Chapter 57

Emil studied the diagrams patiently. Aisha studied Emil. Impatiently. If he couldn’t give her what she required, then she was uncertain what she would do. She had researched that ocular power that the king had mentioned while she was waiting for his mages to put together these documents on their woefully inadequate methods. It would be perfect, but she had no idea whether or not her Medico subclass would unlock it or not.

She’d previously been given the journal of a fourteenth century medico, copied from the original. The man had been a superstitious fool who’d actually believed in bleeding his patients. She’d skimmed the journal to see if there was anything useful about his magical healing abilities, at least, but it seems that, at least in his case, Summon could sometimes turn out a dud. He lived ten years but only reached level fifteen before the journal ended.

The cause of the sudden disruption in his ramblings was, according to an afterword purportedly made by his landlord, a dispute over money resulting in a literally vented spleen.

She refused to have such a meager legacy in this world.

But the king was correct, and she’d been a drunken fool not to think of it first. If you can’t see something, you do something to make it visible. If it’s too small, you invent a microscope. If it’s too large, you take a step back and examine it from a distance. If it’s too bright you invent sunglasses. If it’s somewhere you can’t go, you send a camera. If it’s literally magic, then you use some other form of magic to study it.

“Okay,” Emil said at last.

“Okay? Okay you can do it?”

“Okay any mage in the world can do it, Aisha,” Emil said. “It’s child’s play. I’m not certain whether or not you can do it, since you’re not technically a mage, but if you had the ritual set up for you, you could probably power it with your mana. It’s really simple.”

Aisha frowned. “It’s completely inadequate.”

Emil looked up at her. “What do you mean?”

“I mean it only shows the surface,” Aisha explained. “It specifically only interacts with the skin. I need to see underneath. I need to know where the lifelines are within the patient’s body. I didn’t come to have you perform a ritual for me, Emil, I came to have you design a ritual for me.”

Emil frowned, considering her words. “Okay. And what exactly would you have this ritual do? No limitations, no restriction, perfect world situation.”

“Preferably, I’d have it function as a CT-scan,” she admitted. “Giving me a real-time picture of the patient’s mana circulation system would be the absolute ideal circumstance.”

Emil’s eyebrow raised. “You don’t ask for very much, do you? You do realize that I’ve been studying ritual magic for, what has it been, a few months now? You’ve basically given me a magical flashlight and asked me to transform it into a functional MRI.”

“I actually said CT-scan, but an MRI would be an acceptable alternative,” she agreed.

Emil sighed and shut the book he’d been referencing. “Aisha, even giving you a functional X-ray would take me a year or two of studying this spell and many others. A functional 3D rendering of a living person’s internal mana system is … well, I’m not going to say it’s impossible, but if it was easy it would have already been done before we got here. By the magical doctors who understood magical biology before we were summoned from a world without magic.”

“They said that on Earth a century ago,” Aisha pointed out, “When an X-ray was cutting edge technology, they couldn’t even imagine a CT. But we’ve seen technology change within our lifetimes, Emil. You know that--”

“Aisha, stop.”

She frowned. “Emil, I--”

“Just stop. You’re going about this all wrong. I wasn’t going to say anything, but you are completely wasting this second chance we’ve been gifted. You want to make a difference? Do you know how you could make the biggest difference in this world? It’s not by running around with your free walking clinic or whatever you’re calling your one-woman mission. If you really, really want to make a difference, you need to stop healing and start teaching.”

Aisha examined Emil carefully for a moment, frowning. “I’ve been given the power to regrow--”

“Magical healing in this world is what it is, Aisha. It’s powered by skills and unless someone completely overhalls whatever the system is and however it assigns skills then there’s nothing we can do to change it,” Emil explained. “Some people will be assigned healer. Most won’t. Hopefully the ones that get that Class rise to the call and embrace your medicins sans frontier attitude--”

“I wasn’t in that organization, I was--”

Emil didn’t allow himself to be interrupted. “But regardless, not everyone who hears the call to heal others will be able to use magic to do it. Most healers in this world don’t have access to healing magic, Aisha. And they could really, really use your experience and knowledge on the subject. But you’re too busy running around and doing miracles to see that you could help more people by staying in one place and lecturing, answering questions, holding symposiums, and generally teaching the scientific method.”

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Aisha felt herself blush. She knew he was right. She’d known without having to actually have it spelled out for her. She just hadn’t been willing to admit it to herself. If she really, really wanted to sacrifice, she’d sacrifice her pride and focus on spreading her knowledge. And not just her knowledge, but knowledge in general.

This was a new world. How many new penicilins were there to discover? How many aspirins? How many of this world’s folk remedies were real medicine, and how many were superstition? She had the tools to separate the true cures from the leeches and the bloodletting.

“And what are you doing with your knowledge, oh wise one?” she challenged, cursing her own stubbornness for refusing to admit that she was wrong.

