Reborn Healer Chapter 4

I couldn’t make my way into the locked basement just quite yet, unfortunately. Though I now had enough control over my physical facilities to stack a stool up and reach the handle, it was quite thoroughly locked. It was also slightly warm to the touch. Since nobody had used it recently, I guessed that meant it was magically protected in some way.

Who had a magical lock on a basement door in their own house? It would make sense to me if it was a safe or something protecting the literal family jewels, but this was something else entirely.

For the time being, I wasn’t going to be able to make any progress towards it. Now that I had come down from the high of successfully casting my first and second spells as well as recovered from the shock of the strange sensations within my second, unformed core, I recognized the slight toll those two spells had taken on me. Akin to the sensation I had gotten when I’d studied or worked a bit too late, the mental strain of consuming mana wasn’t terrible but was noticeable. 

Though I’d taken a big step past what I had considered my boundaries, I still didn’t want to take too many risks. The book had mentioned that mana overdraw was to be avoided and that it was especially a concern for defensive mages who tended to be more reactive and thus often were pushed past their limits. It hadn’t gone into detail about the effects that running out of magic had, but I could guess.

There were no lockpicking spells in here anyway, and though I could certainly try to reverse engineer whatever was on the lock, I had roughly ten full minutes of experience in spellcasting and didn’t want to screw myself over on the first day. Night, technically, but who’s counting?

Instead, I practiced with a few other spells instead. 

Spell learned: Barrier [Beginner]

Spell learned: Alarm Thread [Beginner]

Spell learned: Sharpen Sight [Beginner]

Spell learned: Enhance Hearing [Beginner]

Everything I sampled in the Beginner tier came to me with ease. I was more capable than I had thought I was, though that was likely due to the amount of time and sheer repetitions I had put into practicing these spells.

The four I ran through all had obvious uses, though most of them weren’t immediately useful to me in my everyday life as a particularly precocious child. 

Given their low level, they mostly did exactly what they said on the tin. 

Barrier created an honest-to-god forcefield, a translucent shield roughly the size of a dinner plate. I could control the orientation and location of it, though moving it after casting it was a no-go. If I put in more power, I was sure I could make it thicker or stronger, but I got the impression it was meant to be more a quick, reactive spell for beginners than a real form of defense. It was strong enough that it could support my weight when cast horizontally, though that didn’t mean much since I couldn’t be more than around twenty pounds at this age. 

I used one as an intermediate point for me to climb up to the cutting board again so I could wash off the knife and counter as best I could. Wouldn’t do for Aria or Vallis to find my blood on their table.

Alarm Thread created a short, translucent tripwire that notified me if something passed through it. It didn’t last very long, and I still had to concentrate on keeping the spell going while it was active just like with Barrier, so I didn’t think I’d use it for much, but it was good to keep in mind.

Sharpen Sight and Enhance Hearing were both obvious in function. I’d been nearsighted on Earth, though that hadn’t carried over. When I cast the former, the difference between my already functional vision and what I saw was like how I’d felt when I’d put on glasses for the first time in the second grade. My prescription hadn’t been as bad back then, so it wasn’t terribly dramatic, but I suddenly found myself able to see dust settling in the tiny cracks in our floor when I focused.

By the time I tested Enhance Hearing, I was starting to feel the effects of casting so many spells. My mind and core alike were exhausted, so I decided to give it a rest.

Sleep had never come so easily.

Over the next few weeks, I practiced in secret, primarily focusing on healing spells. Our yard had no shortage of rocks short enough to gash myself on, so I picked out a particularly sharp one to hide in my room and practice healing with.

Spell learned: Cure Minor Infection [Beginner]

Fun fact about rocks in the yard: not washing one and letting blood accumulate on it makes getting an infection by stabbing yourself with it really easy.

The sense enhancing spells were pretty easy to pick up, so I practiced those too. I didn’t want to spread myself too thin, so I was sticking to one or two new spells a week for the time being.

One day, after what had to be the hundredth time repairing the same wound, I felt something different in the Mend Wound spell. Somehow, my body seemed to react to it more easily. Though the process was the same as always, it felt physically easier to cast the spell now too, and the healing was ever so slightly faster.

Accompanying that was a system message.

Mend Wound lvl 0 -> lvl 1

I resisted the urge to wake everyone up shouting. Level-ups! I could increase the power of my spells just by using them! That was insane. It seemed to come slow, even with practice, but holy shit. The book had mentioned levels offhandedly, but only very lightly.

Even more motivation to practice.

I also learned more about the system screens. It mostly erred on the side of underexplaining things—hell, it didn’t even show the level of a spell until it went up for the first time—but it gave me a great deal of freedom with respect to how I could arrange the spells I knew. At the moment, I had them sorted into three categories.

Name: Ren Kane

Core: Beginner (Mage) / None

Spells:

[Healing]

> Mend Wound lvl 1 [Beginner]

> Cure Minor Infection [Beginner]

> Body Scan [Beginner]

[Defensive]

> Barrier [Beginner]

> Alarm Thread [Beginner]

[Buff]

> Sharpen Sight [Beginner]

> Enhance Hearing [Beginner]

> Enhance Smell [Beginner]

Skills: None gained

The none gained on the skills part of things was a little confusing. Sure, I was still very young, but it wasn’t like I’d been idle this entire time.

Mend Wound lvl 1 -> 2

Body Scan lvl 0 -> 1

As the weeks passed and I tried a number of ways to gain the skill, I began to nurture a suspicion that it was my second, yet-unawakened core that was responsible for that section.

I still had yet to activate it. Though I could sense it properly now, I wasn’t sure how to push mana into it. For the time being, I directed all of it towards my mage core. Though progress was slow, I could feel it steadily start to expand. By the end of a month of practicing, I could tell that I was lasting a couple of spells longer before I got to the point of exhaustion.

