Andric awoke in a bright room, and he slowly leaned forward, supporting his upper body with his elbows, and carefully gazed at his surroundings. He laid in a small, uncomfortable bed, with his head against the wall of the room. Instead of being in a solid structure, he appeared to be in a tent, where white fabric made up the walls, supported by wooden logs and sticks. The tend had been recently raised, and the logs still had bark on them.

Next to him, on both sides, people were laying on the ground. A few beds and tables were placed sporadically throughout the tent, but the people laying on the ground far outnumbered the available beds. Small, thin, white blankets covered the people who were laying down, but only the people on the beds had pillows.

In front of him, in the center of the tent, Wolter sat on the ground with his legs crossed and his head supported by one hand. He had fallen asleep while sitting down, even though it was the middle of the day.

Not only Wolter sat in the tent; a few more people were sitting on the centerline of the tent, and a few more were standing or walking somewhere. Most of them were family members of the ones in the beds, but a few were healing magicians, who were using whatever mana they had to improve the quality of life of the people in the beds or on the ground.

Andric took a quick glance over everything in the tent, and his strong headache became more apparent the longer he remained awake. His attention briefly shifted to the disfigured burn victim lying to his left, and then he shut his eyes and tried to go to sleep.

Mana exhaustion would hit magicians in phases, and Andric’s wild attempt to create a spell to destroy his enemy had caused him to skip directly into the most severe state of mana exhaustion. His skull’s mana storage was completely empty, and it would take at least a full day to recover.

While Andric recuperated from his mana expenditure, Wolter either sat on the ground or paced in circles around the inside of the tent. Someone occasionally came to him for one reason or another, but he never left within ten feet of Andric.

Six hours after Andric went to sleep, he woke up and stretched his back. This time, he sat up on the bed and looked directly at Wolter, who was standing at the foot of the bed.

Wolter, who held his breath when he saw Andric begin to move, exhaled and said, “Thank the magi.”

Andric opened his mouth to say something but paused for a moment before shutting it. He had no idea what to say. Whenever he thought he had a complete thought, he remembered the sight of Lieve and Hedy being eaten, and he lost his train of thought.

Finally, after several seconds had passed, Wolter spoke, “It’s good that you’re awake. The healers told me it was only mana exhaustion, but I guess your magic would have taken care of it if it was anything else.”

Andric said, “Yeah,” and nothing else. He waited for Wolter to mention Lieve or Hedy.

“Hey, if you’re good enough to walk, how about we get some stew?” Wolter asked and looked at the tent’s exit. “There are a few pots cooking all the time, so we can get food even in the middle of the night.”

“Sure,” Andric replied, and he slowly got off the bed. His legs slightly ached, but he used a small spell to clear the pain.

Andric and Wolter walked out of the tent, and, along the way, Wolter said to one of the healers, “We don’t need the bed anymore,” and continued walking.

The tent Andric and Wolter walked out of was located outside the western edge of Gallus Town. To the south were fields of various yields, and to the north was a forest, which Andric had gone out to play in several times. Many trees had been cut down to construct the tents and pieces of furniture with, but a few were left to provide shade.

Though it was night, a bright moon illuminated the area around the tents. However, Andric first looked toward the southern end of Gallus Town, where embers were rising with clouds of smoke. Some buildings were still on fire, they at least the flames were contained. As they were, the fires would die out within a few days.

Wolter led Andric around the tent, past a row of identical tents, and into a large clearing of space around the road that led into Gallus Town. There, several hundred people were standing in the space between the tents and the road, and the majority of them had bowls and spoons.

At the point where the road officially entered Gallus Town, six large drums were placed. Chefs ladled stew out from three of the drums, and the remaining three drums were being filled with more ingredients. Metal bowls and spoons were in two large piles on a table next to the stew drums, and people who wanted to eat were freely taking them. Once they finished, they placed their bowl and spoon into a dirty pile, where someone was cleaning them.

Thanks to the speed of the serving chefs, Andric and Wolter only needed to wait in line for about thirty seconds to get a bowl of soup, and they walked down the road to find a place to sit and eat. After the found a place, they silently ate, and Andric listened in to the conversations of small groups of people around to him.

For the most part, they were angry about their homes being destroyed. In an event that they had no power to stop, they lost everything they had spent years collecting. Many magicians only worked enough to provide food for themselves. When they bought things like furniture, they bought it for life. After having everything destroyed, they would need to return to working for most of the day.

The amount of people who grieved over lost loved ones was not low. They were hit the hardest, since their loss could not be replaced after a few months or years of working. The monster’s body was big enough to topple buildings with a single touch, and that led to some families being wiped out when the monster landed on their roof. Some magicians had only enough power to save themselves, but were helpless to save those around them. Many people were found in collapsed buildings, barely maintaining their own life.

Due to the way the monster moved and how it constantly left behind a trail of flames, areas of town were gradually encircled by fire. When the monster traveled down the town’s large roads, it scraped against the sides of the buildings, which frequently make them collapsed, which would then block off the alleyways that entered into the road.

