Tom didn’t want to dwell on the unsolvable, but he needed a solution to progress Heal Organs. No, that wasn’t right. He needed a way to progress it safely.
There were no simple answers, and there was no way he was going to use his current method on his heart or brain.
That was a definite no-go.
Trying home surgery on them could kill him instantly, but even the other organs were problematic.
He understood how skewed his understanding of human biology was. There was lots of experience with magically fixing what, on Earth, would have been deadly wounds, but there were no years of study to give him a theoretical basis of how everything connected together. Without innate enhanced healing and a ready availability of spells, he didn’t know how far a normal body could be pushed, which was basically what he had now. There was nothing in his Earth years that could help him. He had barely finished high school, though he had to admit his marks had been good for the amount of study he had put in.
Tom forced his mind back to the moment and shook his head as he remembered various facts from Earth.
Intestines were one of the streams of work under heal organs. They didn’t sound as dangerous as the heart, but even with his education he knew experimenting on them wasn’t safe. As he understood it, if they were breached and not healed properly, sepsis would kill you in a day or two. Not safe for experimentation. It was the same with the kidneys, liver, and lungs. They were all critical and represented the same challenge: a nick might not kill him immediately, but a failure to heal them promptly could have dire repercussions. These were not injuries that he could leave untreated for hours while practicing ineffective magic on them. Or maybe he could do that. Maybe they were safe to experiment on, but the issue was that he didn’t know.
And it wasn’t even like Heal Organs was the only problem here. The other pathways he needed to develop had their own difficulties to overcome. Mend Bone, at least, would not be life threatening to train. But if he broke a bone, how could he hide that issue for an entire day while he worked on his spell-craft?
Replenish Flesh and Blood would run into the same issues as Mend Bones. If the risk of discovery hadn’t been an issue, if he had been in a safe space, it would be a simple matter of bleeding himself out to a critical - but not fatal - level. The body was as good as designed to allow that, because, as you lost blood, your blood pressure dropped, which made it easier and easier to seal up the wound. However, he didn’t have hours or days where he could hide away to carry out that type of experiment.
Purge Foreign Substance, he decided, was probably the easiest and safest to progress. It had its own set of problems, but it he could source materials and went about it carefully, it should be trainable intraday without being noticeable.
If he could obtain the resources he needed.
Tom looked around the isolation room with added interest. He doubted they would include a roadmap like they had if it couldn’t be used. Everything within reaching distance had been catalogued, but that left a lot of space that he hadn’t explored yet, and that included a row of cupboards at the roof level which caught his eyes.. There was no ladder to reach them, but this place had been custom-built. Their very presence screamed ‘I contain secrets’.
It was time to discover what was on those inaccessible shelves. Hopefully, they would contain something useful, because he didn’t want to depend on the trial to progress his spell-craft; he also had no desire to be attempting to progress multiple affinities in parallel. Exactly that would happen if healing gets restricted to the trial. Then he would be doing crafting, skill, and healing in the trial and something like lightning outside it.
Although…
A thought occurred to him and he almost smacked himself in frustration.
What was he thinking, rejecting the idea of practicing healing in the trial? While his time and fate were spoken for there, his mana wasn’t. Besides, working on the more sensitive activities under the protection of a GOD’s shield was just sensible. It was an obvious place for taking risks, especially since April could probably hurt him in the right ways if he asked. She was very accommodating like that.
While he had a kernel of an idea, he had to do the detailed planning. First, Heal Brain. What would it take? What do I need to do? He asked himself. He flipped open the folder and audibly groaned. “That’s bloody ridiculous.” He said and then glanced quickly at the door to confirm the room was still sealed. The stone at the top of the door glowed in a comforting manner. With it confirmed that he was safe from outside gaze, he returned to studying. “Why is it so complicated?”
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He felt like hitting himself in frustration. Thirteen base trash spells and then seven mergers were required to get this single subskill of Heal Organs. “How is Heal Brain by itself twice as complex as Heal Cut?” He asked and no one, of course, answered his question.
