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Chapter 155- An Early Dawn
🕑 Added 2024-05-29 00:38:38 +0000 UTCThe territory of blood was brightened beyond anything the land had ever seen as if dawn had come early and lit the world anew. Iris had tried and failed to set up a ritual to block the light show Ashley Rhye had become, but for one reason or the other, her rituals didn’t function. Judging from her rapid mumblings it had something to do with a concept she didn’t understand, the light Ashley emitted existed on a spectrum other than the base one native to this dimension. Arthur didn’t know enough to realise just how many laws of physics were being broken, but he guessed it was quite a lot.
All eyes were focused on Ashley Rhye, though no one could be certain if they were actually looking at the woman right now, what with how bright she was. When nothing seemed to happen after a minute had passed, Arthur turned his attention to the gains he’d made from these endeavours. First and greatest was his latest tier 4 title Miracle Worker. It was a tier 4 title, which put it right up there with twice-lived and half-breed, though Arthur wasn’t sure if its effects matched up with the competition. The boon if offered was far too vague and situational for his liking. How often would someone get injured to the point of death right in front of him and he’d be positioned perfectly so that he’d be able to heal them in the scant few moments before true death set in and their souls departed?
When considering all this, Arthur realised he had a glaring hole in his education. Whilst he understood medicine and medical procedures to a fairly high level, it was limited to the human body. When it came to magical healing, however, and other species, everything Arthur knew was self-taught. Ether had been doing all the heavy lifting, and with a legendary healing skill to his name now, the trend would probably continue in the future. Nonetheless, Arthur wanted to know exactly what he was doing. Even his knowledge of true death and all the things he'd derived from it, had come from General Bradley, who he’d best describe as a dubious source.
I wonder if the government-run healer initiative provided a crash course or not, Arthur mused. He hadn’t stuck around in the hospital long enough to find out, but it’d be a major oversight on their part if they didn’t teach anything. Arthur put formally learning the art of magical healing right on the top of his ever-growing priority list. Perhaps he’d gain an insight into what exactly Miracle Worker did. For a tier 4 title, it seemed far too underwhelming. At least it told him he’d been successful in healing Ashley, though he’d have to wait for this damned light show to end before he could see what exactly the system dubbed as successful.
Next on the list were the skill level-ups he’d received. True to Iris’s predictions, healing the failed Blood Beast had netted him not one, but two levels up. Considering it was a legendary+ skill, the feat would have otherwise taken months to achieve.
A homunculus Healing (legendary+) level 3- Base effect: Select up to ten individuals. You will heal them at a rate equivalent to 12% of your maximum health pool every minute. (Previously 10%)
Cost: 3300 ether/minute
Secondary effect: You are capable of healing damage inflicted via poisons, curses, debuffs, disease, illness, concepts ( dependent on concept mastery) and soul damage. (As long as the soul shell maintains 68% integrity) (Previously 70%)
Cost: Variable
Tertiary effect: You may store healing affinity ether that will recover health equivalent to 55% of your maximum health pool (Maximum health pool at the time of skill usage). This healing energy will persist in the target for seven days before dissipating (Previously 50%)
Cost: 44,000 ether.
Quaternary Effect: You may bring back a person from beyond death's door and return them to their most recent peak stat so long as their soul remains attached to their body.
Cost: 100,000~1,000,000 ether +10% of total healthpool reduction for 7 days
Cooldown: 58 days (Previously 60 Days)
Noting how the skill had changed, Arthur couldn’t help but grin. Legendary skills capped at level 50, which meant that even in the worst-case scenario, where the skill only grew linearly in the same pattern, he’d end up with a skill that could heal the requirement of 59% of his total health pool every minute for the measly cost of eleven thousand ether. It was a legendary+ ability though, and so Arthur expected the max-level skill to be far greater than his conservative predictions. Its tertiary effect was where things started to get absurd. It would effectively triple his total health pool and make him nigh unkillable.
