Rules of Biomancy: A LitRPG Healer Fantasy

Infected by the good mood that the Royal Mage had protruded through their conversation, Elijah allowed a small laugh for himself before he turned around and went into the kitchen again. The front door had been locked once more, the curtains were closed to stop prying eyes, and now he just needed to wait a little.

Ten minutes passed, no signs of the two Mages returning came, and the kitchen was entirely cleaned up once again. Elijah took that as a sign that they were in the clear once again.

Time to let them out then.

Going over to the end of the hallway, he moved the carpet out of the way before opening up the floor hatch. The smell of dirt and grime met his nose instantly, much to his displeasure, but he tried not to show it in his tone.

“It’s safe to come up now,” he announced, idly wondering if Aleksi would have bought enough for dinner for four tonight, before… he noticed something. Or, actually, it was the lack of something that began to worry him. There was no reply to his words. No steps, no voices, no breathing. “You two dead down there?”

No reply, just as before. A worrying sign that had him climb down and check with his own eyes. Yet he found nothing, no soul in sight, and only the footprints to show proof of them ever being down here.

No, there’s more.

The boxes he’d used to fill up herbs back in the day had been stacked on top of each other next to the window. The fact that several more had been moved there since last he was here worried him.

And the hand and footprints on the wall under it… Elijah’s worry only grew as he saw how the window wasn’t technically closed, the inner lock not turned. It had been pushed in from the outside to hide the truth.

Don’t tell me.

His eyes darkened.

Since there were no signs of struggle, and since the boxes had been stacked with care not to fall over, he knew it hadn’t been a hasty escape out through the window. It had been calculated, done with minimal amounts of sound, and with the full knowledge of what they were doing. They’d left, with no warning and little to no tools they could use to hide outside of the house.

It was at the level of stupidity that Elijah had to wonder what he was missing. Jack might’ve done foolish things, but that in areas outside of his survival, and Sasha… even if he knew little about her, she seemed calculating enough to know the risks that would come from going outside.

She had even questioned his logic and accepted his reasoning for why they needed to hide here.

And now they were both gone out of the window. Likely several hours ago, if the half-misplaced dust prints were to be taken into consideration. Even with the lack of wind down here, the odd change in the house’s structure still allowed enough vibration for those individual bits of dirt and sand to move and cover their prints a little.

Several hours’ headstart before their escape has been discovered…

Elijah just sighed, closing the window properly, putting on the traps and tripwires again, before hanging the cloth back up to stop any light from entering freely. He knew that his chances of finding them again were non-existent now. Too many places to hide in the city, and so little time to work with on his end. Maybe if he’d been younger and had more hands to help, but this was it.

Going back up to the ground floor, he closed the hatch and put the carpet back on top, forgetting about that part of the house yet again. It wasn’t as if it would be needed anymore.

If they’re caught, what are the chances that they’ll be tortured to reveal where they were while on the run?

Unlikely, though captors would likely have some sort of method to get the truth out anyway. Magic and several potions existed for that sole purpose, and, though both were outlawed and strictly forbidden, that likely wasn’t a cause for concern for whoever had their nails in the two young adults.

Perhaps it was best to make another visit to Cleo, then, as Elijah couldn’t willingly sit by and wait for his own eventual capture. It would be awful to leave so much memorabilia and equipment here behind, but it would be for the better. Aleksi needed him to not keel over, and Elijah preferred breathing over having his head cut from his body.

The villages to the south are meant to be lovely this year.

And with his newly regained abilities, it wasn’t like—

The lock on the back door clicked, making him pause in his spiraling thoughts, heavy footsteps coming a second later. The giant himself, with what sounded like several bags rapidly hit the ground.

“Elijah, I’m back with some meat!” Aleksi announced, making him frown as the thuds continued to be heard consistently. It took an embarrassing three seconds more before he realized they were footsteps that just seemed so light when compared to the giant’s. “You won’t believe where I found them.”

He went into the hallway again, anger bubbling within until he saw the state of the trio. Aleksi looked about as expected after a day at the smithy, with black patches just about everywhere along with a few marks that came from working with the heated metal, but the two others.

“What, in the name of Tura, have you done?” he muttered as the swollen faces got closer. Jack was walking with a limp as well, being supported by Aleksi as Elijah looked them over. The bruising only looked worse when properly lit up. “There’s some leftover pastes on the top of the first shelf to the left in the lab.”

