Chapter 143

Nym felt something invading him, not physically, but grasping at his soul well. If he hadn’t already injured himself, hadn’t already spent so much time staring inward while he tried to fix it, he would never have been able to stop the root.

Thankfully, and that felt odd to think, he had destabilized his matrix. He could feel the root attacking him, and more than that, he could see it. He knew how to look at what was going on. Inside him, it had split into a thousand little tendrils of something that was not quite arcana, but close enough for its purposes. It was trying to overshadow his nodes one by one, trying to consume them, to fill his soul well with essence of undeath.

Nym had no intention of letting it do that, of course. He flooded his soul well with his own arcana, as much as he could possibly hold. It pushed back against the root, and maybe if his soul well had been full prior to the undead tendril’s attack, the root wouldn’t have found any purchase. That wasn’t what had happened, unfortunately, and by the time Nym had filled his soul well to bursting, the root had already found a firm foothold.

That did not mean he was just going to let it keep worming its way in. He’d never really manipulated arcana inside his soul well before, but there was a first time for everything. For the first time, the chaotic nature of arcana harvested from the Astral Sea worked in his favor. He didn’t even try to leash it, just braced himself and let it lash around inside his soul well.

The arcana beat against the infection, smacking into it, breaking it apart and pushing it back. Little chunks floated into the arcana, which was probably a bad thing, but he’d start with removing the vast majority of it and move on to filtering out what little bit was left. Slowly, one grasping tendril at a time, the root was forced back.

And then, suddenly, it was severed from the source, and what remained latched onto Nym floundered. No longer reinforced by the rest of the root, it lost much of his potency, and he expelled it out with a pained scream. Essence of undeath rushed out of him, filling the air with a cloud of mixed arcana and necrosis.

Blisters and sores split his skin open, but Nym could handle that. What he couldn’t tolerate was the remaining slivers of darkness clinging to the nodes of his matrix. He needed to flush everything out, and he could only think of one way to do that.

He forged a new conduit and filled himself to the brim and beyond with first layer arcana. The soul channels he’d forged in his body were stretched to their limits, ready to burst. And then he flexed his matrix, let it all flood out and with it the shards of undeath stuck inside him.

Intense pain wracked him, but it worked. The shards dislodged from his soul well and washed out into his body where healing magic could remove them. He came back to himself, laying on his back in the cavern, the root hanging overhead now charred and pitted instead of sleek and glossy. Archmage Veran stood over him, a font of fire bursting from an open palm. He lashed waves of ghouls that swarmed over them, causing them to spontaneously crumble to ash.

“Have you expelled it?” the archmage asked calmly, as though he wasn’t standing there holding off fifty ghouls by himself.

“The root? Got it out of my soul well. Did you cut it off at the source?”

Archmage Veran nodded. “I thought it would be easier for you to fight it if you weren’t connected directly to the reaper.”

“There are still slivers of it in my body,” Nym said. “I need to see a healer. A good one. Gave myself one hell of a case of arcana poisoning, but I think I can take care of that myself.”

“It would be better if we removed it here. I would like to keep this contained. The root appears to be dead, and I do not want it sprouting again somewhere else.”

“I’m not sure I can,” Nym admitted. He didn’t even think he could move, so if Archmage Veran refused to relocate him, there wasn’t much he could do at this point. It was only first layer arcana, but there was a lot of it. “Where’s everybody else?

“I sent them away from danger. It is just the two us down here. Any secrets you might need to reveal, or a … break of character… will not be witnessed by anyone else.”

Nym groaned and let his head fall back to the ground. If he knew how to heal himself, he would have already. The best he could do was clean up the excess arcana. It would probably take an hour or move to remove the majority of it, and he’d be at it all night and likely into the morning to fully rid himself of the arcana poisoning his body.

“Unless you can bring a healer here, I don’t think there’s much more I can do.”

“Nym. I am an archmage. I’m sure I could manage the healing myself if I weren’t otherwise occupied. I can still advise you on how to do it.”

“Oh, right. I don’t know why I didn’t think you’d know any healing magic.”

“Your persona would do well to learn some as well,” the archmage said.

“I’m trying. It’s complicated. There are so many spells for so many specific use cases, and those diagnostic spells give so much confusing information.”

“Hmm, yes. When you do it that way, there’s a great deal of expertise required.”

Nym craned his neck to give the old man a glare. “Nobody told me there was another way to do it.”

“Far be it from me to disabuse you of that notion. Of course your way is the correct way to use second layer arcana to heal. I wouldn’t argue that fact.”

“But third layer arcana can do so much more,” Nym said, letting out another groan. He’d spent so much time, wasted so much money and effort. “Anyway, can you get the rest of these shards out of me.”

