food he was going to get tonight, yes he was, yes he was!

– – – –

Ezekiel laid back in his chair, in his room on the fifth floor of the Southern House. He set aside Xue’s journal for a moment, and looked to the window. The view beyond of beauty and power, with multitudes of houses sitting atop forested and cultured mountains, which were full of even more houses, and teaching rooms, and libraries, and armories, and all sorts of other kinds of places. Ezekiel’s room was about 400 meters above the white road of the Alluvial District, so it was rather high, but it was the same height as much of the nicer housing out there, and below the even nicer places. He wasn’t at the top of the world right now. But.

It was pretty.

Ezekiel returned to his reading, but he didn’t pick up Xue’s journal. He picked up Elder Arilitilo’s.

He read for a while, then set that journal aside, then picked up Loremaster Riri’s literature on the enchanting of spider silk. After a while with that one, he set it back down, and went back to the Doctoring books. By the time he read through all of them a third time, the sun was an hour away from setting.

And Ezekiel had a problem.

Remaking [Treat Wounds] and [Regeneration] had been odd. Different than how he had Remade all the other spells he had ever Remade, and it wasn’t just the burst bit of his soul that made him think this. It was that ethereal ‘guiding-hand’ he had heard in the sounds of [Treat Wounds], and [Healing Word]. It was unnatural.

That guiding hand bothered him.

Not because he didn’t appreciate the help making healing spells…

Okay. Actually. Yes. That was it.

He did not appreciate sidestepping the understanding of true magic. Ezekiel wanted to Remake his healing spells without outside help, or at least through the application of his own knowledge onto an arcane set of physics that may or may not be about communicating with a force larger than Reality itself.

He was being contrarian, he knew.

The problem was not that he was calling out to the mana and that the mana responded.

The problem, which was kinda hard to articulate, was that the ‘guiding hand’ did not sound divine.

Ezekiel knew what Divinity sounded like. Divinity sounded like Phagar, or Rozeta.

This sound in [Healing Word] didn’t sound like Melemizargo, either.

It sounded sort of like… chains? Not in the rattling, linked-pieces-of-metal sense. But in the containing sense.

Yes.

That was it.

Ah.

It was the Script. He was hearing the Script in all of his Healing Magic. That was it.

The sound of mana was a pure sound. It could get jumbled, too, but mostly, it was pure. The Sound of the Script was complicated and constraining. A boundary and a channel carved into the mana, to let the mana flow in specific directions. With Healing Magic, this boundary and guide was very present.

How to confirm this hypothesis, though?

Let us consider the facts thus far; old information.

The Script contains and holds the mana on Veird, and ensures that everyone has access to spellwork, even if most people cannot get high into the tiers. Almost everything about the blue boxes is an attempt to impart to the user what is beyond true understanding; to grant them magics that they can not gain themselves, or to constrain their magic to understood phenomena. But the Script is not magic. It is an overlay.

It is an assistant and a jailer.

Ah.

The Script is a yoke, to ensure nothing too bad happens, for rampant use of magic killed the Old Cosmology. Even if the Wizards had nothing to do with the Sundering, the mana (or it was a magic? Same difference, really.) still went on a rampage and killed everyone, erasing existence itself.

The mana left on Veird is the scraps of the Old Cosmology, yoked into usable form.

Where does magic come from, though?

Mana is created from the soul, but magic… also comes from the soul. When a person gains a new spell, that spell becomes a part of their very being; their soul.

Ezekiel looked at himself with [Soul Sight], and cast a [Cleanse].

He didn’t see anything ‘flex’ in his soul when he cast. But maybe he wasn’t meant to? Maybe that particular part of [Soul Sight] and mana sense was hidden from him?

It seemed… Right, to think that the soul held the magic of a person. Ezekiel had considered that Tenebrae used some sort of [Soul Sight] and [Identification] spell in order to ‘read’ Ezekiel’s Status, based upon what was inside of his soul. But he had no proof that that was what Tenebrae had done, except for the man’s ornery nature seeming to get more ornery, when Ezekiel guessed in that direction.

Thinking it over…

… All of that seemed correct.

So the Script did not control the mana itself, but it did assist Ezekiel in (re)making his two new spells.

But had he called out to the mana, or to the Script, in order to make that happen?

He was pretty sure that he had called out to the mana, for sure.

