Time passed. Before I knew it, we turned ten.
Our life at the alchemy prep school fell into a comfortable routine. The three of us, along with Iselde and Vance, continued to grow, both as alchemists and in height. I also got a lot of coin, healing experience and Achievement from healing with Trish.
Influence: Restore 100 Permanent, debilitating injuries.
Achievement +700
The 700 Achievement I got from healing injuries increased my Achievement from 7,292 to 7,992. But that wasn't the only thing I got from healing with Trish.
I had spent a long time relying on my magic to handle healing. The fungus in my mother’s brain served as a wakeup call. I had never pushed the boundaries of my healing magic, because I had never needed to. But now? I needed to know more.
I spent long hours studying medicine with doctor Trish. I learned every bone in the human body. I learned how the granules of ‘blood essence’ inside of people's bones and organs created blood. I learned how muscles and tendons worked. I studied regular, non-magical healing for several hours after school every day.
And I started to notice that the cost of healing patients was decreasing. When I performed the exact same set of actions, I would spend less essence than before. I realized that my healing magic normally spent mana to compensate for my lack of knowledge. By the time I turned 10, I was spending 10% less essence on each patient. And I hadn’t hit the limit of this world’s understanding of medicine yet. I still had a lot of things left to learn. By the time I graduated from university, I might use 20% less essence for every patient I healed.
I even received a skill related to medicine and healing during my studies.
Skill: Gain [Basic] Mastery of medicine and healing skills (Industrial-era variant)
Achievement +30
The 30 Achievement I got didn’t matter much to me - it only brought me to 8,022 Achievement. But far more interesting was the other skill I had earned.
Since you have trained medicine and healing to [Basic] Grade for the first time, upon your death you will have the option to purchase [Basic Medicine and Healing] as an ability, for the cost of 300 Achievement. This Ability has the following effects:
Keywords: N/A (This Ability does not have any keywords).
Your knowledge of medicine will immediately ‘update’ itself to whatever biology your birth species uses in new worlds. (This will occur over the course of a few days, whenever you regain proper sapience and your brain is able to manage the load of information this ability creates). Your training speed when rebuilding your knowledge of healing will be increased until you regain [Basic] Grade. When you reach [Basic] Grade medicine and healing for the first time in a new world, your body’s [Intelligence] stat will increase by 10.
Glut Penalty: 4
Note: This Ability can also be purchased in the Market from an Ability Cube as well, as it is an Ability with no keywords. However, it will be more expensive than purchasing it after earning it yourself during a Reincarnation. You will need to purchase any Abilities you wish to keep within three days of returning to the Market. Please keep this in mind when considering purchases, and plan your purchases in advance.
While the ability didn’t seem that impressive at first, it was actually very interesting.
The laws of physics and the way our biology worked changed from one dimension to another. In this dimension, for example, the way our eyes processed light and relayed them to our brain was different from our previous dimension. In our previous dimension, I had excellent low-light vision. In this world, without light I was completely blind. And I had also noticed that my vision didn't have any blind spots in this life, unlike the last world. The way people's organs worked could subtly change from one dimension to another.
So each new life, I would need to spend time rebuilding my knowledge of medicine. Otherwise I would be blind again. And not all worlds had accurate understanding of the human body. In this world, people had once believed that the heart was responsible for thinking. They had believed that the brain was responsible for 'purifying and regulating blood.' This had later been disproven during the medical revolution. It was likely that I would face similar misunderstandings in less technologically developed societies.
This Ability offered a chance to bypass that problem. As soon as I was reborn in another world, I would get intimate knowledge of how the human body worked. No need to worry about erroneous teachers, and no need to relearn everything from scratch. I would still need to learn how to use that knowledge, but it would save me years of work every life.
If I had the glut penalty available I would probably grab the skill. It seemed pretty useful for only 4 glut.
Apart from my healing, we continued learning alchemy in school. My results… were quite bad. It was a little embarrassing how awful my talent for binding essence was. Felix and Anise tried to comfort me, saying that everyone had their strengths and weaknesses… but being bad at something felt bad.
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Still, I did well in every subject besides alchemy, so the teacher started encouraging me in other subjects. He praised my exceptional results in math, history, and reading. I think he was trying to make me feel better about my bad alchemy results. Still, alchemy wasn't the only thing that the school taught. Once we started learning about how blood vessels and bones worked, I lapped the material up. Even though the school mostly focused on alchemy, there were still useful things that I could learn.
