Arcanist In Another World-Chapter 7: Healing Bones

“Everything?” the undead repeated.

“Yes,” Valens said, pointing at the burnt pile of corpses before the fog. “Start with these skeletons. They seemed hungry for my flesh, and you look disturbingly similar to them.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” The undead smacked his armor with incredulity. “You really don’t know! And I thought you a racist. Can’t blame me though, now, can you? There are enough of you in Melton who hate our guts. It hurts being treated like that, but you learn to live with it.”

That oddly sounded familiar to Valens. The way the Inquisition acted around the Magi, their rootmetal manacles always at the ready, eyes searching eagerly for a missed step to take one in and hang him for the crowds...

I’m getting distracted.

He shook his head. He had to stay focused. He was talking with an intelligent corpse here, one that had a rather interesting way with words.

“I know the feeling, but as I’ve said, I have no recollection of these events,” he said, then eyed him. “It’s not like you can blame me either. That sword and the armor, you don’t paint a peaceful picture like that. How am I supposed to know you’re not the same?”

“The Heartstone!” The undead ground its rotten teeth in frustration before it waved a hand. “You know what, alright. I’m calm, relaxed. Everything’s under control. Just a misunderstanding. I’ll think of it as a tiny little lesson for a precious Priest.”

“That precious Priest has a few more tricks up his sleeve if you want to test him,” Valens muttered.

“Oh?” the undead cackled once again. “I admit you’ve some skill to have damaged my armor with your level, but let’s not get too ahead of ourselves, shall we? And what’s with your level, by the way? You’re what, twenty years old, twenty-one? How come you’re still Level 13? How does that work?”

“What do you mean?”

“Uh. A normal human gets a level for each birth year, no? The last I’ve heard it stopped around eighteen or nineteen. So how’s that possible?”

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Valens was taken aback. He remembered getting levels. Stats and other things. He’d thought these were a part of the game that Void Magus had him play in this cave. But what this creature was saying suggested a different meaning.

“What is a level?” he asked with a blank face.

“You— What?” the undead blurted out. “You know what, I don’t want to know what sort of sick pot you’re brewing here. Whatever. Secrets and all that, keep them. The point is. There’s a damned Necromancer here in this Rift, and by the look of it he really wants to get to the Haven’s Reach. I have…” he paused, emerald eyes narrowing down, “…lost my way in this maze, but I have to get back to my squad.”

“So, you’re asking?”

The undead sighed tiredly. “I’m saying that I can bring you back with me, but that ain’t going to be free. You have magic, no? The trick you’ve done just a moment ago. That was some good shit. I can take the hits, and you’ll help me deal with the rest. What say you?”

Valens was doubtful. “Do I have any choice?”

“No, unless you fancy these walls.”

He gave a long look at the undead, trying to discern if the creature was lying at him. Then again, it had little reason to do so, as it could easily deal with him now that Valens lacked any mana to cast a spell.

“Fine,” he said at last, fingers clenched around his tattered robe. “I accept, but I need a rest. I can’t go on like this.”

The undead gave him a measured glance, then plopped down the ground with a pained grunt and patted the moss beside him. “Rest, then. I’ll wait.”

Valens sat awkwardly a few paces away, trying not to think too much about it. His mana pool renewed slowly as he took deep breaths to calm his thoughts. He could hear the rattling and the grinding of the undead’s armor. It looked like his second chance in life wasn’t meant to be an easy one.

“By the way, did you just say that you can fix bones?” came the undead’s rasping voice a while after.

Valens cracked his lids open and glanced at it. The undead was massaging its boney legs with a curious look in its sockets.

……

Eight years of magical study. Eight years of active duty in the fields, skirmishes, battles, and a great number of other places he couldn’t remember. Sixteen years of his life spent as a proud member of the arcane, and yet there hadn’t been a single time that he’d thought one day he would be using all those experiences on a living corpse’s broken leg.

