CHAPTER 16 – HEALING DOMAINS

Tom was certain what he had was a roadmap. With growing excitement, he traced the connections from the trash spells up to the two best in the tier.

Heal Minor Scratches and Alleviate Surface Bruising could be combined into Heal Skin.

Stitch Wound and Internal Mending together created Triage Cut.

Remove Dead Tissue Minor and Sterilize Open Wound merged to form Purified Tissue Minor.

Triage Cut, Heal Skin and Purified Tissue Minor became Heal Cut.

Heal Cut, Tom knew, was a very efficient spell whose only weakness was how niche it was. But if a sword sliced your thigh open, that was what you wanted to use. For slashing wounds on an even level basis, Heal Cut was better than anything else in tier zero, as well as outperforming most of the tier one and two alternatives.

He licked his lips and traced the information down further.

There were similar evolution trees for Heal Organs, Mend Bone, Purge Foreign Substances, Replenish Flesh and Blood and then a much smaller tree that clearly represented the prerequisites for healing missile. Out of all six trees, Heal Organ had the most components feeding into it. This was because every organ was different, with each of them needing at least one unique twist to the magic that fixed them. The pathway to fix the lungs required inflating it, intestines had to cater for the removal of waste product, and the heart had an extra pressure-containment module that was not needed for anything else.

Then, once you had all five of them, or six, if you wanted the missile option, they rolled into the ultimate tier zero spell. Tom had, of course, known how flexible Touch Heal was, but he hadn’t realised how many components fed into it. He flipped the page and was unsurprised to find the two core tier zero spells constituted pre-requisites for everything in the tier 1 tree.

Thankfully, there were only half the number of entries in the tables for tier one. Tier two spells had fewer still. The higher you got, the easier it grew - at least, from the numbers’ perspective. Tom wasn’t fooled. Each individual transformation got more than twice as difficult with each step up the tiers.

“Absolutely unbelievable,” he said. He knew some people might consider him crazy for talking to himself, but it had always helped him reason things out – besides, this was the only time he could talk like a normal adult. Outside this room he was Ta, and that was a drag.

Given his plan to evolve crappy spells into better ones, the knowledge on this sheet was extraordinary.

It was a guide. And it was exactly what he needed, and he would kiss whoever had thought to produce this information. They were currently Tom’s favourite person in the world.

Better still, Tom was experienced enough to recognise this was a carefully curated knowledge. There were no specific instructions anywhere. There were no words or diagrams to help interpret the data. You had to tease the insights out by reading between the lines. They might as well have written in bold on the first sheet, that this package has been ‘designed not to interfere with the title acquisition.’ Between the way this information was presented and everything else he had learnt, he was certain that there were juicy titles available, and that they were awarded for acquiring multiple skills and spells before maturity. Not after one spell, obviously, but, perhaps, after four? Or maybe eight? Possibly it required a spell higher than tier one, or maybe they functioned under some weighted criteria that recognised that a tier two ability was worth at least ten tier zero abilities, or something like that.

Tom squeezed the sheaf of pages for a moment. There were around fifty of them, and the first one alone had contained a massive wealth of information.

What else is hiding in there? He wondered.

Reverently, he flipped the pages open, and saw that the next one covered the tier one paths like he had already determined. The next few pages took that journey all the way up to tier six, where the progression ended in a Healing Domain, Basic Resurrection or Restore to Optimal State. Each of these three spells was special.

Basic Resurrection did exactly what its name implied, but it was highly restrictive. Basically, it was a spell that had to be triggered within a minute of death and, when someone died in battle, there was rarely time to do that. Out of the three, Tom saw that as the weakest. The Restore to Optimal State, in addition to healing grievous injuries, could also purge powerful poisons, venoms, curses, and hostile energy types. Over hundreds of pitched battles, it would save far more lives than the limited Basic Resurrection Spell; of that, he was sure. As for the final spell, well, the usefulness of the Healing Domain heavily depended on its exact features. The basic versions Tom had seen would provide continuous low-level healing for free, as well as boost your own healing spells within the domain range. Visibly, it would not save as many lives as Restore to Optimal State, but in an extended battle of attrition Tom knew which one he would want on his side - and it was not the mana-hungry, one-use, heal-all ability.

If Tom’s ambition was to be the best healer ever, then following this guide was how to do it. If he could have two of those tier six spells without spending a point of experience, it was hard to imagine the type of class he would be awarded. It would be a legendary level at a minimum, and might let him find hidden titles like Deliver a Million Units of Healing before getting a class.

He tore his mind away from these daydreams.

“That is not your path,” he snapped at himself. He would not try to do that, even if thinking about it made him wet his lips. He had a build that he had decided on, and that was the one he would follow. For him, the plan for healing was always only to progress far enough to be confident that he could keep himself alive when things went wrong.

