Excerpt from the Mad Scholar's Wall—

Willing young elves were practically offered up to us humans — though by that point, most of us weren't really humans. Not the kind that first arrived in this strange land, at least — on a gold platter.

Those in the leading families had harems of females — elves and humans alike — all pregnant, as they searched for the strongest child.

Little competitions and events began happening regularly, showing off the talent of future generations as our city's political leaders jockeyed for position.

And yet, for all our strides for greatness, our supposed advancements, we forgot our origins. What the world will demand from us in order to survive.

During those years and decades of breeding, the legion that all of us were a part of and why we were here was left to be forgotten. To rot in stagnation and uselessness.

When we first arrived, there was no use for a legion and no way to support it. Not with the elves supporting us.

What supplies would we have to support a campaign? Where would we even go in a campaign? How could we afford the cost of life when a campaign failed and we lost the legion?

The elves gave us everything we could ever want. They told us where to find metal ore. Gave us seeds and better farming methods. Livestock for slaughter and rearing. But most of all, they gave us time.

Time to build the foundation of a future civilization.

I always wondered — and it was not until my twilight years that I understood — why we turned on the elves. I remember the days the whispers started.

From one day to the next, people started whispering in the shadows about conquering the elves. Yet they never explained — or even mentioned — how a city of barely eighty thousand, primarily made up of children, young adults, and elves, could do it.

How could we dream of conquering a nation of tens — if not hundreds — of millions of elves?

**********

I stood behind Bark and watched her heal the woman. The wound weeping blood on her forehead was closed over quickly. Bark then spent a few more minutes pressing and swiping her hands over the woman's head, humming and grunting at seemingly random times.

Finally, Bark gave a harumph and pressed her hands to the woman's stomach for a few seconds before leaning back and flicking her hand to the orderlies to take the unconscious woman away.

The two other fish hovering on the other side of the table from bark looked at each other, tilting their heads at Bark and elbowing the other until one finally spoke up. “Umm… I— is she going to be alright?"

Bark looked at them for a second before motioning to the stretcher she was being taken away on and shrugging. "Never can tell with head wounds until they wake up, but she should be fine."

The pair didn't look happy with the answer, but it was the best they would get.

As one of the young men sat down on the table facing Bark, she reached up, popping two buttons off her apron.

With a practiced flick of the wrist, the top back section of her clothes fell away, revealing her shoulders.

Without a word, I reached out, pressing my hand against her shoulder blades.

Closing my eyes, I began blanking my mind, calming and suppressing any stray thoughts. Slowly I focused my will into my pool of mental power. Then, I unspooled a small strand of energy through my body and down into my palm.

As my mental energy exited my body, it immediately contacted Bark's body, stopping as it touched her skin.

A moment passed, and I felt another strand of mental energy enveloping my own mental energy. The other mental energy began to press into mine, seeking to gain control.

Instead of fighting against Bark as she tried to take control of my power and will, I shifted my mental energy to better match hers, then let her take control.

She didn't completely take control of my energy because if she did completely cut me off, it would quickly dissipate and become useless. Instead, she let a strand of my will remain, so she would not have to fight to control and use my power, then guided the mental energy through her own body. As my mental energy entered her body, it further aligned itself with her own mental energy, allowing her easier control. She then sent our combined energy out of her body and into the young man with the sword wound on his shoulder and chest.

The mental energy stretching between us acted as a link between our minds. For a moment, I felt Bark's emotions and saw flashes of memories, and I'm sure she felt the same from me. Though it was common courtesy to never mention such times.

We had begun the union.

It is a trick everyone in the legion can perform to some degree. Though in the shield wall, the union was just a sharing of perceptions and emotions between the legionaries, which was significantly easier than sharing mental power.

Because I was sharing my mental energy and will with Bark, it was easiest to have physical contact while performing the union of the mind. It could be done without contact, but there was no need for unnecessary strain when trying to heal. It was already complex and risky enough.

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I quickly set about repressing my thoughts and emotions, focusing only on the now and what needed to be done. There was no way to stop everything, but you needed to get what you sent out down to a level that the other parties could ignore what they were hearing, like a whisper or stray thought in the back of their mind.

Nearly as fast as I managed to slow and reduce my stray thoughts and emotions to Bark, she did the same to what she sent me.

I had enough practice sharing my power that I was able to keep up a constant flow of energy while mentally sitting back and watching a master at her work.

And she was a master of healing. No one could deny that.

Most medicos were. It went with the job. Or, more accurately, the calling.

While most with sufficient levels of mental power or control can perform some degree of healing. There were those who were natural's at healing.

It was usually the people who were naturally caring and did not like to see others in pain. Even without training and knowledge, they could heal.

Some were able to devote their lives to studying the body and ways to use mental energy to heal it, but they were never quite as good as those like Elder Bark and hardly ever became official medicos.

