Rules of Biomancy: A LitRPG Healer Fantasy

With a practiced hand, the outer layer of the Core was peeled off, made to float a small distance away from the internal parts. It was easy, though Elijah felt some stirring while looking at the growth under it.

The natural method he was using was never meant to be pretty, but seeing the random crystallization properly made his stomach churn. It wasn’t close to the fractal beauty that came from the Academy and nor was it akin to the natural world in its pattern. There were no patterns.

It was chaos.

Chaos that he would add onto soon. Before that, he had to fulfill the requirements that came from a technique known as ‘Layer-Based Growth,’ by making a new layer inside his Core. While the main parts were always chaos, two separate instances of it rarely worked well together. That was why he had to create a small distance between the two by manifesting a layer of pure Mana.

The requirements were simple. Not too thick or thin, as perfectly spherical as possible, and made with no Mana that hadn’t been sitting within his body for at least a day. Any outside influences on the layer could mean a possible imbalance, and nobody wanted that to happen.

There was some level of forgiveness at this point, a few flaws not being the end of the world, but enough imperfections meant that the increases wouldn’t be as high as they could’ve been.

For good reason, Elijah spent many minutes forming the shape needed, checking it over several times before putting it into place and willing it to crystalize without changing its form in the process. Though there were a few spots that carried small indentations, and though the malformations already present in the previous growth caused some empty space, the final shape wasn’t something he could be angry about.

From that point onwards, it was mostly the same as he had done in the past, though this time it was on a larger scale. With a sphere increasing in radius linearly, the volume inside grew cubically. That meant having to herd more ambient Mana into the space between the peeled-off surface of the Core and the layer created minutes ago.

It was a challenging endeavor, truthfully, as it required a long time with no loss of focus. The amounts that had to be contained made it so easy for chunks to slip out and cost him many minutes of work.

Yet he persisted, seconds growing into minutes and minutes growing into a full hour of diligence. By the time he could feel his mind starting to waver, it was done. After what Elijah had grown to think of as the easiest step of them all.

Making the ambient Mana trapped inside crystallize without forcing a certain shape. It had taken so long to do during the last attempt, but back then he hadn’t been sure of how to truly go about it. Now, with the hours of fiddling around already completed beforehand, it barely took any time at all, with instant steady progress.

Hmm.

It was interesting how the crystallization formed when compared with the first attempt. While this one had much larger strokes and formations that contained spirals, the other was much more wild with its geometric mess of clusters. Instead of anything in larger consistency, there were constant shifts between different basic shapes. Squares, triangles, and sharp edges with no real connections.

The difference between a river floor created over a thousand years ago and an area revealed by an earthquake. One was safe to the touch while the other would cut you up into a thousand pieces, yet both were equally valid.

I’d rather have the second one for everything, though.

Maybe it was some part of his mind that retained animalistic instincts, but Elijah was much more comfortable with the smoothed shapes. He knew when looking closer at it that it was still a hive of destructive potential, but the consistency made his brain see it as inherently superior regardless.

However, when he was halfway through the process, at most needing ten minutes more to finish, he could feel a disturbance to his Core. A subtle one that made the spiral waves shatter, breaking off into smaller versions as they continued to grow. Elijah didn’t interfere, knowing the rules that came with the usage of this technique, yet that feeling of wrongness was impossible to ignore.

And it only got worse when he realized it didn’t just come from his Core, but also the presence surrounding it.

‘You have changed more.’

The words made his inner world tremble, Elijah’s exposed core being infested with the observations and altering on their command. He couldn’t stop the influence and neither could he halt the process.

His heart quickened but he forced it down, refusing to leave his meditative state.

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Is that a problem?’

‘You have changed in how you change,’ the Dungeon said. The voice was perhaps meant to be quiet and analytical, but the sheer power that each word carried made it a battle to maintain his integrity. ‘Less human. More different. More natural.’

A flood of images was forced into Elijah, carrying more weight in memories than his entire lifespan had been able to create. So much knowledge, so much that he didn’t understand, and so much that shouldn’t have made sense. It was… different.

‘Different,’ he sent back, before he knew what he was doing. ‘Still human.’

‘Still human,’ the Dungeon agreed. ‘Useful human.’

Another flood of images, accompanied by the last screams of thousands of creatures. The demise of humans, of insects, of beasts, of abhorrent existences, of a dragon, and… was—

The two that he had found half-dead in the street were being pulled out of a black void, a hundred eyes staring down at them.

‘Remove,’ it ordered, but Elijah couldn’t understand what it meant. ‘They are not welcome here.’

‘Who?’ he questioned. ‘Those two?’

‘No,’ the Dungeon said. ‘The unwelcome. Remove them.’

A last round of images was put into one, showing an amalgamation of half-faces that Elijah couldn’t understand anything from. Only the purple robes, lit up by the glowing moss, could be identified.

The Royal Mages.

‘Yes. Be useful. Remove the unwelcome.’

He didn’t even need to send his thoughts out for the Dungeon to know of them, so omnipresent was the mind when inside the caverns. Elijah wasn’t a fan of that fact, wasn’t a fan of the power it left behind in its wake, but he could do nothing but return to the process that had already finished while he’d been distracted.

