After our bath we headed back to my room to start working on Alice’s new spell. Immediately we came across a stumbling block. In order to have Alice work on creating a new rune spell she needed me to boost Dual Consciousness with mana. I had to spend about a tenth of my mana just to get it started then another hundredth to keep it going every minute.

That was about 25 mana a minute, 23 when you accounted for my mana regeneration. That meant she could only work for about an hour before my mana would run dry. Additionally we found out her using rune magic cost mana. When she was learning how to do it in the mind stone she was using the mana in the stones to power her spells. Without the reservoir she needed to use my mana.

All that meant our first attempt to create the new spell ended after only 20 minutes of her testing new incredibly incritate runes. Alice knew what type of magic she needed but she had to constantly test slight variations in how she built the rune circle to create new magic. She would need many hours to get a prototype spell, then she would need to polish it and attach it to her meta-spell so she could cast it constantly. Creating this spell 20 minutes at a time would take weeks if not months.

It might just be impossible with our current skill levels. Alice was brainstorming the problem. We had already gotten 1 level in Dual Consciousness, yet it was still just improving Alice’s control over her magic rather than reducing the cost. Alice’s ability to operate Rune magic was curtailed by the skill so leveling it just made it easier not less expensive. We probably need 10 more levels in the skill before the cost will get reduced. Either that or gaining enough Manipulation so we can spend more mana.

I grimaced, her suggestion made sense, but that would be weeks of work. We couldn’t afford to take weeks focusing on this skill. I could meditate and fill our mana back up pretty quickly after, we get back 56 mana every minute we meditate. I considered the numbers, for a moment. About 40 minutes to fill up my mana.

That means every hour we spend we only make progress for a third of it? Plus each interruption will just make the whole process longer. Alice thought then let out an exasperated sigh.

If only… I froze mid sentence as my mind began to whirl. We had two consciousnesses! I already knew one of us could do one thing while the other did something entirely different. Yet could I meditate while she was working on Rune magic? It was certainly far more advanced than anything we had done before. I have a crazy idea.

My face scrunched into a skeptical look. “Anything like grafting cancer onto a piglet?” Alice asked out loud.

Nothing so horrible. What if I meditate while you control the body, the skill costs about 23 mana a minute, but meditation regenerates 56. I explained.

There was a silent beat. Oh… that’s a great idea!

Alright let's give it a shot then. I grabbed my Sukeshi and put it in my lap, then activated the Dual Consciousness ability. Go ahead and start working.

On it. She confirmed. My body began to move under Alice’s will. As she began to draw rune magic I focused on my connection to my sword. It wasn’t nearly as easy to fall into the meditative trance but after a minute or two I felt my mind clear and the ability activated.

While I was meditating I was only vaguely aware of my surroundings. I could feel my body moving around but the skill made my awareness of those motions superficial at best. Yet still my current mana was in the upper left hand of my vision and I occasionally noticed it going up by 33 or 32 mana each minute. It was working!

I allowed Alice to work until mother interrupted us to come out to dinner. We were both startled by the knock at the door and it interrupted both of our work. Nearly 2 hours had passed and Alice had gotten a ton of work done while I meditated.

“Time for dinner sweety.” Mom called from outside our room.

“Be there in a moment.” Alice and I responded, our actions syncing together seamlessly again.

I glanced over our notifications while we were working.

*Level up. Elven Adolescent level 22. You gain 2 free stats, 1 physical stat, and 1 mental stat.*

*Dual Consciousness has leveled up several levels, level 14.*

*Training has leveled up, level 22.*

*Noble has leveled up, level 22.*

*Learning has leveled up, level 22.*

*Elven Heritage has leveled up, level 22.*

*Pretty has leveled up, level 22.*

*Sukeshi Chakra has leveled up, level 57.*

Another species level?! How was that even possible? We were getting species levels like other people got early class levels. Having more than one species level a year was incredibly rare usually. Was it because of the potency of the Dual Consciousness skill? I just didn’t understand, and my leveling rate was so odd I didn’t really want to bring it up to anyone else. Penelope, who trained daily and was almost 2 years older than me, was only level 16 in her Adolescent class. I had a better start than her, but at this point I was likely to max out the class at level 40 before I even turned 13.

Getting 5 levels in Dual Consciousness would improve Alice’s ability to work on her magic a lot. Doing two entirely different things at the same time seemed to be the way to make this skill level quickly.

I decided to turn off notifications for skills that were keeping up with my class levels. I didn’t need to know that Training, Noble, Learning, Elven Heritage, and Pretty were all keeping up with my species class. If one of those skills didn’t level up with my class I would be alerted instead. That would also help with my Bioshifter Curist class since both Bioshift and Critical Care were capped.

