Rules of Biomancy: A LitRPG Healer Fantasy

When morning came, the pace of tasks didn’t stop. Elijah barely had time to rest between his actual work, the journey preparations, and the experiments with Aleksi.

Phoenix Drops helped keep his body moving while the sun rose above the horizon, but only so much that could be done for his dwindling patience for arrogant nobles. With just about all the dukes and important barons within the castle walls, each one had to be seen for any injuries or ailments they believed they had. Anything from toes hurting to a mild morning headache was the most severe wound anybody had attained in the past millennia and required Elijah's presence immediately.

Most of it could be thrown at his assistants after the initial observations, but all the morning hours still had to be wasted within the castle halls. The next few after that were in the gardens, using his newfound knowledge to further improve any of the plants and herbs that showed any signs of actual sickness or weakness.

That included a small study on the Phoenix Tree which proved that Mary’s claims had been true. Though it was a rather rare event, the branches would swing around during the early and late hours to catch the first and last rays of the sun. Elijah initially thought such sporadic movements were a waste of energy, and that there was no chance of any net gain, but that assumption was proved wrong.

Such efficient conversion to sugars.

All the plants inside the garden needed an hour or so to reach the peak effectiveness for photosynthesis, but the variant in front of him had grown beyond that scale. Through modifications it’d done with the spare Mana sent its way, the tree had modified the surface cells on the leaves to become powerhouses of conversion.

Another hour had been spent adjusting that particular plant’s position inside the Royal Garden to maximize the hours it could receive light from above, and his assistants were ordered to monitor the soil for nutrients in case the extra rays would increase its performance as much as Elijah hoped.

Not a good pace.

Taking care of alchemical provisions for the journey was incredibly fast. With the routine harvests, and the fast-growing army of variant plants inside the gardens, a multitude of dried leaves and herbs were ready for the taking. With all three of them inside the laboratory, burners at full capacity, and all the tables filled with glasses in use, they could sit back and let the mixtures cool before lunch arrived.

The rest of the day was spent down in the Dungeon together with a certain giant. With his newfound ability to consume the elixir without his heart exploding, they had both become curious about where the limit was drawn. Anything they’d tried through the night had caused no strain on the heart in the slightest, and cuts and deeper gashes took less than a second to disappear.

Even in the morning, when the elixir had stopped showing its presence on the skin, that ability to regenerate had still been present. It came with a surge of green veins around the throat and made the giant’s eyes glow brightly, but that was expected.

The rapid change in mental states? Less so.

‘Do you see why I brought him a change of clothes now?’ Elijah said as he and Dawn sat by one of the trees down in the dungeon, watching Aleksi rip the head off the fourth flying insect in a minute. Though that species had very little capacity for high-level logic, the shouting and laughing from the giant’s side seemingly made the rest wary of approaching.

Or maybe it was the fact that the man was drenched in green blood from head to toe.

If Elijah hadn’t been desensitized from such views decades ago, he was sure he’d be having second questions about being so close to the fighting.

“Oh, I love this!” Aleksi shouted from the top of his lungs, as the final bug fell to his ax. The flesh was smeared into every crevice of the stone floor, the stench of guts was enough to make lesser men lose their stomach contents, and Elijah knew for a fact that the giant would need to spend a few hours in the shower to have a chance of getting all the goop out of his hair and beard. “Never thought I would do something like this again.”

“Clear out an entire floor by your lonesome?” Elijah asked.

Minding the slippery ground, he moved over to the giant and put a hand on his chest. There was a brief moment where instincts demanded that he pull away, the heated blood and gore a warning sign to flee, but Elijah forced that emotion away.

Studying the heartbeat was much more fascinating regardless.

“I got the entire floor?” Aleksi said. The giant briefly tried to turn his entire body to look around, but Elijah forced him to keep the pose as he looked over the ticking organ inside. “Huh. Didn’t even notice.”

The trance state is still in effect then.

As expected, the heart was doing quite well. Response adjustments had caused it to adapt to current circumstances. Unlike before, where the elixir would spike the adrenaline to the maximum and make it beat at over 200 beats per minute, it now held steady at 150 outside of active combat. Still incredibly high for a person standing motionless, but Aleksi suffered no ill effects from it.