Once more, he tapped the paper and considered the hidden information contained in the drawers. The folders were filled with knowledge, but what was implied was as important as the specifics. The level of detail provided was, to put it lightly, interesting. Why did they choose to go up to tier six - why not tier four or eight? The fact they had included those extra steps, but not further, suggested that someone obviously thought it was possible to develop a domain before getting access to the experience shop.

I’ll get three, Tom promised himself. He had developed one in six months, though, admittedly, off a far higher base, which had given him far more mana and fate to invest into the effort. He had done it once, so he was confident he could do it again.

As his fingers flipped over the first few pages of the Healing Domain, the complexity really drove home how hard gaining a domain was. Last time, he had cheated heavily by using both high tier and significantly levelled spells. This time, he would need to start with nothing. He would need to create almost a hundred base spells, ranging from tier zero to tier two. They would then have to be pushed through a couple of hundred evolutions. He did the mathematics in his head. Ten years, twelve months per year that gave him a hundred and twenty months, which meant getting the domain would require him to evolve or create a spell almost every week!

Tom whistled at that requirement.

To get three…

He frowned. That was more challenging, but he moved on.

He was only on sheet seven, and the stack was far thicker than that, so he flipped over to the next page, wondering what else was contained in the information pack.

The revealed page was nothing like what he was expecting. There was only a single heading - Remove Bone Bruising - and no other words after that. Instead of rows of text, there was a series of detailed wireframe diagrams created to show a three-dimensional structure on the two-dimensional surface.

The diagrams seemed familiar, and he was pretty sure he understood what they were trying to show, but he knew nothing about the Remove Bone Bruising spell. Feverishly, he flipped through the pages, until he found the one labelled Heal Minor Scratches.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

That was what he needed to solve this mystery.

He sat back with a very satisfied grin on his face.

The wireframe on this page was one he recognised. With a flick of thought, he activated his singular spell, and the spell form appeared. He held it in stasis while his eyes darted between what he had created and the diagrams.

They were nearly identical.

The same wireframe was repeated down and across the page with a series of slight differences. Extra lines were added, and an occasional additional swirl and the thickness of various lines altered between each of them. He studied the true spell form that the system had created, then compared it to what was on paper.

The spell form, he realised, was not three-dimensional.

“No,” Tom corrected himself. “Realised is the wrong word. I meant I recognise that the spell form isn’t three-dimensional. Because I’ve always known that.”

He could distinctively remember delving into Touch Heal and changing its function – not by altering the three-dimensional representation, but by changing the density and the internal oscillations of the spell structure. He had always understood how the spell worked, and all he was doing now was consciously recognising that component of it. It was not at the front of mind, because the system did the bulk of the work, and all he usually did was filling the construction with mana. That, and maybe fiddling with a couple of areas. Now that he had seen the components that made up Touch Heal, he understood that those changes had been specialising it closer to its basic and therefore more efficient forms.

Even this simple trash spell, Tom realised, existed in four-dimensions. That could not be captured cleanly on paper, but whatever artist had constructed the diagrams in front of him, they had attempted to do exactly that. The thickness of the lines, the changing additions, the multiple sequential illustrations were there to mimic that four-dimensional structure.

Curiously, he flipped over to a higher tier spell and saw that the diagrams were now in colour. They were also glowing with mana to better reflect the extra dimensions beyond the four – the dimensions that the earlier ones had required and captured via multiple diagrams.

He had never realised how complicated magic truly was.

You couldn’t show multiple dimensions on a basic paper in a single illustration, but numerous views from the same perspective allowed you to get close, especially when you added in tricks like colour and embossed paper.

He flicked back to the spell he knew and studied it.

“Wow, amazing,” he whispered as he went from one diagram to another and compared them to the official system spell form he had created. “An absolute genius created this.” With this process, he could see exactly how the thing recorded on paper could be translated into the four-dimensional space.

The sheets of paper he held in his hands were a road map that would allow anyone with a sufficient control over raw mana to create a spell form even if they had never seen it before.

Whoever had come up with this was a certified brainiac.

“How did you even think about doing this?” he asked the empty room in disbelief.

There was, of course, no answer, but Tom knew what he had to do now. He went back to the first page and referenced the evolution pathway. The best way to improve his existing spell was combining it with Alleviate Surface Bruising.

His hands flicked to the page that contained the sketch of the four-dimensional spell form that he needed to duplicate. Tom studied the diagrams carefully, then compared them both to his memory of Touch Heal and the Heal Minor Scratches spell form. He still had it materialised to compare those in real time. What was on the page was significantly simpler than Touch Heal, and was - unsurprisingly - close in both structure and complexity to the spell that he had already learned. The differences were mostly below the surface. The alterations were in the fourth dimension rather than the usual three. That was captured by the thickness of the lines and some minor physical changes, a couple of extra spirals and one missing cross beam, but in only three dimensions they were nearly identical. Even in four dimensions they were very similar, to be honest.

It was a spell form he was sure that he could duplicate.

First, he needed something to heal.

As usual, once he had made his mind up he didn’t hesitate.