I made some serious progress on the spell. I think I’m one solid day of work from finishing it. Alice commented.

I considered the time frame, I’d like to also keep training with my combat class during that time. Especially since Alice and I could work on modifying my magic skills now. Let’s go down and train on combat a bit after dinner, we’ll get back to work on the spell tomorrow.

A grin came over my face. Want to see what I can do with our skills? I’m kind of looking forward to that myself. Though, other than stepping on the air I haven’t come up with much yet unfortunately. Alice thought.

Well even just that we need to work on and figure out its limitations and mana usage.

---------------------------

Training with Alice went surprisingly well. We were able to incorporate the air step modification into my Radiant Step skill easily. It cost about 50 mana, then 5 mana a minute to allow Alice the control required to modify my skill. Each time she did so it cost an additional 20 mana over what I spent on the Radiant Step skill. Overall the costs were reasonable, but if a fight went long, or I had to rely on it too much I could run myself out of mana quickly. Hopefully with further improvements to the Dual Consciousness skill the initial cost would come down.

We also learned the limits of this modified skill. Air Step could change my trajectory mid stride and could even launch me into the air. However, attempting to take more than one Air Step in a row without touching the ground always failed. That meant I couldn’t walk through the air unfortunately. Alice thought it might eventually be possible, but it was likely too much for my current stats to handle. I would either need a more powerful skill or to gain potentially hundreds of levels.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

We worked on our coordination with the skill, adding it to my potential combat arsenal. With Dual Consciousness smoothing the discontinuity between two consciousness trying to control one body it actually wasn’t that hard. I didn’t need to tell Alice when to use Air Step, she just knew my intent automatically.

The next day we spent most of the day working on her new spell. With our new method Alice was able to complete the spell and apply it to her meta spell. The meta spell drew the incredibly complex rune for her. She would draw the meta spell in the air, two interlocking circles with a relatively simple symbol in the middle. The meta spell would then draw out 4 interlocking circles each made of tiny runes that empowered them. Inside each circle was another symbol which was also made of smaller runes.

It took Alice hours to find the right combination, then several more hours to draw the complex rune out one time so she could copy it with her meta spell. All the while I sat and meditated.

For our efforts we had a diagnostic spell that could give me the entire DNA of any sample tissue. It could also compare two different samples and show just the differences between them. Those differences were where I would have to focus. I needed to create something that would target just the differences between the two samples.

After we tested it on myself to see my own DNA we headed out to the piglet. We arrived at the stables, but no one was inside at the time. Only a few horses were left in the stables so I imagined they were out in the adjacent field exercising.

So this is your poor test subject? Alice thought as we approached the piglet’s pin. I feel kinda bad for it.

Her. I thought as I got into the enclosure. Plus my tests aren’t going to hurt her. I’m not really testing anything on her, I just needed something to graft the true test subjects to. And, fortunately, I don’t think the cancer cells are going to care very much about being tested.

I knelt down and let the piglet sniff my hand. She was a rather docile young pig. I was glad Riza hadn’t picked out a rambunctious piglet. “Hello there.” I smiled down at the piglet before plopping down a stool and sitting on it. She gave us one more sniff then curled up and laid down at our feet. It was positively precious. She was like a dog.

Ignoring those thoughts I gently checked the grafts on her neck. The oddly colored flesh and small clump of flesh stared back at me, alive and well it seemed. I just had to hope whatever I had done to them with Bioshift to make the grafts take hadn’t changed them too much.

Go ahead and use the spell on each of the samples, just once at first. I asked Alice.

Without a word my hand moved and began to trace out the relatively simple meta-spell rune. Then that magic drew out the more complex rune. Knowledge streamed into my mind from the diagnostic spell. In my mind’s eye I could see the string of DNA of one of the chromosomes for the healthy cell, two lines entwining each other creating the 3 billion base pairs.

It would be far too much information to even begin to consider except that the spell somehow made me able to take it all in at once. I attempted to remember everything I knew about DNA. Adenine, Thymine, Guanine, and Cytosine were the 4 ‘bits’ of information that made up every code in our body. I remembered that not all parts of the body had exactly the same DNA, even just baring random harmless mutations. Brain cells and some immune system cells could be a little different. However in general every cell held the ‘blueprint’ of our entire bodies.

*You have gained access to the Enhanced Memory passive class skill.*

Oh! A new skill? I popped up the description.

*Enhanced Memory

Prerequisite: Attempt to remember the details of something that you have taken great care and effort to learn and memorize.