Aleksi nodded, making Sasha take over as the giant headed in to grab it. In the meanwhile, the other three moved into the kitchen to settle on the chairs. Elijah would’ve preferred the room upstairs, where it was easier to clean up blood stains and whatever else, but he didn’t trust dragging the man upstairs at the moment.

“I can see the mark of a knuckle,” he commented. Jack tried to reply, but a swollen lip made his words impossible to understand. “Just nod instead of talking. Easier for both of us.”

He nodded.

“Is it the same story you’ve got?” Elijah asked Sasha, who just nodded. Her own bruising was a little higher up, centered more around the left eye and what was underneath rather than the lower half of the face. It still looked painful, though, with how she could only look at him with the right eye, the other too swollen to even open up. “Are there any other injuries on either of you I should be worried about?”

“She gone hip with pife,” Jack commented, in the most understandable manner known to man. Elijah just looked at the man for a moment before turning to the woman for guidance.

“I was hit on the arm with a metal pipe,” Sasha said calmly. Very calm for somebody who supposedly had a very serious injury to their arm. “Didn’t hurt.”

“Show me,” Elijah ordered, to which she rolled up her sleeve in the impact area. Other than a mild tinge of red that just as well could’ve been due to irritation with the fabric, there was nothing at all. “Are you sure it was metal?”

“Gave off the right clang when it hit the ground, and it had the weight of metal when I picked it up,” Sasha replied, to which Elijah gave a small grunt. It didn’t make much sense, but the fact that there wasn’t any immediate damage meant he couldn’t care less at the moment. No external or internal bleeding meant that the obvious and actual wounds could be treated first.

“One packet of paste,” Aleksi announced as he entered the kitchen and sat down beside Elijah. It was handed over and a good chunk was swiftly applied to Jack’s face. “You’re lucky, kid. If he didn’t have his powers back, you’d be sitting on that chair for the next six hours waiting for the effects to work.”

“Instead, we only have to survive this treatment for a minute or so,” Elijah continued on the giant’s behalf. With a small bit of adjusting, he got both hands on Jack’s head to keep it in place. “You’re going to have flashes of extreme discomfort along with short bursts of pain, as everything settles back into place. The face has too many muscles and delicate tissues to heal fast without some cost, so deal with it while I work.”

The man barely got to widen his eyes before he started working his magic.

Channeling of [Plant Bond] has been activated! Current cost: 2MP/sec

Even without much practice, the basic tricks that Rubeus had given him about efficiency were already showing stellar results. Using this particular Spell usually came with double the cost with the same level of effectiveness.

And here Elijah thought he had it all figured out.

“Hurs,” Jack complained, without the ability to pronounce a single word right. Elijah just shushed him, as moving around would just lengthen the process. Maybe even damage something more than it already was.

An audible snapping sound came a moment later, the swelling on the face of the man evening out in a disgusting fashion before rapidly reducing in size and disappearing entirely. Not that it was over at that point, the spread of blue coloring coming next. It reached as far as the top of the neck and the left eye before finally stopping and reducing in strength until everything had returned to its natural coloring.

To be sure, however, he gave it another five seconds before finally relenting, releasing his iron grip on the man’s head and letting Jack lean back in his seat.

“Fuck, that hurt so much more than getting punched,” came the instant complaining. Elijah just shook his head at the ungratefulness. He’d seen kids handle this better than the man before him. “Why does it gotta be so painful? Don’t you have some magical plant that could’ve gotten rid of that?”

“I do, but the concoction required to have your facial muscles sedated would’ve made you stupid for the rest of the day,” Elijah replied. Although… he supposed there could be a way to make the effects much more short-lived. Something for another time. “And the pain is a side-effect of having several weeks' worth of healing compressed into a single minute. If you’d prefer the three weeks of not being able to talk, let me know next time.”

That made the man quiet down, though there was still one part that needed to be considered as well.

“Was it a kick that messed up your leg?” Elijah asked, glancing at the limb. Even when sitting on the chair, it sat flat while the other continually tapped the floor in a rapid rhythm. An inpatient soul or whatever they called it. “Or a fall?”

“... I hit somebody while putting my entire weight on the thing,” Jack replied, which caused Elijah to frown. That wasn’t the answer he’d expected, and neither was the awkward chuckle that left the man a second later. “It’s, ah, an old injury of mine. When I put pressure on it the wrong way, the nerves have a habit of making me feel like there’s hellfire spreading through the leg. Not fun, I’ll tell you that, but it’ll pass before morning.”

An old injury.