One thing the recent fight had taught him was that if he was able to survive long enough, every fight would eventually end in his victory. A drawn-out battle with a soul mage was impossible to win, where every exchange would see your decades of progress and effort slip away forever, like sand lost in the sea. You either killed a soul mage quickly or ran like hell and hoped you didn’t get chased. It was a shame armaments of the soul hadn’t levelled, but it wasn’t like he’d pushed the skill in anything. He’d just used the ability the most from his arsenal of skills which he honestly couldn’t expect to see progress from. Still, he would have loved to see how the skill grew. How much more soul damage would it provide at every level?
“Hey Arthur, you might wanna focus,” Ayesha said. “The lights are finally going down.” True to her words, Arthur noticed a visible dim in Ashley’s brightness, one that was rapidly growing faster. It was like a solar eclipse in how quickly the light went out. Only six seconds and the territory of blood had returned to its natural gloomy state. Calling it a territory is being generous. The thing’s barely the size of a football stadium. Once Ashley became visible, Arthur, along with Iris rushed forward to her prone form. She wasn’t moving, and for a dreaded second, Arthur thought they had lost her. He was surprised by just how relieved he felt at the rise and fall of her chest. For all intents, this was a stranger but it looked like he’d gotten a little attached to patient number one of his evolved healing skill.
Putting a finger on her neck, Arthur felt for her pulse. It was going steady. There were no marks of discomfort on her face which he took as a positive indicator of zero complications, but he pushed some healing affinity ether through her body and ran a basic diagnosis just to be safe. She was in perfect health, and Arthur couldn’t help but grin widely at the budding life growing in her womb. Her foetus looked like it had another chance at life which it certainly deserved, considering the horror-show its first appearance had been. If anything, Ashley seemed to have benefitted from her little stint as a Bloodbeast.
A deeper look at her cells showed that she’d maintained some of the adaptations monsterfication had given her, though they’d subtly changed to work properly with the human body. Arthur wasn’t certain how the minor evolution would affect her, but things looked fine on the surface. The changes to her cells seemed to make them more energy efficient as well as resilient, and they generated around 40% more energy than before. Her bones were denser and her muscle structure too had changed, though he couldn’t tell its effects at first glance. Arthur guessed this would all translate to increased stamina and health regeneration as well as increase her constitution and strength, most likely in the form of a title of some kind.
If surviving a Blood Beast transformation didn’t scar your soul enough to grant you one, then nothing would. Unless she was unlucky, Arthur was certain Ashley Rhye had gotten her hands on a potent tier 4 title. Given her relative level, there was very little reason why she wouldn’t. He briefly wondered what that meant for the unborn foetus, and he hoped that the benefits would carry over somehow. The child deserved every advantage it could get early on in life.
“No one can retell the healing that transpired here” Iris suddenly announced, staring pointedly at Captain Arencia and his squad, “Lady Sleyca has sent a construct to planet Earth. It will arrive here in six minutes. When she asks what the golden light was, say that I was responsible. She doesn't have the political weight to get any answers out of me.”
“I was blinded by the light, my lady. These eyes of mine saw nothing. I swear it upon my honour,” Captain Arencia said solemnly. It sounded like a simple promise to Arthur, one easily broken, but it looked like Iris was happy with it. For that matter, he didn’t understand why the seer had done a complete 180, something that was apparently clear on his face. She sighed tiredly and it was only then Arthur remembered she was just as exhausted as he was, perhaps even more so. That was on top of the potion sickness she was no doubt suffering from. She looked like she was one stiff breeze from falling over. Arthur quickly ran his skill over her, but Iris was in perfect physical health, with no signs of injury. She simply needed some rest. Nonetheless, the healing energy was soothing and took the edge off her fatigue.
“Thanks for that,” Iris said, rubbing her temples. “You’re wondering why I want to keep you out of the spotlight, I guess?”
Arthur nodded.
“To be honest, I put your chances of actually healing Ashley at less than 20%. I didn’t account for the light show you put on or the exact nature of the healing energy your skill produced. What exactly do you know about the healing affinity?” she asked.