Barrier lvl 0 -> lvl 1

Sharpen Sight lvl 0 -> lvl 1

Apart from just sheer volume, I also improved my flexibility with the spells I had. Most of the magic could be adjusted in power just with mana volume, which I found was instinctive enough to do without much trouble. Beyond that, though, changing the speed and method of passing mana through my channels could also result in significant changes to a spell’s duration and even effects. 

With some concentration, I could even cast two spells at the same time. That was definitely the hardest. Controlling two separate flows of mana inside my body while also ensuring the effects were proper was an ordeal in itself.

Mend Wound lvl 2 -> lvl 3

Barrier lvl 1 -> lvl 2

Cure Minor Infection lvl 0 -> lvl 1

The incantations were an interesting point to practice. The book had described that voiceless magic was feasible but generally restricted to powerful, experienced mages. For my part, I had been able to skip all but the final steps of the incantation just from repetition letting me memorize how the mana flowed through my body. With enough practice, I was able to cast Mend Wound and Body Scan completely silently just by following the same track, but it definitely required more of my attention.

Even if it was limited, being able to cast without words was a major boon. It meant skipping over a lot of potentially tricky word work and casting faster, which could make a crucial difference in the future.

My third birthday came and passed. Once again, my parents made time to heal me through it. Vallis no longer seemed actually terrified during the time around his healing, which I hoped meant he’d figured something out.

Eventually, I decided it was time to take another step forward. Depending on how much I limited the spells I used, I could cast somewhere between ten and fifteen Beginner-tier spells before I got tired and had to rest for a while. 

I wasn’t sure what the gap between tiers was, and the book hadn’t elucidated much other than to say that they were large, but I also knew that I should be capable of casting Initiate-tier magic. According to the spellbook, once a core was in the same tier group as a spell, the base requirements were met to cast it—it just happened that the strain on a Beginner-tier core by, say, an Adept-tier spell, would be too much to bear and either the spell would break or the caster would.

One night, I decided to put that to the test. Telling myself that I’d just cancel the spell if it looked like it could become dangerous, I snuck out of my room again, treading well-remembered steps towards the spellbook.

Both of my parents were out for the night—from what I’d heard, Vallis was visiting a noble patient in the city, while Aria was just gone like she often was. Iryn was asleep in the guest room. She was always easy to sneak past. Even on the nights she slept out in the open, she was a heavy enough sleeper that I didn’t even need to tiptoe around her.

I went outside to cast this time. The first Initiate-tier spell I wanted to cast wasn’t a healing one, even though I did want to improve my healing capabilities the most—after all, the amount of damage I would have to do to myself to even see the difference between Beginner and Initiate was enough that I’d have real worries if the spell didn’t work out and fully exhausted me. Instead, it was going to be a perception buff spell, and I had seen enough of the inside of our kitchen for a lifetime.

Our “yard” was more of a garden with a small walking path than anything I would’ve considered a yard. This alongside the size of my family’s house was what had convinced me that my father was a more important man than I had originally thought. Then again, we were in the countryside, so it was very possible it hadn’t cost all that much.

I made my way to the fence separating my house from the rest of the city and looked up. Cloudless nights were always beautiful, and today was no different. There were no artificial lights beyond a handful of torches lit within houses, and I had an unimpeded view of the cosmos above.

Breathe. I told myself. You can do this.

I didn’t need to follow the book, but I did anyway. Just like with the other spells, I’d practiced this one so many times that its movements were ingrained in me. It came easier than it had before thanks to my increasing familiarity with mana manipulation inside my own body, and soon enough, I could feel mana under my skin, ready to burst.

This spell was more complicated than any of the enhancing spells I’d learned beforehand because it was a generalized spell that encompassed multiple senses rather than one, which obviously also meant its cost was substantially higher. I found myself grateful for practicing casting holding multiple spells at the same time and resolved to continue doing so. If not for that practice, I doubted I would have been able to follow the spellbook so easily.

“Augment Perception,” I whispered.

Spell learned: Augment Perception [Initiate]

My senses sharpened instantly. I’d grown used to the sensation after practicing so many times, but when there were multiple of them active at the same time, they seemed to feed into each other, heightening my awareness far past where any of the individual Beginner-tier spells had. Where the  previous spells had been like using better equipment, this was real magic. 

Off in the distance, so faint that I hadn’t been able to hear it before, the sound of insects chirping rang from what I could now clearly see was a forest.

The amount of energy it took to upkeep this spell was definitely higher, though. I probably wasn’t going to be able to hold this for all that long.

As I started to wind down my mana usage, though, I froze.

Something was rustling near the house. At first, I wanted to dismiss it as the wind, but my senses were sharp enough to tell me that there wasn’t even a breeze.

I looked towards the source of the sound, my enhanced senses guiding me to it easily.

There. Maybe fifty feet away, just off the beaten path to our house. In the tall grass. A glimpse of red eyes, moonlight glinting off them.

They stared right back at me. As if realizing that it had been discovered, the owner of those eyes stepped out from the grass.

I gasped.

It wasn’t a thief, which was what I had initially thought. No, this was significantly worse. 

An animal three quarters of the way between an attack dog and a wolf snarled at me, its snout pointed straight at me. It must have been the size of an adult man on all fours, and judging from the measured, threatening gait that it took towards me, it was intelligent to recognize it could get to me.

I took a step back, and it sped up.

Shit.

I ran back towards the house, but it was far faster. Just as I got to the door, it charged our fence and leapt straight over it, clearing six feet without even trying.

And it kept coming right for me.