It was so ridiculous that it started feeling funny. Valens had to rely on Apathy to not laugh in the face of the undead as it rubbed its leg painfully with the sword resting by its side. Odd that apart from that earlier outburst, it did mostly act like a petty old man with a habit of grunting instead of speaking like a normal man.

Perhaps that is the only way it could communicate? Perhaps it can’t help but grunt the words out?

“There’s one thing you should know,” it said as Valens placed a hand over one of its bare legs. It swept a serious glance at him, eyes narrowing down.

“Speak,” Valens said.

“I’ve not much gold,” the undead grunted. “I know you Priests need all that money for whatever your little Gods are plotting in the backyards of your churches, and some more for recruiting fresh blood to your ranks, but I ain’t got nothing. I promise I’ll get you back to the surface, though, you can count on that.”

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“I’ve changed my mind,” Valens said, pursing his lips at the mention of ‘Priests.’ He was no believing man, but then he wasn’t entirely sure what that really meant in this world. Culture differences could be even harder to deal with than making new friends. “Just stay still and keep your legs fixed. I need to get a clear picture.”

He started with a Lifeward on the undead’s body rather than the legs since he was genuinely curious to see its anatomy. Questions always soothed him and this right here was one big question that made little sense at first sight.

How was the creature holding up? What sort of magic, exactly, was in play here? You couldn’t pour life mana into a man whose flesh had long corroded and expect him to get his mind back. Hell, it was the first lesson they taught to all healers. There was no remedy for death.

“You smell terrible,” Valens mumbled as the Lifeward painted the undead’s body in his sound vision, shifting to the side as it grumbled groggily and gave him a disappointed look.

“I didn’t have the time to skin all the flesh. We were supposed to be off duty this week. Nobody expected a sudden call.”

“Skin all the flesh? What do you mean? Aren’t you just—” Valens snapped his mouth shut. The cadaver had a sensitive side about it, he forgot.

The undead’s emerald eyes clouded. “Are all Priests like this? I’m starting to think you’re not just some miserable fool who by some chance slipped into this Rift. They dumped you, didn’t they? Your Guild. They must’ve had enough of that vile tongue.”

“And you got lost while searching for, what, exactly?” Valens answered, pointing a finger toward the stretching cave. “You can feel the wind with these bones, right? Then you ought to have known the draft was moving through that way, not the other way around, but you were digging deeper. There has to be a purpose in that.”

“Maybe I felt the need of an unfortunate Priest caught in the depths?” the undead grunted. “A lost sheep waiting to be rescued? I’m pretty sensitive about these things.”

“Oh, are you?” Valens said, fixing him with a stare that made the undead flinch before shaking his head. “Everybody lies.”

“I—“

“Hold still,” Valens said, then his eyes widened at the sight of the undead’s inner web.

A sprawling, stretching mess of lines came alive in his sound vision, brimming with blood-like mana flow that nearly reached every part of its bones. Thousands of them seemingly have laid purposefully under the bone frame, fixed there like a sculpture meant for life. There on the left side of its chest was a heart-shaped stone, infinitely more durable than a human’s heart, but still alive in a way that made him nearly gasp.

There was not a single live tissue under these bones. Not even a muscle or any fat. Cleaned obsessively from inside out, save for a few patches of dangling flesh.

“Move your left leg,” Valens commanded the undead with a voice strict by habit, honed by thousands of hours spent ordering about wailing men in desperate need of attention. When the undead obliged, he felt the mana inside the veins constrict in a way that allowed the motion to take place. “Stop,” he said when he caught a blockage round the lower part of the leg.

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” the undead gave a sigh.

“It is… different,” was Valens’s answer. Different, as in, it shouldn’t be real. Even if he could somehow stomach the fact that this creation had veins of mana keeping it alive, he couldn’t, in his integrity, outright admit that this particular corpse-turned-man had done what he’d been trying to do with his mana-core idea for years.

It had turned itself, or got turned by another master’s hand, to a construct solely dependent on mana to operate. It didn’t even need a source, as the Heartstone was constantly sucking ambient mana to replenish the reserves.