“Whatever system descriptions have told me.”
“Well, I’m no expert on the subject, but I can give you a barebones explanation. Don’t take my word for gospel though. This is far outside my area of expertise. The short of it is that there are grades to the energy a healer produces, outside of the skills they use. There are level 1 healers out there that can produce more potent energy with common skill than millennia-old monsters can with legendary ones.”
“This isn’t classified information or anything, but the vast majority of people aren’t aware of it. You can thank the gods of fate for that, or you’d have been kidnapped the second someone saw you using your healing affinity. You see, the grade of someone's healing energy, colloquially referred to as the green gradient is fixed. It doesn't change, perhaps a tier 4 title would do something, but the only well-known case is a high-orc by the name of Maneth, a man who gained one of the few documented tier-six titles when he attempted and succeeded to heal the dying core of a tier-2 planet.”
“As far as I know, that happened eighteen hundred years ago and hasn’t been replicated since, much to everyone's chagrin. Suffice it to say, that people tend to concern themselves with your gradient. You need to be mid-B-rank to ever hope to bring out the full potential of a legendary skill. Around one in every thirty thousand healers meet those requirements.”
This was the first time Arthur had heard anything Iris was saying and he absorbed it all like a sponge, listening with rapt attention. He could guess where the seer was going with this. After all, he’d more than made the most out of his skill. Her next words confirmed his suspicions. “Of course, finding a healer with both a high gradient and a rarer grade of skill is easier said than done, the odds infinitesimally low. Unfortunately for us, at least as of now, your healing gradient is at least upper B-rank though I suspect it’s significantly higher. We can’t test it right now, and whilst I’ve tried my best to get rid of your magical signature on the area, Sleyca’s construct will recognise the residue, she’d have to be blind to miss it and for all her faults, Sleyca is a shrewd woman.
“I’m offering to take the credit for everything. With no one saying anything, it’ll be nearly impossible for her to deduce what exactly happened here, though she’ll become mildly interested in Ashley Rhye and why I used a healing treasure to save the woman."
“And what would happen if I chose not to hide my abilities?” Arthur asked.
The seer smiled grimly at him. “Best case scenario, nothing. Lady Sleyca decides to be benevolent and turn over a new leaf. She ignores it. Most likely, she’ll do everything in her power to recruit you. The woman’s been given jurisdiction over the planet, at least for the length of the lockdown. Off the top of my head, I can think of six ways she can force you into her service using some bullshit system law. The worst case scenario, I don’t even want to think about it.” Her face took on a dark look and he could see barely repressed rage in her eyes. The expression was gone in an instant, so fast he would have thought he’d imagined it if it hadn’t shocked him so much.
“When you're strong enough, rules become guidelines you can choose to follow, punishments, petty fines you can ignore. A word of advice. Until you can stand on your own two feet, attention from nobility, any kind of attention, is a poison best avoided.”
“And are you included in that?” Arthur asked.
Iris appeared troubled at that. “Honestly speaking. Yes. My assistance in this fight will have far-reaching consequences. I can't take a shit without reporters trying to find out my favourite foods. Ayesha is a known factor. My helping her won't raise any eyebrows. You, on the other hand, are a no-name mage from out in the boonies. People will wonder who you are. They’ll start asking questions. It won’t be anything malicious, people know not to cross the limits, but I’m certain things will get annoying.”
“Perfect,” Arthur replied dryly. “Just what I needed. Some more drama in my life.” Iris tried to hide it, but Arthur could tell his words had hurt her. He didn't particularly blame her for this undesirable situation, but that didn't change the fact that she was the root cause. Still, without her help, beating the bloodbeast in time would have been impossible. She did technically save the planet. Sighing wearily, Arthur prayed he wouldn't come to regret the decisions he'd made today.
Comments
Benjamin Collins
To much explanation, not enough action, and again too short. Honestly it's not even about word count you literally took a two minute conversation and said yup thats a whole chapter......
