The High Peak of Brenn [southern shores of Fuminao Legacy Kingdom], local time [1794.01.06]

As he listened to the man, Zeph did a simple medical check on the women’s bodies. He observed their breathing pattern, checked their pulse, tried to measure their temperature against his own, opened their eyes to see the eye movements, and constructed a tuned-down Flashlight Spell to test their pupils’ reaction. Everything was in norm.

Finally, he checked their brainstem reflexes. Firstly, he brushed their eyelashes with a finger to trigger a reaction, but none was given. Then, he kept their eyes open and moved their heads from side to side to check the oculocephalic reflex – or doll’s eye reflex. As expected, their eyes stayed unmoving relative to the head.

In unconscious patients, that meant bad news. They were either in a coma or had damaged brains.

He should have checked other reflexes, like the cough reflex, but decided against it. Not only were they ineffective in certain cases, but he also didn’t have safe equipment. Instead, he tried noxious stimulation by squeezing their fingers, but they didn’t even grimace.

He had to take into account the Flexibility PE and other machinations working behind the scenes in this world, though, so he took the results with a grain of sand, so to speak. Next, he focused on their muscle and flex reflexes.

He knocked lightly on their wrists and knees. Then, he scratched just above their heels. All responses were positive and regular, so he could at least confirm that their bodies and circulatory nervous systems weren’t disabled.

He knew too little about the Corora denizens’ anatomy to really assess the damage, though.

It was a reoccurring problem. He was no Doctor nor Medic of this world, and his knowledge and experiences were mostly wasted here. Not only was he dealing with ‘slightly’ different anatomy, but Mana and System were positively screwing with the physicality.

Either way, from what he saw, those two were in a coma and wouldn’t be able to wake up for quite some time. He himself had fallen unconscious on many occasions, so he knew that a full-fledged coma was different from an enforced unconscious state. First of all, their bodies were inactive, which included the brain to some degree.

Without brain activity, they couldn’t restore their Will resources or align their Will to the current state of their bodies. Well, as long as they weren’t some kind of spiritual geniuses. Only Gru was able to keep a semblance of consciousness while his body was inert, but that method wasn’t available for most organisms. Either way, Will was responsible for enforcing data exchange between the body and Soul. Theoretically, that was a function of the Mana, but it was more complicated if one part of a being was disrupted. If their Souls were being damaged, the two were in a death spiral because their Will wasn’t synchronizing their Souls with the state of their bodies.

In other words, they were in a state that deprived them of a chance to consciously fight against the damage that being was done to their Souls. Assuming the damage was being made at all.

Zeph puffed out another dose of his Willforce pseudo-Magicules through the faulty skin enchantment – just to be safe in case of some curious eyes. It would be extremely unlucky to meet a person who could actually see that, but he was becoming paranoid after his last encounter with the hidden, external mind manipulator in the last village. It was also a good practice, as he would rather be seen as an exotic case than a must-have person in case some higher-strata people were in the vicinity to see what they were doing.

As for the skin enchantment itself, it was the one that Gru applied during the night in the laboratory building. Zeph decided to keep it for the future because, from what he heard from Kwan, no one was able to see past the trick. And, because they had a good alibi, Gru could touch the Souls of others with impunity.

Well, the ‘Will clash’ was always a risk, so Gru did it moderately. It was impossible for them to assess the state of another Soul without that, though.

Truth be told, Zeph should allow Gru to make a few more skin enchantments for him. His Enhanced Module possessed a whole library of them in the first Tier and he managed to glance at them in his free time in the carriage. But most of them were unusable because of his armor, not to mention he could either construct those as Spells fast enough by hand or already had a higher-tiered version enchanted in his gear. Some were interesting, like the enhanced force dispersing, but in the end, they were unusable before he tested them while fully geared up.

“You should stop trying to feed them with solid foods,” he said, looking at Carrick. The man explained his unsuccessful attempts at feeding the women. He selected solid food especially because he was worried that he would choke them with liquids, which also meant the two were in the first stages of dehydration. It was understandable, though, as their swallowing reflexes weren’t working as they should. Their brainstem was out of commission, after all. “You need to stick a tube down their throat and pour a liquified meal. I will give you a few simple recipes that should keep them well-fed. I will also show you how it’s done, but first, we need to find an appropriate material for the task.”