An endless flow. He doesn’t look aware though, and the mana has a silent quality about it inside those veins. Just like a person who can’t feel the blood under his skin. It's Natural for it, which makes it… what, another lifeform?

More data and experiment was definitely needed to come to a deeper conclusion, but for now, Valens had grasped the nature of the bones and thus could operate without further tests. He was about to send a Lifesurge to the area when the undead stirred.

“What is that look?” it said, eye sockets turning at him. “You’re looking at me as if you’re about to cut me wide and peek at what's underneath these bones. That’s not how a Priest should act—“

“I’m not a Priest,” Valens said. “I’m just fascinated by the intricacies as to how your body works. Unlike those Skeletons, you have the ambient mana stirring in your core.”

“Uh,” the undead grunted. “Glad that you’ve begun to see the truth. Undead are a living, breathing folk. We have nothing to do with those bastards animated by a man sick in mind.”

“You’re saying that a human controls those Skeletons?” Valens stared down at it. Made sense. This was likely that Void Magus’s doing. He then arched a contemptuous eyebrow. “By the way, you’re not breathing. It’s true that your Heartstone has a song with a touch of intelligence, but all I can feel inside your bones is a current of mana.”

“You… We breathe mana! How bad is that amnesia that you don’t even remember these things?”

“It’s quite bad,” Valens lied with his expression as blank as a sheet of paper. “I’m a helpless, helpless man.”

“Yeah, right.” The undead didn’t seem to believe him. “But for some reason you still remembered you’ve had a Fireball in there somewhere. What do you have to say about that?”

“A Magus without skills is no Magus at all. It seems however broken it was, my mind has refused to let go of those precious spells,” Valens said, and eyed him down. “I think you should be grateful.”

“A cynical, arrogant prick. Color me amused,” the undead muttered. “Can’t say I’m surprised, though. All through my life—“

“Stay. Still.” Valens gave him a look, which put the undead nicely back to the ground with its leg stretched out. He wouldn’t have the patient giving him a tirade about his life and or that how the injury happened. None of those things mattered. It had a crack in his leg, and that was a problem Valens would fix.

Simple as that.

When he focused on the crack around the left leg, he caught more than a few vibrations in the Resonance, coming from near the kneecap. The bone looked healthy from the outside, but inside it was filled with multiple micro-fractures.

“I think that’s enough,” Valens said. “Now, I want you to take a deep… breath.”

“Humorous,” the undead said sourly.

Valens sent a Lifesurge down the left leg, Lifeward still active and providing him with a constant song. His empty hands twanged for a second as he felt the need to reach for his tools, only to realize he didn’t need them anymore. Not as much as a Ward, for that matter, when he could feel the mana in his whole being.

It took him but a second to catch the vibrations, focusing the Lifesurge on that area. The fractures guided by invisible Lifesurge threads clicked silently back to their usual places.

“Try to move it,” Valens said when he was finished, taking his hands off the cadaver’s warm bones.

The undead glanced suspiciously at him. With a hesitant nod, it rose and stomped its left foot on the ground. Its emerald eyes widened slightly. “Huh?” The air shifted around them as the undead lifted its foot again.

“What are you doing?” Valens frowned at it.

“Making sure everything’s in place,” the undead answered, hardly paying him any heed as it brought its foot back to the ground, sending a shock wave across the cave. It snapped its head at Valens, jaw trembling.

“Nine Hells! You really fixed it!”

“What did you expect?” Valens raised his chin. “Just some minor fractures. I’ve dealt with worse.”

“I’m sure you have. This trick alone can make you a fortune in the Underworld,” the undead nodded knowingly. “Though I doubt those Bone Collectors would let you get away with it. So you have some talent to put weight into your words, then? Not a simple fellow, I see.”

“That makes two of us.”

“Yeah, right,” the undead cackled with twisted laughter. “Get your rest. We have a long way ahead of us.”

…..