That explained the multitude of strange scars that Elijah had seen while going over the two’s injuries while they’d been unconscious. Since the leg hadn’t been actively bleeding back then, he hadn’t given it a second thought, but now things were making a little more sense.

“Did it heal wrong after breaking?” he questioned, getting the man to roll up the pant leg so he could see better. Even just feeling with his fingers, he could tell how some sections of the muscles were tensed up as much as possible along with smaller parts that kept cramping now and then.

“I’m pretty sure the bone didn’t break, so no,” Jack answered. “It was an explosive that detonated near me. Shot too many metal fragments through my leg. Most of it was removed, but the muscle and nerves that it had settled in were messed up from it all.”

How painful.

Elijah was confident in saying that the man would’ve likely died of blood loss long before any person in the city would have been able to treat him without the use of magic. That the people in the other world had saved his life without removing the limb entirely was a true wonder.

“This is a bit of a reach, but you think you might be able to fix this mess?” Jack tried, to which Elijah had to shake his head. “Eh, worth a try.”

“If it didn’t heal naturally, it would require more finesse than what I have to offer. Maybe with some more powerful plants from further down in the dungeon, but their price tag is higher than what this house is worth in its entirety,” Elijah explained, debating the alternative choices. He needed the man undistracted from the pain for the next few days. “But I can help you mitigate it a little. Wait here.”

A few minutes were spent pursuing his leftover products in his laboratory. Most of his finished works were out in the shop to be sold, but the stronger, more expensive variants were kept outside the reach of grabby hands.

The vials filled with an unnaturally swirling liquid were one of those.

“Uhm, what’s that exactly?” Jack asked, sounding worried as Elijah put on a pair of gloves for his own safety. He’d rather not get this on his fingers.

“Something akin to a sedative,” Elijah explained as he opened the vial. As soon as the contents had contact with the open air, it began to dissipate, but he worked faster to prevent that issue. Within mere seconds, he’d already coated most of the leg with the concoction, eliciting a long hiss from the owner of the limb. “It deadens pain signals from your leg while allowing you to retain most of your maneuverability.”

“Sounds… very dangerous,” the man commented in between deep breaths.

“It is. Stopping your body from warning you about injuries usually leads to death because of negligence,” Elijah confirmed. “But being able to keep on moving through extreme waves of pain can mean the difference between a massive victory and a pitiful death, though the former usually also end up with the berserkers that consumed this dying of their wounds later.”

“Nice to know.”

“It’s not a permanent solution, but it’ll let you walk normally for a few days,” he continued. “Don’t take that as an invitation to run around as if it wasn’t already wounded, don’t put your entire weight on it regularly, and you should be fine otherwise.”

“I… thank you,” Jack said after a moment of stunned silence as he could rise from the chair and shift his weight between both legs without crumpling. “There’s still a slight sting but this is better than anything the other doctors got me.”

For good reason.

“Just sit on that chair and start explaining why you decided to leave the basement while I treat the other idiot in the room,” Elijah ordered, Jack obliged as he moved to the other side of Aleksi while Sasha settled herself in the chair this time.

“Not sure I should be the one to do that since I was more of a follower than a leader with this,” Jack confessed while Elijah repeated his previous work. The golden paste was smeared onto the affected area, his hands found themselves in an optimal position, and he began to channel the Plant Bond to speed up the effects by a thousandfold. In clear opposition to how Jack had reacted to the experience, however, Sasha’s gaze barely wavered. “We, uh… actually, I don’t know how to explain it. The whole plan just kinda manifested when we got down to the basement and… yeah.”

Slightly distracted by guiding the Mana to take effect through the muscle tissue, Elijah couldn’t understand just what he meant by that. Just what exactly did the basement contain that made them decide running was a better choice than staying?

“Oh, I think I got it,” Aleksi blurted out, accompanied by a short laugh. “I’m guessing you two noticed the graves?”

The magical light in the back of Elijah’s head finally turned on, his mind bringing the memory of burying those broken corpses. That had certainly been a while ago, to the point he’d almost forgotten entirely.

“Yeah…” Jack confirmed, wariness clear in his body language. Even when he’d just been granted the ability to walk normally for a few days, there was still so little trust. “Was it, like, justified?”

“Depends on how you look at it,” Aleksi vaguely replied. “The group that tried to mug you today wasn’t too different from the ones that tried to attack me four years ago. I was out a little later than normal, had a few drinks, and they thought that I was old enough to make my reputation an act and nothing more.”

It was all coming back to him now. The state that those bodies had been in… It was a testament to Aleksi’s brutal efficiency that none of the six had been able to flee or make enough noise to be noticed.