Felix, of course, had no such problems with binding essence. He blew the rest of the class’s results out of the water in every alchemy exercise. Mister Delmont raved about his results. After a few months, he started preparing advanced lessons for Felix to work on when we practiced alchemy. I was still happy to see that he was having so much fun with this world’s magic System. By the time we turned ten, Felix was able to do some basic transmutations on his own, and had made some progress with affixation. He could rearrange granules of matter into new configurations with little effort. He was capable of turning turning plants into dirt, or copper into iron in a minute flat. Of course, he still needed to use specific formulas and step by step processes to get the right result. This world’s alchemy relied a lot on memorizing molecules and knowing how to break them down and rebuild them. But he was far ahead of the rest of the class, most of whom could barely do easy transmutations. Affixation was harder for him, but Felix did manage to bind the idea of ‘sharpness’ to a kitchen knife. The kitchen knife was great at cutting things afterwards.
Unfortunately, this affixation made the handle of the knife sharp as well. This made the item useless. And Felix also had to get the idea of ‘sharpness’ from somewhere, meaning that Felix ruined a perfectly good kitchen knife to make his dysfunctional sharpness enchantment. But it was still evidence that he was getting somewhere with his studies, even though there were some issues to work out.
Iselde and Vance remained a part of our social group, and I started to get better at ‘acting my age'. I learned to dumb down my vocabulary a bit, and think a little bit more like a normal child. I doubted I would ever have a moment where I tried to drink fertilizer potions to grow big and healthy, but Old Mo stopped commenting on how 'adult' I seemed. I considered that a victory.
My attempts to form more runes slowed down a bit, since I had so many other things competing for my time. But I didn’t let my runes fall completely to the wayside. On my ninth birthday, I formed my fifth rune, giving me an extra +10 Perception and another chance to improve a sensory organ.
Power: Form your fifth rune (Note: this dimension does not have the laws to support runes, although it does somewhat support absorption spellcasting. moderate Achievement penalty).
Achievement +350
This also brought my Achievement from 8022 to 8,372.
Since I had chosen to improve my ears the first time, this time, I decided to improve my skin. Being able to feel space seemed incredibly useful.
My skin improvement gave me an excellent ‘feel’ for any spatial manipulation in our surroundings. If we were to encounter the spacequake again, I would be able to sense tears in reality much faster. I might have even been able to avoid falling into the pocket dimension. It was too late to save Sallia… but I hadn't forgotten the worldstriders. They had taken Sallia from me. If I ever saw them again, they would pay for that. Being able to feel space would make it much easier to fight them.
Of course, it was useful in a lot of other situations. My improved skin let me feel everything for nearly 100 meters in each direction. I could now detect people walking behind me, even if they were behind a wall or an entire street away. By this world's standards, I was impossible to ambush from close range. I hadn't tested whether I could feel bullets moving through the air yet. But if I was able to, I wouldn't need my 'spatial sight' rune ability anymore.
Apart from alchemy school, rune construction, and healing, I spent the rest of my time researching. I had three main lines of research I wanted to complete as soon as possible. I wanted to learn how to make illusions using alteration essence, shapeshift, and figure out what was up with my spatial abilities. I felt something when I used all three of them at once. I wanted to know what it was.
The illusions research came along nicely. After a year of research, I figured out how to make light bend using only alteration essence. I could also create sounds out of thin air. They looked pretty stiff and transparent, but I was getting there. With another few years of practice, I would be able to ignore my illusion rune ability. I had found a way to make two of my three rune abilities obsolete in this world. That opened up a lot of options for future worlds.
My shapeshifting research did not go anywhere near as well. I had started experimenting on plants, to see if I could shapeshift something simple. So far, almost every single test subject died after I finished ‘helping’. In one particularly memorable experiment, I somehow caused the potted flower I was experimenting with to explode, showering me with plant bits. That was my worst mistake, but it put me off of the experiments for a few weeks before I started again. I still had a long way to go before I could do freeform shapeshifting. My ultimate goal was to be able to do things like create bear claws mid-fight and then transform back seconds later. If I tried that right now, I would probably explode just like the plant. It was going to take a lot of time and effort to make my manipulation of alteration essence as fluid and efficient as it needed to be. And I was also going to need a lot of knowledge about biology and medicine. The most productive thing that came out of my shapeshifting experiments, at least so far, was an increased desire for the medicine ability.
My progress in learning more about my three rune abilities, and what they did when combined, was even less productive. I could still sense that something was happening when I used all three of my spatial abilities at once. I could even sense that it might be something special. Something that would propel me forward. Maybe it would help me push past the [Expert] grade in my attunement, or give me some kind of neat new keyword ability. But I was missing some sort of critical insight to turn the whole thing into something useful. For now, every time I experimented, I just had weird, out of body experiences. I never gave up on it, but I couldn't tell if I was making progress. And unlike with my shapeshifting research, I wasn't even sure what I was doing wrong.
About a month after our tenth birthday, Anise contacted me over the communication bracelet. Her words broke me out of the frustrated mood I had been in after I killed another plant with shapeshifting.