Reborn Healer Chapter 6

Author's note: Sorry, it's been a bit. Wrote some without posting.

This was more than a little awkward. I had been actively trying to avoid detection of my magic this entire time for multiple reasons, but there was no point in trying to hide it now. My parents typically were away from home for long enough that I hadn’t anticipated any trouble in keeping it from them for longer.

Iryn must have arrived just as I’d stunned the wolf. I had been focused enough on the fight that I hadn’t really noticed that she’d seen me hit that.

I guess this means I can kiss my spellcasting time goodbye, I thought. I knew how parents were. Even if I wanted to do something, it was ultimately their decisions what I would do with my life. If they decided it was too dangerous for me to continue on my current path, which I was sure they would given the risks that the spellbook said were inherent to practicing magic, then that was that. I’d have to figure out better ways to do it.

“Yes,” I admitted. “I have been.”

“I told you,” Iryn said. “It’s unnatural. I’ve never known a mage who could cast before they could walk.”

“I can walk,” I replied. “Plenty of children walk by the age of three.”

“No human one, at least,” she said, ignoring my protest. “Not to mention the brain. I’m telling you, Vallis. It has to be an Aiken.”

“Iryn,” my father said, his voice suddenly growing stern. “I would ask you not to cast aspersions on my wife’s character.”

“I would never—“

“Nor my intelligence, if you would. I have done my due diligence.”

Aiken? That was an unfamiliar word. It hadn’t been in any of the books I’d read so far, either. I made a mental note to look it up whenever and however I could.

“I worry for you, Vallis,” Iryn said. “We all have our blind spots.”

“And my child is not one of them,” he said tersely. “Iryn, I appreciate your concern, but this is a family matter.”

She took the implicit dismissal for what it was, backing out of the room with an odd look thrown my way. “Be careful. That’s all I’m asking.”

I was definitely missing something here. I could guess from context that Iryn was accusing me of being something other than human. Had she guessed that I had come from another world? I didn’t know if that was something that could normally happen here. If that was the case, the way she’d talked about it made me think that being discovered in that respect was very bad.

Or maybe the Aiken were another race of some sort. Given the existence of magical beasts, I had to assume that there were other fully intelligent species out there. Either way, that exchange set me much more on edge than I had been at any point before. I’d considered the possibility of being discovered before, but this was worse.

“Ren,” Vallis repeated himself. “Can you show me what you can do?”

“Show you?” I asked. “Right now? Here?”

“If you’d prefer, we can do it somewhere else,” he said.

“You don’t look very surprised.”

“I have been blessed to have a child as smart as you,” Vallis said. “You’re years ahead of the children your age.”

I doubted most people my age were doing much more than stringing together a handful of words, let alone reading full-on spellbooks, but the compliment was surprisingly effective nonetheless.

That feeling inside me… was that accomplishment? I’d forgotten what that felt like in my last life.

“I saw the books moving,” he continued, “but I never thought you were reading them. The spellbook has a lot of interesting images, does it not?”

Assuming that I had just been looking at the pictures instead of reading was a fair but incorrect assumption. I nodded, still unsure where he was going with this. It was clear that I was still outside of his expectations, and I could feel the other shoe waiting to drop.

“I suppose it’s my fault,” Vallis said, passing a hand through rust-colored hair. “I should have realized this was a possibility from the moment I awakened you early.”

Fault. That really wasn’t promising. What was he going to do now? Undo the spells that I had learned somehow? I wouldn’t put it past a healer like him to have something that could make me forget everything I’d learned.

No. I had no reason to not trust my father. He wasn’t like the one I’d had before. He’d been there for me when I was hurting, and he hadn’t ever flown off the handle at me.

Your last one didn’t, either. Not until you thought you could trust him.

I brushed the pesky thought off and decided to cast Barrier. If he did have some way to remove my knowledge of spells, I could afford to lose this one.

“Incredible,” Vallis breathed. “Unspoken magic on command at this age… Ren, you have an incredible talent. Never let anyone tell you otherwise.”

I blinked. That was it?

“You’ve been learning from the book I leave on the shelf, yes?” he asked. “It’s good theory, but it’s elementary and covers but one field. I have a small library locked in my study. I will avail them to you at once. Once you’re old enough, you’ll need a tutor. Your next birthday, perhaps?”

