Rules of Biomancy: A LitRPG Healer Fantasy

As luck would have it, nobody stopped them while walking back to the shop. Countless were sitting in the street, tattered clothing and scratches on their faces but alive regardless. Elijah doubted that many if any at all of the wounds were from monsters. He’d seen claw marks many times, and these looked closer to those gained from human nails.

Nobody raised their heads to look their way, even when covered in blood, which made it clear how most were dealing with what had occurred not many minutes before. Elijah didn’t interact with any of them either, he and Aleksi kept their eyes ahead until they reached the shop and entered, locking it when they were inside. This wasn’t the time to entertain customers.

“Oh, you both look like shit,” Jack commented when Elijah had given the green light to come out of hiding. He didn’t reject the idea, handing over the bags filled with food boxes before heading into the laboratory and grabbing healing paste and disinfectant. “What happened out there? People were screaming and running by the shop for twenty minutes straight.”

“Dungeon Break,” Aleksi explained, the giant settling on one of the larger chairs. The mutter of pain didn’t go unnoticed, Elijah throwing the man his own batch of healing paste to smear on. “People were gathered around the entrance when monsters started running up. Caused chaos on a scale I don’t think has happened in the city for a long time. I’m guessing a few hundred or so have died.”

Not a bad guess, with how things had turned out. Elijah could easily imagine that the streets people had filed into had effectively been death traps as well. The lack of free space to the sides, and the rush of everybody to move forward couldn’t have been forgiving of anybody not able to follow the pace.

“... Shit,” was the only thing that left the young man, as he leaned back and went silent. Reality seemed to have settled in for them. “Does the Dungeon Break happen often?”

“Happens every other year or so,” Elijah replied, grimacing as he cleaned his wound of whatever was left of the organic blade before he allowed it to heal properly. “Sometimes an extra year can go by without one. Sometimes it only takes six months before it happens again. Nobody can predict them.”

Except this time they had. Not to the point that they knew it would become a Dungeon Break, yet they knew that something strange was happening down in the depths. Grace had revealed as much when she’d visited that morning, and Rubeus had even talked about it the day before. Yet nothing had been done quickly enough, the Royal Mages not taking it as seriously as they should have.

Can’t blame them too much, at least.

For them, it was a curiosity and a chance that something deeper inside had changed around. Not that a release of monsters would incite enough panic to kill hundreds.

Elijah doubted they would be allowed to make this mistake again.

“How involved were you?” Sasha asked, making her presence known at the entrance to the kitchen. “Are there any risks of the house being searched?”

… That was a good question, one that Elijah wasn’t confident in answering concretely.

“Maybe,” he said, honestly considering the possibility of delivering the two to Cleo when night came around. If not for the fact that there were likely going to be countless guards and mages patrolling the area around the center of the city, an area they needed to cross to get to the brothel, he would’ve already suggested it himself. “Aleksi grew as soft as I was a few nights ago, and he and I went in to help some of the wounded. Nobody important was entirely lucid, so they hopefully won’t remember our faces, but Aleksi’s physical size will probably make people point our way if they decide to question others about us.”

When had they started acting so stupidly? Even when the giant had been at his weakest, having trouble looking even younger adults in the eyes, they had always been able to resist the pull of risking their own lives and the truth that was hidden behind it. Elijah knew it because the giant had told him every single time they had been forced to make that choice, and every time they had made the right choice.

Not the right choice. The safe choice.

Was there any right choice at all? It depended on how hard you’d hit your head before thinking about it. Elijah certainly hadn’t, though his strained Core was creating some sort of lightheadedness.

“Be ready to move, if we get visitors within a few hours,” Aleksi said. “With how strained they’re going to be while securing the city from threats, I can’t imagine they’ll send anyone to us during the night.”

“They likely don’t have any to spare, with how many Dungeon Guards were killed,” Elijah said, wondering how many of them he knew. He hadn’t gotten close enough to see their faces, but the familiar streaks of hair were something he kept dwelling on. The longer locks that Olivia possessed hadn’t been present at least, so he felt somewhat secure in her safety. “Rest easy until you can’t. There’s no reason to stress yourselves out over this.”