Carrick looked skeptical but didn’t comment. Instead, he decided to ask a more important question. “I will follow your lead, but the cause of all of this…”

“I need to meditate on it. Give me half an hour,” Zeph answered instantly, already receiving the first reports from Gru. Very worrying reports. “I will take a chair from the kitchen. Makani, can you force some oxygen into their lungs? It should help a little with the current situation…”

Makani shrugged. “I can try, but from the tests we did with P’pfel, around 2 to 5 percent increase in the concentration is all I can get.”

Zeph nodded. “That would be plenty enough. Now, let’s see what we can do besides that…”

They quickly organized the space. Zeph sat at the chair near the bottom of the bed, keeping his hands on the shins of the women to allow himself and Gru a better view of their Souls. He even displaced his Veil for Gru – to touch them directly with his own Veil coming from Zeph’s chest area. Makani took a seat near the top of the bed to form a bubble of oxygen-rich air. Zeph had to help him a little by using his advanced Mana manipulation to remove the women’s Veils out of the way, but there was almost no push-back from them either way.

He instructed Gru to proceed very carefully. With the amount of Will available for the two patients, it would probably take one Will clash to erase and overwrite the residue of Will they possessed right now.

He closed his eyes and concentrated on his Will-Powered Soul perception. He was using it for the first time in a long time and, sure enough, the image of the alien space that his brain plotted was as fuzzy and morphing as always. He, at least, had a clear view of his own Soul. The patients were… kind of visible. It was hard to put into words, though.

Souls weren’t exactly 3D objects. More like a constantly-morphing fractals in multi-dimensional space – the best he could do for most of the time was to identify their position in the physical world. Because of that, it was very difficult to say with what resolution he was working with, or what exactly he was screening at the moment. His own Soul was much easier to perceive, mostly because he could easily map it with his Will and Mana, but besides the incident in the Talpa’s caves, it was the first time he tried to actively look at a Soul of another organism.

And he had a good argument to not train that technique.

‘Dr. Gru, how are our patients? I am not sure what I am looking at…’ he sent while humming a random song he knew. It was time for more advanced communication to take place.

An unnoticeable vibration joined him a moment later. Resonate?

Zeph nodded involuntarily and allowed Gru’s Will to resonate with his own. He immediately lost the visual component of the Soulscape, but started to feel the touch and smell of the alien space. At least, those were the closest senses he could attribute the new sensations coming from Gru’s inspection.

They have gone a long way in exchanging Soul memories. What they were doing right now was boarding the Tabu set by the System, but they weren’t exchanging PE or anything like that, so they should be safe. It was much closer to exchanging senses with a bonded partner, actually.

Although their technique was still quite basic, it was technically more advanced at the same time. A problem to solve in the future.

‘Hmmm…’ Gru vibrated, repeatedly touching the Souls for a fraction of a second with one of the hundreds of his tendrils… ‘Excavated…’

‘Can you explain more, dr. Gru? I can’t see anything, really,’ Zeph sent. The mix of sensations he was receiving almost made him vomit. He wasn’t prepared for the full-fledged sensations of hundreds of ‘arms’ touching something at different times.

‘Right! Sending~’

The Soul memory he received portrayed a pair of humanoid-shaped Souls. But both were riddled with holes, as if worms ate through them. The image was three-dimensional, but the information was multi-directional, so Zeph could easily see how the hollowed-out cavities coiled inside of the mental constructs, forming a net of connections inside.

It was quite sickening. Thankfully, he didn’t have a Trypophobia, but it was a close call nonetheless.

‘Ugh… The holes aside, isn’t that part breaking off?’

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

‘Gra! Wound forming… But the image not real.’

‘Wha—wait! It is your interpretation only?’

‘Gra!’

‘How does it look in reality?’ he asked with morbid fascination.

‘…Zeph sure?’

‘Yes, send me one.’

What he received gave him a headache. It was a 3D space, all right, but the distances and depth were fucked up… heck, the time was screwed over, operating more in response to the connection to the body than anything else. Everything was involuntarily swimming in an unending cycle of fractal progression. The wormed-out holes weren’t visible in this construct at all. Instead, he could see that parts of the Souls were absent, all at different levels of the fractal, at different times, and in shapes that couldn’t be real.

One thing he could tell for sure was, it looked very similar to his own broken Soul. But again, any Soul wound would look similar to him when presented like that.

‘Gah… Ok, good choice at the first impression…’

‘Gra!’ he vibrated proudly. ‘Will weak… But rising. Soul fragile…’

‘Can you stitch them somehow? That cracks looked bad…’

‘No touch! Hmmmm… the parts…’ Another wave of overwhelming sensations took over Zeph, so he concentrated more on enduring than anything else. Their Resonation was depleting his Will, but he could live with it if they could help those people.

