After I finished scanning my ability evolutions, Sallia and I returned to our house. I could worry more about my ability evolutions later. What I wanted to do right now was stop everyone’s injuries from getting worse.

We found Anise first. She was sitting at the dining table with Ella, trying to eat breakfast. Because her jaw was still affected by the fog creature, she was having a hard time chewing.

I winced when I saw her. She had gotten thinner.

“Anise, wait for a second,” I said. “I found a way to heal your mouth and nose. I just need you to be patient for a few seconds, all right?”

“Really?” Anise said, as her eyes grew horribly bright and excited.

I nodded. “Hold still, all right?”

Anise immediately froze, before she sat still and waited for me to start healing her.

Then, I made my way towards her… and bit the air in front of her face, using my teeth to shred apart the spatial contortion.

Ella gave me a blank look. She watched me ‘bite’ the air in front of Anise’s face over and over again. For a moment, I felt as if Ella was considering whether or not I had gone insane.

Luckily, as Ella gave me an increasingly baffled look, Anise’s flesh around her lips and nose began to slowly lose its off-gray color, and its slightly foggy appearance started to retreat as well.

At the same time, Anise broke into a stiff grin. She touched her nose and mouth, and her grin slowly started to become a little bit more natural. The skin and flesh around her mouth still looked withered, like a plant that hadn’t seen rain in months, but it no longer looked like it was slowly turning into fog, and based on Ansie’s reaction, the pain was gone. “It doesn’t hurt anymore!” Then, she winced, and touched her lips and nose. “Much.”

Due to receiving constant erosion for two weeks, Anise’s lips and nose still looked as if they had gotten frostbite, been thrown into a pit of acid, and then left there for two weeks. The muscles and skin were both atrophied and shrunken. It would be a miracle if there was no long-term damage at all after what our bodies had been through. I used a little bit of alteration essence to heal her a little bit. Even if I had no real way to fix the long-term damage she had taken yet, I could at least reduce the pain she felt as much as possible.

Anise’s smile widened. Then, she leaned over the table and hugged me. “Thanks, Miria! You’re the best!”

I returned her hug and smiled, before I turned towards Ella. “Are you ready? I can at least help your arm recover a bit, even if I can’t instantly fix all of the long-term damage.”

Ella gave me a curious look. “Might I ask what exactly you did? As far as I can tell, you just bit the air in front of Anise for some reason, and then the gray color near her mouth and nose started to recede. I’m not really sure what happened besides that, though.”

“Sallia, Felix and I were talking, and we realized that the fog monster was somehow attacking us from a distance. It was probably ignoring the distance issues due to some sort of special attunement, or something of the sort,” I said, shrugging. Honestly, I wasn’t quite sure how outsiders worked, or even if they were using a magic system at all. “Either way, I figure that the fog monster was probably literally digesting us from afar, bit by bit. I spent a while thinking about how to deal with it, and eventually, I managed to use my general shaping to ‘cut off’ the connection between the creature and whatever part of our body it was attacking.” Naturally, I couldn’t talk about absorption essence with Ella, so I pretended it was related to general shaping instead.

Ella thought about it for a moment, and then sighed. “You’ve truly come a long way as a shaper. I can’t help but wonder if it’s a shame that you were born with the talent of both a shaper and a spellcaster…” she laughed ruefully. “If you spent all of your time thinking about how to advance as a shaper, perhaps you would single-handedly remold the way shapers think about interacting with the world.” She sighed, and then glanced at her ruined arm. “All right, do it. Let’s see if I can get my arm working again.”

I quickly bit into the spatial connection near Ella’s arm, and quickly shredded the connection into nothing.

The gray color in Ella’s arm started to recede. However, much like with Anise’s face, the shrunken, withered muscles in her arm didn’t recover.

Ella sighed in relief. “At least it doesn’t hurt anymore.” Then, she stared at her arm, and grunted in effort.

Nothing happened.

Ella furrowed her brows in concentration, trying harder and harder to do something… and out of the corner of my eye, I saw her elbow bend very slightly. However, the movement was very faint. If I hadn’t been paying close attention, I probably wouldn’t have noticed her movement at all.

Ella looked at her arm and sighed. “I suppose I’ll try calling the muscle expert again. You say that you think the creature was digesting us from afar?” I nodded. Ella sighed again. “Well, if the damage has reached my bones, maybe the muscle expert won’t be able to fix my arm. But it’s worth a shot, at least. Shapers that can heal are pretty rare, so I’ll see what I can get and hope for the best. Perhaps I can regain use of my arm soon.” She sounded a bit dispirited, and I could easily imagine why. The method I had offered removed the connection between her arm and the creature that had been attacking us from all the way back in its chasm.

