Chapter Twenty-Seven: Gina

“About time that you presented yourself for wood tutoring!”

A man in bleach-white robes with a lotus flower-shaped badge pinned on his right breast furiously wagged his finger at Lacy as she took a seat in the simple clinic building. It had just a handful of rooms, and Lacy sat in the office, where shelves full of medical supplies and surprisingly detailed diagrams of the human anatomy hung on the walls.

“The wood affinity is the most valuable of ALL affinities!” he went on. “While anyone can cause injuries unto others, only a select few can heal as we can! It is very nearly a crime against our people not to wield the wood arts to the betterment of others! We were ordained by the Heavens to heal!”

The healer’s rant went on for a few minutes until Lacy grew impatient and resorted to throwing her weight around.

“That’s enough!” she grumbled, and the man looked almost shocked at her attitude. “I agree with you! I want to learn to wield the wood affinity so that I can help people! However, I am talented in the earth and water elements, and I’m in training to awaken my body so that I can dual cultivate! I took so long to be tutored because my priority is being able to defend myself!”

The healer was not happy to be interrupted but Lacy could see the resignation in his eyes as he was reminded that the person he’d been ranting to was someone whose status was equal to his and would soon be higher, despite her young age.

He mulled over his words for a bit before saying, “That is…understandable, Student Lacy. Defending oneself is important. Where have my manners gone? Call me Elite Physician Dod. Thank you for finally attending my tutoring. I plan to first test your wood arts to decide whether you need to learn the very basics of wood qi, before going into a short lecture about a wood healer’s abilities, then finally practical training. However, the tutoring may be interrupted by anyone in need of healing. If the healing allows for a teaching moment, you will assist me, but that is unlikely to happen for a while until you gain more practice.”

“That sounds good,” Lacy half-smiled, her previous frustration mostly mollified by Dod’s sort-of apology.

“Then let us begin.” Dod pulled a green crystal the size of a walnut from his robes. “Are you familiar with qi gems?”

Lacy’s eyes tracked the gem with no small amount of avarice.

“I am. My general spirit instructor, Peegra, made sure to tell me all about them.”

Qi gems were refined treasures made by powerful spirit cultivators using natural treasures and parts from powerful spirit beasts. They were basically qi batteries, as Lacy understood them, except they couldn’t be recharged. The amount of qi within them was fixed and only got lower from the moment they were created as the energy was expended.

The relevant details Peegra taught her included: they could only hold a single type of qi at a time. In Dod’s case, his obviously held wood qi; the energy inside a qi gem could only be extracted at a fixed rate, often too slow to use in combat; but they held a lot of qi. A Seed-level qi gem might hold enough energy for months of sparing use, which was exactly why Dod had one.

Instead of being forced to treat people in an environment surrounded by plants that Dod could extract wood qi from, the qi gem allowed Dod to treat people anywhere. And healing wasn’t usually as time sensitive as combat, so if Dod was close to running out of energy he’d already stored in his soul he could leisurely take a few minutes to pull the necessary wood qi from the gem without much to worry about.

“Good. To begin with, demonstrate your prowess by attempting to heal this cut.”

Before Lacy could ask, Dod pulled a scalpel from a drawer and lightly pressed it against the tip of his right pointer finger. He’d basically caused himself a paper cut, and blood didn’t even surface for a few seconds.

“Okay.”

Lacy’s hands rose slowly like an orchestra conductor’s as her aura spread out into the room and latched onto the normal ambient qi. Then, ever so gently, she formed a soft veil that wrapped around the qi gem and pulled at the wood qi inside with the least spiritual force she could apply.

With her lackluster skills it took Lacy over a minute to even get a drop’s worth of wood qi, which she made glide over to the wood cultivator’s barely injured finger. Lastly, the woman spread the drop’s worth throughout the thin veil of qi that she wrapped around the cut.

Lacy let out a tired breath as she pulled back her aura and slumped in her chair, unimpressed by her own efforts, considering what she could already do with water and earth. However, Dod seemed to have a different opinion.

Looking between the healing paper cut and the woman, he said, “That was remarkable control, Student Lacy. Are you positive that you have not spent long practicing wood elementalism?”

Lacy sat straighter in her chair.

“Uh, yeah.”