So, taking all of that into account… Had he damaged himself today, not because of any ‘building on shaky foundations’, as Tiffany had theorized, but because he had gone against the shackles of the Script? The Script demanded that a person level a spell to X before they made new spells with it. But his [Treat Wounds] was very much not level X. Had he gained [Regeneration] only because he had forced the issue, through the mana, and the Script had made allowances for the ‘bucking bronco’ that is the mana? But he had been harmed in the process, because the Script didn’t like that?

Where does the body and soul damage come from, exactly, when he makes a new spell?

He mumbled, “The damage has to come from the Script, right?”

Back when Ezekiel was trying to figure out the [Teleport Lock] of the Shades, he guessed that it was not a denial spell of any sort, but instead it was a spell that would ensure a fight. In this way, a Shade’s [Teleport Lock] was more of a lateral attack, and not a straight-up denial. Hard denials are difficult to do under the Script. But a lateral attack is easy.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

For instance, when killing a monster with 1000 Health, it is easier to kill the monster by sticking a steel sword through the monster’s brain and getting a critical, than it is to throw a 1000-damage [Force Bolt] at the monster’s flanks and accomplish nothing.

And yes, it was ‘lateral thinking’ to strike at the weak point instead of at the strong point.

When Ezekiel asked the Interfaith Church of Spur and the gods therein about how [Teleport Lock] worked, regarding his own ideas about how to tear down that part of Melemizargo’s power, he was promptly told that to create such a spell would not only be an act of Wizardry, but it would also go directly against Melemizargo’s interests, and the Dark God would give a response. He was also told that Rozeta would still help him make such a spell, but that he might not survive the creation. It would be like [Zone of Peace] all over again, which was another act of violence that Ezekiel didn’t quite understand yet, but he had been told that he had tried to control the Script, and the Script didn’t like that.

Anyway.

Rozeta had sent him a note telling him to come to the Orrery in the Splinter Mountains if he wished to know more about the Script, and why a person is damaged whenever they make new magic.

But Ezekiel was guessing that there was no real secret to this damage.

When a person created new Basic Magic, they became trapped between the free use of mana, and the constraining power of the Script. Going too far out of line with either force would have a disastrous effect on the person in the middle, which often resulted in damage, based upon how much struggle happened between the involved forces.

None of this was truly new information, but with recent events, Ezekiel had cause to go over some old thoughts and to reorganize them into something new, and more informative.

In particular, this ‘guiding hand’ in the mana that helped him to make [Treat Wounds] and [Regneration] was very much not the ‘helping force’ that he spoke to when he made [Call Lightning].

[Call Lightning] came from the Script organizing what the mana had helped Ezekiel to make.

But [Treat Wounds], and all other modern Healing Magic, came from the Script enforcing a specific action of the mana.

Which meant the healing spells he currently knew were not his own, at all. Ezekiel had followed a road laid down in the Script, instead of finding his way through the mana. Remaking [Treat Wounds] and [Regeneration] had been a trick of the system. Not even Tricking Magic was such an obvious trick.

Oddly enough, the only spell he made today that he felt he had made himself was [Inflict Wounds], for that was destruction, and destruction was easy.

Considering that all healing spells used to be divinely granted magics… could he have ever made them himself?

… Maybe not.

Ezekiel didn’t like that.

He didn’t like that, because… Of reasons.

And now he was being contrarian again. So what if the Script helped him to make magic? This was fine, right? The only actual problem would come when Yggdrasil opened up new worlds to new Scripts. If there wasn’t some overarching compatibility with each new ‘Script’ that populated the universe, then Healing Magic would never again exist. All other magic would be easy enough to remake… Maybe.

But not Healing Magic.

And there was another problem.

Ezekiel said, “It means that if there’s ever a space where the Script does not exist, then the magic that has been made might still exist, for it seems to become a part of the soul, but how would anyone gain any new magic? Through learning aura control? That would have to be it, right? But is that even how magic creation actually works? Is all my spellwork actually a function of the Script?” He added, “I want the magic I have made to actually be mine. But is it? Is this [Treat Wounds] actually mine, now, since it is a part of my soul, but I used the Script to do it, and that was an obviously incorrect method? The true way to make this magic would have been to use pure Elemental Healing, and control.” He murmured, “But I didn’t do that.”

Ezekiel let his mind wander.