After I created my new and improved healing spell, time passed.

I spent about two and a half weeks healing everyone’s injuries, starting with Anise. After Anise’s face was healed, I divided my essence equally between Felix and Ella to heal their injuries, and then finally healed my own legs. The muscle healer was able to help reconstruct everyone’s deteriorated muscles much more quickly than I would have been able to manage on my own, which saved me a great deal of time, and I was able to gain some inspiration from watching him heal everyone’s muscles as well, which would make my healing cheaper and easier in the future. My healing was a lot slower and more expensive than the muscle expert’s, but it also did a much more ‘perfect’ job, ensuring that there were no long-lasting issues left behind, and also allowed me to heal things like bones and nerves that the muscle healer couldn’t really address.

Sallia’s healing didn’t see much use during the time we worked on recovering, but she was more than happy to help everyone run through exercises to get them used to using their limbs again. Even though she didn’t end up being much help during the healing process, she ended up being very useful during the recovery process. After all, I was able to heal all of the physical damage left behind on everyone’s body, but people would naturally start to develop different habits for moving after being unable to use their limbs properly for over three weeks. Sallia decided to help everyone get ‘back into shape’ and train us out of whatever bad habits we picked up during the time we were injured.

As it turned out, the one that needed to do the most work to get used to moving again was me. I had unconsciously started to adopt a much slower and more awkward pace when I walked or ran, in order to reduce the pain I felt in my legs as much as possible. This was something Sallia forced me to fix.

Once I had completed Ella and Felix’s healing, I also got a rather nice Achievement bonus.

Influence: Heal 3 permanent, crippling injuries

Achievement +150

This brought my Achievement from 11,018 Achievement to 11,168 Achievement. I was still short of the amount of Achievement I needed before I died, since I was almost 3,000 Achievement and 18 Glut Penalty short of the two major abilities I wanted to purchase. Since Stats gave three points of Glut penalty when going from grade 1 to grade 2, I had to max out six new stats if I wanted to keep my new Ability AND evolve my absorption essence Ability. Each Stat cost 1600 Achievement to max out… which meant I was a whopping 12,000 or so Achievement short. I needed to double my Achievement before I died.

In other words, I might need to give up on either my Evolution or what I planned to be my primary magic system. Both options made me feel very unhappy, but I hoped I could somehow scrape together what I needed before we returned to the Market. At the very least, I intended to make use of my training time to put together some more Achievement before we returned to the wastes above.

Apart from realizing how woefully inadequate my Achievement reserves were, as I worked on healing my friends, I learned a great deal about how to control my new healing ability. It was still ridiculously expensive for each drop of healing I wrung out of the ability, but with every single day that passed, I felt my control over the spell getting better and better, and I optimized more of the spell by learning more about both the Orthanoid body structure and the way my spell itself worked. It would take quite a long time for it to reach the same level of energy-efficiency I had trained Extinguish up to, but the spell clearly had far more potential than my original healing spell. To my own surprise, however, I realized that my old healing spell did still have some uses. Even if its potential was dozens of times lower, and it had no way at all to interact with permanent injuries, it was still quite a bit more useful in the heat of combat.

More time passed. Months started to turn into years.

Ella maintained close contact with her merchant friends, and kept an eye out for my family and Sallia’s parents. However, no word came of them, no matter how much anyone looked. At one point, Ella even left the city to search for them, taking me along and bringing several experienced trackers, but we were unable to find any sign of them at all.

At first, I hoped that perhaps they had simply gotten lost, or hadn’t reached a nearby city yet.

Eventually, I started to accept that I was never going to see them again. They had likely been eaten by monsters in between one city and the next, and I would probably never learn how or where they died. I felt a little empty when I thought of the fact that I finally had a way to cure Jonathan’s arm, and restore his dream of being a great swordsman and adventurer.