They accepted his words since there was nothing else that could be done before they moved back to their work. Though Sasha had shown an apparent lack of interest in her abilities the day before, the constant questions from Jack had forced her to either silence him or find the answers that he wanted. That it was easier to do the latter wasn’t as surprising to Elijah as he would’ve preferred.

First putting away the food for later properly, Aleksi went upstairs to rest while Elijah took a quick peek inside the laboratory again to see the progress on the Sundrop Flower. If he could even call it that anymore, with how it changed so much from the base, moving on from being an actual flower and delving into the realm of shapes that only expert gardeners could usually create.

The duck-like shape was coming along nicely, the adjustments to the neck and beak becoming very accurate while proper wings had been added to the main body. Before it had all been connected into one chunk, yet now Elijah was able to pull the wings a little to the sides before they moved back into their usual placement.

And the legs… they weren’t exactly as thin as the ones the actual bird possessed, but it was shockingly close. The texture looked eerily accurate as well, the smoothened stalks used imitating nature with a very high level of accuracy.

Elijah was about to pull over a chair to further inspect the properties of the fake feathers when the ‘head’ of the Sundrop Flower turned his way.

If not for his tired body stopping him, he would’ve jumped instead of limiting himself to a sharp intake of air while he stumbled back a few steps.

‘Can I have food now?’

It only got worse, as the entire body of the plant turned, the feet of the plant rising out of the earth to adjust its placement.

The plant, an organic construct based around taking nutrients from the earth with roots and using them to grow above the surface in a locked area around those roots, no longer had any obvious roots that it was connected to.

Elijah, for lack of a better description, blanked out at the sight.

‘Did I do it wrong? I can change it for food.’

Still the same Sundrop Flower with the same personality. Elijah knew that. It might’ve… changed to a degree not meant to be possible, going beyond his wildest expectations. He was having fun with it, experimenting and pressing the plant to change as an initial test. Anything serious, anything he actually wanted to do after, would be done with other plants. Elijah never thought it would actually succeed.

‘Should I change it back?’

The smacks heard as the flat and wide feet of the plant hit the earth to get closer to the edge made Elijah hone in his thoughts again. He needed to focus.

‘No, you shouldn’t,’ he replied, putting a hand to its main body again while sending it a good amount of the reserves he’d recovered while waiting around in the kitchen. It wasn’t everything he had to work with, but it was still significantly more than he’d given the plant at once in the past. ‘That’s everything I can give you right now, but I can give you more in a bit when I recover. I’m just surprised you were able to walk.’

‘You promised much food if I walked so I walk,’ the plant replied in its excited fashion, as the body shook the fake feathers around a little. Absorbing the Mana sent its way was not an easy task, but it was one that the construct was hellbent on completing above anything else.

‘Are those movements of yours intentional?’

The tail feathers, as he was starting to call them since they were just about identical in appearance to real ones, were wagging with each pulse of energy successfully absorbed. Though Elijah had never been an avid follower of animal husbandry and the knowledge required for such a position, he still knew the basics of how some animals showed emotion.

If it was a real duck, tail feathers wagging meant it was excited and happy, emotions that most definitely fit into the thoughts that Elijah was passively being fed by the Plant Bond, but the fact of the matter was that he had never intentionally sent over the behavioral characteristics of the animal to the Sundrop Flower. It was strange to see, along with the way that it moved its head around as it was looking at him through actual eyes.

Wait.

Did it have eyes that worked?

Elijah frowned as he looked closer at the head of the plant, seeing how the pupils glistened like the real ones would. And the fact it had eyelids that were actually used only made his heart rise even further up his throat.

‘I walked intentionally. You gave me food for walking,’ the plant said, confirming the wrong part.

‘No, I’m talking about your tail feathers,’ Elijah corrected, sending over the recent memory of those wagging while it was absorbing the energy. It still was doing as much, actually, the plant taking its time with the final cycles.

