I didn’t fall entirely unconscious, a fact that surprised me because most of my past experiences with extreme pain and sensory overload had knocked me out. Instead, as my senses were overcome by static, a similar effect wormed its way into my brain and made thinking about anything for more than a moment difficult. I wasn’t sure how long the stupor lasted, but once it began to subside I still felt like my thoughts were slow for several minutes while my senses came back. Eventually, the center of my field of vision started to respond again, displaying a small tunnel into the library. Over the next few minutes the tunnel expanded until it reached my peripherals, giving me back my normal eyesight. I’m still in the chair, I sighed, that’s good, and the book is still on the table so I didn’t damage it.
My limbs lacked strength, especially my legs, and getting out of my slouching position took noticeably more effort than usual. Once I was leaning forward again I felt a wave of weakness and lightheadedness wash over me, then my stomach growled loudly. So hungry, I thought with a groan, wasn’t the kitchen just down the hall from here? I should stop by and get some food. My hunger kept me from thinking about anything else as I stood up, staggered a few steps, then pushed my way out the library door into the hallway, accidentally banging my head on a bookshelf in the process.
Something about my clothing felt wrong, but every time I tried to figure out why my brain simply switched back to thinking about food. A servant man walked past me, staring wide-eyed for some reason I didn't have the energy to contemplate. In a haze I walked right past the kitchen door, only realizing I had missed it when I came to a turn in the hallway, then had to double back. I startled the chef when I shoved the door open with my left hand, but by then I was far too hungry to care. A moment later I had a mouthful of bread and a loaf in my hand, and was trying my hardest to swallow.
Why am I suddenly so hungry? I wondered as the haze in my mind started to lift. I glanced at my heads-up display, which I had kept open by accident, and blinked in surprise. The green bars had gone below half in every category, despite their aggregate bar sitting around eighty percent when I saw it during the magic experiments. Suddenly finding myself without any bread left in my hand, I blinked and looked around the room, then felt like I was waking up a second time. As the full memory of the day flooded back to me, I looked down at my missing right shoulder and blinked a few times in surprise.
Instead of the empty sleeve I expected, I saw a fully-formed shoulder. There was still no arm attached to it, but my collarbone had grown back out, as had my shoulder blade. As I pulled the shirt aside to take a look at the flesh, I was shocked to find that it didn’t look at all as I expected. Instead of healthy-looking skin in my normal tone what I found was pale and mottled with deep reds, as though it had lost its pigment and been stretched forcefully over the flesh underneath. The bones, however, appeared to be formed correctly, as did the musculature, so the effect was mostly cosmetic. The sound of a throat being cleared drew my attention outwards again, and I saw the chef glaring at me.
“What are you doing in here?” he finally snapped, his plump face twisted into some version of anger.
“I need food,” I replied.
“Naturally,” the chef condescended, “but what are you doing in here?” His grip on the chopping knife in his right hand left little to the imagination about what he might do if I upset him further. Putting a gentle smile on my face, I decided to try to use some manners I had been practicing while working in the office.
“Apologies,” I said in my best Koyl impression. “I was so hungry that I passed out in the library, and it seems I… lumbered in here without thinking. Do you have any quick foods that you could make? It doesn’t have to be anything complicated, just vegetables and meat.” The chef’s expression changed from anger into fatigue, and he slapped his knife into the cutting board beside his stove lazily.
“Just get out,” he said, pointing to the door to the dining room. “I can have something ready for you in five minutes, so long as you aren’t picky.” Giving a courteous head bow, I left the kitchen and entered the servants’ dining room, sitting at one of the long benches to wait for my food. My mind was abuzz with excitement, and I looked at my shoulder again to make sure I hadn’t somehow fooled myself. Then, a drop of something fell from my brow onto the table, drawing my attention.
Blood, I thought as I touched it with my left hand. Why am I bleeding? The bookshelf? I had no mirror, but a cursory check of my face with my hand showed that I had a small cut on my forehead. It’s not healing? I thought with worry, What did I do? Looking back to my heads-up display, I also saw that I had depleted a huge amount of magic, over ninety percent of my cores. That much? I thought with a quiet inhale from surprise, But still, I have magic, why am I not healing? That doesn’t make any sense. A quick check showed that I could still make a light orb, confirming that my magic was functioning as usual, but for some reason it was refusing to engage the healing process on my forehead.