I finally had a way to heal an injury, but the person I wanted to heal was gone. And I was probably never going to see my family again. This knowledge created a small, persistent ache in my heart. I had lost my mother and father from the Islands, and I would never see them again. Now, I had another family I loved and longed to see again. And just like my parents on the islands, and the people I could barely remember from my first life, they were gone to me forever.

Every single time I died, I would leave behind a family that I loved, and possibly a group of friends as well. Like Anise. That knowledge hurt me more than anything, but I did my best to keep moving forward. Even if it hurt, I needed to keep moving. Still, I paid careful attention to news about the survivors of our old city.

My parents weren’t the only ones who never made it to a new city after fleeing into the tunnels. Not many people had escaped the city after its fall. Of the original population, which had been just shy of 20,000 people, Perhaps 8,000 had made it to nearby cities to start new lives. Many of the remainder fell to monsters in the tunnels, or the Orukthyri invasion, or got lost in the tunnels and died of hunger or thirst. Many scouts and soldiers who patrolled the tunnels spent a few years finding corpses during their travels.

However, years passed, and gradually, the fall of our old city stopped being a topic of conversation and interest. Cities in the underdark fell sometimes, but life continued on for the cities that remained.

One of the cities about two weeks of travel away became renowned for their new, incredible ‘healing cube,’ a magic item said to be able to heal dozens of people per day so long as one fed it paint. Apparently, a group of adventurers had brought it back from a dangerous location on the surface. Rumor had it that the group had only made their way past the first few layers of defense before finding the cube and returning to the city with it, inspiring a new wave of adventurers who hoped to find more from the ruins.

I was still a little interested in getting ahold of the cube for research purposes, just to see if I could cross-reference the way the cube worked with my own healing spell. I felt that it would probably give me a lot of inspiration for how to make other spells from my attunement, and might help me revise a few details about how my healing spell worked. However, I didn’t really have the qualifications to borrow the cube right now, or even spend some time investigating it. Just traveling there would be difficult, and there was no reason for the overseer of that city to lend the most important magic item in the city to a random stranger.

I decided that if we succeeded in recovering some artifacts from the wastes during our next journey to the surface, I would try to find something I could use as collateral to investigate the cube more, but I suspected it would be difficult to succeed.

Day after day, the eight of us who had survived the journey to Silver City began to build a new life. Anise’s parents found new jobs as mushroom farmers. Felix’s mother instead ended up spending quite a bit of time with the military, and started teaching their scouts some of the less magical tricks to moving around the surface that she had learned during her time as an adventurer. Ella didn’t opt to farm or join the military: instead, she managed to work out a deal with the city where she would be compensated for continuing to teach Sallia, Felix, Anise, and me, which kept our group together, while also ensuring we had a bit of loyalty towards our new city. The city also made sure to get us a second, entirely spell-oriented teacher to ensure we didn’t waste our potential as spellcasters. The teacher was named Vance, and was a stern but fair man. He was able to use a few fifth-circle spells, and specialized in stealth and scouting, much like Felix’s mother.

Felix found a third teacher on his own time, although this teacher was entirely nonmagical. He wanted to continue learning how to smith and create items, and while his metal-attuned shaping certainly helped him create items, he still needed to know how to make a regular item before he could speed it up with his attunement. Despite Vance’s best efforts, Felix’s spellcasting started to lag behind his shaping abilities, but his item creation reached a point where it was indistinguishable from an experienced craftsman’s. After a decade, Felix completed his apprenticeship as a blacksmith. With the permission of his former master, he worked as a blacksmith part of the day, and spent the rest of the day learning how to use shaping and cast spells. Some of the incredibly bulky build he had when I first met him in the Market returned, although he still remained much slimmer than before. His muscles were well defined, but not bulky or bearlike.

