Rules of Biomancy: A LitRPG Healer Fantasy

“I didn’t get to congratulate you on that, by the way!” Grace mentioned as he sat down. “Alin told Rubeus about it yesterday afternoon, and I could scarcely believe it. Here I thought you wanted a ‘quiet life.’”

“I would still prefer a ‘quiet life,’ thank you,” he assured her, declining the offer for tea and food. They already apparently had an entire stock of things to eat and drink inside the laboratory, as both Grace and her mentor were not known for leaving the room for anything other than sleep. And even that was sometimes skipped. “The position was mainly dropped on me, more than anything else.”

“You weren’t forced into it, I hope.”

“Not outright, no,” Elijah said, Grace worried. “I noticed in the contract that the position would grant me permanent immunity towards all dealings with the Academy, including having to be registered on their list of Mages. If anybody is to ever discover my absence on the registries, it’ll be a non-issue and nothing will be done against me.”

“Smart,” Grace replied. “I’m happy to know being discovered isn’t a fear anymore then.”

“It’s quite the relief,” he confirmed, looking over at the table beside him. On it were various schematics, though it also included some rather strange goggles. “Is this yours?”

“Oh, please be careful with those!” Grace instantly said, up from her seat before he could blink as she took the goggles from him. “I was just able to get them working again last night. Rubeus wouldn’t be happy if I broke them a second time this week.”

“What are they?”

“Half of my thesis,” she explained. “Mainly used to test the other half, which is sitting over there.”

She pointed towards a metal box on another table. It had countless holes on the sides, made in a spiral fashion that traveled across the entire surface. Beautiful, though it was the sigils flowing between them that Elijah was interested in.

“The main idea about my thesis is to use nothing but Wind Magic to transform one person’s voice into another’s,” Grace said, fiddling with the goggles before a click was heard, and a soft blue light began to leave the lenses. “A simple concept, and one that’s often seen with people able to use Illusions, but using only normal sound… the extra pushes given by other Affinities don’t carry over to pure Wind.”

After making him promise to be careful, he was given back the goggles. They were adjusted for his head before slowly being put over his eyes. It took a moment for Elijah to adjust to the light that came through them, but his pupils widened and the numbers and waves that flew by rapidly began to settle down.

“What is— oh,” Elijah began to ask but stopped once he realized how much his own voice influenced the numbers, the waves likewise multiplying and passing about in different frequencies. The information was seemingly endless in its depth. “These are sound waves?”

“In a simplified view to make them easier to work with for beginners, but, yes, that’s what you’re seeing,” Grace confirmed, smiling as Elijah paused to inspect how different the waves were when she spoke. “Amazing, isn’t it? Took six months of study to make it show something that made sense, and even that was when Rubeus helped me with the interface.”

Elijah couldn’t help but agree, though the amount of things flying around his vision made him take the goggles off within a minute or so. The headache that came from using them was unreal.

“I’m using this to calibrate the second half of my thesis, though… that’s not going as well as I had hoped,” she said, waving a hand toward the rest of her work area. On the chalkboards, the papers that were strewn across the tables, and even in small notes on various objects, calculations could be seen. Formulas with arrows towards other formulas, half-translated to the magical sigils that were then crossed out or wiped away before they could be finished. “It is possible in theory, Rubeus is sure of that, but translating one voice into another’s, and making the tone and speed believable, is probably going to require incorporating a quick-time neural net at the start of each use, which is fed a sample list of lines from both participants before we can then… Right, sorry, I know that look. Got a bit too into it there.”

“Oh, no, it’s fine,” Elijah assured the younger Mage, seeing how she deflated at the end. Too used to people that didn’t want to or had the time to listen, he guessed. “Please, do continue. If I want to learn a bit of the craft myself, it wouldn’t hurt to listen to somebody with a few more years of experience.”