Suddenly, the sensations stopped.

‘Legs and hands. Cut off.’

‘Like hell we would! They don’t have my enhancements or your body! They would stay like that for the rest of their lives.’

‘Gre! No helping.’

‘What should be in the cracks? I won’t believe those parts only had information on the body!’

‘In cracks… Something brain? Something ELemeNtaL?’

‘Elemental part be screwed. Neural system? Their neural system is unlinked?’ he asked, sending his best impression of human anatomy he could give. Of course, it was off by a mile because he still didn’t manage to fully study the anatomy of Corora’s people, but it was hard to miss the neural system.

‘Give a moment, I check…’

It took a few minutes and Zeph could feel that Gru even used some Spells on the bodies. They were primitive, as constructing Matrix Spells from the Veil only wasn’t easy at all, but it was enough to give Gru some directions.

‘Lambs hurt in wrong places. Links exist, but not working.’

You take your Profession too seriously, Mr. Shepherd, Zeph thought before sending a different message. ‘So, the holes you showed me are responsible?’

‘Gra! No back-signal, no recovery, no information.’

‘Well…’ Zeph started, thinking hard on the real shape of their Souls. ‘Can they just… shuffle through the fractal structure until their nervous system is linked back? The links exist, you said, so there has to be a working canal.’

‘Shape-change not helping. Same everywhere. Can’t see where plugged.’

‘Ok, so let’s go from the opposite direction. If the nerves start to fire, would they reconnect?’

‘Gra!’ he agreed. ‘New information. But no thinking…’

‘Yes, they are in a coma, but you don’t need them conscious to move their arms. I think I know what to do. Let’s stop with the resonation before it escalates.’

‘Gra!’

Ever so slowly, they untangled their thought processes. A sad side effect of going into resonation of Wills was a temporal alignment of their thoughts, which they experienced a few times before. This time, they worked consciously to limit the effect but it still took time to truly snuff out all connection points that could potentially cause a full resonation. Of course, Zeph planned to use that as much as he could in the future, but he knew enough to know that an unwanted resonation would just screw up his psyche. Right now, they were in the process of learning how to control and use this phenomenon, it would take some time, still.

Either way, it didn’t have much effect on him besides increasing his Will contamination. He could live with his current, and surely wasn’t going to take Gru’s values as his own by mistake.

Zeph opened his eyes slowly, making sure that his body, Will, and Soul were in a balanced state.

“Did you learn something?” Makani asked almost immediately, waking up Carrick who was dozing off while leaning against a wall.

“Yes,” he nodded. “How long I was out?”

“Around a cycle.”

Zeph grimaced. Almost three hours? It didn’t look that bad when I was meditating… It definitely took more time than he expected. He wasn’t even sure which part of their examination was responsible for the wasted time.

“…At least I have some conclusive information. Anyway, give me a second and I will explain everything,” he said, concentrating on his notifications.

Congratulations!

[Soul] is now [T1][L71]. (+5)

[Will-Powered Soul perception] is now [T2][L70]. (+5)

[Will-Powered Soul Memory access sharing] is now [T3][L18]. (+5)

[Resonation Suppression] is now [T2][L7]. (+2)

[Universal Cir language] is now [T1][L92]. (+1)

New sub-data derived from the learning process. [10 000] [Universal Points] awarded!

Thanks, Gru.

Gra! he vibrated happily.

We will continue with the training later on.

Grau?

Yes, I need to focus on another thing before the Tournament… Sorry for that.

Gre!

Heh, thanks.

He dismissed the notification and looked at Carrick. “We have a problem… I hope you can stomach the medical procedures I am going to show you. Because if you are not, those two women are going to lose a large part of their Souls.”

“Are you serious?” Makani asked in disbelief. “Aren’t they just sick?” He waved his hand in their general direction.

“What I have to do?” Carrick asked, frowning deeply. It looked like he aged a few years from the last time Zeph saw him.

“We need to stimulate their nervous systems, possibly even the brain. The easiest way to accomplish that is by stimulating them with electrical shocks…”

Makani blinked. “That doesn’t sound so bad?”

Zeph shook his head. “It needs to be constant and regular. I am expecting at least a few tendons, or even muscles, to break during the process. Not to mention soreness and other symptoms of overusing this method. You also need a source of electric impulses. Do you have one in this village? An enchantment producing charge?”

