Arcanist In Another World-Chapter 2: Arcane Healer

Valens woke with a sudden jolt. He was sprawled over the ground awkwardly, the back of his head stinging from the tough ground, knees drawn up near his chest. There was hardly a place in his body that didn’t ache from hard use. There was no light. Nothing but the frequencies of the world that told him he was still alive.

Awareness stabbed at him. He remembered where he was now. He’d been in the cell, with the Void Sphere clutched tight in his hand, the last gift of--

Master!

He turned and twisted, scrunching his face up when a sudden stench stabbed at him. Rot and pus, his nose was full of the smell of them. Dark walls all around him. Stretching further away, jagged faces dripping wet.

No sight of his Master. He was gone, for good, and now Valens was alone in a dark cave.

He floundered to his feet. He blinked. Sounds dinned in his ears. Thousands of them. Their tunes carried a different feeling, almost joyful and free, not like the forbidden source suppressed with the rootmetal’s presence.

Life mana cuddled him, tight. Warm. Home. There, he could feel the wind. What was happening? Was the ritual a success? But this place looked disturbingly similar to a normal cave.

Pain lanced through his hands when he tried to move.

The handcuffs.

They were gone, and left behind them a smoldering pain.

Wincing, he reached to one of the gemstones stitched into his thigh, spreading the skin with the tip of his finger. Apathy took hold of his mind, muting the pain. He plucked one of the jewels, and raised it high to his eyes.

It took him a year’s pay to get a dozen of these jewels. Master Eldras thought they needed more of everything to be prepared against the unknown once the warping spell sent them off to that different world, where the truth of all things awaited.

Pressure behind his eyes.

Valens pinched the bridge of his nose.

Onto the wound, now.

That would keep his mind away.

Immediate troubles and something he could focus on.

Right. Pain. He lifted the Apathy off his mind, and welcomed the agony.

He felt the stone, and mana started washing through his hands in waves, each time producing a Bloodsong that let him know how serious the wound was. From the slight ting in the otherwise harmonious frequencies, it seemed a few pieces of rootmetal had seeped into his blood flow.

Scowling, he directed the life mana inside the stone to his pores, adjusting the frequencies of the Bloodsong to a healthy one. The delicate balance demanded focus. He had to find those bits of rootmetal and force them out of his blood flow.

Life mana wormed its way through his veins. Each millisecond it released a new Bloodsong, the sound waves brushing and bouncing back from his veins to let Valens know every detail of the pursuit.

Only a Life Magus could hear these frequencies, and only a Resonant Healer could command them. Valens had learned the craft in sixteen years, eight of which he spent at the Institute, bruising his elbows on sleepless nights. The other eight had been served as a Healer in the Empire’s Lifeward.

He fought back against the urge to stand straight when the next Bloodsong whispered into his ears. There, he found them. Their song had a metallic sound about it. Unnatural. Valens focused on the gemstone and commanded the life mana with practiced ease, forcing the bits to move against the current of his blood.

Pain streaked across his arm, through his fingers, until small slits opened on both his wrists. His stomach revolted in disgust at the sight of rootmetal bits. Valens wiped them clean and used the life mana for a basic stitch to close the slits. A second after, both his hands looked as good as new.

[Ding!]

[You have been assigned the class ‘Arcane Healer - Ancient’]

[You have been assigned the trait ‘Resonance - Ancient’]

Ding! You have learned the Class Skill ‘Apathy- Master’. Do you want to register it in one of your skill slots?

Ding! You have learned the Class Skill ‘Lifesurge - Master’. Do you want to register it in one of your skill slots?

Ding! You have learned the Class Skill ‘Lifeward - Master’. Do you want to register it in one of your skill slots?

Ding! You have learned the General Skill ‘Mana Manipulation - Master’ Do you want to register the skill in one of your skill slots?

[Ding!]

[You are currently in the Gate of the Necromancer where a Queststone is active.]

[Gate of the Necromancer - Queststone

Difficulty: C

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Description: Melton’s King has given the claim of the Queststone to the Duality Guild. Cleanse the Necromancer’s rot. Bring back the traitor’s corpse.]

[Quest has been accepted!]

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“Wait!” Valens jerked back as a host of voices sounded inside his mind. Terrible waves of frequencies rushed to his head, and he doubled over, palms clamped over to his ears, eyes blanking at the lines of text hovering before his eyes.

“What is happening here?” he blurted out.

…..

Valens scratched at his tangled stubble and scowled at the hovering texts that appeared out of nowhere. They didn’t seem material, a fact that presented itself when he waved a hand through them and his fingers just passed through. Perhaps magic had a quality he wasn’t aware of. He asked himself if there was anything as such in the old texts, perhaps a passage talking about magical letters kept in a dimension out of a magus’s reach.

But no, he was certain that he wouldn’t forget something so positively absurd. And what was this strange, airy feeling that appeared in his stomach? Not as much as shock but more like a sudden joy that tingled in the deeper parts of his body. Tingling there on his core, as if mana was coursing through his veins.

That was not possible.

Apathy fixed the little gap through which this sudden joy spilled into his mind, and it was with a cold detachment that he felt the Resonance, focusing on the frequencies of his veins.

Breath caught in his throat. There was scarcely a change in the outer web of his systemic veins, but something heavy was pressing over them from near his heart. Something that brimmed with a familiar weight.