“Me having something to teach you something? Alright, fine. If you want to hear the long explanation, you’re going to get it,” Grace said, laughing at the thought of her being his senior in anything. “So, the basic idea is around the concept of decomposing a multivariable complex function into a long series of smaller functions which we can manipulate much easier.”

As she continued with her explanation, where Elijah understood most of the words but not the way they were put together, he kept nodding along, asking questions where he thought they were needed. Most of it honestly went over his head, the mathematical approach that was required to move the magic over to the sigil framework being one of the biggest issues for him, the fundamentals did resonate with him.

And, before either of them knew it, ten minutes had passed without Grace seemingly drawing breath, words flowing without end and respite. Sentences became one, and Elijah almost thought two voices were talking at once at some point, as several subjects became entangled into one big mess that somehow made a sliver of sense.

Somewhat, at least. Those five years of pure theory work couldn’t be skipped past with just a load of common sense and age, sadly, so much of it was still outside of his grasp.

“And… yeah, that’s the starting idea on how this works,” Grace said, taking a deep breath when she finally slowed down. “That monstrosity takes a lot of inspiration for it, but… the inner workings are using another framework as it needs to both take in sound and output a transformed version continually. I’m going to be spending at least a few hours explaining that one to whoever is unlucky enough to hear my presentation on it, so I think we can save that one for another day.”

“What a shame,” Elijah commented, looking at the time. It would be best if he began to make his move within the next few minutes. “Is your mentor working on something at a similar level of complexity? I must say that most of this space is looking to be occupied by your writing and very little of his.”

“Yeah, we did have to rearrange a lot of things to make the chalkboards fit,” she admitted. “But, no, he’s still working on his own projects as well. A lot of projects, honestly, so very little is actually in here.”

She walked over and showed off some of the Arcane Mage’s schematics. Some looked rather close to the goggles that Grace still had in her hand, which he was quick to point out.

“Well… I might’ve taken a bit of inspiration,” Grace said, going over to one of the taller shelves and taking some glasses that had been collecting dust. Wiping off the worst parts with her shirt, she handed them to Elijah. “Slowly put these on.”

“Why slowly?” he asked, looking at the glasses. The frames were slightly larger than normal reading glasses, but they were otherwise entirely normal-looking.

“If you get a headache from my goggles, these are going to give you migraines for days if you’re careless,” she explained, restating that he also needed to be careful when holding them as it would be rather embarrassing to have those break as well.

Slowly.

Doing as asked, he carefully put on the glasses, first having his eyes half-closed before steadily opening them up and looking through the lenses.

As multi-colored light worthy of being called suns overpowered him, he knew he should’ve been slower. The headache from before blossomed into new heights, and he could only feel regret as he swiftly removed the magical item and handed it over to Grace who was fully prepared for it.

“If you’re not one of the people with very sensitive Magical Senses already, it can be a bit much,” she explained, when Elijah was able to get back to thinking properly. “This was meant to take the natural senses of Mages a step further, increasing our… I think he called it tolerance? It allows residue, the mildest traces of Mana, to be shown off in their full glory. Our normal senses usually work in averages, tricking us into seeing a view that isn’t all accurate and doesn’t allow for as much nuance as we would like at the higher levels.”

“So the answer to that is to blast people with enough light to make their eyes burn out?” Elijah questioned, to which she laughed.

“No, it is not, and Rubeus wasn’t happy about these back when he finished them a few months ago,” Grace confessed, explaining how that was why she’d been allowed to take so much inspiration from them while also getting plenty of help to make her own version of the glasses. “The problem was that these increased the strength of everything, which can be useful in some circumstances but wasn’t good enough for a paper to be written. Instead, he started working on something that could change the spectrum it allowed the wearer to see, along with enhancing it as much as possible.”

There it is.

“And the end product of that research?” he asked.

“Never finished it, sadly,” she said. “He was very close to figuring out how to make a Ritual that could allow him to see residue from a specific Mana-Signature not long ago, but then the theoretical costs apparently got too high and he felt it wasn’t worth it. The other side-project he started instead is these smaller gizmos which he hopes can be used for long-range communication. They’re currently only stable a few meters away, but that’s due to some interference he’s hoping to isolate and remove within the next few days when he gets time to be in here again.”