“They wanted my coin and didn’t care if I had to die to make that happen,” the giant continued, picking up a knife from one of the nearby shelves. An old one, with a half-broken handle and a few chipped-off spots on the edge. “A cut on my arm revealed a little too much, the darkness made my green eyes obvious, and I… had to silence them or know that Elijah and I would be dead before morning by the hands of royal guards. Not a hard choice to make, when I was already planning on beating them to within an inch of their life for wanting to prey on the old.”

They’d barely needed to cut up the bodies since so many parts had been ripped off during the slaughter.

“Why did you get green eyes when you were cut?” Sasha asked the moment that Elijah removed his hands from her face.

“Enhancing elixirs from when I fought as a berserker, provided by the finest of alchemists,” Aleksi replied in a formal tone, making Elijah roll his eyes. The giant needed to choose the time for theatrics better. “I’m the reason he knew that concoction would dull the pain, to begin with. Me and the other idiots were covering ourselves with it alongside that green booze so we could get pelted with hits without blinking. It all added up to make us stronger, faster, and deadlier than ever, but it also gave those who lived enough the long-lasting side-effect of glowing eyes whenever we get injured or strain ourselves too much. Not to the same level as when we were still drinking that elixir, but enough that those who know the stories can recognize it instantly.”

Stories made them seem so much less real than they were. Those who survived the attacks on their villages could barely talk of what they’d seen. Ruthless giants with green veins protruding out of every part of their bodies, their laughter, their cheering, their taunting words, and their complete disregard for anything related to empathy. It haunted so many, and that emotion was carried through to the next generations.

When somebody fitting the description appeared, it only made sense that those six had turned to try and flee. It also made sense why Aleksi was so effective at making sure they could never say a word about it to anyone.

“Killing people for your own survival,” Sasha concluded. While Jack looked rather disturbed by what they’d been told, she was none the worse for wear, going as far as to show Elijah a few scrapes she’d gotten that he could deal with as well. “Did you do it often?”

“Not counting those in battle with the military group we were in, we’ve… reached a count of nearly a hundred,” Aleksi answered after some mental counting. “Most of them bandits and outlaws trying to benefit from people fleeing war back in the day, but there have been times in the early days when we had to kill to keep our secrets intact. We weren’t as careful back then. Elijah kept his emblem for the first three years. Deadly memorabilia if found, I’ll tell you that.”

It was more the seeds hidden within that were important to Elijah, but he didn’t offer to correct the giant. Neither did he add that the purple flower that he meticulously kept alive in those days would have earned them both a death sentence if discovered by anybody knowledgeable about its true nature.

“Hmm,” Sasha voiced, saying nothing as Elijah inspected the red patches of skin. Everything was healed as well as it could be, the final signs or irritation simply needing time to fade. “If it’s murder for the sake of preservation, I can’t be one to judge. Staying here would’ve been the better choice.”

Was that an apology for possibly ruining Elijah and Aleksi’s cover that they’d spent decades making? If so, it was terrible.

“We all make mistakes. If you learn from them, it’s fine,” Aleksi supposed, not having the same opinion of her words. “Just don’t screw up the same way twice.”

The implication was clear.

“We won’t. I’ve got enough of that fantastical adventure in me for a long time,” Jack half-joked, before sitting upright in the chair. “And we got one thing out of it! Sasha awakened!”

“I believe you’re wrong on that front,” Elijah corrected, letting Mana travel to his eyes to better inspect Sasha one more time. His passive senses had seen nothing magical within her, and the enhanced version said much of the same. Even the golden particles from the healing paste could barely be seen. “I can’t see any innate Magical Energy in her.”

“Then you must be missing it because she’s working with something magical,” Jack pressed on, not faltering by the firm rejection. “When we were fighting, and Sasha was distracted for a second, one of the guys picked up a metal pipe and swung it at her. She defended with her arm, the thing was big enough that it should’ve broken bone, yet it just instantly stopped once it made contact with her skin. Didn't even have enough pressure to dent the surface.”

Elijah was more than ready to diagnose a mild concussion if not for the fact that Sasha had said something akin to it several minutes before. Two dazed people rarely agreed on a lot, so this was a cause for concern.

Yet he could still see nothing! Since Elijah was rather confident that the woman hadn’t figured out how to seal her Core after less than a day of allegedly awakening, there was little chance it was just hiding in plain sight.

Right?

There’s nothing here.

