A wild mad scientist’s laugh threatens to burst out and scare all the sane people around me.

I succeeded in my ‘evil’ ploy.

I want to rejoice on a successful last minute capture, but I continue to make the best use of my ‘self made’ opportunity.

They reform their defenses and a team of Druids march under several layers of shielding with the healer left in their village to be treated at another healing place, so I turn my attention to the other elf inside the inner world for a few seconds.

The little cell, with everything from mana shielding to solid layers of stone, deep steel and rock, keeps him safely locked away and apart from the other people in the inner world. I can feel his mind turning as he comes to terms with where he is and it takes only a moment for his decision. Instead of continuing to heal himself, he inverts the effect.

“Ohhh. No, you can’t do that.”

The healing tries to liquefy his organs, so I take the strongest paralyzing and sleeping agents I have at my disposal, wrap him in thorny vines to directly deliver it to his bloodstream, while I dump a dozen points of Life to help him recover.

Both energies fight for only a moment, but the healing attuned mana doesn’t even compare to the quality of my organic, natural, free range Life juice.

I take a nearby freezing formation and put it underneath his cell as quickly as I can should I need it, but he falls asleep in seconds even with the higher endurance compared to any human pre system.

“Oops, I guess that you will have to remain asleep until I can deal with you.”

Coming back to the other healing building where they took the healer still in their village, I see a stream of healing attuned energy arcing in the air from one of the other healers before he is even laying down.

It wastes a little of it, and it is nowhere near focused enough to be fully effective.

With a huge chunk of his chest gone and other internal complications, this takes much longer to regrow but he is an important patient, so he doesn’t just get patched up to last until after the battle. Let alone what we were often forced to do which is to bandage someone so they can even survive. No, they attempt to get him back in the game.

So I find one of my own people that needs healing and I try to connect a life stream while watching the enemy.

It takes me a few seconds for my frame of reference to shift, and a light bulb pops in my mind. Half of the reason for my inspiration was that my very hands put his into motion, but I don’t let my squishiness slow me down.

The flesh regrows and then it inflates back to full. The double fist sized chunk takes roughly twenty seconds to grow back, but I can that it isn’t finished on the inside. It happens again. So the streaming of ‘healing energy’ keeps going. Direct observations might have been better, but I start to get a hint from a path unexplored by any human healers' in the instance as far as I’m aware.

They understand the principles governing healing and have techniques to improve their efficiency by a huge margin.

This is no longer only the system’s touch, changing the aspect of mana to a healing nature, but a proper, if shallow understanding of the restorative nature of this mana.

This time the healer is not playing the first two notes on the flute with little attention to what he is doing, but almost a symphony forms and cycles.

Twenty one different notes, each in perfect tune and seemingly melding with one another.

I KNOW they are the right notes like I’m listening to music and can tell if something isn’t right. But that’s a world apart from being able to create something similar. It’s an intuition deeply ingrained in my brain, maybe everyone’s brain. So far all my efforts are like randomly hitting a keyboard, instead of playing a melody. Without help, I couldn’t come up with a song on my own.

As it comes to an end, I lay back down without a worry in the world, not because there aren't a thousand other things that I could be doing that would help our side. Some of which might save a life or two, but I try to contain the magnitude of what I just witnessed.

Music, true music of the heart and healing.

I can remember each and every note nearly unconsciously carving it all in my memory palace. Got to make sure I don’t forget a single one of the cycles, but becoming a healer is not a simple matter of memorization. They are not following scripts nor are they simply reproducing a single song that they memorized. They follow the flow, almost like a jazz musician. Just about the opposite of who I proved to be on the rare occasion I tried to make music. I work much better by pressing a well defined sequence of keys on a keyboard, preferentially without having to care for the strength I hit those keys.

As these thoughts flit through my head, a slowly widening smile takes over my face.

“I don’t have Beethoven’s ear, but that doesn’t mean I can’t imitate the masters, does it? All I need to read the sheets they wrote.”

So I find someone injured in the inner world with the closest injury to what the other healer experienced and do my best to repeat those exact moves. The precise patterns that the healing took. Life isn’t perfectly the same, enough similarities remain that I can mostly make do. I’m imitating a flute with something closer to a binary nature like a piano without understanding the theory of notes and how they translate from one form to another.

Still, my whole attention goes to the endeavor and four much thinner intertwining strings of Life quickly regrow the flesh and heal the burned skin. Still, I realize one drawback of my new approach. It isn’t a one size fits all and proof of that comes when popping his crushed ribs back into place takes more Life than doing it the old way.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

In the end, I try to measure the effectiveness of this new technique with all my mistakes and everything that I did wrong. And I come with savings of roughly a fourth. Amidst all the wrong key hits and delays from one note to the next compounded with a rocky restart every 21 notes. With a little training, I can probably get to saving one third, though that would be exclusively for regrowing burnt flesh or something very similar. Regrowing flesh is not the most common type of injury, but it is one of the most expensive ones.

On the other hand, I could have used 20 percent less on his ribs by forgoing the new technique.

Not a lot and it’s fairly cheap to heal clean breaks in bones, but having only a single sheet of music could only evoke one set of emotions, instead of the whole range would get boring pretty fast.

