Rules of Biomancy: A LitRPG Healer Fantasy

“Sorry I’m late!” somebody exclaimed, slamming the door opening and making Elijah flinch to the point he almost dropped his favorite set of beakers. Eyes narrowed at the man responsible. “Oh, sorry, sir, I forgot you had already arrived.”

“A pleasure,” Elijah replied dryly, taking a moment to place the last of the glasses inside the right space on the shelves before closing them and shaking the last assistant's hand. “Oscar, I believe?”

“Oscar Bardon, to be precise,” Oscar confirmed, Elijah noting the firm grip and lack of shakiness even when he had run for quite a while to get here. Not a bad gift to have in this field. “And you’re Elijah Caede, if I remember right?”

He took a second to study the man. They were in their late twenties to early thirties when going by their face alone. Though there wasn’t much in the way of a beard, the blonde locks went down to his shoulders.

That he had to slightly look up to see their face was going to get old quickly, wasn’t it?

“I am,” Elijah finally replied. Without looking directly at either of them, as he picked up the documents from the nearby table, he could already feel the eyes of the assistants meeting. Hopefully, this wouldn't be too complicated. “With both of you here, I suppose some more proper introductions are in order. Other than your names, I haven’t been told much regarding the both of you, and I assume that the same goes for what you’ve been told about me.”

“We… other than your name, which was quickly mentioned last night, we don’t know a thing about you, no,” Mary said, as the three settled down at one of the tables. Elijah noted the chairs were surprisingly comfortable. “Should we start?”

“If you would, please.”

“Then we can do as much,” she continued. “I was brought in by Reynold seven years ago after he found me working in a herbalist store close by the upper district. Not to say I was given a wage fitting that area, which was why I jumped on the offer of actually learning the craft more in-depth than just ‘what can I sell this for?’ Turns out he’d seen some potential in me, and I’ve been here learning ever since that point.”

“Not too different a story for me, though I was recruited from the royal kitchens,” Oscar offered when Mary signaled for him to continue his side. “I, uh… borrowed a few ingredients from the shelves there without asking. Would’ve gotten in a lot of trouble, but being able to make a decent batch of psychoactive leaves with nothing but a soup cauldron, a fire, and a few towels to dry with apparently impressed Reynold enough for him to rescue me and put me under his wing.”

Elijah had to admit that he was impressed by that accomplishment as well. It was more than possible to do as much only using such tools, but the precise measuring required to have a stable final product usually meant using something more precise than one’s own eyes and trust in one’s sense of time and gauging of temperature.

“Interesting stories,” he commented, wondering how his own was going to be told. He briefly considered fishing out one of the seeds in his inner pockets to repeat his previous stunts of growing a flower in his hand, but he supposed that he could do better nowadays. And since there was little chance of Dawn always being hidden away when his assistants were present. “My own isn’t nearly as glamorous. I was born in one of the villages a month’s travel away. Learned the craft of herbology and alchemy there from the village’s healer until it was struck by the war. The next few decades were purely self-teaching, with the rare book here and there to supplement what I’d already known. There is one facet that has helped me for a long time, that I figured you might as well know about from the start.”

He put his right hand on the table, palm facing up while the other two looked on curiously.

‘Out with you, Dawn.’

‘Finally!’ came the delighted shriek in response, the warmth of energy swelling up in his hand rapidly. A brief golden light could be seen coming from under the skin before it flashed right above, all three blinking away the spots before they could see a golden duck standing on his palm. ‘Did I make it bright enough?’

‘You can control the brightness when you come out?’

‘Yes!’

‘Judging by their faces, then, I think you did a fantastic job,’ he said, holding back a smirk at the clear bafflement from the two.

“To be clear, I’m a Biomancer,” Elijah said as the duck jumped off his palm and walked around the table, looking down at the edge before deciding to stay around the middle. Both assistants had their eyes locked on her. “Not too powerful, I warn. My abilities are nowhere near whatever you will see in the Academy. But I am nonetheless able to use these abilities to enhance and accelerate my work with plants, building upon my skills in the craft to a high degree.”

“That’s a duck,” Oscar replied bluntly, seeming to have ignored Elijah’s explanation of his abilities in favor of defaulting to basic words.

“It’s not a duck,” Mary corrected. “Look at the neck, where the feathers are thin. There’s no skin under it.”

Elijah inspected the area and pointed out himself, finding her words to be true. Though he had missed it the past hundreds of times that he had looked Dwan over, she did have a mild bald spot whenever she looked to the sides. And, since not having an even surface below the fake feathers allowed her to drastically reduce her weight, it had never been thought of as a necessity.

“You have good eyes,” Elijah commented, the first assistant giving her thanks for the compliments immediately. “Yes, it’s not a duck. It’s not an animal in general, though I admit she does act like one. In truth, she is a heavily modified variant of the Sundrop flower, grown from a seed and steadily changed while she grew until she finally came to look like this.”

He was taking a lot of undue credit for the transformation, but explaining how the modification of plants mainly relied on discussing and bargaining with them would probably not reach the others in the way he hoped. Better to lie than worsen their view of him so early on.

“Does she have a name,” Mary asked, putting a finger in front of Dawn. The assistant made a strange noise when the duck tried and failed to nibble on the digit, just mildly scratching up the outer layer of skin. “So cute.”

“I call her Dawn, though she doesn’t respond to it yet,” Elijah explained, going into further detail about how he could communicate with plants to some degree. Mental bonds were something the two assistants could understand surprisingly easily, and they asked a few questions regarding it all. “Do you have many interactions with Mages or was the man I’m replacing a Mage himself? The two of you seem… unfazed at all this.”

