Reborn Healer Chapter 10

Aria squeezed through a crack in a cave barely large enough to fit an elbow through, grunting as she pulled herself through into a dripping wet tunnel not that much wider. Clenched in her fist was a strangely familiar knife, magic imbued in the item to make it glow gently. Under the dim light of the blade, her blue cloak shimmered, somehow remaining undamaged even as it piled on mud and dirt.

She wiggled through inhumanly narrow span of cave rock with startling speed. Above and around her, small points of light lit up from time to time, mana flickering out of the cave rock as she moved.

What… where was this?

This wasn’t the first time I’d seen a vision like this. Why now, though? Was this real? Or—

Mother stopped in her tracks, still sandwiched between two slabs of rock close enough that I had no idea how she hadn’t been crushed already.

“Ren,” she said, the words half-wheezed with how shallow the breaths she was taking were.

The scene changed.

The basement door again. Open, just like the last time.

It was calling to me.

There was something on the other side. Something that I was missing. A part of me was in there, and it wanted to be with me.

It felt right.

Once again, I stepped forward.

#

Having never been knocked out by anything other than surgical anesthetic before, I now realized what the difference between falling asleep and falling unconscious was. When I woke up from sleeping, I might feel a little groggy. That had been less so the case in this world, where sleep had seemed entirely restorative and made me much more of a morning person than before—basically, at worst, I would have a little bit of a headache when I woke up from sleeping if I’d not gotten enough.

Now, I was reminded of the single time I’d ever had a hangover before swearing off large amounts fo alcohol for years. My head was heavy, pounding like a future star drummer was doing his level best to impress an abusive teacher using my head as a cymbal. The rest of my body was little better. It didn’t seem to want to respond to the rest of my movements either. I was sore from head to toe, every part of my body aching.

I realized soon enough that the pain wasn’t only coming from the impacts I’d taken while I’d been dragged along, and neither was my body’s inability to respond.

Bits and pieces came back to me now, the vision of my mother still fresh in my mind.

Fuck. Right. The spider. I had so many questions I needed to ask with respect to the vision, but my immediate peril came first.

I gave opening my eyes a try, wincing at the bolt of pain piercing through my brain as I did.

I kind of wished I hadn’t.

My body was suspended upside down, wrapped in thick white spider silk that adhered me to a web that spanned what had to be a twenty foot radius, stretching across the inside of a cavern dimly lit by similar magical-looking lights emerging from crevices in the rock. From where I was, I couldn’t make out an exit.

Unfortunately, I could see well enough by the faltering light of the minerals to make out other things in the webs.

I wasn’t the only living being to be added to this web, though it did look like I was the most recent. There were others—animals, insects that had to have been magically enhanced in size, and… quite possibly another human.

It was hard to tell exactly what they were. Their bodies were cocooned in silk, and anything that remained was little more than bones and the pallid flesh of bodies drained dry of blood.

Also on the webs were spiders. Not just one, but at least three or four of the big ones I’d seen earlier. They were individually larger than me, and the intermittent hissing that sufficed for communciation between them sent shivers up my spine.

It wasn’t just those big ones, either. Though I couldn’t quite make out enough details to see the smaller ones, the skittering sounds made it clear soon enough that there were many, many more than three or four lesser spiders.

The truth of that soon became clear as they approached. Calling them small was doing a disservice to how much they made my stomach want to jump out of my mouth. Each was the size of a dinner plate, beady red eyes and long legs reaching out for me.

They’re feeding me to their young, I realized.

They crawled onto me, and I had no way to stop them. I screwed my eyes and mouth shut, praying to whatever gods might exist here that they wouldn’t try to crawl inside me.

I needn’t have worried. The skin-crawling touch of their legs was more than enough to make me want to vomit, but even that was soon overtaken by pain as they bit me, injecting me with further paralyzing venom and draining me of blood.

From there, I did what any reasonable person would have done in my situation and panicked.

Calm down, I told myself after failing to struggle out of my bonds. You’re not going to get anywhere like this.

Now that I was awake and debatably aware, I could feel the venom propagating out from each bite, pain radiating and skin swelling.

I needed to take stock of the situation and breathe. As much as I wanted to panic, doing so would only guarantee that I died here.

The bad news: I couldn’t move. If I spoke, it was very likely one would crawl into my mouth since they were already on my face.

The good news: I could cast. I had practiced healing spells day in and day out, and my time unconscious had restored enough of my mana pool for me to cast again without fearing passing out immediately.