Maybe I can force it to… I thought with a mental flex. A trickle of power that I could now perceive much more finely than before left me, and a stinging sensation passed over the cut. Touching it again, I could feel that my skin had fixed itself, as expected. I’ve never had to force it before, I thought, it’s supposed to be automatic. Then again, that book did say that the healing has some kind of limiter on it to protect the body, so maybe I’ve tripped it? Maybe I can test that theory right now.
Hesitantly, I reached down to my waist and removed the throwing knife that I kept on me while working, then pulled down the left side of my pants. Making sure I was ready to heal myself as quickly as possible, I positioned the knife over my thigh and quickly stabbed myself to a depth of around five centimeters. My rapid healing automatically engaged and fixed the majority of the injury, only stopping at the skin, which I had to prompt it to do. It’s a power conservation mode, I realized, because my magic levels are low it’s only fixing things that are an immediate threat to my life unless I specifically tell it to heal the rest. That actually makes a lot of sense from a design standpoint. The chef came out of the kitchen, loudly slamming the door, and practically threw a large bowl of stew in front of me as I frantically pulled my pant leg back up.
“I made a whole pot, I expect you to come and get more after this,” he hissed. “If you make yourself the reason I have to throw out good food, I don’t care if you’re the master’s guest, I’ll be cooking a stew with your fingers in it. The ones you have on you right now, anyway.” It was an odd threat, but the intent was clear.
“Of course,” I replied, and the chef walked back to the kitchen in a huff. I gulped down the stew directly from the bowl, not even bothering to use a utensil, watching my green bars go up. All of them were rising but at different rates. Once I was done eating I felt the stinging of rapid healing on a few more spots across my body, then I got up to get seconds. The stew pot was placed right beside the door, so instead of going back to the table I just stood in front of it, scooping out bowls and gulping them down as fast as I could while the chef looked on in disgust.
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After seven bowls my belly was so full that I knew I couldn’t fit another drop of stew in it without vomiting, so I put the bowl down and wiped my hands on a nearby rag. The chef walked over and glanced into the pot, finding it nearly empty, and gawked at me.
“I told you, I was hungry,” I said.
“I didn’t expect you to eat the whole thing,” he replied. “Reading books got you that hungry, did it?”
“Something like that,” I replied, shrugging my newly-formed right shoulder in unison with my left.
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When I got back to the library, I noticed that it was night outside, meaning that I had actually been in a daze for several hours. I wasn't exactly tired physically, but mentally I was still exhausted, so I opted to leave Magical Phenomena out on the table and head back to my room. By the time I arrived, my body started to feel as tired as my mind did, so I slipped under the sheets and got comfortable. Before I moved to put out the lantern, I had a thought and tried to direct my healing into my shoulder again, but without doing any core manipulation. I felt some effect, and it looked like the pigmentation began to return to my skin. Satisfied, I snuffed the lantern and fell asleep quickly after, waking up at my usual time the next morning.
Back at work, nobody commented on my shoulder, but I did catch a few of my coworkers staring when they thought I couldn’t see them. It baffled me that people who couldn't even do simple mathematics without errors were perceptive enough to notice such a small change. The working hours passed by very quickly, and my mind was even more occupied than usual, so I barely said more than a word to anyone as I fixed their calculations. Huh, Thahvzao tried to use decimal numbers, I thought as I looked over a sheet, seems she almost got it right, she just doesn't understand how zeros are used in digits beyond the first. When everyone finally left for dinner I headed back to the library, finding it just as I had left it.
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There has to be a way to speed this process up even more, I thought a few hours later, grabbing any book I could find with a title that suggested it had information on magic in it. I had already leafed through the rest of Magical Phenomena and found that the later chapters weren’t nearly as useful as the first few, as they delved much more into theory, philosophy, and primitive forms of scientific investigation. There was an interesting section where the author made the same observations about healing as I had, mainly that there were at least three types of healing, but aside from that the nature of the work appeared to be more academic. The eventual conclusions about magic, namely that whatever substance it was made of was also the one chiefly responsible for thought, were something I disagreed with entirely.
“Looking for something?” A familiar voice asked. I turned my head to see Aavspeyjh walk between the shelves to stand near me, looking at the same set of books I was. He looked as tired as he usually did, and his demeanor didn’t suggest that I was doing anything wrong, so I relaxed.
“Magical healing and limb regeneration,” I replied. “I need to find more information about it.”
