Bleeding Resistance and the Anatomy passive from one single battle was a great haul, so Symon felt like Keelgrave was justified in being surprised. The resistance was reasonable, he'd survived an inhuman amount of bleeding, but all he'd done to earn Anatomy was cut open a single monster corpse and take a look at its insides. They'd thought that gaining the Swords passive in less than a week was good, and he'd been able to train for it at an unsustainable intensity for anyone without his healing.
Symon was too distracted staring at his arm to think about Keelgrave's implied question any further. He'd always been so pale that his veins were easily visible — the nurses had loved that — but they felt more... tangible. He could look at them, close his eyes, and then still feel the blood flowing through them. It was like his proprioception, that sense of his own body, had been dialled up to eleven.
"Damn, this feels so crazy," he said aloud as he opened and closed his hand into a fist. He could feel the bones in his hand, the way the muscles and ligaments pulled against them to curl his finger. He'd been able to feel his vitality moving around his body, as well as when and where it was absorbed to heal wounds, but he hadn't been able to sense his own body so clearly. This was by far the most noticeable passive he'd gained, to the point that it was distracting. "Keelgrave, how do I turn this off? I can't fight like this."
Symon did so, closing his eyes and drawing his attention inward. He paused briefly at his lungs, watching them fill with air for a few breaths before continuing to his vessel. It wasn't that he was literally seeing inside himself like an x-ray, but a separate sense that was closest to touch. It was akin to his awareness of the threads of his draining magic. He could always tell where they were, even if he had his eyes closed.
When he reached his vessel, it was the first time he could take a proper look at it. Up until recently, he'd never been able to feel the actual structure of his vessel. He'd been aware of the vitality inside it, meaning he could estimate its shape by tracking where the vitality could and could not go, but it had been lacking in detail. He'd already known that it was similar to a mana core in that it was spherical, but he could now see the differences. While a core was perfectly smooth like a marble, his vessel was covered in small, symmetrical hills. It reminded him of the pattern on a turtle's shell.
He took deep breaths as he did what he now realised must be some form of meditation, doing his best to ignore the feeling of the air entering his lungs and oxygenating his blood with every breath.
As his awareness traced over the contours of his vessel, his mind mapping and visualising their shape, all the myriad bodily processes began to fade into the background. When he opened his eyes, that strange sense of his own body was only barely there. When he focused on his hand he began to see the minutia of its internal components, but they faded away into the background once he stopped paying attention to it.
Symon let out a short sigh of relief before speaking aloud. "Man, that was strange. I think I'm better now."
"New skill?" he heard Aslan ask. When he looked around, he saw the rest of the group resting on a nearby boulder. The shadows were all a little shorter than how he remembered them, and when he looked upward, the suns had shifted slightly on their journey through the sky.
"Yeah, just took a bit to get used to. Sorry for making you guys wait, I didn't realise it had taken so long."
The other man waved him off good-naturedly. "It is no bother, some skills take some getting used to. We shall drink together to celebrate this new skill, as well as your swordsmanship, once we reach the village."
Symon felt the muscles in his face adjust minutely as they twitched into a smile. "That sounds great, just don't expect me to be able to drink as much as Atabek." The feeling from the new passive was much less noticeable than previously, but still slightly distracting. He'd get used to it in time, hopefully.
The others all dusted themselves off from where they'd been sitting and resumed their journey through the valley. Symon took a few quick steps to join their two-by-two formation, although naturally he was offset from everyone else.
"I take it you did not find a core in the creature?" Aslan asked.
Symon shook his head. "No, no luck. There was this bag of mana-rich blood, but no core. There wouldn't be any alchemists in the village who would be interested in that, right?"
Much like Keelgrave had suggested, Aslan confirmed that the village was both too small to have a dedicated alchemist and too poor to afford one's work. After that, the conversation naturally died down as everyone kept their eyes out for another attack. Symon still had questions about the fight, but conveniently he had a captive audience to bother instead of his friends.