In reaction to the images sent, the head of the duck turned 180 degrees and became elongated so the plant’s eyes could see the wagging closely. Though Elijah thought he would be mildly disgusted by the sight, seeing it move around in a way very distinct from the real animal made him calm himself slightly. While it could mimic appearance, movement, and some characteristics well, it could still intentionally act outside of what the animal could do normally.

Like twisting and doubling the length of its neck so it could see the tail feathers twitching from more angles.

‘I am not doing this,’ the plant replied, the head retreating when the feathers wagged extra hard from the last pieces of Mana being cycled through its system and being fully absorbed. ‘Who is doing this?’

The head of the plant looked around the room, searching for anybody other than it and Elijah, while the earth beneath began to vibrate from something moving beneath. Putting a hand on the dirt, he was able to connect to the root system beneath.

As it turned out, the concept of roots hadn’t been entirely removed from the plant. It had just… somehow evolved to freely separate and reconnect with the root system, manipulating them like normally whenever it wished while also allowing for free movement at other times.

‘You are doing it yourself, though I believe it might be a subconscious reaction,’ Elijah explained.

‘I don’t like it. Waste of food. I want it to stop.’

The head of the plant shook from side to side, and its wings vibrated as they stretched out and flapped around a little.

Clear signs of irritation in ducks, Elijah noted. From the fact that the plant had only gotten more expressive the longer they talked, it was becoming clear to him that he was likely to blame for the actions he was seeing. Whether or not he intended for it, his mental concept of what the animal would behave like was influencing how the plant was acting.

Fascinating.

‘I can give you more food to help mitigate the waste,’ Elijah offered, making the duck instantly forget all the worries of the world as it stepped closer to him. It stood right at the edge of the table, where the dirt it was settled in ceased. That made a question appear in his mind. ‘Are you able to move away from your roots safely?’

‘If you give me food.’

‘But how much food would you need, and would it be enough in the long-term or would you have to return to or grow new roots to survive?’

‘... Food.’

Right. That was a little too complex a question for a plant that just recently figured out how to walk while somehow having control over roots that it wasn’t physically connected to constantly.

Elijah was surprised to see it could even make the roots move around while it wasn’t directly in contact with them. Though it was a very limited version of the spell, it was using Plant Bond to control its other half.

It did need to be relatively close to the roots, of course. When testing it out, the plant wasn’t able to control the roots when it sat on the other side of the table, and only when it was within a meter or so could it make the system beneath the earth move around. Distance also added increased costs, but Elijah helped mitigate that by supplying Mana to the plant as well.

“You… are very strange,” he muttered as he lifted the duck-shaped plant off the table and held it in his hands. When it quacked in his face, the sound only slightly off from the real animal, he barely blinked. “So, so strange.”

“Hey, do you have ducks? I swear I heard a— Oh, shit, you really have a duck in here,” Jack said, not sounding like he believed his own words. Still, the golden-feathered animal look-a-like with a flower hat couldn’t be rejected as not existing when it sat right there on the table. Especially not when it quacked again while looking up at Elijah, who sent it a smidge of Mana at the request. “Wait… Is that a duck?”

Was it a good thing they weren’t sure? Elijah just took it as a sign that experimentation really did help him progress.

“It’s not,” he said, as Jack closed in on the table and hunched over to get a closer look. Sasha had also appeared, looking at the fake animal from a safer distance. “I believe you’ve already met this flower. You commented on its size last night.”

“Huh? Oh, damn, okay,” Jack replied, the man’s brain needing a second to process that fact. “The little guy has shrunken down a little bit, I guess. You think he’ll mind if I touch him?”

‘Is that food?’ the plant in question asked, as a finger started to approach the head before Elijah had even answered. ‘Can I have it?’

‘Not food,’ he replied, happy for the ability to reply quickly through the Plant Bond. ‘If you don’t attack or act aggressive, I'll give you more Mana.’

That had the plant being as careful as possible while Jack touched its body. A careful poke at first, before a finger was run down the feathers.

“God, it’s so stupidly soft,” the man muttered, watching as the tail feathers wagged in reaction to Elijah sending over a dose of Mana. “He likes being pampered! That’s so cute!”