Type: Species, Knowledge

Passive

Skill cost: 1 mana regen/level

You have spent time learning and memorizing a huge amount of knowledge. From world history to the culmination of thousands of years of medical knowledge, you have dedicated large swathes of both your lives to memorization of facts. With this skill your memory will become clearer and will be more resistant to fading or shifting after remembering it. Focusing on a specific memory will allow you to remember some of the details surrounding it. Clarity of your memory increases with level, amount of changes and fading that occur to your memories over time decreases with level. Increases your resistance to memory based mental magic with level.*

Ah damn, this was absolutely the best skill ever! I slammed it into my empty species class skill slot even before Alice could remark on it.

Well that will certainly be useful for you. Alice thought. My memories on the other hand are held within the magical construct in our brain, I doubt they could ever fade or change over time. Your memories should have some of the same effects, but your mind seems a bit less entangled with the magic than mine is.

Well good I guess? I didn’t really like the idea that my mind was partially attached to magic I couldn’t even begin to understand. Still it made it possible for Alice and I to work together, so it certainly had its benefits. Hopefully this will let me remember more about cancer, I learned a lot, but it was never my focus. If I ever saw signs of it I would generally just send the patient along to an oncologist.

Alice shook our head. I never understood why your system was so needlessly complex. Specialists for every little thing just seems wasteful.

Well that’s what happens when there is more known about a single field than someone can learn in a reasonable time frame. There was so much known about medicine in my world we needed computers to remember most of it for us. Not even the greatest of geniuses could hope to specialize in more than a few fields. Alice had an overview of my life on Earth but she still really didn’t understand just how different it was from this world.

I still don’t really get it, but whatever. Just looking at all the information from the spell makes my head spin. It’s crazy to think that all this information is in all of our cells. Alice continued to marvel at the DNA as she cast the spell again on the cancer.

When the spell was completed I was met with something I hadn’t entirely expected the spell to see. The DNA of the cancer was mutated certainly, with entire sequences missing or changed, but there was also more than the normal number of chromosome strands present. It was an absolute mess.

The spell analyzed the two samples and compared them showing me where mutations were. It was obvious even to Alice which was the healthy cell and which was the cancerous one.

Now I just needed to find a way to use this difference to attack the cells with magic. On Earth trying to target only cells based on what was in their nucleus wasn’t really possible. In a way that’s kind of what chemotherapy did, by attacking all cell growth and concentrating it on the specific type of cell the cancer was affecting you hit cancer harder than normal cells. Cancer cells consumed way more resources than normal ones and grew out of control. So the poison would make the cancer shrink down or prevent it from invading more healthy cells.

I had to do something similar with magic, but in a much more effective way. I needed to make Bioshift destroy all cancerous cells while leaving normal cells alone. So I would need to start experimenting. My experimentation would start with trying to target the malformed nucleus that was always present in cancerous cells. I just had to apply the magic to both healthy and unhealthy tissues and see what happened.

I used my new skill to see if there were any clues in my memories. The common characteristics of cancerous cells; irregular cell shape, larger darker nuclei, rapid uncontrolled growth, resource hungry, terrible efficiency, nearly ‘invisible’ to the immune system, and lack of communication with other cells.

*Enhanced Memory has leveled up, level 2.*

The notification broke my train of thought and I disabled notifications on that skill until I left the stables. I found triggering when to show me notifications was a particularly useful mechanic of the system. That way I wouldn’t forget to turn notifications back on.

I was confident that the answer would be found in targeting something among that list of differences. I pulled out the small notebook I had brought and began to write down notes on the differences between Earl’s cancerous cells and his healthy ones.

After taking notes I tried one or two very obvious things. Firstly I tried to destroy cells with the abnormal nuclei, it worked and didn’t even cost much mana. But it also destroyed the healthy cells. I also suspected that if I had tried that in an actual patient their magic resistance would stop me. These grafts either had no magic resistance or had the magic resistance of the young piglet. An animal as young as the piglet would have almost no vitality or animus, so I could easily overpower it without even noticing.

My first attempt failed, but I wasn’t entirely sure why. Either I didn’t have a good enough picture in my mind or my Manipulation wasn’t high enough to let my magic differentiate the cells. The latter seemed more likely since Dark healers with high Manipulation could remove all or almost all the cancerous cells from a patient. Yet they didn’t completely eradicate the cells because the cancer almost always came back.

I continued to try different things, but it either wouldn’t work or would also kill the healthy cells. After a couple hours and several meditation breaks to recharge my mana I decided to take a break. This was going to take some time.