“Hardly,” Archmage Veran told him. “You may have noticed I’m a bit preoccupied at the moment.”

That was true. The old man hadn’t stopped channeling arcana for even a second while they spoke. It was a minor miracle they could even see each other with all the piles of burning ghoul surrounding them. Whatever disposal spell he was using, it worked quickly but left an inordinate amount of greasy smoke hanging in the air.

Nym tried not to think of what exactly he was breathing in with that smoke. It wouldn’t help anything to dwell on that. He could practically see it congealing on the cavern walls, and briefly wondered what kind of long-term effects it might have on anything growing in the region. In fifty years, the whole forest might be shrouded in some sort of necrotic mist due to all the ghouls burned to ashes during the conflict.

“While it’s great to know the possibilities of third circle healing magic, I don’t actually know how to cast it. If you can’t help right now, we’re going to have to risk leaving,” Nym said.

“Of course you know how to cast healing magic,” Archmage Veran said. “What do you think you’ve been doing with every modification you make to your body?”

“That’s… huh. That is a good point.”

Nym had made quite a few modifications to how his mind and body functioned. Without them, he would never be able to dual cast, nor would he be able to split knots of arcana in the second layer so that he could push straight through to the third. He’d even tweaked a few things involving his metabolism and muscles as well so that he wouldn’t get tired as quickly.

Those were changes though, not healing. They were permanent. He could change a broken arm into an unbroken one, but without the base knowledge of how it was supposed to function, he could end up doing more harm than good. But then, he had a lot of that base knowledge already. And in this case, for the removal of a foreign substance, he even knew more or less exactly what everything was supposed to look like.

He could remove the splinters of root in his body. He’d already done the hard part by flushing them out of his soul well and pushing them back into the physical world. At this point, a determined surgeon could physically cut them out, though Nym would likely die in the process without magical aid. All he needed to do was locate them, extract them, and heal whatever damage he did to himself during the process.

Of course that would all be a lot easier if he wasn’t trying to keep from throwing up from all the arcana built up in his body. He didn’t really feel like this was the best possible time to start experimenting with this line of thought, but the man who was supposed to be teaching him had apparently decided to throw him off the pier and see if he could swim.

Nym didn’t really believe Archmage Veran couldn’t maintain a barrier to keep the ghouls back and extract the root slivers at the same time. He thought it was more likely that the old man was trying to push him to stop holding back. A generous interpretation might be that the archmage was trying to help him by pushing him, but unless the whole scenario led to him unlocking another memory shard, the only way to make him more like a true ascendant was to reach the fifth layer.

A less generous interpretation was that the archmage was simply trying to get rid of him now that Nym had fulfilled his obligations. That didn’t track though, not with what Nym knew of him personally or with the fact that he was literally standing over him, keeping the monsters at bay.

And then Nym saw the real truth. The old man was just tired. Once he really stopped to look, stopped seeing an indomitable figure, it was easy to see that Archmage Veran wasn’t doing so good himself. His posture was slumped and his hands trembled at his side. He was in fact risking his life to give Nym a chance to rid himself of the root splinters rather than just abandoning him.

There wasn’t really a lot of time to mull that over. Nym was working overtime trying to clear out as much arcana from his system as possible, and he had reached the point where he felt ready to perform some magic. First on the list was a pain numbing spell. He wasn’t skilled enough to do this in any way that wasn’t going to hurt, and he didn’t need to lose his concentration in the middle.

“Okay, I’m giving this a try. I’m confident I can get the splinters out, but… uh… maybe be ready to teleport out of here and do some real healing just in case I don’t get everything patched up properly.”

He located the first splinter, buried deep in his leg. A very delicate and precise application of the tip of his mage blade parted flesh down to the muscle, and a gentle telekinesis spell pried the splinter out. That set his teeth on edge, even through the pain numbing spell. Whatever that stuff was, touching it with active magic hurt worse than just having it in him.

Nym flung it away and used third layer arcana to pull everything back together. He was almost completely sure he didn’t do it right, but for now the wound was closed and that was the important part. It would hold for a few minutes until he was done.

There was one floating next to his ribs, fortunately on the outside and not nestled up next to his heart, and another in his shoulder. The one on his lower back was the worst to get out, and considering how close it was to his spine, probably the most nerve-wracking to do. That involved a lot of work-by-feel and was probably far messier than the rest.

Eventually he’d pried out every last splinter. Archmage Veran burnt them away into nothing, and then the two of them teleported back to his sanctum. The old man practically fell off his feet from the effort, and it was only through sheer willpower than he managed to stay upright.

“Come with me. We’ll get you looked at and fixed up.”

The two of them limped slowly over to the medical station down the hall, and Nym cursed the teleportation wards that made the walk necessary.