Shaden thought as he sat on the ground. He thought about the contents of the books he had read. He thought about the blood in his hands. He thought about the cells that made his body.

He looked at the knife. The knife was on the sink, farther than he could reach. He used his mana to grab the knife and levitated it to him. Then he set it down in front of himself and looked at it. He saw his baby face reflected towards him on the surface of the knife. It had a mean glint to it.

He looked at his finger. He looked back at the knife. Yup, this was scary.

To cast healing magic, there needed to be an injury. For there to be an injury, someone had to get injured. To get injured, Shaden had to cut himself with the knife in front of him. If his parents saw their almost two-year-old baby in front of a knife, they would freak out. But since they weren’t present, he could cut himself as much as he wanted.

But honestly, he was afraid. He had never cut himself with a knife before. What if he made the wound too deep and killed himself? His weak arms could barely lift the knife, let alone control it. And he wasn’t certain he could heal a cut; the best he had done so far was remove a bruise by circulating the blood and using his mana to quicken the process of healing. It wasn’t as simple as just adding more mana like adding fuel to a flame. It required something more. Shaden was sure he could discover what it was, but he lacked experience. To gain experience, he needed an injury. But if he injured himself too much, he could die from his lack of experience. It was a dreadful cycle.

Plus, the wound would hurt. Shaden didn’t like sharp pain. He needed an alternative method where he could train his healing power without injuring himself.

He sat there contemplating his choices. As he thought, he would need to injure himself.

He used his mana to set the knife so that the blade faced upwards. He readied his finger. Then he heard a chirping noise outside.

Birds? Wait a minute…

Shaden turned his head around with a wild expression on his face. If he used other animals as test subjects, he wouldn’t need to get injured!

He got up and loosened his grip of the knife. Then slowly, he headed towards the window and opened it. As he had thought, there were birds nearby. The closest one was on the roof of the building in front, around six meters away. If anyone was watching, they would have seen a baby greedily eyeing a bird with a creepy smile on his face. Suddenly, the bird would start to panic as it was pulled towards the child who would be smiling even more creepily now. The child and the bird would both disappear behind the window as it closed shut.

The random dwarf tourist who saw everything rubbed his eyes and stared at the closed window in confusion. He shook his head and went on his way. Human cities sure were weird, he thought.

Meanwhile, Shaden restrained the struggling bird with his mana and conjured the wooden floor to turn into a bird-shaped shackle. He pressed the bird down on the floor and tightly wrapped its head, legs, and wings with the wood. The bird, being unable to move, stopped screeching as it realized its fate. It looked at Shaden with blank eyes.

Shaden observed his specimen. It wasn’t a bird he was familiar with. The bird’s feathers were rainbow in color and its claws had an extra back-talon on it, making it a total of five talons—three facing forward and two facing backward. It had a white stomach with a black dot in the middle. It was a pretty bird.

Shaden retrieved the knife from the floor and returned to his experiment. The bird made a weak squawk. He was about to make a small cut on the bird when he noticed a crucial detail.

This bird had so many damn feathers. He couldn’t even see its skin. Who knew birds had so many feathers? Shaden had thought this would be a simple operation: make a cut on the bird’s stomach and try to heal it. But he couldn’t make the cut when he couldn’t even see the stomach.

He thought about plucking it. No, that would make too much of a mess. He could clean it. Where would he throw the feathers away? Outside? How about the bird? Someone would notice if a naked bird was waddling around without feathers. But would he have time for that? He had thought this would be a quick process, but it was starting to get bothersome.

He didn’t want to break the bird’s bones either. It was too cruel, and he didn’t know how to mend bones yet. He sat there while staring at the dumb bird.

Shoot. He had studied human physiology, not bird physiology. Things just became worse the more he thought about his experiment. Why couldn’t he just get on with it?

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He held the knife with the support of his levitation magic and pointed it towards the bird. He searched for a place without feathers and spotted its legs. They looked so thin. Well, he couldn’t waste any more time. He slowly brought the knife closer to a leg and gave it a small nick on the side. It was barely anything.

Contrary to Shaden’s expectation, the leg started dripping blood. Maybe the cut had been too deep. He started to panic as the bird’s blood started oozing out onto the floor. He hadn’t gotten anything to put the bird on either. Damn, he had messed up.

He had to stop the blood first. Healing magic couldn’t be that different from normal magic, could it? He had read plenty of books on cells and knew how they regenerated and connected. If he imagined the same thing to happen on the bird’s leg, he would be able to heal it. He concentrated and pictured that the cells on the bird’s leg started replicating, patching the wound up. He felt his mana go through him and waited for any signs of recovery.