“And you only began training as a spirit cultivator on your journey here to the camp?”

“Yeah,” she repeated.

Dod stared into space with wide eyes for a moment—kind of scaring Lacy—until he nodded and asked, “Please demonstrate your water elementalism.”

“Sure.”

Lacy took out her waterskin—which she kept despite not needing to drink water in case she was attacked—and untied the top. She released her aura and took up the ambient qi with ease before superimposing it onto the water, where it became one with the water qi. Then she brought the water out of her waterskin and created flat shapes with it in the air.

First a circle, then a triangle, then a square, then a pentagon, then a hexagon, and finally a seven-sided star. But she wasn’t done there. She hollowed out the star so that its shape was made partly by negative space, and then held the star in place while she controlled the rest of the water that had previously been its insides to form a ring around the star, which she made spin just because she could.

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Dod stared slack-jawed. When he didn’t say anything, Lacy thought to have some more fun and brought all the water together again to make an oval, which slowly morphed into a more familiar shape. A human face. She gave it a small nose, big ears, and a weak chin, trying her best to copy Dod’s expression. However, the details proved too hard to create, so it only looked vaguely like a male human. Next she tried creating Dod’s hair, but the man finally spoke, so she put the water away and recalled her aura.

“Truly, a talent like no other I have met,” he said, tapping his chin with the wood qi gem. “Frankly, I am impressed beyond words…”

Lacy was taken aback at the man’s reaction. Peegra showered her with praise but she’d kinda gotten the impression that it was his job to do that, and Autberry had praised her before, but not like this. Maybe Peegra’s reactions were genuine and Autberry played his surprise down?

“It is no wonder you insist on becoming a dual cultivator,” Dod continued. “Spirit cultivation has clearly been too easy for you if you are already so skilled with water, and I presume earth, while still being able to address simple wounds as cuts with wood. Not only that, but you have also been training your endurance and spear skills. Truthfully, I planned to attempt talking you out of your decision, like so many already likely tried, but seeing your progress combined with knowing of the incident with the koroths…” Dod shrugged. “With your talents I would aim for dual cultivation as well.”

All Lacy could say was, “Thank you.”

Dod nodded.

“Returning to the matter of your training… You have already trained yourself to a significant degree, relative to how long you have been a spirit cultivator. I will not need to instruct you through the basics, it seems, which brings us directly to the lecture of practical applications of wood qi, as you have proven capable of improving your direct wood qi manipulation on your own.”

“Understood. Where do you think is best to start?”

……

As it turned out, being a wood-magic healer still required a lot of basic doctor skills that Lacy had to learn before she could reliably practice magical medicine. She should have figured as much, but she’d been hoping that magic would make the process trivial, like it did in anime. Need to set broken bones? A healing spell would take care of it. Need to close a wound? Healing spell. Need to bring someone’s temperature down from a killer fever? Healing spell. Need to rid the patient’s body of an illness, venom, or poison? Healing, or maybe antidote, spell. Was the patient missing fingers or even an entire limb? Grand healing spell. Did the patient just die? Super Awesome Mega Healing spell.

But it was not that at all.

In this world’s magic system there existed “techniques” which were basically qi spells. Body cultivators used techniques to enhance their bodies in different ways, and spirit cultivators used techniques as shortcuts to create specific results with their elemental manipulations. Lacy had learned exactly zero techniques because, one, she wasn’t a body cultivator yet, and two, she wasn’t yet experienced enough as a spirit Seed to hold qi in her soul, which was a prerequisite to using many techniques.

Where all of that information became relevant was the understanding that healing with wood qi…had no techniques associated with the practice. As Dod explained, it was all done manually with no shortcuts for practical reasons. Every body was slightly different, and while a spell could be used to create a fireball the exact same way a thousand times in a row, a healing spell could cause just as many problems in one person as it could fix in another. There was just too much variation between bodies, requiring every spirit physician to have a deep understanding in the fundamentals of how bodies worked, that way they could analyze anybody to learn how to help them. More powerful wood cultivators also had the advantage of auras that could scan the inside of someone’s body, but that wouldn’t be Lacy for a long while.

That fucking sucked for Lacy, who dropped out of her nursing program in college because it was too much. She could have feasibly pushed herself through it, but that would have been a drain on her mental health and she would have had a terrible time.

