After Old Mo’s death, I stopped interacting with other people for several days. I still healed others and worked at Trish’s clinic, but I withdrawn. The world felt gray. I didn't feel like talking to people. Even though I had known that Old Mo would die soon... I still wasn't prepared for it. Being left behind while someone I knew disappeared was a horrible feeling. I spent nights hugging Anise and Felix, drawing comfort from my two best friends who were still alive. I had a newfound respect for the quiet, something I had never valued before. I felt empty.
Luckily, our standing in town didn't take a hit while I took a break from people. Two years of hard work had put us in a strong social position. A few patients expressed their sympathy when they heard of Old Mo's death. A week after he passed, I found a small row of gifts outside of my door. They were small presents - a few pieces of candy, a few novels, and some handmade arts and crafts. Even though they weren’t amazing, seeing them touched my heart. This was the kind of community I liked belonging to. One where people cared about each other and stuck up for each other. We were truly part of the town's community, in a way I'd always hoped to be. But I wasn't in the mood to appreciate it.
After asking around, Anise told me that Maela, the daughter of the town elder, had organized the gifts. That made me feel a little better, at least. I was thankful for the effort Maela put into making me feel better. Our relationship had been a normal doctor-patient relationship... but after she put so much effort into organizing a gift basket, I felt a little better. I started to get closer to Maela, not as a doctor, but as a friend. Having a new friend to pay attention to helped wash away some of the sorrow of Old Mo’s death.
As a thank-you gift for her, I tried to learn more about her condition. I studied the human body, trying to figure out exactly how her illness worked. Right now, I still needed to heal her legs every few days to keep them functional. I wanted to see if I could change that. I had no idea how to cure her, and it might take years to develop a ‘true’ cure… but I wanted to improve my healing abilities. I was running into too many situations where I couldn’t fix problems. I could heal a lot of difficult or problematic injuries with little effort, but I was beginning to realize that had made me lazy. I had stopped learning how to improve my healing abilities in recent years. It was time to change that. I would start by finding a proper cure for Maela.
Of course, research was slow. The destruction of the Zelyrian continent also ruined millions of educational books. The most advanced unversities in the world were now rubble and corpses. Pursuing any high-end technical knowledge was far more difficult than before. But things weren't hopeless. Ennalia still had a functioning government. It was difficult to secure book imports during the civil war, but Felix helped find a route for me. With his help, I started importing professional medical books from Ennalia. All of the books were in Ennalian, which I started learning from scratch.
If Old Mo had still been alive, I was sure he would have loved to help me learn it. But now he was gone. I didn’t have a language teacher anymore, and that made things harder. It took far longer to learn Ennalian than any of my previous languages.
Meanwhile, the civil war continued to rage on. The split between the rebel factions only got worse. Factories continued to explode on a weekly basis. Artillery shells continued to rain upon cities as armies battled over the husk of Zanna. By now, hundreds of thousands of people had died in the fighting. Half of them were soldiers, and the other half were civilians who got unlucky and got caught up in the fighting.
Luckily, we were still isolated from the fighting. Our town was too remote and unimportant for anyone to bother with. However, the state of Zanna continued to deteriorate. In newspapers and by word of mouth, I could feel how weary the archipelago was. Right after one civil war, the people had been dragged into another conflict. And unlike the previous one, most people felt that this factional dispute was pointless. Most people were as disgusted by the endless fighting as I was.
I was glad our group had decided to stay out of things. The revolution turning upon its children and devouring them wasn’t exactly unexpected. Many revolutions turned on the revolutionaries once the dust settled. Still, I was sad. I wanted things to get better for people - but it didn’t feel like things were going to improve anytime soon.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
After a year of renewed fighting, the remnants of the old government snuck back into the fray. Somehow, they had held onto a few scattered groups of soldiers. With the civil war now a three-way factional battle, they found a spot to sneak back into the fray. They managed to retake a major city from the naturalist faction, much to everyone's surprise. The naturalists found themselves facing all three other factions. Meanwhile, The monarchists and extermination advocates started to focus more on each other. With the naturalists busy trying to kick the old government out, they were more free to kill each other.
I was actually kind of sympathetic to the people who supported the rebel factions. The original goal of all of this was to kick out Damilius. I felt that was a reasonable desire. Damilius's government had been corrupt and discriminatory. However, the result of their labor was rotten fruit. The rebellion they had fought for turned into another fight for dominance and power. There wasn’t much I could do to change the situation, sadly. The only thing we were capable of doing was hunkering down in our town and keeping ourselves safe. I had already learned how helpless we were against an army. We could keep ourselves safe, but overturning the outcome of a war was impossible for us.
More time passed. The year we turned twenty, Felix stopped working to acquire more materials. I wasn't sure whether he had run out of funds, or run out of storage space. Either way, he seemed satisfied with his preparations. I suspected that the moment the civil war settled down, he would rake in Achievement hand over fist. I was more than a little excited to see the results. If he ended up with over 50,000 Achievement, next world he might become the strongest member of our group. Anyone growing stronger was a cause for celebration.
I didn’t have anywhere near the level of preparation for our eventual return that Felix did. However, I had still made strides towards earning more Achievement over the years. I kept up with my rune training as well, and the year we turned twenty, I got a new Achievement reward.
Power: Condense your seventh Rune.
Achievement +490
That brought my total from 17,092, to 17,582.
This was the first time I had reached seven runes. After reaching seven runes, I realized that seven runes wasn't quite the limit for me. As long as my keyword were activated, my essence generation was higher. That also meant I could create and sustain more runes. I wasn't sure how high my rune total could reach... but it was definitely higher than it would have been before the ability upgrade.
Even the seventh rune provided me with a rather interesting upgrade. The rune helped me attune my body to the concept of space. It decreased how much air resistance affected me, and also made me a bit more... other. It was hard to put my finger on exactly what was different about me, but I knew that I was a bit different than before. If the second layer of reality existed on the Zannan dimension, I suspected I would be able to interact with it, even without a Skill. I could also perform short-distance teleports, even without using my rune ability. It was no longer an 'ability,' so much as an innate function of my biology. However, perhaps it was because I had only condensed my seventh rune, but the efficiency was quite bad. I suspected that with a rune ability focused on teleporting people, I could probably pay 20% of the essence for the same effect. But even if the efficiency was poor, I suspected it would improve with more runes.
In the future, this would be something worth paying attention to. In future worlds, if I could reach seven runes in a timely manner, I could save my rune ability slots for other abilities.
Combined with the reduced impact of air resistance, and the 'otherness' that I didn't fully understand, I was much more agile than before. It was almost the same as adding an extra two Grades of Agility - although it wasn't quite the same. It was more like space bent itself around me, assisting me in moving... although the benefits weren't much different. I couldn't help but think that with 9 runes, my flexibility and speed would become terrifying.
At least for now, I had no real use for my personal combat strength. I had decided to stay out of the mess of a civil war. But at the very least, the Achievement was still nice.
A few months after we turned twenty, things started to change on the continent.
The ‘royalist’ faction knocked out the other biggest faction in the civil war, the faction that hated the people of Damilius.
The royalist faction was now very well positioned in Zanna, having over 65% of the major population centers and industrial output of Zanna. The naturalists and the old government kept fighting each other. Since they didn't unite against the strongest faction in the civil war, I suspected the outcome was now determined. The civil war was finally coming to an end with a royalist victory.