The opposite, in fact. The lowered heart rate allowed the elixir to have a more fine eye for detail, as it mended the most minute of micro-tears. Those small injuries within the flesh that would be overlooked during fights, ones that had little consequences in the short term, were now being dealt with.

From that trait alone, the life expectancy of the giant had just increased to a hundred.

Insanity.

“Anything you want to do before we go down to the foxes?” Aleksi asked, rolling his shoulders in anticipation of the next fight. Elijah just stared at the glowing eyes for a moment before sighing. “What? I can handle it, don’t you— Holy. Warn me next time, please.”

“If I warned you, I fear you might want to delay the pull-down,” Elijah replied, removing his hand from the giant’s chest while the man dealt with the sudden lucidity. “And I do need you to be able to think properly if I’m to alter your vital organs. It’s going to be bad if I’m stopped halfway.”

While finding a method to mostly nullify the effects of the elixir on the body near-instantly had been accidental, Elijah treasured it regardless. It was relatively simple as well. A sudden flash of Mana from a Biomancer through the nervous system would make the elixir panic and go into something close to hibernation.

Temporarily, to be clear. It wasn’t anywhere close to permanent. Going by what they’d learned from repeated experimentation, the effects would be back in full force the second Aleksi got hurt, had a sudden surge of adrenaline, or ingested any amount of additional elixir.

The discovery of the last trigger had not been fun.

“... Can’t say anything against that, I suppose,” Aleksi gave in, blinking a few times while the green light within the pupils faded away. “I thought the last change you made was meant to keep me a little more sane.”

“So did I,” Elijah countered, frowning as he returned to analyzing the internal structure of the larger man. “You were more lucid at the start, but that madness reached you in full force when you entered the fight.”

“So it’s linked to when my heart goes above 200?”

“Maybe. It doesn’t explain why you were able to keep yourself together two months ago,” he explained. There was no doubt that Aleksi had been able to reach above that 200 beats per minute threshold back then since he had both shown off incredible levels of fitness and had almost died from his heart refusing to lower itself down to manageable levels afterward. “And it’s not something unique about your original biology, since you were just as stupid while on high dosages during the war, but… shit, it was the damage keeping you sane, wasn’t it?”

The lower sections of the heart had been hit hardest by the long-term usage of elixir, but the upper internal mechanics had suffered as well. One of the more important parts was the cardiac branches of the vagus nerve. It was one of the ways for the heart to communicate directly with the brain and one of the ways for the organ to influence the production of a multitude of stimulants.

Among them were the psychoactive ones. It was in a very reduced form during normal operations, barely able to grant a person a small high when they were physically active, but the elixir had no qualms about overloading the nerves to the extremes. The green gold would push the limits, not just influencing the brain to send out the euphoriants but forcing them to stay there without end.

It wasn’t the only source of the overactive mental faculties, the elixir also went for the brain directly, but a large part of the berserker-like traits could be narrowed down to that single interaction.

And Elijah hadn’t known about it until that very instant when Breathe Life allowed him to rip away the curtains and see the truth.

“It’s a surprise you’ve survived this long,” Elijah commented, as he delved into the nerve and made a multitude of microscopic adjustments. The nervous system was a sensitive beast, and turning any dials had to be cross-checked with everything else before being allowed to settle. “Pure luck must’ve saved you from organ failure so many times.”

“Don’t sell yourself short now,” Aleksi fired back, giving Elijah a few pats on the back before stretching. “Those pills of yours kept me balancing on the edge. No doubt on what would’ve happened without them.”

“True,” he admitted. “The changes should be settled now. Take another sip.”

Aleksi didn’t hesitate to follow the request, pulling out a prepared dropper. It contained a twentieth of the usual dose, not close to enough for even the giant’s more receptive body to work with, but more than sufficient to reawaken what was already present.

There was no immediate tensing as the green veins sprang out again, and nor did that grin from before sprout. The eyes regained their glow, and the muscles increased in size, but there weren’t any obvious physiological traits.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“Confident that Castilla would’ve won the war if you were this powerful back then,” Aleksi replied. He smiled, but it didn’t hold that manic quality from before. “I haven’t been dumbed down to a degree where I can feel it. There’s still that rush of energy, but it feels… a little empty.”