I felt the mental energy continually trickle out of my body, and I resigned myself to being a reservoir of power for Bark. It was far from the first time I had performed such a task.

Getting on the medicos' good side was always a smart thing to do. And volunteering to help them out was an easy way to do that. So long as you could perform a proper energy transfer.

Thanks to my unusual level of control, even if I only had a small amount of mental energy, when I performed a union with a medico, I made them far more… efficient.

While using less mental energy for more was necessary for the gauntlet of battle healing, what mattered most of the time was it left less residue within a patient.

As my mental energy flowed through my mind, I felt tiny pockets of foreign mental energy dislodge from my brain and flow out of my body. It was like stretching your back and feeling the pops.

A build-up of tension before a sudden release and a feeling of relief and relaxation. Though every time some of the residual energy was dislodged, it momentarily disrupted my stream of mental energy.

When a medico used their mental energy to stimulate the growth of the body for healing, some of the mental energy they used would remain inside of the body, unused.

Usually, this isn't a problem. The use of mental energy and time would work out the residue left in the body.

When it came to a head wound, especially one's like — let's say as an example — the mini-stroke I had when I pushed myself too hard while falling into the haze, it was necessary to remove the residue of mental energy. Preferably as fast as possible.

For the most part, nothing would happen, but there were those rare times that the residue would spontaneously twist and distort the flesh it was trapped in.

If such an event happened in the arms or even the gut, who cares, a medico could heal that right up within moments. If it happened in the brain, you didn't have a working brain.

So it was best to clear out one's mental energy in the first week to dislodge the residue of a procedure involving the mind. Just in case fate decided to hand out the rare reward of spontaneously dying, one did not leave their mental energy stagnating too long after waking up from a head wound. I could have rested for a day, though. I mentally complained to myself.

"Hush." said a faint chastising voice in my mind.

Wincing at the rebuke, I silence the grumbling thoughts in my mind trying not to distract Bark. She was unlikely to be distracted by anything I did short of trying to regain control of my mental energy running through her body, but that was not the point.

I could distract her. And she could kill her patient because of the distraction, and I would be at fault.

The fact that it happened at all showed that I was not as great at control as I liked to believe. Or that I wasn't giving it my full effort because of being voluntold into it.

Maybe a little of both.

Even if it was for my own good, I still didn't want to do it.

Resigned to the long hall with Bark, I decided to get serious so the time would pass faster.

After all the time I spent helping out the medicos, I found the best way to keep one's mind clear was to follow what they were doing.

It wasn't the easiest thing to do, and most people couldn't do it. It was like focusing on a numb arm coming back into full feeling while it was moved around by someone else.

Unnatural was a mild way to describe what it felt like. Once I could get past how it felt, it allowed me to supply my energy for long hours at a time.

Our combined mental energy pooled in Bark's hands. With every twitch of her finger, she would send out tendrils and pulses of mental energy into the young man's body.

The pulses would give her an image of anything wrong with the body's internals. While the tendrils would supply the mental energy to stimulate growth in the wounded areas of the body.

As Bark's finger tapped on the outside edge of the wound, I could feel the tendril shot into his body. The energy went to the deepest parts of the wound and layered itself along the bone and flesh.

There was a slight vibration of the energy, and I felt small objects on the bottom and edges of the wound start floating on the surface of the layer of energy.

She tapped a finger on the inside of the wound, sending out several strands of energy that wrapped around the rib bones that were sliced into. After a second, Bark adjusted the mental energy layered onto the bones so it was only covering the parts that were damaged sections. I could feel her give a few more slight adjustments, then give a small push to the energy, letting it go.

I got the briefest sensation of the energy seeping into the bones before losing the feeling of the energy completely. That is not to say I did not see its effect because as Bark continued to use mental energy, I could get snapshots of the bones regrowing.

After she layered energy onto the bones, Bark began sending out strands to different sections of the wound. As the mental energy reached whatever Bark's desired location was, it would split into so many tens or even hundreds of smaller strands in an instant that I would lose track if I tried to count them all.

I asked once why she healed specific areas and not others before going back over it again. She said something about how muscles have layers and different groups, and she was making sure they all healed right before moving on.

I don't really remember what she said.

After the lecture she gave me on the topic, I never asked again… which might have been her plan…

She continued to send out one pulse and tendril after another as she saw fit, slowly razing the initial layer of mental energy she laid down, scraping it against the walls of the wound, picking up more specks as it went.

Eventually, she sent one tendril licking across the outermost sides of the wound, growing a layer of skin over her work.

Tapping on the freshly healed wound, she sent one last pulse echoing through his body, searching for any more damage.

Once she was satisfied, I felt her lean back in her chair.

I didn't move or let go of the union while she moved. I saw the number of fish that hurt themselves. With the news I told her earlier, there was no way she was leaving before they were all healed or recovering.

I would just have to suffer through this.