He seemed to be having the time of his life learning how to make new items and improving his skill as a blacksmith, and Sallia and I were happy for him. He had no idea how to create magic items, unfortunately, but I suspected that it was impossible to do so without some research notes or hints about how the old Orthans had made the massive magic items in the first place. They had managed to create roadways that showed no signs of wear and tear, obstruction, or degradation, even after hundreds of years, and despite centuries of attempts, nobody had managed to replicate their work yet.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Felix’s hard work didn’t go to waste. After he forged his 100th item using his attunement, he got access to a new keyword ability. Much like {Echos of the Deep}, it let him retain access to the shaping spellcasting system, although it also restricted what attunements he could form. If he took the ability, he would never be able to form an attunement besides Metal, and it had no other bonuses. However, it also only had one keyword, which was Creation. That meant it wouldn’t take up much ‘space’ in his build, since he would still have nine keywords free for a binding magic system that he liked and some supplementary abilities. Felix seemed very excited about it, and I was glad that Felix was guaranteed to have a magic system in the next world.

Sallia continued to refine her swordsmanship, and just barely reached [Expert] grade swordsmanship. Unfortunately, all three of her rune abilities and her attunement had already been filled up before we ventured into the wastes for the first time, meaning Sallia didn’t have any open slots to correct the weakness she had. She was still unable to interact with ‘strange’ attacks. Sallia simply sighed, and said that she would keep in mind the issues she had run into in this world next life. There wasn’t much else we could do about this issue anymore, unfortunately.

Apart from that, Sallia and I started using our healing abilities to rack up money and influence in the city. People who could heal with magic were pretty rare in this world, so Sallia and I healing people often was both a way to accumulate money and a way to make sure the city valued us and felt that their assistance to Ella wasn’t wasted. Sallia’s runes were mostly built to heal recent injuries, so she helped people who had just returned after getting hurt by denizens of the darkness most of the time. I spent a lot longer with each of my patients, since my ability was less energy-efficient, but I treated injuries that had been around for much longer.

In addition to racking up wealth and some social power, we also got a decent amount of Achievement from our hard work.

Influence: Heal 12 permanent, crippling injuries

Achievement +400

Influence: Heal 30 permanent, crippling injuries

Achievement +600

Influence: Heal 100 permanent, crippling injuries

Achievement +750

Wealth: Become the owner of 5 bars of (almost) pure gold

Achievement +200

Influence: Slightly increase the strength of Silver City

Achievement +400

The extra 2,350 Achievement I got from healing people and racking up wealth brought me from 11,168 Achievement to 13,518 Achievement. I could heal about one crippling injury every couple weeks to a month, depending on how difficult the injury was to treat. I probably healed somewhere between 100 and 200 injuries during the decade and a half that followed our flight to Silver City, but apparently I had yet to hit the next break point for Achievement rewards.

Naturally, Anise and I also focused on our training, although the direction we took was quite different from Felix and Sallia. While Sallia focused on her swordsmanship and treated everything else as secondary, Anise spent most of her time on spellcasting, and I started to split my time between spellcasting and shaping again.

Anise became a fourth-circle spellcaster, the only member of our group who was actually able to cast fourth circle spells. Her shaping was starting to lag behind a little bit, but she was still able to modify her own spells on the fly extremely proficiently, and was truly shaping up to be a talented little super-witch. Sadly, her mana reserves weren’t quite high enough to let her cast fifth circle spells. Unless one was a transmigrator, magical talent was usually at least somewhat linked to one’s parents, and both of Anise’s parents were completely and utterly untalented in either spellcasting or shaping. And while Anise’s magic reserves did seem to have expanded some as a result of some mixture of skills she had acquired while growing up, she was still far away from the minimum magic symbols per day she needed.

I, myself, saw two very notable breakpoints as I trained.

First, I managed to reach [Expert] grade with my attunement.

Power: Form an [Expert] level attunement

Achievement +1000

With that, my Achievement went from 13,518 Achievement to 14,518 Achievement.

I had been at [Advanced] grade before the Orukthyri battle, and another decade and a half proved just long enough for me to slide into the next grade. However, after reaching [Expert] Grade, I felt as if I had hit a wall of sorts. My innate talent in manipulating alteration essence was still making it much easier to move forward, but I was still… missing something if I wanted to move to [Master] Grade. I got the feeling that [Master] Grade was somehow special. It was like the final step before a much bigger step. It was the preparation for something different.