Valens sat shakily on the ground, rubbing the nape of his neck. Mana was there on his body. Not the energy stored in the gemstones and needed a touch of his skin to be used. Not the source of all magic that grew scarce by the day. No, this was mana in its rarest form, resting in a well fashioned from his own flesh, sloshing against the walls of his body like the waves of a gurgling river.

That could only mean one thing.

“It worked,” he muttered when it dawned on him. The ritual worked after a number of attempts that had him question his life. After months of suffering and preparing in silence. After one last attempt that cost him his Master.

It had worked, and that was why he could see magical letters in the air.

He’d promised to himself that he would keep an open mind to the truth of it when he’d see the world. Even going from a village to a big town could leave a man breathless with the culture shock. Thus, he’d been preparing himself for the biggest shock of them all through these last months.

Tears welled in his eyes, fingers of his right hand tightening around his chest. Then he started laughing. A rasping, mad kind of laughter that echoed off the walls of the cave, echoed deep in his ears. He cried and laughed, and bashed his back into hard stone when he tried to work himself up.

That brought his sense back.

Right. Words asking him questions, obviously intending him to do something about them. But what was this about learning things he already knew? What about the quest? What Necromancer, and what rot that needed cleansing? Resonance was a Trait now? It was… well, the frequencies of the world, a name known to all Life Magi that have ever lived. It wasn’t a trait. It was… eh, something entirely else.

“So I have learned them, you say, and you ask me if I wish to register them into skill slots?” Valens tapped a finger into his chin, a gesture he came to realize that made him look as busy and thoughtful as possible. Did wonders to stave off the occasional assistant eager to learn the tricks of the field. Never really worked against his Master, though.

“Why would I do that? And how would I do that, exactly? You can’t fit the knowledge of arcane into a slot. The weight of it is felt only by a mind delicate enough to see its intricacies.”

He waved his hand one more time through the magical letters, and paused when they slowly fizzled out. Cold, wet walls of the cave stared at him. Water dripped slowly down the ceiling in big droplets. The letters were gone. Erased likely because of his ignorant questions.

Did they take offence because of his manners? But any disciple of arcane should be expected to ask the obvious questions! How else would anyone learn the ways of the world? If even something as little as a question was enough for them to brisk off, then what Valens faced here could only be one twisted possibility that he’d never considered.

A mad Magus. The worst kind, really.

“I wonder who is behind all this.” He sighed out a long breath, already regretting his decisions. He should’ve known to expect a certain degree of madness from a fellow Arcanist. Nobody sane of mind would ever take a cave as their nest without being cracked in some ways.

“If you can hear me,” Valens muttered. “Then do know that I’ve sacrificed a lot for… this. I’m eager to learn. I want to learn! And I’m a fast learner by any standards. Earned my Archmage mantle by the age of twenty-two. Nobody has done it before, and I mean, nobody in my world!”

Silence. Looked like the other party had taken his manner in the worst way possible, so much that they refused to speak up to him. Strange thing was that there was scarcely any change in the Resonance, other than the sudden abundance of all kinds of mana weighing down on the wavelengths.

Those words… They were indeed resting in a different dimension that couldn’t affect his immediate proximity. So then, he was facing a Void Magus — a complete blank, as he knew nothing of their abilities. But, by logic, having a bunch of words appear in the air should be well within the means of such an adept Magus.

“I…” Valens said, having decided to take the initiative. There was no other way. “I want to learn. I accept your offer. Yes, put those things into skill slots, and tell me what that really means.”

Another stretch of silence, Valens growing tense by the second, before those words appeared once again, this time a touch different.

Ding! The Class Skill ‘Apathy- Master’ has been registered into your skill slots.

Ding! The Class Skill ‘Lifesurge - Master’ has been registered into your skill slots.

Ding! The Class Skill ‘Lifeward - Master’ has been registered into your skill slots.

Ding! The General Skill ‘Mana Manipulation - Master’ has been registered into your skill slots.

Remaining Class Skill Slots (7/10)

Remaining General Skill Slots (7/10)

Perfect. Not a single change other than telling him that they’d been registered into skill slots. He managed an absolute focus around the Resonance when the words appeared, and failed to recognize any new tunes in the harmonious rhythm of this world. Who was doing this? And why must he face a mad Magus on the first day of his new life?

By all means he should've felt glad. The ritual was a success. Yes! Months of work, and now he was finally here. But why—

“Wait,” Valens scowled out into the dark of the cave, eyebrows raising. “There was a Quest. Can it be that you want me to complete this quest before you give me the answers? A sort of trial to gauge my worth to see if I deserve your attention? Cleanse the Necromancer’s rot, you’ve said, but what is a Necromancer, exactly?”

The wind picked up from behind him all of a sudden, flapping the tails of his ragged robe. Valens risked a glance back. The draft was suggesting the exit of the cave was forward, and if he knew anything about his mad colleagues, chances were this was indeed a sick challenge for him to overcome.

Explore the cave. That seemed like the only option. And whatever this Quest wanted him to accomplish would surely be waiting for him there on the path. He nodded. Made sense. There was no reason for the Magi of this world to trust a man who appeared out of nowhere in this cave. They had every right to be suspicious of him.

“I’m not here to play games,” he said, stretching his aching legs and peering out into the cave. “But for this once I’ll humor you.”

……