“Me? I’m building things. I’m a civic engineer, it’s what I do. I’ll teach too, once things calm down and I have a few examples to point to and say ‘look, this is what I’m talking about, see how it works?’ That’s the thing about engineering; once it’s been done once, it’s easy to do again. It’s innovation that’s truly difficult. When you interrupted me, I was working on building a water tower to supply this community with plumbing, Aisha. Aside from that, I’m working on showing them better ways of heating their homes during the winter and --”

“You’ve made your point,” she admitted. She turned aside and felt ashamed. “You must think I’m an idiot.”

“I think you're a beautiful, intelligent, and prideful woman, Aisha,” Emil corrected her. “And I’m not saying to neglect your abilities. It’s exactly the opposite, you should study them as much as possible, and use them in conjunction with your skills from earth. You need to level, Aisha, if you want to live long enough to really make a difference. Antoine is over a century old. Can you imagine the amount of good that you or I could do in that time frame to this world, given the knowledge that’s in our head from Earth?”

“What about Grant?” she asked. “Do you hold him to the same standard as yourself and I?”

“Grant was a politician,” Emil said, “And he’s using his skills to guide the one who brought us here. I certainly don’t know how to navigate the political waters of Welsius, Aisha, so I’m grateful to have him on the team. I’m pretty sure that we got the one honest politician on Earth when he got Summoned along with us.”

Aisha laughed, and she wiped away a tear. She wasn’t ready to quantify the emotion that caused her to shed it. She put it away for analysis later.

“Okay. Fine. You win, Emil,” Aisha said. “I’ll stop running around and doing my own thing. But I still am going to need that ritual. Not the CT-scan version. The version I can power myself. You said you could do that with your skills as they are?”

“Aisha, I could set up the ritual such that it extends to the entire city if I wanted to,” Emil answered. “Tweaking it to accept your mana would be the easy part. The hard part would be teaching you how to get into the right mindset to actually activate it.”

“Right, let’s do that then,” she said. “And then I’ll see if I can’t find some volunteers.”

“Volunteers?” Emil frowned. “Aisha, where is this going?”

“The people in this world have an organ system that I know nothing about, Emil,” she explained. “So whether or not I actually practice medicine, of course I’m going to study it.”

~~~~~~

“Here?” Tom asked.

“Can you do it here?” Emil inquired. “We’re quite a ways away from the Core, do your powers extend this far without actually having it in your hands?”

“It’s fine. I mean, it would be easier if I had the core in my hand, but it has plenty of mana to Customize, and we’re well within its territory,” Tom answered. “I think it would be different if I hadn’t Claimed the Core, but since it’s Linked to my network of Claimed Cores I’ve never been inside its territory without having a connection to it.”

“Right then, I’ll take your word for it,” Emil said. “Do you have any questions for me?”

“I think I’ll have quite a few once we get started,” Tom admitted. “But for now, just tell me if I’m doing anything wrong.”

With that, the teenager began focusing on using his Customize skill. He pulled rock up through the soil, the solid stone moving like a liquid as it responded to his will.

Emil watched in awe, wishing that he had that sort of ability. The things that he could manifest if he could literally shape stone with his mind the way that this kid could. Tom didn’t even seem to realize that he was doing anything particularly special as he followed Emil’s diagrams as well as any layman could be expected to.

Antoine and Aisha stood nearby, observing. As Tom built the barrel of the watertower, the forgotten soldier of a war that ended long ago offered the doctor a smile.

“Are you planning to level in earnest now?” Antoine inquired.

Aisha frowned, hesitating. “I still don’t like the idea of being violent. Even against monsters. I’d rather level slowly through healing the sick than delve dungeons and seek trouble with you.”

Antoine shrugged. “Have you considered the fact that Tom might be the most important person in this generation, and that if he’s injured in battle, he could truly use a healer to keep him alive?”

Aisha looked at the ancient man in confusion. “What makes him so special.”

“Solum progenitor hanc fores ingredi potest,” Antoine answered.

Aisha frowned. “Only the progenitor may … something about a door?” she asked.

“You tell me,” Antoine said. “You’re the doctor. Don’t you speak latin?”

“That hasn’t been an actual requirement for a very long time, Antoine.”

“When Tom asked me about his subclass, I lied to him. I had heard of it before,” Antoine explained. “That latin phrase appears throughout the dungeon which Marshal, I, and a team of other high level individuals challenged believing it to be an entrance to the World Dungeon. On a Quest which Marshal sacrificed his life to complete, only to fail at the final step. Just like every Inheritor and Conqueror to come before him for almost five hundred years.”

“I don’t understand,” Aisha said. “What’s this about a world dungeon?”

“The system is dying, Aisha,” Antoine said. “And I think Tom is the only chance to save it.”

“You’re not making sense, Antoine.”

“I’m a very old man, Aisha. I don’t have to make sense all of the time.”