My instincts were quite vague, so I didn’t really know what to make of my feelings. But at the very least, I was pretty sure that I needed something more than just time to reach [Master] grade. For now, all I could do was keep an eye out for some way to move to the next step, and try to keep my skills sharp.

Finally, I had fully and properly stepped into the third circle of spellcasting, along with Sallia and Felix. The three of us trailed notably behind Anise, but at the very least, we had hit the point where we could call ourselves capable, fully grown spellcasters. I knew several useful third circle spells, and Felix and Sallia could also cast their own kinds of spells. I had eventually opted to take a more offensive and support role as a spellcaster, and learned a bunch of scouting spells from Felix’s mother, as well as several useful offensive spells such as proper fireballs and ice lances. Sallia ended up focusing more on her muscle enhancements, but also made sure to pick up several offensive spells and a few utility spells. Even if a lot of her offensive third-circle spells overlapped with mine, both of us felt that it wasn’t a bad idea for us to be able to launch a volley of offensive spells at the start of every fight before it turned into a melee. Felix ended up learning scouting spells from his mother, but also learned a few spells that could help shield us from certain kinds of elemental attacks, such as fire and acid. Combined with the ability to mess with spells in midair that he had learned from Lauren, Felix was basically an anti-wizard specialist now, on top of his archery and item-crafting.

Finally, Felix and I finished extracting all of the benefits we could from Sallia’s training armor and ramen bowl. The day that I finished raising my Perception stat to Grade 5, I felt a sense of… completeness I hadn’t realized I was missing before. My eyesight got better. My taste buds got sharper. Picking out smells and identifying them got easier, and my sense of touch and hearing also improved. Most importantly, my ability to control my body improved, meaning I could use more of my physical stats. I still hadn’t managed to make full use of my Strength and Agility, since they were way ahead of my Perception, but I was at least closer than before.

My stat block looked much nicer after all of the training, hard work, and use of Sallia’s magic items.

Physical (+73)

Mental

Essence

Strength: (20+108)

Grade 10

Intelligence: (20+120)

Grade 7

Absorption: (20+120)

Grade 7

Agility: (20+120)

Grade 10

Willpower: (20+140)

Grade 8

Manifestation: (20+105+10)

Grade 6

Fortitude: (20+129)

Grade 11

Perception: (20+80)

Grade 5

Binding: (20+70)

Grade 4

Alteration: (20+123+9)

Grade 7

Before I knew it, I had turned 35. Most people started an apprenticeship at about 30 and ended it at about 40, making them officially adults. However, Ella felt that the four of us were ready at the age of 35, and it was generally up to a master’s discretion when their students were finished with their apprenticeships. Physically speaking, I would say that we resembled a human who was between the age of 19 and 20, meaning we had basically finished physically maturing as well.

To Sallia, Felix, and I, that meant one thing.

It was time to return to the surface. We wanted to see if we could find the palace where the adventurers had found the healing cube, and see if we could find any hints about why that cube had seemed connected to the river of souls, and possibly, the wider multiverse. We wanted to see if we could find enough bargaining power to study the cube. Most importantly, however, we had exhausted most of the sources of easy Achievement we could get access to by remaining in Silver city. Sallia and I could get some more Achievement by healing people, but many of our Skills had hit bottlenecks, and training an entirely new skill would still take several months just to get a little bit of Achievement. Our knowledge of the wider multiverse was still much too shallow, and the palace might hold important hints that we could use in the future.

If we could successfully raid an old research lab, we would be able to get a huge amount of Influence Achievement, and possibly have a way to turn our discovery into a large network of connections that we could use to farm even more influence Achievement.

We just needed to find the place where the cube had been seized and then successfully raid it ourselves to get both Achievement, and answers.