While people were escaping from the initial flames and where the monster originally entered the town at, they naturally funneled onto the large roads, and the monster would naturally follow them there. The more people who found an escape path, the more likely the monster would appear there.

A few death tolls were speculated, but Andric didn’t pay them any mind. A few people were even asking questions about how the newly freed up land would be sold. Some were talking about jobs that opened up, due to the last working being killed.

Over the last ten thousand years, a code of ethics had been formed in society, that centered around receiving and recovering from disasters. About ten percent of Gallus Town’s population had died, and another thirty percent were injured in some way. Roughly thirty percent of those injured people were seriously injured, but they would all recover. Eventually, Gallus Town would return to normal, minus the several hundred people who died.

“Mind if we sit here?” a woman asked, and Andric looked up from his bowl. Susanna and Cato were standing in front of him and Wolter, and they each had bowls of stew.

Although Andric hadn’t ever taken any particular notice of Susanna’s appearance in the past, she looked obviously disheveled compared to the past. Her hair was dirty, and her clothes hadn’t been changed or washed in days. After making those observations, Andric passed his gaze to Cato and then to Wolter, and both of them were similarly dirty.

People loved to bathe, but the bathhouses of Gallus Town were located inside the residential district. They might have been destroyed or not been able to gather enough workers, but most of the people around Andric were dirty.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Sure,” Wolter said, and he moved a little away from the road to make room for Susanna and Cato. Andric waited a moment for Heiko to arrive, but he could safely assume what happened to him when he didn’t join his family to eat.

Susanna and Cato sat, and Susanna began eating her food before Cato. Between the two of them, Susanna had the most composure. She had mentally prepared herself for Heiko’s death when he joined the town guard, and she knew he died doing what he loved: helping people.

Cato, on the other hand, couldn’t help but feel angry and sad. Her father had died, but he died while trying to save the lives of strangers. The three of them had escaped Gallus Town together, but only Heiko decided to go back and save people from the flames. ‘Were those strangers more important than me?’ Cato asked herself constantly.

“Do you know what happened to Hedy and Lieve?” Cato asked, and Susanna pinched her arm. Susanna angrily glared at Cato, and Cato tightly shut her mouth, but the question was already asked.

Nobody needed to be told that Lieve and Hedy were dead, but nobody knew exactly what happened except for Andric. No identifiable remains were left behind by the monster. The only clue that Andric knew about Lieve and Hedy was that he was found unconscious near their home, only a few dozen feet away from the monster’s corpse.

Andric remembered everything clearly, at first. But, over time, he lost memory of what actually happened. What color was the monster? How tall was it? How fast did it move? How long did it take for it to eat Lieve and Hedy? Every time Andric reimagined the event, the monster became a little darker, a little taller, a little faster, and a little hungrier.

“...” He opened his mouth to speak and let out a small sound, but he didn’t continue any further, and he shut his mouth after a few seconds. Just as he was about to speak, he remembered his final spell - the one that took every ounce of mana from his body to complete.

That last spell had completely obliterated a large portion of the monster’s head and neck. In terms of cubic feet, Andric couldn’t say for sure how much tissue he vaporized, but he knew it was much more than what would be possible without an affinity for it. He put his spoon in his near-empty bowl, then looked down at his open palm.

Several minutes passed. Andric eventually finished eating his stew by using telekinesis magic to transport the stew to his mouth, and Wolter took the empty bowl over to the pile of dirty bowls near the chefs. In their group of four, Wolter and Susanna did most of the talking, while Cato and Andric were mostly silent. Around them, many people were still talking.

“Most of them are suffering from mana exhaustion, and I give it two more days until everyone who wasn’t seriously injured wakes up. Really, those magicians shouldn’t have been using spells that weren’t from their affinity. If they had just left everything to the right types of magicians, we wouldn’t have almost a thousand people passed out and laying in tents.”

“It’s not that bad. The eight of us will be able to heal everybody three or four more days, and then we’ll go back to our own city.”

Wolter, after hearing the two healing magicians speak, said to Andric, “With your affinity, you could probably heal a lot of people. Once you’ve recovered from your mana exhaustion, you should see what you can do.”

“Cato, you should go with him. When you’re done, go to our tent and we’ll meet you there,” Susanna said and took Cato’s empty bowl. The mother looked at her daughter with her stern eyes, and the daughter’s ‘Why should I go with him?’ died out before she said it.

Instead, Cato turned to Andric and said, “Yeah, I’ll go with you.” She clearly didn’t want to initially go with Andric, but, the more she thought about it, she began to think she might enjoy it. At least, she wasn’t entirely opposed to the idea after thinking about it.

For Andric, though, he’d rather go by himself and quickly get it over with. He needed to contribute somehow to the recoveration of Gallus Town, and it would still be an effective way to increase his fame, but he just wasn’t in the mood to be boastful about anything.