This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.
"Hey Keelgrave, why did Atabek not get hurt at all during that fight? Is this like with Safiya's situation where her stats make her faster than me but she has a skill for when she needs to go extra fast?" he whispered into the privacy of his own mind.
"As hard as iron? I can figure that part out. Is it possible for me to get it for myself?"
"Damnit, that would have been the perfect skill for me, but I guess it makes sense. It would be like trying to teach Atabek how to drain vitality and use it to heal."
Symon rolled his eyes, a common occurrence when talking with Keelgrave. "I didn't exactly choose to pick a cursed class, you know..."
----------------------------------------
As was becoming a strangely recurring theme, their travels through the valley were largely absent of any monsters. The centipedes had been everywhere in the desert, and yet now there seemed to be fewer monsters, especially considering that the plant life and easy access to water should have drawn them in.
"Guys, do you find it odd how few monsters there are around here? Is that just normal for the area?" Symon asked.
"Yes to both questions, friend Symon. We noticed the monster density is... strange. The population is high immediately surrounding the village, and for a few kilometres—" Symon was converting the units for distance in his head "— surrounding it, but then it dips down to almost nothing for, well, a very large area. We did not notice it picking back up by the time we met you."
"It certainly picks up a bit once you reach the desert, but most of the monsters I found were small," Symon added.
"Hmm, odd indeed. We were not sure why they appeared concentrated towards the village," Aslan said.
Symon gave a wordless grunt in reply as he considered the matter. "What do you think Keelgrave, are the monsters all trying to eat the villagers?"
"Hmm, I see. What was it like when you were here half a century ago?"
"I suppose it works out in my favour then, but I still want to know why it happened."
----------------------------------------
His time with the Dumosans had been 1% life-or-death fights and 99% boring marching. Aslan had told him this was a common occurrence for adventurers, and Keelgrave said it was very similar in both war and sailing as well. It seemed all of Symon's allotted excitement had been used up with the first batch of monsters, as the remainder of their journey was lacking in any visible monsters.
That wasn't to say that nothing had changed. As soon as Symon exited the valley, he was immediately struck by the salty smell of the sea. He'd never been a big fan of beaches, but that was changing now. To him, the brine of the ocean smelled like freedom. It was freedom from the desert, from constantly looking over his shoulder for monsters, and worrying that they'd eat him while he slept. Though in many ways, this second chance was both a blessing and a curse. He'd be able to save a lot more lives with healing magic than he otherwise could have, but it seemed he was liable to get killed before he could put it to work. Perhaps he could spend half his vitality on healing others and half on training?
He didn't want to delay doing something so important, both to himself and those he would heal, but he understood now just how important personal power was in this world. Even if there were police or guards or whatever the equivalent here was, they wouldn't do him much good if a monster had already eaten his head off. He'd been sick for a good portion of his life, and he couldn't help but feel that he'd missed out on working towards his true life goal of saving lives, so he wasn't a fan of delaying this even further. Thinking back on it, it was almost cruel that he died on his first-ever shift as a paramedic. The patient in the back had surely died after the crash, too. It reminded him of that old saying 'Man plans, god laughs'. Only, he hoped that wasn't the case here, where there were beings powerful enough to add blessings to his Ledger.
Shaking off the melancholy, Symon took in the forest that stretched out to the sea. The exit of the valley wasn't elevated enough to see the sea proper, but the fact he could faintly smell it meant it wasn't far. Noticeably the forest in front of him was a real forest, not just towering stalks of grass. It had large, leafy trees that he didn't recognise — although he doubted he could have recognised many trees from Earth anyway. A few birds flew overhead, the first he'd seen since coming here.
He stopped and stared at a small, squirrel-like creature. It stared back, its bushy, reddish-brown tail swaying slightly. When Symon waved at it, it scurried off away from him.
At least not every animal wants to eat me, he thought as he hurried to join up with his friends.