Less than a minute later he is back on his feet. A 20 percent savings compared to even the more meticulous technique of concentrating a thin stream of life on the precise spot injury is definitely something to explore. But I’m not content with one song, so I start to pay attention to other fallen enemies, sometimes helping to create those injuries in the first place. I seek the worst ones, the ones that will take the longest to heal and in another thirty seconds, a root manages to slow someone enough they fail to dodge. The sword wielder madly scrambles back with a nasty crushed arm.

I try to follow along, paying all of my attention even as the slightly higher rank Elf skips the line and a healer pays exclusive attention to him, but all I get are the first five ‘notes’.

Double the average and it isn’t not enough to raise him to full health, but they seem to have a cap of 5 notes except in very special circumstances that I fail to create without exposing even more of my inner world.

I keep following similar situations, trying to find the places where a little help will create the need for these slightly longer healing sessions, but it is still not enough, far from enough.

Dozens of our own people move in and out of the inner world to be healed and I start on the songs that most closely match their needs. As it barely starts to make an effect, I hit the fourth or the fifth note and then I start again.

So I keep trying, again and again, to add a single note at the end randomly while listening in carefully to see if I find anything that sounds right.

The battle rages on. IT cycles, with people continuously cycling through around the higher level anchors we have tanking at the front or the mages supporting just behind the front lines. Almost everyone maintains their breath even in this intense fight, but the stream of injuries is relentless and it doesn’t stop for even a minute.

Something that I’m both horrified at and also strangely grateful for.

People learn to heal and then it comes. By random chance, one of the songs that seemed to deal with the most common type of injury, a 5 note melody that heals cuts on muscle gets one more note, hitting 6 notes in a row.

Then the 5% percent savings on Life that I was reliably hitting goes to roughly 7% with just one extra step, though part of it feels like that is more than just the notes, but my own improvements in hitting the correct pitch and timing and the sheer excitement in learning what I needed.

The way I conceptualize the whole healing business is bizarre.

I’m not singing, these Life constructs are physical, moving through time and space forming shapes that loosely resemble runes, but unlike runes, they behave closer to notes coming one after the other on music.

So I keep the mental model to ease the burden on my mind while building and trying to use my intuition to get improve them even further. Even if I can’t suddenly use the system’s runes to convert my plentiful Qi into Life, small edges like this will help delay the problem a little further, maybe further enough that we will get enough healers on our side. So there is light at the end of the tunnel. There is a chance that I won’t have to spend weeks in full deep meditation to recover just a fraction of a fraction of my stores. With every single trick in the book that I can think of, I could probably regenerate over 600 hundred Life points in 24 hours and that is only enough for a few serious injuries or a hundred shallower cuts that severed a tendon or something of the sort. But in intensive fighting with how many are injured, I often go through more than that every minute.

A nigh instant five percent savings across the board will extend the window of healing. Even if it’s not ideal, I can probably scour the world for injured people and use minute streams of Life to speed their healing while measuring the effects with songs for the most common types of injury.

Having the opportunity to properly train outside a combat situation, which is beyond chaotic, and spending a few hundred points every so often would probably help me to test a few hypotheses and help me save Life at the end of the day.

With control, willpower and perception as high as mine, I might even get a full day of training, while spending little more than a thousand points in Life if I was especially frugal. Not insignificant, but worth the expenditure. Let alone when I weighed the few lives I would likely save in the process. After all, even without fighting, a cart coming down and crushing someone was about as fatal now as before the system or any of the hundreds of ways someone can seriously injure themselves.

Need to think more about this.

The hundredth person that I work on in place of my second mind is a fellow with a wound bleeding so profusely, he would have died already without the system’s stats. A quick patch by the pair of seeds, a little glue made with collagen and fibrin and pressure hold the tissue to heal in the perfect place.

I concentrate on simple and smooth motions, trying to get them perfectly, repeating the same 6 notes for an ‘impressive’ 8 percent saving after so much practice, but even after a few repetitions of the song, each time with a random ‘note’ at the end, I fail to find even one more note on all the others with simple if deep cuts I treated before him.

When I trust the tissue closed well enough that a random sneeze won’t cause a rupture his wound again, I go out looking for the most seriously injured my other half s treating once again. I see hundreds of recovering people. But not a single stream of life. Everyone is back to normal levels of regeneration once again. There are probably around 200 people that could be back in the fight for less than 5 Life each, but they are no longer rushing to go out and I realize what must have happened.

I really zoned out.

Opening my eyes and looking through the shields in place, I see the main concentration of our troops all around me with a good 200 meters of distance from the walls. Close enough that if we want we could hit them and they could do that same in return, but they are at the breaking point and I can almost sense that they will simply head back to their hiding stop like last time if we press the issue.

A quick look at the recordings of what had been going on and a look at the written log of the battle quickly shows me why we retreated.

Rest.

The much smaller number of enemies had retreated a few minutes ago and after we knocked down parts of their walls along with a few other preparations, we were the ones to step back. A large portion of the elves had approached once again, but if they moved to rebuild their defenses, we won’t just let them, and for some reason, we feel that this waiting impasse is more to their benefit than to ours. They might be right, we didn’t have the requisite experience to even state that for a fact.

We could only trust our instincts.

So we will rest, recover, sharpen our spears and in half an hour’s time, their village will be gone from the map once again.

They may try something and if we get overconfident, maybe hundreds of us will die, but this battle is already won and they know it. We simply have too much of an advantage.

Soon it will be time for what I had been planning when the constant stream of injured for me to heal trickled down.

I will march in their village like, I own it with the others at my back and prove that I’m a juggernaut.