However, it did nothing to regenerate the muscle tissue and bones that had been subjected to constant corrosion for more than two weeks. After Ella’s arm had been ‘digested’ for over two weeks, it was incredibly unlikely that repairing some muscles would give her full mobility back in her arm. Sure, it would help, but Ella would probably still be crippled for the rest of her life at this rate.

I looked at Anise and Ella, both of whom still had clear signs of muscle damage on their body, and sighed.

I still needed to figure out how to heal their bodies. But at least I had removed the pain and stopped the problem from getting worse. That was a start. I didn’t want to say I was going to cure them yet, though. I didn’t want to get their hopes up in case I failed.

Then, I quickly found Felix, and severed the spatial connection between his eye and the fog creature.

Felix sighed in relief as the pain in his eye disappeared.

“Thanks, Mir. I don’t know what I’d do without you,” he said. Then, he frowned. “I still can’t really see out of my eye. Maybe vision will come back over the course of the next few days?”

“I’m still working on rebuilding the healing half of my attunement,” I said. “Hopefully, it’ll be much more effective once I’m done. The muscle guy will probably come back soon as well, so maybe he can do something. His specialty is muscles, but maybe our eyes have a lot of muscles in them?”

Felix gave me a hopeful look. “You’re working on rebuilding the healing half of your attunement? What are you thinking of doing?” I noticed that he completely ignored the fact that the muscle healer was going to come back. Apparently, he held little hope that the muscle healer would be able to fix his face.

“Right now, I’m thinking about that cube that we saw while we were traveling the wastes,” I said. “It was also at least partially based on the ocean of souls, so I want to try using it as inspiration. However, since I don’t have the cube anymore, it’s hard to use it as more than a rough reference point. I’m not quite sure how to translate that into a full reconstruction of the ability…”

Felix nodded thoughtfully. “To be honest, I’m not sure how you would fix it. Attunements are really personal, and so it’s hard to offer any ideas, because your attunement is too different from mine. Any ideas I offer might be more of a hindrance than a help. But I know you, and I know you’ll figure it out.” He smiled at me. “You’re not somebody that gives up when it comes to people you care about. And I know you’ll succeed sooner or later.”

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I nodded, and gave Felix a hug. He patted me on the back a few times.

After that, I retreated to my room to think.

The first half of the healing process was completed. With everyone free from crippling pain, and the complications that would arise if their bodies kept being corroded nonstop, I had done at least half of what I needed to.

However, there was still much to do. I wanted to get Ella full use of her arm back, and give Felix full use of his eye back. My legs were also much weaker than before, and Anise’s jaw and nose looked pretty messed up. By sheer luck, Anise didn’t seem to have any problems breathing right now, but I still felt that healing her face would be a good idea to prevent any strange medical complications in the future.

But what was missing from my healing ability? This had been bothering me for a while. I knew that there was something missing from the healing part of my attunement, but I wasn’t really sure what.

Was there something I had overlooked while creating my healing ability?

Was there some sort of foundational issue in the way I healed people?

I frowned, losing myself in thought for several minutes as I simply sat in my room.

I thought back to the cube. Much like my attunement, it relied on the concept of the ocean of souls as the source of its power.

Ocean of souls… Ocean of souls…

Ocean…

Suddenly, I realized what was wrong with my healing ability.

When I had been constructing my two primary abilities, I had focused on the concepts of life and death, both of which were fundamentally related to the ocean of souls. Extinguish was related to the way the ocean of souls took away souls after death, returning them to the cycle of reincarnation. However, it was also important to remember that Extinguish used water as a medium for the entire ability to work. I was using the ocean of souls and its relationship with death to fuel the entire spell: however, it was still, ultimately, directly tied to water and oceans. The way extinguish worked was to create a ‘conceptual’ drop of water and then attach it to the body of whatever I was trying to kill. Without the drop of conceptual water making contact with my enemy, the rest of my ability would do absolutely nothing.

Meanwhile, my current healing ability that was derived from my attunement was mostly related to the way I conceptualized the ocean of souls bringing new life into newborn infants, by allowing souls to find and reincarnate inside of children.

However, in the creation of my healing ability, I had neglected a rather important key aspect of the way my attunement worked.

Both life and death were ultimately derived from the OCEAN of souls. That is, my abilities may be quite different from simple water manipulation, but both of them were ultimately derived from water and the ocean. I had used water and candles of life as the entire spellcasting method for extinguish, but water wasn’t really present in my healing spell at all. It was, at best, used in some minor component of how I visualized the spell. It was basically just an attempt at creating a regular, run of the mill healing spell using my concept of life.

I realized where the problem was.

I thought back to the cube, and wondered if it was somehow related to water as well. Perhaps there was water inside of the cube? Or perhaps the wet paint applied to the outside of the cube somehow caused the cube’s healing ability to connect itself with the concept of water?

I wished I could see the cube be used to heal someone again, so that I could verify how this worked, but sadly, I didn’t have access to the healing cube anymore.

However, I still started thinking about how healing worked again.