That was it. Not only was he not stopping me from learning magic nor taking me in to be examined as a demon by whatever methods Iryn had wanted to try, Vallis was actively pushing me to learn more magic. He was giving me resources.

What was this feeling? This loose warmth in my chest? Parents weren’t supposed to be like this. They were supposed to be controlling and cold, never understanding anything I did or said.

“…Ren?” Vallis asked, suddenly sounding concerned again. “Are you okay?”

I tried to blink away the moisture in my eyes, but as it turned out, toddlers do not have the necessary control over their tear ducts to not cry.

#

Over the next few months, I continued practicing magic. For the most part, I worked through the list of spells in the defensive magic spellbook. Many of them were near useless but were recommended to learn since they could be used as components in later spells, and others were good enough that I practiced them until they leveled up.

By the time my fourth birthday rolled around, I had accumulated quite the range of Beginner-tier spells. I’d fully cleared out the beginner’s section of this book, though granted I was less familiar with some of the spells and didn’t practice them as often because they didn’t seem all that useful.

Spell learned: Harden Skin [Beginner]

Spell learned: Identify Illness (Inferior) [Beginner]

Spell learned: Enhance Strength [Beginner]

More important was leveling the ones that mattered as well as acquiring new Initiate-tier ones. Leveling seemed to be a much slower process when I was just practicing a spell rather than using it in combat—I remembered how fast Barrier had increased when I had needed it to save my life, but it didn’t increase much when I was just casting it again and again. At least getting everything to at least level 1 was easy enough.

Augment Perception lvl 0 -> lvl 1

Mend Wound lvl 3 -> lvl 4

Enhance Strength lvl 0 -> lvl 2

Training skills was a different beast entirely. Neither of my parents knew about my warrior core, and even if they had, they didn’t exactly have books on how to be a better warrior. The skills seemed to mostly activate only in times of danger, which I couldn’t really force at home.

I was able to discover a rudimentary meditation technique that worked better for the warrior core, though. Most of it stemmed from trying to replicate the original success I’d had in forming it, but bit by bit, I constructed a new technique from it, one that emphasized a greater connection with the world around me rather than devouring mana.

Internal Harmony lvl 2 -> lvl 3

At least I made some progress there.

Leading up to my birthday, my biggest priority was learning a couple more Initiate-tier spells. Even though my mana pool was gradually increasing as I continued to push and train myself, I could still only cast two or so Initiate-tier spells before getting tired. I wanted the ones I did know to count.

Spell learned: Basic Heal [Initiate]

Basic Heal lvl 0 -> lvl 1

Spell learned: Fortify [Initiate]

A good number of the Initiate spells were just combined, improved versions of Beginner-tier spells, which gave me some insight into those spells too.

My parents were still away from home more than not, but I could practice without worry of being discovered even when they were present. In a twist of events, my situation was now basically the opposite of what it had been before. The person I least wanted to practice around now was Iryn, who was constantly on the lookout for my spells.

She didn’t exactly seem to hate me, but she grew more wary around me with every passing day. Iryn started to take to wearing a utility-belt-like article of clothing inside the house, which she definitely that she hadn’t before. Based on the shape of the pockets, I suspected she was carrying knives around now. The first time I saw that, I was terrified that she was going to use them on me when I was sleeping, but it looked like it was more for her peace of mind than anything else.

That made me curious. Even if I was extraordinarily talented for my age, I was still not even four. What was an Aiken to be so terrifying?

On one of the rare occasions my mother was home, I asked her. Though it did seem like she was only able to stay home for a week out of every month, not much had changed since I’d had that strange nightmare-like dream about her. I had thought it to be a vision of some kind, but she’d never addressed seeing me in it, so I had to assume it was just in my head.

For the time being, I asked about the Aiken instead.

“Dad doesn’t seem to want to tell me,” I explained, the word dad sounding strange on my tongue even in this other language.

“He wouldn’t,” Aria sighed, brushing back my hair with a soft smile. “The Aiken were once a race of possessed beings. A long time ago, they were a big part of the kingdom that ruled the whole of southern Tarn.”

Tarn, I’d learned slowly, was the name of the continent we lived in. The entire place was now theoretically under the control of a single empire headed by the Sovereign-tier Heavenly Emperor, but it was split into many countries under that.

“What happened?” I asked.