She went on, explaining other side projects strewn around his work area, but Elijah didn’t care much for them. He’d gotten his answer, the revelation that he needed to hear. The Royal Mage was able to track a specific type of Mana Signature in the literal sense, seeing it in the air and then following the trail along.

Or maybe it had improved more than Grace had been told. Elijah couldn’t say, though he knew he would soon find out.

“On the topic of flying disks, I was actually hoping to go by your shop this evening,” Grace mentioned, catching his attention once more. “Mom’s been a little out of it, with everything that’s been happening, so I was hoping to stop by and get something that might calm her down to help her sleep better.”

“That… should not be a problem,” Elijah replied, weighing the possibilities in his head. “I was actually planning to go there in a few minutes. If you’re done with your current work, we could go now.”

“Oh, great! Just give me a second to pack things together.”

Various books, papers, and pencils were thrown into her bag within the minute, and the two were out of the laboratory in record time. Grace locked the door with practiced ease and out the building they went, their pace high while chatting about various smaller topics. Nothing serious, mainly being about her starting experiences with her Affinity and other related subjects.

“I really should’ve been able to use Wind Magic already, but what can you do?” she commented, as they turned the street and left behind the Academy’s area. Elijah could tell as much by the fact that the buildings started to make sense again. “So many years of messing around, and I’m still not closer to doing more than a small sub-domain.”

“You’ll figure it out eventually,” Elijah promised. “We’ve all got some things that are harder to learn than others.”

“Like you and working with anything other than plants?”

“What do you mean?”

“Plant Manipulation, the sub-field within Biomancy?” Grace tried again, making Elijah falter in his steps. They slowed a little, as his confusion became noticeable and her eyes widened. “No, don’t tell me you didn’t know!”

“Please elaborate,” he requested, as her laughter at his misfortune grew. People were starting to look their way at her voice, the muttering starting up in full. “And keep your voice down, please.”

“Right, sorry, it’s just— Oh, I really need to ask Rubeus about getting you another book or two,” she relented, apologizing a few more times while she got her breathing under control. “But, well, Plant Manipulation is one of several domains within Biomancy. Not everything that has to do with biological matter is restricted to plants. We are made of organic material as well, you know? Skin, organs, our brains, they’re all made of some smaller components that you can manipulate, just like how you can manipulate plant cells. Not individually, of course, since that would be far beyond any Biomancer’s capabilities, but you can definitely swap them when they’re grouped together.”

She listed off several more sub-domains, Plant Manipulation and Flesh Manipulation and Fungi Manipulation only being the start. There was also the matter of Shapeshifting, which was adjacent to all three main fields before it then moved over to more serious topics like Life Creation focused on forming life without anything but Mana to start out with.

Elijah was shocked, to be honest. Hearing her rattle off the various achievements of the old Biomancers in the Era of Legends made him feel like he was withering away. The grand achievements he’d heard were the ability of a group of Biomancers to grow an entire field within a day, to enhance the properties of herbs and plants, to use them more effectively in recipes, and to evolve and alter the plant life already present. To move outside of that, to move over to flesh alteration, was something he would’ve never considered.

Yet, as he thought about it more, the Tier 2 Spell he had learned several days ago had been given the name Animal Bond. At the time, he had thought of it as a way to simply separate the scale of depth it gave as opposed to the Tier 1 Plant Bond since he could use both while working with the seeds he grew, but now it was becoming more clear to him.