All of it was finished, actually. The Dungeon had somehow known what to do, allowing the crystallization to finish before wrapping it firmly and channeling Mana through until it was fully settled together with the rest of the Core.

Incredible.

“Hey, you in there?”

Elijah began to slowly open his eyes when a mild slap was felt on his cheek. He glared at the giant responsible but didn’t get any sympathy for his efforts.

“Been a little over three hours,” Aleksi informed him. “You said it would be around two. What’s happening?”

Three hours?

He could’ve sworn that the first had barely passed him by, when…

Right.

“The Dungeon decided to invade my mind for a while, as I was doing the sensitive part of the process,” Elijah explained, the giant not looking to take it well. “Sent me… images of some people it wanted gone. Thought that I would do it since I’d talked to it before.”

“Did it mess up your growing tricks?” Aleksi asked, which Elijah promised him it hadn’t. Not that he could tell, at least, though his body might have still been behind on the consequences that came from it. Time would tell. “That’s at least something. Who does it want gone, though?”

“The Royal Mages,” he said, trying to go through the images and scenes that had been forced into his head. Apparently, he’d spent nearly an hour just looking at it all already, yet the memories were fading faster than they could appear. Unlike normal echoes of his past, these had no ability to stick properly. “I… I think they were in here doing something? It kept showing me various beasts dying over and over again. Might’ve been a dragon at some point? Jack and Sasha were there at the end, at least.”

“Always fun to hear how much wrongness there is,” the giant commented, helping Elijah up before he could brush himself off. “No monsters have come around, but I’ve started hearing some scuttling further away. We’re leaving before they decide to pay us a visit.”

Elijah didn’t reject the idea, though he spent a moment opening up his Status. With the Dungeon working hard to refill his Core, the thick density of Mana working in his favor, he could already now see what the increase had allowed for.

Name: Elijah Caede

Affinity: Biomancy

Mana: 631

Spells:

[Accelerate Growth](Tier 1)

[Plant Bond](Tier 1)

[Animal Bond](Tier 2)

[???](Tier 2)

By the looks of it, he had gotten something just under a 20% increase in his capacity. Not a bad trade, though the downward trend from the 30% the last time had him a little worried. Would the next layer only provide 10%? Elijah wouldn’t know until he tried it, and, since that required a Mana density around him much higher than the one he sat in now, that wasn’t going to happen soon.

Wait, what is that?

He’d been ready to move away from the Status shown to him by the world until his eyes fell on the Spell section. Right below Animal Bond, the third and presumed last spell in his arsenal sat a new ability. It had no name, only question marks, yet the Tier was 2 just like the spell before it.

A byproduct of his conversation with the Dungeon? Perhaps, though that didn’t mean much when he couldn’t see the name of the spell. It didn’t innately call to him from within either, not allowing him to manifest whatever effects it could provide.

“Are you coming?” Aleksi asked, the giant already walking up the tunnel. Elijah put away the information for later, as he followed at as fast a pace as he could manage. Three hours of meditation had made his legs grow colder than he intended, and it took a sizable effort to follow along as required.

It took them nearly an hour to finally trek through the floors they’d been in before. The corpses seen on those layers before, and the piles they’d been stacked in, were all gone when they walked through. There were no traces of life present in the areas, other than the plants that kept swaying in sync with an invisible wind only they could feel.

Or maybe Elijah could feel it now as well, something pressing against his skin as he walked along. It was prickly, with a thousand eyes and a mind that never stopped focusing on him. It never stopped focusing on anything within its body.

The Dungeon.

Instinct made him shudder as they reached through the first caverns and onto the tunnel that they’d originally come through, just five minutes away from the surface once again. The eyes following them tried as best as they could, but the influence the Dungeon had over something so close to the top was negligible, changing the prickling sensation to one isolated behind the duo as eyes looked on from a distance.

“Are you cold?” Aleksi asked, seeing the shivers from Elijah as they became able to see the end of the tunnel. Night had come, and the cloud-free sky did not hold in the heat well, but the summer months were not as ruthless as those in winter. “It’s a little early for that.”

“Not cold,” Elijah assured the giant. “Just tired.”

“Of course,” came the response. “Shivering from tiredness. We’ve all been there.”

His blank stare made Aleksi laugh, the giant finding humor in the strangest of things. Maybe it was less for him as it was for the Dungeon Guards ahead, as heads turned and torches were put aside to welcome them back from their journey.

“I see you both made it out fine,” Fred commented, looking them up and down. “No bags this time?”

“Just a few smaller ones,” Elijah replied, pulling out the one with the fox teeth. Fred barely needed a look inside before grimacing, the cracked fangs not being a pretty sight. “We needed a few ingredients for my work starting tomorrow, and the prospect of waiting several days for somebody to fetch them for us didn’t seem… worth it.”

“Hands-on as always,” the guard joked, getting a chuckle out of the giant at least. “Olivia’s in the office over there. She said I had to direct you over there, as she has some forms you need to fill out. Seemed angry.”

“Olivia did mention it before we went in, thank you,” Elijah responded, him and Aleksi moving over.