“The kingdom collapsed,” she explained. “Mostly thanks to demons, devils, spirits—the ken. The Aiken were one of the first to begin fighting their own kind. They are a proud, violent race, and they reproduce by snatching the souls of ones like your own.”

“I… see,” I said, my throat suddenly dry. There was a whole lot of difference between hearing about something like this in the opening exposition to an RPG game and hearing it be mentioned so casually as history. “Do they still do that?”

“In stories, yes.” My mother laughed, ruffling my hair. “The ones who caused the fall have been banished to the demon islands and the lower levels of the World Dungeon for centuries. Don’t you worry yourself about them. You’ll learn more about them when the time is right.”

“World Dungeon?” I asked. 

I’d seen that term mentioned in the encyclopedia, but I had yet to find more books covering it. I was pretty sure that one of Vallis’ more advanced books covered herbs inside said dungeon, but I had yet to grab any of those.

“You’re a curious one, aren’t you?” Aria smiled. “The World Dungeon comes from the ancient era. From a time when the gods walked the land and the oceans were yet young. It spans the world beneath not just Tarn but the other continents too. Nobody has ever found an end to it, and it is the home of all manner of monsters. If you choose the path of adventurer, you might find yourself delving into them yourself one day. But that’s a story for another time and another place.”

A dungeon that spanned the world… I was familiar with the concept of dungeons from tabletop games back on Earth, but I got the impression that this one was nothing like the fantasy ones I had learned about before. Despite the danger, I couldn’t help the excitement that bubbled up within me.

Once I was able to move like I wanted to, I had to go there. Fighting monsters with magic and this new warrior skillset was the kind of thing I had always dreamed about.

Like Aria said, though, that was for when I got older. I was still young and untrained, and critically, the issue of my two cores had not yet been fully solved.

When my fourth birthday came, both of my parents were present. That shouldn’t have surprised me given their track record so far, but it did. Again, they’d both taken time off of their respective pursuits to ensure that I made it through the day safely. It was a level of commitment to me that I just wasn’t used to. Even though they’d done so thrice already, I had thought that revealing my magic to them would have… changed things, somehow.

Especially after the fire, I hadn’t had anyone who would care for me. Years had gone by in that sorry state, and even after nearly half a decade in this world, I still wasn’t used to it.

I also was never going to get used to the pain.

I had initially thought that activating both of my cores would be the end of it, but I had steadily grown to realize that wasn’t the case. Even in the months after awakening my warrior core, I had felt my cores begin deviating again. With Body Scan, even an inferior version, I had been able to continually make checks on my core. The warrior one still felt a strange draw to whatever was in our basement, and it still didn’t seem to play nice with the other one.

Before the pain could get too bad, though, my father did the same thing he had on my other birthdays. This time, I could understand much more of the casting sequence. It was still obviously way above my level, but it was good to know that my self-study was working.

“Rebind Soul!”

Once again, my cores settled down, merging closer to each other, and that was that.

I needed to learn that spell for myself. If I ever wanted to leave the house, which was much more of an appealing prospect in a world where I not only knew I was capable of doing something with my life but was also actively working towards it, I was going to need a way to keep myself from abruptly falling apart every year.

To that end, I started sifting through the higher-level spellbooks in Vallis’ study. He’d given me a key that fit a closed closet in his room, the inside of which was packed entirely with books of all sorts—references on wildlife, nature, history, and of course magic.

It took a lot longer than I thought it would to find it. Every spellbook I skimmed through was way too high level for me to understand more than the absolute basics of the theory behind them alongside their effects, which was time-consuming, but the kicker was in the books I was looking within. 

For the most part, I’d been looking at advanced defensive magic or specialized healing books. Not a single one of them contained that spell.

Ultimately, the book I found it in was a well-worn leather-bound copy titled Spellcasting and the Ken.

A spellbook about demons.

When I finally found out what the spell my father had been casting on me was meant to do, my heart dropped.

Spell: Rebind Soul

Tier: Highmaster

Type: Seal

Reseals a soul to its current host. Primarily used to prevent demons from escaping an object they have been bound to. Aiken naturally learn this spell upon reaching the Master tier and use it to maintain their connections to their stolen bodies. For a more detailed list of variants of Rebind Souls and the ken it may be cast on, consult appendix 3.

This spell does not work on humans.