…

A lot of nothing, frankly. A bigger lack of ambient energies than most sterile environments had been able to produce even. Elijah had seen it the day before, coughing it up as a side-effect of world-hopping, but maybe there was more to this.

“You were able to make the world give you your Status, I believe?” he asked, to which she nodded. “Would you mind trying it again to see if anything’s changed since yesterday?”

As it turned out, a change had indeed occurred. Though it took several minutes for her to reach within and send the request to the world, the results finally returned.

“I am an Absorber,” Sasha read aloud. “My Mana still says minus one, if that makes a difference.”

Elijah looked over at Aleksi who just shrugged. An Affinity that didn’t fit the usual nomenclature was very strange. That it wasn’t one of the dozen commonly known for that attribute was even stranger.

“I’m assuming you still have a Spell already learned?” he asked. With the world giving an impossible answer in regards to Mana, it wasn’t a given that it would work right in other aspects.

The world making mistakes… What am I even thinking?

“I have two,” Sasha said. “The first is called Active Absorption and the other is called Active Desorption. I take it they mean this in a literal sense?”

“You absorbed the blow, so it must,” Jack replied, giving as good an answer as the other two could provide. “Wait. Is it a thing where it absorbed the swing as kinetic energy or just like… energy in general? You have to be able to send out something at least.”

Sasha hummed, looking at her hands for a moment. Elijah didn’t comment, even as he saw the nothingness inside the woman starting to swirl. Before, he had taken the sight as a clear sign of her having no magical abilities, but it turned out that was his mistake. It wasn’t the blackness that came from Mana.

It was simply that her Affinity was characterized by the absence of all color. An intriguing thing, one that he was sure would make Rubeus and Grace go wild if they saw it.

Not that they ever would, if he had something to say about it.

We’ve risked too much already. Quieting down is the only viable option now.

That was internal agreement, one that none of the others had understood as Sasha put her hand on the kitchen table and flexed her arm. A day ago, it would’ve likely done nothing. Now, it was the only warning to the splinters that flew from the impact.

As if Aleksi himself had become mad and delivered a punch, Sasha’s arm went halfway through the table. Wood that had been maintained for decades, with the strength to last many decades more, shattered at her mere touch.

…

“So it just keeps the kinetic energy as it is,” Jack concluded as everybody else was frozen in place. “Good to know?”

“Yes,” Sasha said with an unreasonable amount of nonchalance. “That swing would have certainly broken my arm.”

Nobody refuted her claim. Jack was too excited for such a thing, Aleksi was trying to save the boiling water which had gotten wood chunks thrown in, and Elijah was busy trying to figure out how to repair the new hole in the table.

It has been some years since we used tablecloths.

The damage was given a small layer of adhesive to put the larger chunks before the cloth was put on it. It looked natural enough to avoid questioning, so fixing it properly was moved to another time.

For now, there were other matters to worry about.

“If you want to test the limits of your abilities, I request you do it where you won’t destroy anything valuable or get noticed by curious minds,” Elijah requested, already hearing Jack’s whispers about using the basement. Good that they did, since they needed to stay down there until Grace had come by one final time today. “Maybe see if you can absorb more than just kinetic energy. Sunlight, heat, anything you can think of. And if you can hold more than one type at a time. The spells you have are only Tier 1, so there’s likely some limit in place, but it wouldn’t hurt to experiment.”

“That’s awfully open-ended compared to your usual warnings about messing around,” Aleksi pointed out as he cut some vegetables for later. While Elijah would help with the last parts, tonight’s duty fell onto the shoulders of the giant.

“The Royal Mage that came by today gave advice similar to that,” Elijah explained, Aleksi giving a hum in reply. He’d already retold much of the day’s experience, including the conversation with Rubeus and the trip to Cleo. The giant hadn’t been against visiting the latter again whenever it was possible. “If you don’t feel a sense of dread, or it goes against common logic, broadening your understanding of your abilities could benefit us in the long run.”

“And that trick with your Core wouldn’t hurt to try out either, whenever Grace arrives with that book,” Aleksi added, to which Elijah agreed. “Anyway, I’ll need your help with this in about an hour. If you want to take care of that overgrown Sundrop Flower you’ve got going on in the meantime, I wouldn’t be against it.”

Right.

Elijah had happily forgotten about that plant. It had been a somewhat normal size this morning, growing slightly larger as he experimented with it, but his absence hadn’t deterred it from slowing down. While Jack and Sarah had been cooped up in the laboratory, it had reached head height. In the hours since, it had… gone slightly beyond that.