“Oh, we don’t see Mages often and Reynold wasn’t magical, other than how knowledgeable he was in his craft,” Oscar assured him, making Elijah frown. “It’s just that, well, the Mages we do meet have done more… grandiose things. Making everybody in the room fly, making animated ice, or… that one time where we were all able to see through each others’ eyes at the same time last winter, if you remember that, Mary?”

“I do, and I still have a headache from seeing through a hundred eyes at once,” Mary confirmed, shuddering at the memory. “But, yeah, this isn’t the craziest magical thing we’ve seen. Also, I think your plant is trying to eat my finger."

The beak that had previously imitated that of a duck beautifully had mutated gruesomely, elongating and wrapping around the finger. Blood was steadily having a harder and harder time circulating, and the grimace revealed that the pain might’ve started up as well.

‘Not food,’ Elijah reminded Dawn as he tapped her on the head, hearing some grumbling through the bond as she retracted the biomass and regained her duck features. “She says sorry. Won’t happen again.”

‘I did?’

‘No, but you’re not going to do that again regardless,’ he sent the duck, feeling confusion in response. ‘These people are not food, no matter what you might think. If you want to eat meat, I can get you some, but the living people we are on good terms with are off-limits.’

‘... Is meat good?’

‘We can find out later.’

“It’s fine, though I think that might leave a mark,” Mary said, tracing another finger across the area Dawn had grabbed onto. “Are all plants a little hungry for humans, or is that just a thing with her?”

“I’m afraid there’s little empathy in the kingdom of plants,” Elijah replied. “Other than some select species sharing nutrients, and the sapient races that hardly qualify as pure plants, they see all others as potential sources of food and little else.”

“Brutal,” Oscar commented, keeping his hands firmly to himself as the duck sat down on the table to clean its fake feathers.

Used to more grandiose displays or not, Elijah could already see it would be some time before the two would be used to the fake animal. The eyes previously filled with wonder were now wary of the duck.

He showed off the Dawn's ability to create a variant of healing paste, which alleviated some of the unsaid concerns, but there was still the air of carefulness as they kept glancing at the duck resting by the nearby window.

At least Elijah knew where he could find the duck from now on, a box of dirt placed on the windowsill to create a base of operations for the plant while they were in the room.

Try as she might, staying with him constantly wouldn’t be possible while he worked. That became obvious when the documents for his position were finally opened up, and the trio started to go through the various duties.

“Oscar and I usually handle the majority of the Royal Garden, while Reynold took care of the more sensitive plants which are located here in their separate area,” Mary explained, pointing at the different spots on the map of the garden. There were several of those maps, each with its own standard temperatures, humidities, and hours of sunlight being able to be adjusted to maximize the possible growth of the plants within. A very expensive system that explained how they were able to grow herbs not usually found on the continent due to the incredibly specific conditions required for them to grow. “We’re personally fine keeping it this way, but it’ll require about thirty minutes of daily work from you and about two hours of harvesting every other week during the weekend. Is that fine with you?”

“Not a problem at all,” Elijah assured them, already adjusting his mental timetable. A lot of activities would have to be pushed to the side to make space for everything, but none of it would be impossible. With the focus on his duties in the castle, he would actually spend less time in the laboratory working, which he was sure Aleksi would be happy to hear about. “I don’t see anything listed here about weekly upkeep on the commonly used ointments. Is that supposed to be missing?”

“Oh, we only have monthly standard brewing sessions, when it comes to the common creams, gels, and pastes.”

“From what I’ve seen mentioned here, many of those don’t have a shelf life of more than two weeks.”

“Those are included as they are needed instead of having standard time slots since the need for them varies by a lot,” Oscar explained.

“... Right. I can see most of the longer-lived medications being brewed consistently, and I take it that there are no serious issues with that process or with the quantities?”

“There’s been no major shortages in the past two years,” he was assured. Reading the documentation regarding what amounts were made each month, Elijah did note an upward trend in those meant to help with muscle tiredness and ease sleeping. The consequences of an aging population within the castle walls, he supposed.

The size of the reports regarding each patient that he had to oversee implied that as well, as Elijah was forced to realize when they moved away from the supplying of the medicine and over to individualized usage.

“In the past 12 hours, I’ve gotten… 17 requests from different people who would like to be checked on by you personally today,” Mary mentioned, finding the folders of each of the 17 headaches. That the files together matched the thickness of a large tome made his heart sink. “Each has checked out the box saying it is an urgent and high priority, which means we can’t take over before you have seen the patient yourself.”

“Do you usually have this amount of patients in one day?” Elijah asked.

“Luckily not, but most of these refused help from us since we don’t have the proper title.”

Elijah noted the edge of the man’s tone before opening up the first folder and looking inside. It was some Baron, five years younger than him but looking ten years older. The consequences of the old war, which had taken the right leg and robbed the man of most motor functions in his left hand. The first had been due to a warhammer crushing the limb into a pulpy goo which had forced an amputation within the hour, and the second injury had been due to a stray bolt of lightning that had passed through the man.

With the list of accidents through the years, Elijah was surprised that the Baron hadn't keeled over before he had even started going gray. The wonders of stupid amounts of luck mixed in with constant medical check-ups, he supposed. By saving several important figures, he’d been granted the title when the war was over, along with being granted permanent residency inside the castle after reaching the age of 60 since traveling had become too much trouble.

He gave up on reading all the pages of notes surrounding the man, putting them to the side to see what the next 16 folders had to say. Most were very similar stories, with war veterans needing maintenance and care of various amounts. There were a few younger ones as well, though, including several in the higher ranks of staff who had reported work difficulties of the highest order.

This is going to take a while.