“T-the head of the village… he should have one…” Carrick said reluctantly. “We use it during summer fish hunting… Are you sure it would help?”

Zeph could only wave his hand ambivalently. “They need the stimuli because their brains aren’t working like they should. Speaking more precisely, their nervous systems aren’t fully linked with their Souls. Because of that, without that stimulus, it’s almost certain they will lose huge parts of their Souls. It may not be healthy for their bodies, but I believe it’s more important to preserve their incorporeal part in this situation. If they manage to wake up, though, you should stop the procedure immediately.”

He omitted the information about Will because there was no way for anyone on this planet to truly check the status of this incorporeal resource. Not even Gods could touch it, after all.

The man nodded, now more convinced. “I will do what you suggested. But…” He looked down at his feet, his voice losing strength. “Can they… survive?”

“If you feed them properly and do the stimulation, I can’t see why they wouldn’t,” Zeph said, looking at the two women. “Which worries me, because that trial you spoke of looks more like a test of perception on your part, and a test of endurance on theirs. Are you sure there is nothing more to it? Because—”

“There should be none,” the man interrupted him, conviction easily heard in his voice. “It’s very much in Custur’s style. The trial is one of the body, intelligence, and luck.” He looked up at them, then bent down in a deep bow. “To have an elevated Manacaster and a Soul specialist looking after my beloved… it’s a luck I’ve never anticipated.”

Zeph grimaced. For the life of his, he couldn’t understand this Custos Naturae’s ways or the mentality of the people who followed him.

“Stop bowing and start learning,” Makani grumbled, similarly dissatisfied with the man.

The dusk was coming quickly, but Zeph managed to teach him how to handle a patient in a coma. The way of feeding was crude, mostly because they lacked the equipment, but after maneuvering the women to sit straight and putting a stiff, wooden pipe down the throat, it was just a question of using a funnel and preparing a liquified meal beforehand.

To that point, Zeph left the man with a few recipes that were not only easy to digest but contained enough calories and nutrients for the body. He was no specialist, but it should help their bodies to recover.

When they left the house, it was night already. They were still a few hours away from the end of the day, though.

“I don’t know from where you are drawing so much patience, but it was impressive. So, what now?” Makani asked, stretching his arms.

“Religious fanatic or not, they deserve a helping hand,” Zeph replied lazily, looking around. “I have a feeling we will see many more in the future, so you better get used to them.”

“Like I could,” Makani sighed. “You just overwhelmed him with information. It would definitely take me a while to convince him,” He said while squatting. “I am not good with unreasonable people.”

Zeph shrugged. “I have some experience working with troublesome individuals. Also, that was just a basic method used by teachers and medics,” he used a Rui word to indicate that he was speaking about the Earth’s equivalent. “No one argues with their Doctor, after all. At least as long as they believe the Doctor is theirs. Anyway, let’s go to the hunting grounds. You said it wasn’t that far.”

“Relatively speaking. Without our boards, it will take a few hours.” Makani glanced at him.

“I am not going to strip those sails from their feathers… but the locals may. Especially the young ones.” He smiled mischievously. Exchanging a few coppers for a full stack of feathers should be worth it. “We will walk there on foot~”

========Theron Nalani PoV========

Dritt, this is beyond me, he cursed, looking at the perfectly flat snow.

The storm erased any and all traces, to his dismay.

He successfully managed to become a part of the caravan guard, he even found out that Einar was a part of it.

Then, suddenly, all traces of the man disappeared. Not only the physical ones.

It was the third village they visited, and still, there was no trace nor rumor. If not for a random kid’s testimony of people surfing through the snow during the night, he would’ve abandoned this caravan a day ago.

Anyway, he now knew that Makani and Einar were moving ahead of their schedule. It wasn’t even that surprising, taking into account Makani’s genius mind. Moving through the snow-covered lands using the winds, especially during the last storm, would only be possible with that man’s abilities.

He wasn’t going to underrate Einar, but the man was evidently going for Soul Arts and physical enhancements lately. Even despite his talents in Mana manipulation. He had learned a lot about the man and felt more comfortable knowing that his overall level was below 50.

He can’t be good at everything. Probably just building a base for his future development.

The attacks he received during his last assassination attempt were still fresh in his mind, though.

No matter what you do, I will find you! he reiterated in his mind. This time, I won’t hold back!

He started trotting in the windy night, in a hope to decrease the distance to his prey.

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