He tapped the names of the spells and frowned. His anatomy knowledge was unfortunately lacking. Luckily, he knew from his earlier reading that there was an appendix of anatomical explanations at the back. He quickly flipped through to it. When he noticed it initially, he had firmly rejected the idea of learning it as an unnecessary time sink – after all, why would he want that type of technical knowledge when magic solved everything? In fact, he had wondered why such old Earth information had even been included in the first place. But now that he was engaged in the nuts and bolts of building the spell, the inclusion made a lot of sense. There was only a single sheet of paper covering the topic of the brain, but it was written in size eight text with lots of miniature diagrams. It felt like it was supposed to be read with the aid of a magnifying glass, but he put his complaints aside and absorbed what it had to teach him.
Armed with the requisite knowledge, he went back to the hierarchy sheet, and understood exactly what was happening. For the brain, there were five analysis components - presumably because mucking around in someone’s brain or, worse, your own, without knowing what was actually damaged was dangerous.
The first of those skills was Macro Mapping, which caused him to wince slightly. It was needed because the brain was not like bone or muscle. If a chunk of it was detached, you had to restore it to precisely the right spot or the neuron connections wouldn’t work. Any damage had to be rebuilt exactly as before, or you would be doing brain damage to the person.
In addition, there were four more equally important, but less dramatic, analysis tools that covered all the components necessary for brain health. They checked the health and functioning of the blood-brain barrier, the integrity of brain fluid, located dead and dying cells and, finally, one that functioned on a level below cellular to locate broken synapses. From his primer, Tom knew how vital each of those steps were. They could, he also understood instinctively, be developed without hurting himself.
That changed things, Tom realised.
At least for Heal Brain, over half of the development did not require the trial. The entire diagnosis suite of spells, along with the ones that were concerned with fluid health, he could safely test on himself.
The enormity of what he was planning struck him. Momentarily, he lowered his head and cupped it in his hands. He was almost five-years-old, and starting a project that wouldn’t be complete for months, potentially for years. It was a massive undertaking, but not one he would relent on.
But the child in him (and the man too, he admitted after a moment of introspection) wanted results now. Heal Cut, when it was created, would be useful for his fighting.
Tom was very glad he had focused on it first.
Ideally, he would want the same level of utility from his next set of spells.
Another thought struck him, and he felt like hitting himself again. The process of developing his spells was the same situation that April had highlighted with his skills. The order he did it in would influence how long the process took. It was almost certainly why she had explained the skill acquisition in such detail.
That meant there were multiple consideration on what to do next. What could help immediately? And what would help him gain his abilities the fastest? Both were important, but the first was ultimately limited by his eight mana. There was no way he was going to get the resources to do brain surgery in the immediate future, or fix a heart, or even mend a shattered bone. What was useful didn’t matter; instead, he needed to focus on finding the optimal path to lower his time investment.
Once more, his eyes were drawn back to the hierarchy sheet.
That the first eleven lines were dedicated to Heal Cut.
Internally, he whistled.
Although there were coincidences, the orphanage setup was meticulous, and Heal Cut being at the top of the page felt deliberate. The order was not random. The positioning of Heal Organs proved that. It was right at the bottom, with brain and heart being the last two within that section.
It wasn’t a series of hierarchies, copied down blindly from the experience shop. Instead, it was a roadmap, a plan that the readers were expected to follow from top to bottom.
His eyes went back to the top of the sheet. Purge Foreign Substances followed Heal Cut, and after it Blood and Muscle Replenishment. That was the order he would follow, with one change. In the trial, he was regularly bleeding to death, which meant conditions were going to be perfect to experiment with Blood Replenishment. He would take advantage of that within the trial, and outside of it he would focus on Purge Foreign Substances. Energised, he set about memorising the wireframe diagrams for Marrow Overdrive and Emergency Pressure, which were two of the four spells that fed into Blood Replenishment. It took him half an hour to embed them both in his memory, and he planned to use the future isolation room sessions as a refresher to ensure they were well and truly ingrained by the time of the next trial.
With that done, his eyes turned to the cupboards above him.