“Alright, let’s go,” Andric stood and said, and he walked back toward where he had woken up at.

Cato followed behind him and wondered why her mother told her to go with him. She thought it might have something to do with the question she asked when they first sat down with Andric and Wolter, and, maybe, it would be fine to ask as long as it was just her and Andric.

When they were both out of sight of Wolter and Susanna, Cato asked, “So, what happened to Hedy and your mom?”

Andric’s step faltered, but he managed to reply, “They were eaten.”

Finally saying it, he felt like a weight had been lifted from his chest. Earlier, he had denied his emotions, but just saying one sentence to Cato made him better able to accept the death of Lieve and Hedy. Cato didn’t ask any more questions, and Andric got to think about it even longer.

Andric had a tough time describing his family relationships in his new world. He still had ties to his previous-world family, but he hadn’t seen or heard them for over a decade. He would never forget them, but he allowed the positions of mother, father, and sister to be changed out with his new-world family.

Although the death of his new family members was sad, Andric had hope. He had reincarnated into a new world, and that meant Lieve or Hedy could too. Life had its ups and downs, and death was only the beginning of a new life - at least, it was in Andric’s experience.

He thought to himself, ‘I should start a religion,’ and arrived outside his destination.

Andric and Cato entered through the tent’s large flap, and Andric approached the nearest injured person laying on the ground, while Cato briefly observed the entirety of the tent before following. At Andric’s feet, a man laid with most of his body covered in burns, but his face and palms were clear. Looking around, Andric judged that the healing magicians had prioritized faces and palms before full-body healing.

Andric, though, wouldn’t be doing that. He bent down and placed his hand on the man’s hand, then activated a burn healing spell. A few seconds later, the man’s skin cleared up, and his face showed that a pain had been lifted from him.

Although Andric didn’t need to touch his patients or specify what kind of wound he was healing for his spell, the mana cost for the spell would increase if either of them wasn’t done. He had an affinity for ranged magic, but it still cost about fifteen percent more mana to perform a spell at range than with physical contact. By specifying burn wounds, Andric’s spell would be prevented from healing things like scars, tooth cavities, damaged liver cells, or benign malignants that would eventually sort themselves out.

While Andric walked from person to person, healing them of their burn wounds, Cato noticed him touching each person and asked, “Why do you touch them when you heal them?”

“Because it takes less mana,” Andric replied. “I can probably heal a few more people by doing it like this, and there’s no real reason not to.”

Andric had always been able to sense his mana more clearly than other magicians, and he knew how much mana each spell used without having to experiment with draining all of his mana. An ordinary magician would need to see how many times they could use the spell before they reached a stage of mana exhaustion, but Andric didn’t need to do that.

Cato thought to herself that Andric never used any mana-saving techniques when he healed her, then shook her head when she thought about what that would entail. She covered her face with her hands and watched as Andric moved throughout the tent, gradually progressing along the row of patients laying on the ground.

Each side of the tent had about forty people on it. Some people had already been healed, such as Andric, and he ended up healing one row and two people from the next row before feeling the onset of mana exhaustion. His brain pulsed in a way that didn’t hurt but warned him not to continue any longer. If he pressed forward, he could probably heal five more people, but he would then be having to resist a headache for the rest of the night.

“That’s all I can do,” he said, and he turned to the now calm Cato.

“Okay, let’s go to my mom’s tent,” Cato said, and she led Andric out of the tent.

The large space that separated Gallus Town from its surrounding fields was used for the medical tents, and the forest to the north was used as an area for families or individuals to put up tents to sleep under. Andric recognized the area because of the many times he had entered the forest with Hedy and Cato, but many trees had been cut down, and many tents were hung on low branches.

In the day and a half that Andric was unconscious, Wolter never left the medical tent to get his own sleeping tent. Susanna and Cato were given a tent to accommodate for them plus Heiko, but Heiko never came back after he returned to the flames to save other people from them. Thus, when Wolter and Andric needed a place to spend the night, Susanna offered the vacant space in her tent. After all, it would only be until houses inside the town were rebuilt.

Each person received a sheet to lay on a sheet to cover up with, and Wolter took his and Andric’s before going to the tent with Susanna. A few minutes later, Cato and Andric arrived.

They were all friendly, and Andric and Cato had napped at the other’s house on many occasions, but sleeping in a tent together was almost entirely different. When they looked at each other, they couldn’t help but notice the ones who were absent, and they knew things would never go back to how they were before.

Over the next few days, construction of houses in Gallus Town began. As thanks for Heiko’s contribution to saving lives, Susanna and Cato were given priority housing, and they moved into a new house in less than a week. The combined efforts of magic and manpower enabled the builders to complete several houses a day, and Susanna and Cato were among the first fifty people to move back into the town.

Wolter and Andric would have soon had their own house built for them, but logic dictated that their two families could pool their resources and recover faster, and Wolter and Andric moved in with Susanna and Cato in their new home.

By sticking together, rebuilding became easier.