I wanted to be able to breathe ‘new life’ into our damaged and atrophied muscles and bones, wiping away the serious, permanent damage that our bodies had gone through under the attacks of the fog creature. I wanted everyone’s bodies to be in perfect, working condition afterwards. For that, I needed to use my attunement. Not just the concept of life, but the concept of life derived from the ocean of souls.

I spent several hours imagining how my attunement should work, and trying to figure out how that mapped to a new healing ability. One that was better, had more potential, and was more powerful than before.

I first tried visualizing my new ability in a way similar to how I had visualized ‘extinguish.’ Just like one drop of water could bring death to a person by extinguishing their candle of life, perhaps one drop of water could revive someone’s candle of life by feeding them a soul?

However, I quickly realized that wasn’t the right direction for visualizing this spell. I got the strong feeling that what I was currently visualizing was even worse than my original healing spell, and might even backfire and harm people I was trying to help. I immediately backed off, and lost myself in thought again.

That was clearly the wrong direction. But what was the right direction?

I lost myself even further in my half-awake trance, until I stumbled upon a new idea.

A normal, steady stream of water was critical for all life to grow. This was the fundamental requirement for most life to keep existing: Orthanoids and Orukthyri needed to drink water to stay alive, and plants needed steady streams of water to grow big and strong. Of all the creatures I had encountered so far, only the creatures that came from the dimension of the black sun seemed to escape this fundamental need.

Similarly, dimensions were also somehow related to the ocean of souls, even if I didn’t know the correct way to visualize how this relationship worked. However, I started to think about how everything that was alive was in some way connected to water and the ocean. Even this dimension.

I felt a stab of pain in my head, and realized I was overreaching. Touching on how dimensions worked was way beyond my current abilities. I focused again on plants and smaller forms of life.

I also started thinking, once again, about how the ocean of souls brought souls of the dead around the multiverse, allowing souls to occasionally find new bodies and breathe new life into infants.

I felt my ability start to form as my mental image solidified.

I quickly ran out of the house, ignoring Sallia’s attempt to start a conversation, and filled up a small tub of water from the nearby river, then rushed back into the house.

Then, I ran back into my room and stepped into the tub of water. I wanted something a little more controlled than my lake-dress for this experiment.

I looked at my disfigured legs, before I brought my image of the ocean of souls and the way it brought ‘new life’ to things to mind again.

Just as the ocean of water took life away, it also gave new life to bodies and souls near it.

Both human and Orthanoid souls looked like silver blobs of light to my soul-sight, so I visualized ‘life’ as a silvery blob of light, lazily wandering through the ocean of souls until it made contact with a new body and breathed life into it.

I visualized the way a body needed a soul to truly ‘live,’ just like a body without a soul was just a coma patient that would never wake up.

I thought about the way plants needed water, and the way water sustained life in every single creature native to this dimension.

And as my legs sat, submerged in a tub of water, I saw a small little blob of silver-white light condense near the bottom of the tub of water. If I wasn’t looking carefully, I might have mistaken the silvery blob of light for a soul. However, I didn’t currently have my soul-sight active. Instinctively, I knew what the silvery light was.

It was life.

The silvery blob of light wandered closer and closer to my damaged legs, before it made contact with my skin.

And then, all of the silver light was suddenly sucked into my body, like a ship caught in a whirlpool.

All of a sudden, massive amounts of water in the tub started to sink into my legs. I felt my crippling injuries start to heal.

And then I realized that I had lost a massive amount of alteration essence, and quickly shut off my new ability.

I stared at my legs, and grinned.

The previously atrophied and damaged muscles, skin, and bones hadn’t been fully healed. However, they looked better than before.

My new healing ability had been successfully created.

I decided to call this new spell-like use of my alteration essence ‘renewal,’ because I was essentially breathing new life into whatever my ability made contact with. I felt that my ability could do a lot of strange, interesting things with the ability, beyond just healing people’s long term injuries.

I suspected that, if I had a ludicrous amount of essence to throw away and the right adjustments were made to my mental image, I might even be able to do something like return the dead to life, if they had only died a few seconds ago. Of course, there was no way I would have enough essence to do that by the end of this life: it seemed incredibly expensive. And even if I vastly improved the ability, I would probably never be able to revive someone if their soul had found a new home already.

My legs weren’t healed yet: I had probably only resolved about a tenth of my permanent injuries. Just like how extinguish had been cripplingly inefficient when I first learned how to do it, this spell was also horrendously inefficient right now.

However, my new healing ability met my expectations.

As long as I learned to use it more effectively, I was pretty sure I could heal almost any injury. Even regrowing limbs, the way a plant grew from a tiny seed into a massive crop, was probably possible if I had the patient submerge themself in water and had enough alteration essence to support it.

I had finally figured out how to properly heal my friends with my attunement.

I grinned to myself, as two new System notifications popped up.