He grabbed the nearest blunt object. It was a rock shaped like a thicker phone that served some kind of magic purpose he hadn’t figured out yet. For now, he didn’t care. It was hard and convenient and there were no nearby perfectly positioned corners to kick.

Without hesitating further, he brought the rock down hard onto his shin bone.

He winced and then lifted the stone back up.

This was one place he knew that bruised easily. When he was a kid, his shin had always been covered with them. He struck a second time, then a third and a final fourth. It was both worse and better than cutting himself. The initial pain was more intense, but it faded quicker.

In the mirror, he could see them already forming. Ugly red welts that would soon go black.

That was enough for now.

Tom took half a minute to focus on deep breathing, until the pain went down sufficiently to become less of a distraction.

For this, he wanted absolute clarity of mind. He pictured what he desired and spent ten fate to weigh the probabilities of it occurring into his favour.

Then, with painstaking accuracy, continually referring to the sheet of paper, he constructed the spell form out of raw mana. As always, it felt like he was picking up screws while wearing heavy work gloves. The magic did not conform to the pattern he wanted. The fate was actively correcting the worst of his errors. But it wasn’t enough. The magical lines he had drawn only loosely aligned to the complicated structure that Alleviate Surface Bruising, one of the simplest spells in existence, demanded.

In defiance of its imperfections, it snapped together to create a stable spell form. Tom raised an eyebrow at that. He could see the whole thing had a slant to it, and, by rights, it should have collapsed, but the active fate had obviously reinforced it in the right spots – enough so to keep it together. He filled it with his entire pathetically small mana pool, and then he sent it into the bruise that looked the ugliest.

There was no itchiness and no overt signs of healing.

There was also no ding that would have announced success.

Tom frowned and studied the bruise he had tried to heal. It appeared slightly more yellow than the dark blue of the other three. He was confident that the spell had worked. Not perfectly, because if it had been perfect the spell would have been awarded to him by the system, but it had worked. The severity of the bruise had been noticeably reduced. It was, he suspected, a long way from perfection, but it was closer to it than his scratch spell had gotten in his first few days. The more he watched the bruises, the more certain of it he was.

It would do, Tom decided. Within a week, not only would this spell be mastered, but he would have also taken the next step and evolved the two of them into Heal Skin, as he promised himself. There was no time to waste.

That was proof of concept, and it meant he would be well on his way to reconstructing Touch Heal, and, once that was done, he could turn to more interesting applications like lightning.

Tom looked at the brick that he had used to strike himself. Creating the conditions for his learning was not going to be pleasant.

He shuddered.

Eventually, he realised, he would have to work on bones and organs.

But that was a problem for the later him, and there were more important things than fleeting physical discomfort. The fact was he was making progress and had the tools available to do more, for example.

Smiling, he got up once he had recovered enough, then worked through his spear forms. The movements were as crisp as he could make them, but he wondered if it would be sufficient. Unlike with magic, he didn’t know, even theoretically, how to create Skills from scratch beyond the method of almost dying multiple times, which was not a technique he was willing to try even with fate backing him. There was a fine line between almost dying and actually dying, and if you got close to it too many times eventually you would cross it. Tom knew he wouldn’t get a fourth life - at least not one where he had a chance to save humanity.

He would not throw his life away unnecessarily, even if it meant he would come out of it with only spells. However, Tom still had hope. He remembered the girl with the fork, and Corrine implying the skill was not that impressive. There had to be a shortcut or a cheat to create skills - he just had to find it.

The mana spells that he had thought he had understood inside out had been far harder to build from scratch than he had expected, and his knowledge of skills was far less than that of spells. One thing was certain: he was not about to crack this problem by himself. For now, he hoped that practice and repetition could help him establish a base for later.

He alternated his recovery time between studying the Alleviate Surface Bruising diagrams and continuing the cataloguing of resources. He was hoping for a similar road map for skills, but he hadn’t found what he wanted - at least, so far. There had been successes. He had found the Lightning and Earth domain folders, but Teleportation was missing.

He shrugged. There were holes, but so what? He had roadmaps for half the things he wanted to develop, and finding that in the first two weeks was pretty good going, as far as he was concerned.

Teleportation, Precognition, Time Stop and Spear abilities were going to require a different solution. He had over ten years to solve this problem, and to be honest, he had known the skill acquisition was always going to be the hardest part of his build, so nothing had changed apart from one part of his development becoming a lot more certain. That was something to celebrate.

There was a ding to signify the approaching end of the session, and he packed up, as always, by spreading the toys everywhere. Then he stepped out, excited by his progress.

“Clean that up.” Dimitri snapped at him.

Tom glanced back at the toys that covered the floor. There was no way Little Tar would want to spend time cleaning that. Dimitri was scowling at him, but was also not in a position to easily grab him. Tom sprinted away with a laugh. Their caretaker did not follow or try to stop him.

Tomorrow there was no isolation session, but that was okay, because he was going to be forced into the trial instead. He hoped it would allow him to kill stuff. Training was useful, but there was nothing quite as good as a full-on life and death fight.