“No sudden desire to crush skulls?”

“I think you’re heavily misunderstanding how the elixir affected us.”

Elijah silently stared at the former berserker, while the green veins traveled down the rest of the body. It was hard to see on the arms, though, as the limbs were still covered in blood and guts from the horde of monsters that had been ripped apart minutes before.

“... It was more like a push that was heavily rewarded than an outright desire,” Aleksi tried to use as a defense. “You got trained to like the violence. It didn’t make us violent to start with.”

“An amplification of chemical rewards from doing activities that involved high levels of adrenaline,” Elijah recited. Between the two of them, he was the one who had read the theory. “Let’s just see if that lack of bloodlust stays away while you’re tearing through some hundred foxes.”

As they found out an hour later, when another floor had been covered in the blood of the fallen, they found the answer to be a resounding ‘yes.’

With the improved mental clarity came a significant increase in Aleksi’s technique. The giant went from swinging his ax haphazardly and preferring to use his hands for anything that came too close, to skilfully avoiding such situations with precise footwork and devastating counter-attacks for any monster that stepped out of line.

There were still glints of enjoyment in those green eyes. Elijah could spot them when a battle came close to finishing, and Aleksi didn’t deny feeling the rush of winning a fight, but it wasn’t to a degree that it hindered the giant.

When the end came, he could still settle down and talk like usual. The man behind the muscle wasn’t lost to the haze.

“You think we can convince Alin to go back down to the floors lower down and let me have a try against one of the drakes?” Aleksi asked while wiping off the blood before it could think to dry. “Not now, of course, but after we’re done with this next trip.”

Elijah wished that the arrogance that made the giant want to do such a thing was because of the elixir, but, alas, he knew the truth. Aleksi was just like that when he got going.

“I don’t think you could win that match-up right now,” he mused. “But after the trip? Maybe.”

“What, you’re going to be making me stronger than this?”

“I’m hoping to make you more resilient,” Elijah corrected. “I’d prefer if you’re able to be entirely self-sustaining, so you can go without taking medication daily. If that means making you stronger… so be it.”

“Well… Not like I’m going to refuse the offer,” Aleksi supposed. A small chuckle did escape the man as Elijah handed him a new shirt, though. “At this point, I might as well ask if you could rewind the clock a little on yourself too. Those wrinkles of yours have grown lately.”

Feeling at his face, he had to acknowledge the giant was onto something.

But to rewind the clock? To revert the damage that the last decades of aging had caused? The concept was met with an internal bitterness. To side-step the consequences of a mortal shell, to let go of another piece of his humanity, was… It felt wrong.

Can I even do it?

The air thickened, as another presence joined them.

‘Maybe later. You’re too weak now.’

He blinked. That hadn’t been the expected answer. The Dungeon knew more than him regarding the complexities of the living, of both the organic and inorganic variety, but to know the threshold for making the flesh persist was… Elijah didn't know what to think.

‘Could you make a human younger?’

‘Yes,’ the Dungeon said. ‘But I won’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘I consume to grow. Why make food last?’

…

They left the Dungeon behind not long after. The night had reached the world at that time, the streets filled with darkness. Nobody around that could bother them, and they could return to the shop to sleep in peace.

The morning seemed to arrive before Elijah could close his eyes.

With a tired body, and some Phoenix Drops to keep him awake, they made their way to join the others at the castle. Grace was there, her bags in the second wagon next to their own, and in a mood that could only be rivaled by Aleksi.

“Did you get bigger?” Grace asked the giant after the farewells between the prince and the queen were made and they began to ride out of the city. “I feel like you’re… taller than usual.”

“My growth phase ended a few years ago, Grace,” Aleksi denied with a laugh. “Are you sure you didn’t get smaller?”

“As if!”

This new trip was perhaps shorter in the number of days it was meant to take, but the endless banter in the front made Elijah start to fear that it would feel much longer.

At least there were several projects to work on in the meantime.