“Right,” Elijah said, not feeling like ruining the excitement felt by the man. “Was there something else you wanted to say?”

After another round of petting the so-called ‘duck,’ it was revealed there was indeed news with their own progress. Sasha had figured out she could only take hits up to a certain strength before not everything was absorbed, and that there was also an upper limit for how much kinetic energy she could store inside her before she felt like she was being stretched from the inside.

The opposite problem from the one Mages usually suffered from, but knowing the limit wasn’t bad at all. And that discovery had led them to another discovery while resting.

“She made the room colder,” the young man announced, Sasha confirming the claim. “She just raised her hand and there came this strong wind for a second and then it just felt like I needed a jacket to not freeze. It got back to a normal temperature quickly, but it’s still incredible.”

It couldn’t be done consistently like with the kinetic absorption, though, so that was currently a one-time occurrence. Hopefully she could learn to do it more consistently soon, as Elijah could see the potential in such an ability. He certainly wouldn’t mind somebody close to him being able to produce a flash of heat that didn’t contain any contaminants.

But, of course, Sasha wasn’t the only one who had shown progress with their abilities. The hours that Elijah had spent with Jack in the morning hours had proven themselves to be rather worthwhile. There hadn’t been anything serious in terms of progress during their time together, but the multiple hours of steady attempts afterward had allowed an incredible discovery.

“It’s not just me having to think about the texture, how it feels in my hand, and the memory of my experience with them while also pulling on my Mana,” Jack explained as he walked over and grabbed the cup of now-dry pollen used previously. Elijah had to admit he hadn’t expected to hear that.

The usual method for making one’s ability activate at the beginning was to attach it to the experience of using it. For Grace, during her youth, she used the memory of the songbirds on the roofs of the houses and that strategy worked flawlessly. But here it hadn’t, which had made Elijah believe it was merely a lack of mental focus. The aspect of using Mana and directing it within one’s body had already been honed by the young man, but still, he hadn’t been able to manifest the ability to transmute consistently.

“What was it you needed to change then?” Elijah asked when Jack put a few grams of the powder into the palm of his hand. In mere seconds, the silver aura that surrounded the man pulled on the Core within, and the pollen was transformed into the black powder that he was so fond of. “It’s very impressive work.”

No reason to waste it either.

“Thank you,” Jack replied, accepting the small flask that he could put the black powder inside and closing it off with a cap. “The way to fix the mental block was to stop trying to focus on the personal aspect of the memory.”

“In what way?”

“I had to be less emotional and more technical,” he continued. “Thinking about what it could do, how I had used it in the past, did nothing, but when I started thinking about the individual components it was made of, becoming as detailed as possible about every part’s composition, the Mana just began to flow.”

So the secret was a critical eye?

Elijah had to admit he was a little jealous of that, though he also supposed that working with a plant that could converse, misunderstand, and have independent thought had allowed him to progress in a manner that he otherwise wouldn’t have been able to. It was simply the pros and cons, one Affinity favoring detail to the extreme while the other allowed much to be controlled by whatever filled in the blanks.

“The more I’m able to break everything down in my head, the more I can create at the same price,” Jack added. “It’s amazing, though the amounts are still extremely limited. If I want to make any sizable amounts of this stuff, it’s gonna take days.”

“How lucky that you indeed have several days to work with,” Elijah replied sarcastically. It was a nice discovery, but the way to learn more about it was to continue with the experimentation. When observing the process a few more times, he gave a few pointers on how to further decrease the costs of transferring the Mana, but it was otherwise something the man needed to study on his own.

It was the same story for Sasha, who simply followed to observe the man’s attempts and left Elijah in the laboratory. Not that he complained about that fact, more than happy to have some more time to work.

An hour was spent preparing some concoctions and healing pastes in the event they would be needed before he turned to a certain book.

He was reaching the point where it wouldn’t hurt to look into growing his Core, and the monsters he had helped kill still exerted much pressure. Enough that it could even simulate the inside of the Dungeon to some degree.

So, without the need to do much else for a few hours, he sat down to read the tome from beginning to end.