“Don’t look so dejected, Elijah! We’ve all got some things that are harder to learn than others,” Grace said, repeating the mantra he’d given her not many minutes ago. “And, just to be fair, not all Biomancers can even do half of those things. The Shapeshifting is mostly done by the elven druids or the shamanic tribes, Flesh Manipulation isn’t really popular at all as a main focus since it has such high requirements, Fungus Manipulation is mostly for underground races that never see the sun, and Life Creation is… well, I don’t actually know of anybody who’s done that in a non-laboratory setting. It’s probably the hardest one of them all since it requires so much Mana to do. Still, you shouldn’t be hard on yourself for not knowing all of this. I only know of it because I looked it all up in the library when you revealed your Affinity to me.”

That made him consider his chances. What was the possibility of him learning anything outside of this field he’d already grown up in? What were the chances he would spend many years learning the druidic arts of Shapeshifting, since it was something those with his Affinity could technically perform? The alteration of Fungi was something he would probably look into when he got the chance since it didn’t seem too far away from his current work, yet everything else would likely be forever out of his reach. It was simply too complicated and too demanding in terms of Mana, both of those factors not being able to be improved on too much.

“You’re right,” he gave in, accepting the claps on his shoulder without complaint. “I don’t believe I would find too much use in the other subdomains anyhow. I can’t imagine transforming into a dog and enjoying the experience.”

“I don’t think you’d be a dog, honestly. You’re too pessimistic for that,” Grace commented, Elijah staring her down. “Oh, a cat would fit you well, wouldn’t it? The one that lives close to the inn always gives me that Look of Death when I don’t give her food in the morning.”

“Don’t liken me to that fat ball of fur,” he ordered, but the thought was already deeply rooted inside the Wind Mage’s mind. Whether he wanted to or not, the next many minutes were spent with Grace trying to figure out what kind of animal fit him or not. He was granted the privilege of being an owl, a crow, and, she couldn’t stress it enough, ‘one of the thorny houseplants that didn’t stop being dramatic.’

It’s just impossible to stop with this overly descriptive nonsense.

“Really, though, you have to come by and help me with my plants sometime,” Grace said, losing a bit of steam after a few more minutes. “I’ve been trying to get them a bit further away from death, but they just can’t stop drying up and having the leaves fall off. It wasn’t a problem during the winter, since they’re meant to do that, but they haven’t been looking too good even when it’s summer.

“... Not all the leaves are meant to fall off when they’re kept indoors,” Elijah replied, relatively sure she meant the small chili plants that he’d grown for her last year. They’d been very small then, but healthy enough that she should’ve been able to care for them easily regardless. “How often do you water them?”

“Uhm, like, every other week?” she answered after a moment of thought. “Maybe it takes a bit longer for me to do it sometimes, but I still give them plenty of sun! My room’s like an orangery during the day now, so that must be helping them.”

Not everybody had the green fingers for keeping the green lives intact, but Elijah had to wonder if some people just had a subconscious vendetta about killing any plants they touched. A person who could spend hours talking about the internal mechanics of transforming voices without any hardship should’ve been able to care for a chili plant easily, yet here they were.

“I think I might have to buy you a book explaining how to tend a garden because the last decade-and-a-half of explaining it all verbally must not have sunk into your skull right,” Elijah said, Grace looking a little sheepish before looking around and realizing how close they were to the shop. Just a turn around a corner, and then that was everything needed to see the shop entrance.

Elijah tried not to show it, as he inspected the windows and door for any signs of damage. He did breathe out slowly when he saw nothing, no fractures or broken locks obvious. Neither were the windows on the second floor broken or opened up, assuring him that nobody questionable had gotten inside without his notice.

Except for a certain Illusionist, hopefully. She’d been given Elijah’s key for the back door, so she should’ve been able to get in and out rather easily.

Or maybe not too easily, as the locks weren’t working as they should yet again. Even when he put the key inside, it refused to open properly unless shaken in just the right way. Elijah personally blamed the humidity, yet he was forced to mentally note down the need to contact a locksmith very soon. It wouldn’t do good to be unable to enter his own home, when—

“Oh my! What are the odds?”

As he got back up from wrangling the door lock into submission, Elijah froze. The voice, the note of surprise from Grace, and that flash of purple robes. The Royal Mage had arrived.