Still, Lacy didn’t find Dod’s lecture too much. He began by explaining that healing cuts on skin was the easiest procedure ever, which is what she had done earlier with no issue. When there was only a simple cut, the wood qi had no problem stimulating magical growth in the skin to close the wound. That also went for larger cuts, though extra steps were necessary in lots of cases.

If the cut was too large then it needed to be healed in sections. A cut might be dirty, requiring that it be washed clean first because the healing process sometimes covered up dirt instead of pushing it out. If flesh was scarred, then the scar tissue needed to be excised before the healing because the body considered scar tissue part of it and would not fix it. If the skin was burned it needed to be treated like it was both dirty and scarred. Simple stuff like that.

Where the lectures became more serious and difficult to follow along were when Dod got into the anatomical specifics of skin layers, muscle fibers versus ligaments, the importance of setting bones and rebuilding shattered bones, how to treat cartilage damage…

It was a lot, but not too much, and Dod would be helping demonstrate what he taught with live demonstrations on his own flesh in the future. Apparently, numbing nerves with wood qi was also possible and he was very confident in healing himself afterwards. It seemed to be the most efficient and ethical way for spirit healers to pass on their knowledge.

Still, because Lacy hated anything that reminded her of school she was grateful for an interruption, which came in the form of shouts at the clinic entrance.

“Ah, follow me, Student Lacy. As I previously stated,” Dod said as he stood up, “if the injuries are light then they might present a teaching moment. Otherwise, simply observe and do your best not to interrupt.”

Lacy nodded and followed Dod out of the room, crossing her fingers in hopes that the person in need was a guard who’d been injured on a hunt.

She nearly laughed when she saw the injured party, whose face scrunched up in confusion as Lacy followed Dod into the room.

“Shoo, shoo!” Dod said to the three men who’d helped carry the lady recruit to the clinic. “Only the patient must be present! Return to your training!”

The men began to protest that they couldn’t leave her side but Dod was having none of it and unleashed a bit of his aura pressure, shutting them up and convincing them to scurry out the door.

“Now then, I am Elite Physician Dod. What seems to be the issue?” Dod asked as he helped the lady recruit onto a simple wooden bed with sheets on top. Lacy hoped the sheets were changed out or at least washed between patients. “I suspect that your ankle is bruised—likely from a fall. Am I correct?”

Then before the woman could answer he turned to Lacy.

“My aura, as a Seed, is not nearly powerful enough to sense abnormalities in someone’s body, but through my experience I can tell that the patient favors her right foot because it hurts to apply pressure on it.”

Then he faced the lady expectantly, who cleared her throat.

“Uhh, hello, Elite Physician Dod. I am Initiate Gina. As you wisely surmised, I tripped while jogging today. That is all.”

“I understand. Allow me to investigate the injury closer.”

Dod took off Gina’s shoe and sock, then gently moved her foot around while asking how it felt, eliciting a few grimaces and gasps. After a few minutes of poking and prodding, he set her foot down and nodded.

“Very good. Your injury is a simple bruising of the ankle ligaments by virtue of over-stretching. No significant tearing that I can see. I will not need to open your foot to fix it. Had a spirit physician not been available this kind of injury would only take a few days or weeks to heal completely on its own.”

Gina visibly relaxed at that.

“Thank you kindly, Elite Physician Dod.”

“Thank you for not injuring yourself too badly,” he replied, before turning to Lacy. “Now, healing over-stretched ligaments from ankle twisting falls—”

“Is all very fascinating, yes!” Lacy interrupted Dod. “Thank you for letting me witness your magic.”

Dod raised an eyebrow in confusion, but before he could ask, Lacy turned to Gina.

“I have been consulting Elite Physician Dod about my amnesia, you see—which is why I’m here—and he graciously allowed me to watch him perform his practice!”

Dod looked between Lacy and Gina.

“Yes…” he finally said. “Initiate Lacy has an interesting case of amnesia… I will perform my arts on your ankle now, Initiate Gina.”

Lacy internally breathed a sigh of relief at his playing along. She still wanted to befriend Gina, but only as a fellow recruit, not a spirit cultivator. At least, at first. She would reveal her powers for a joke later, just like she had with Rogen.