However, the wound did not heal. The bird kept bleeding as it squawked.

Something is interfering with my magic, Shaden thought to himself. It feels like mana. Could it be the bird’s mana that’s resisting my spell? Or did I just fail?

In the world, there were generally two types of healing that could be done. The first was support healing. A healer could cast this on his ally while his ally was still active. It boosted their recovery but did not directly cause their wounds to close up. Since the magic did not alter the cells themselves, it could be cast at any time and at any moment. All types of support magic were essentially converting your mana into energy that the receiver’s body could use. Most people knew how to use this. It was what Melsei used on Rother and what Shaden used on his bruise.

What Shaden was trying to achieve currently was a pure healing spell. This was far more advanced than simple supporting magic. Pure healing replicated the cells on the body directly, enabling miracles like restoring a lost limb saving a person from a fatal injury. The greatest Healer was said to have saved a man whose whole lower body had been chopped off by a monster.

However, because pure healing directly acted on the receiver’s body, the healer’s mana and the receiver’s mana would influence each other, making the magic fail. Healing was a delicate thing. To successfully use the magic, a patient was placed on a magic circle that suppressed their mana. The spell’s chances of activating would rise significantly afterward. All of the prominent hospitals in the country used this. Emergency scrolls also exhausted one’s mana before activating a pure healing spell. They were used as a last resort because the receiver wouldn’t be able to use mana after the treatment.

Shaden had the knowledge to use a pure healing spell. He also had the gargantuan mana capacity required to successfully cast the spell. However, he didn’t know how to remove the receiver’s mana that interfered with the healing. If he had a mana-canceling magic circle, it would have worked.

Shaden continued to pour his mana onto the bird’s leg. Nothing was happening. He increased his mana output. Still nothing. It had to work, or he’d be bored forever. He concentrated deeply and swelled the mana into his hands and blasted it out. The mana almost visibly gushed out of Shaden’s hands and rushed into the bird’s leg with the force of a violent river.

Slowly but surely, the bird’s wound started to close. Shaden let out a cry of joy and increased his mana output. The cells began to multiply and cover the cut. Shaden saw the blood stop flowing and the skin reattach itself. After a few seconds, the bird’s leg was good as new except for the pale scar that remained.

The bird stopped squawking and bent its dumb head in curiosity. Shaden released a sigh and fell backwards. He never knew healing a simple cut would use that much mana.

Shaden’s logic had been simple. If the bird’s mana was interfering with his, he just had to use enough mana to force the bird’s mana away. In theory, it was possible. In reality, the chances of succeeding were practically null. Every cell in a living creature’s body contained mana and diffused mana. To force a cell’s mana away from itself was like cleaning up snow under a snowstorm. No matter how hard you shoveled, the snow would still pile up.

Mana-canceling spells were like small shelters in the snowstorm. While it would be snowing outside, the inside would be free from snow.

What Shaden had done was blowing the whole snowstorm away for a short duration. It was absurd. The mana he used was massive. His mana expenditure had been so great that it had almost liquified. Shaden also was aware of the sheer amount of mana he used. He never knew healing was such an exhausting process.

Well, it’ll help increase my mana, he thought.

He undid the bindings on the bird and set it free. He watched it fly away and closed the windows. Now he had to clean up the blood and fix the messed-up floor.

Maybe next time I’ll try breaking a bone to see how I do, he thought while returning the floor to normal.

Magic was always so fun. Using magic also somewhat helped him understand the principles behind it better. Like seeing and feeling the muscles on your arm as you worked out. The more you used it, the better you understood it.

Well, only by just a little.

〄 〄 〄

Melsei returned from the market with bags of food in her hands. She felt something off about the room and looked around. Nothing had changed. She let her bags down and quickly went to the baby crib.

Shaden was sleeping peacefully like he had been when she left him around two hours ago. She hated the market for being so far away. She wanted to take him with her, but he had been sleeping and his face was too cute to wake up. Melsei became slightly worried. Wasn’t he sleeping too much for a child that was almost two years old? He had been sleeping almost every day for the afternoons. Maybe he had some sort of sleeping-sickness.

She would take him to the doctor after discussing with Garthan. For now, she looked into his cute face and poked her finger on his cheeks. He looked just like his father.

While his mother organized her ingredients, Shaden peeked a glance at the room. Good. He hadn’t been discovered. His skills with manipulating people and objects were increasing every day. He chuckled evilly to himself and closed his eyes in embarrassment.

Life was good these days.