“Your shoulder looks to be healing well,” Aavspeyjh noted. “It has been the talk of the servants, how you walked out of here yesterday with your shoulder back in place and a bleeding cut on your forehead that refused to heal. One of my chefs even said you devoured enough food for three men afterwards.”
“I was hungry after… experimenting,” I explained.
“I trust that none of my books were ruined in the process?” Aavspeyjh asked.
“They’re all fine,” I replied quickly. There was actually a small drop of blood in Magical Phenomena from an unrelated paper cut, but I decided to keep that fact quiet since it didn’t obscure any of the content.
“Would you like to tell me about the experiments you were performing?” Aavspeyjh asked, his tone implying the question was more of an order than a request. I sighed and stopped looking at book titles, turning to him and facing him fully. “I am not accusing you of doing anything wrong, just so you know,” he added. “I just want to know what actually happened yesterday, because it sounds a bit fantastical when the servants speak of it.”
“I suppose you have a right to know,” I said.
“That I do,” Aavspeyjh smiled. “I will promise you that, regardless of what you tell me, it will not impact your stay here, in duration or quality. You have been a model guest and employee so far, I would not dream of being so petty as to throw you out at this point even if you did do something wrong.”
As usual, Aavspeyjh was telling the truth, and I reasoned that sharing the information with him had a better chance of accelerating my research than hiding it, so I explained everything that happened. During my recounting of the story Aavspeyjh listened quietly while not displaying much in the way of emotion at all. Still, due to him being a human it was hard for Aavspeyjh to fully hide his surprise at certain parts, and I knew he was examining me for signs of deception since it was what I would have done. When I finished up the story, I pulled my collar aside to show him the shoulder’s skin, finally eliciting a proper facial reaction of surprise.
“That is certainly… impressive,” he admitted. “I want to be sure of this, so I will ask for clarification: You are telling me that you only just learned this information yesterday, and managed to apply it like that the same day to such a result? Even though I know you are likely a prodigy with magic, even by the standards of prodigies such a thing would be astounding.”
“I re-attached my arms once,” I said. “The book had a description of something similar to what I did back then and said it was similar to the regeneration technique, so I just tried to do exactly what I did then. As for the core manipulation, I had used it before, I just never knew what I was doing before reading the explanation of it.” I recalled when I had first felt a body-wide rush of pain in Suwlahtk; when I had deflected the darts while fighting the merchant and his guards. I made a force magic shield, just like Yaavtey, I thought, but I didn’t know anything about force magic. All I was thinking was “I wish I had armor”, and just like that I used magic instinctively, without so much as a single coherent visualization.
“And this theory about ‘magical saturation’ that you mentioned,” Aavspeyjh prompted.
“Have you not read Magical Phenomena?” I asked. As soon as I spoke the words, I realized that the question came out sounding less polite than I had hoped, as though I was accusing Aavspeyjh of willful ignorance. These people's manners are so complicated, I thought, it's a wonder they can even converse at times.
“I have not, unfortunately,” Aavspeyjh chuckled, forgiving my accidental rudeness. “My family simply has a history of collecting books, I rarely find the time to read them these days. Many of the books in here were not purchased by me, and as such, I am not entirely aware of the contents of these shelves. My personal favorites are-” he paused, looking at me with a strange expression. “Can I trust you to keep a secret for me?” he asked, cracking a half-smile. “You cannot tell a soul this information if I reveal it to you, understand?”
“Of course,” I replied. “I’d never reveal classified information.” What is he about to tell me? I wondered.
“My personal favorite books are in the romance section,” Aavspeyjh whispered, gesturing to the other side of the library. “I simply love the characters, and the stories remind me of when I was a young man. Sometimes I can spend a whole afternoon in here, hiding from my work and indulging in a good story of love and drama.” For a moment, I had no idea how to respond, and Aavspeyjh gave no indication of what he expected as he stared wistfully into the distance. Was that the secret? I scoffed quietly, putting everything together. “I suppose you do not share my tastes,” Aavspeyjh finally said in response to the noise. “You seem to be a more practical sort of man.”
“All fiction is useless to me, except for gathering cultural information,” I replied honestly. “My literary interests only extend to research, history, military tactics, and geography. That said, I understand that recreational reading exists, I simply don't participate in it.”
“I see,” Aavspeyjh replied, clearing his throat. “Well, we all have our quirks. Please, follow me to the chairs and explain this idea about ‘magical saturation’ on the way. I think you have sparked my interest.”