I started with Mend Wound, testing the limits. Though I’d practiced casting blindfolded and without moving as much as I could before, this was my first time trying to do so in a situation like this. It was much easier to do with easier spells, of course—Mend Wound worked pretty well, closing up the entry wounds that the spiders were creating. I’d gotten it to level 10 already through diligent practice, so using it was fluid and effective. I barely even needed to think to clear up my wounds.

The poison was probably also important, though. I could feel it slowing me down, spreading through my veins. Fortunately for me, I’d just gotten to practice curing a bear of what I was now sure was the same poison. Just like I had with the bear, I scanned myself and used Cure Minor Infection, tweaking the parameters of it so I could neutralize the venom instead.

Body Scan lvl 6 -> lvl 7

Cure Minor Infection lvl 4 -> lvl 5

Spell learned: Cure Minor Poison [Beginner]

That was interesting. The system so far had really only codified the gains I’d made and provided an idea for the progress I was making, but it had just identified this particular type of casting this spell as a new one. I resolved to dig into that when I wasn’t bleeding out and dying from spider venom.

Also, it wasn’t poison that was inside me, right? Wasn’t it venom? I guess the system didn’t particularly care. Maybe there wasn’t a difference between the two words here.

I rationed my mana, knowing exactly how screwed I would be if I let myself run out. When the pain got to the point where I started to feel my heartbeat fall out of its rhythm, I cast it repeatedly.

Cure Minor Poison lvl 0 -> lvl 1

Though the pain was pretty bad, I kind of got used to it. The human mind was pretty good at getting used to its circumstances so long as they didn’t change too fast, and this was no exception. Once I got into a rhythm of it, it became only on the edge of unbearable instead of mind-shattering. I could at least focus enough to consistently cast.

As it turned out, using spells when they were very necessary to save your life was pretty good at increasing my ability to use them.

Body Scan lvl 7 -> lvl 8

Cure Minor Poison lvl 1 -> lvl 2

…

Body Scan lvl 9 -> lvl 10

Cure Minor Poison lvl 8 -> lvl 9

Cure Minor Poison lvl 9 -> lvl 10

I meditated in between uses of my magic. As inconvenient a location as it was, using Mend Wound was enough of a pain reliever for me to at the very least recover some magic.

The longer it went, the better I got at it. Eventually, it felt like it wasn’t even my body anymore, just like I’d decoupled myself from my physical vessel when I’d fought that wolf, then again when I’d been running from the bear. A flow state, of sorts.

Internal Harmony lvl 7 -> lvl 10

It continued. The larger spiders crept closer as time went on, maybe curious as to why I wasn’t a dried-up corpse yet, but they didn’t move to act yet. Maybe they thought having a regenerating source of food was a jackpot. It wasn’t like healed blood tasted any different.

I wasn’t sure how long it lasted, but at some point one of the big spiders joined in. That one shook me out of the near-trance state I’d been in, tearing off a large chunk of flesh and sinking its fangs in.

For that one, I had to cast Basic Heal. It wasn’t the only one of the big ones to take a bite, either. Apparently, figuring out that one of their prey just kept on making more food for them was appealing. Who knew.

Basic Heal lvl 5 -> 6

Basic Heal wasn’t going to solve all my problems, though. It could heal large entrance wounds pretty quickly, but if they started going for other bits, I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to mend a broken bone or replace a torn-out eyeball.

It was also pretty costly. I needed a good amount of mana to manage my spells, but I just didn’t have the power to do so.

Just concentrate, I told myself. You’ve done this before. Just do it again.

This should have been terrifying, but the fear had long since faded away by now. Adrenaline pumped through me, and it was… almost exciting.

No, it was exciting. What was wrong with me?

I pulled mana from the air around me, pulling it into my body and nurturing it, trying to massage every last drop I could before drawing it into my core.

This was doable. I didn’t know how long I could stretch this out, and I didn’t know how I was going to get out of this, but I hadn’t put this much effort into my new life to become spider food.

Or, well, to become dead spider food. They were already eating me.

Inhale. Exhale. Let the sensations fade away.

Become one with the world.

Not quite my voice. The same instinct that had driven me to awaken my warrior core. I listened to it, letting my mind fade from everything except keeping my body going like a machine. 1, 2, 3… 28, 29, 30, Minor Heal. 31, 32, 32, Cure Minor Poison. 33, 34, Cure Minor Infection. 1, 2, 3…

Internal Harmony has reached level 10 and is now evolving!

Internal Harmony -> Flowing Harmony [Initiate]

My focus sparkled, becoming sharper, and I continued at my cycle with measured progress, my warrior and magic cores working in tandem for once.

A core is evolving!

A second core is evolving!

Advancing to Initiate…