Chapter 15:

  The group of boars Eli was tracking were not discreet, making it easy to follow them through the underbrush. Heavy steps thundered against the ground and the sound of blunt tusks tearing at roots was clear in the pre-dawn morning. Eli moved in stealth, scentless, soundless, and focused. Once he was at what he felt to be an optimal range Eli sent out a ripple of earth that caught the beast’s foreleg before it even knew it was in danger. It toppled with a grunt and a squeal, and before it could thrash, a tendril of water had snaked its way up its nostril and straight into its lungs, suffocating it until it passed out.

  Eli crouched at its side, notebook already open. His hand hovered above its shoulder.

  Healing was something he knew enough about to patch his own wounds or his reservoirs’ long enough to escape or find a true healer, and that was something he needed to change. It wouldn’t be enough, and he needed to get better. Unfortunately for the denizens of the wilds, it was a contentious discipline to learn because while a cadaver might suffice for small weaves and simple wounds, in order to get any meaningful experience, a mage needed living tissue to practice on. Like, an unconscious boar, for example.

  A thin blade of pure mana opened a shallow line across the beast’s flank. It twitched, then quieted as earth tightened around its legs, and water flooded it once more. Master Healers and above had spells that could target parts of a person’s brain or body to deaden sensation. A terrifying if convenient magic, Eli thought as he pressed his palm over the wound and pushed mana inward. Flesh knit in a clean, smooth line.

  Eli’s focus was not on simply healing the wound as much as he was focused on numbing the area surrounding it. It was a completely separate skill from pure healing magic. This was a theme with a lot of secondary and tertiary healing skills. They tended to tap less into pure life magic – which he did not have a strong affinity for – and allowed him to experiment more with his light, water, or nature magic. While Eli did have a stronger connection to them, they were certainly not his strongest affinities. Time healing had startlingly little research to pull from, and he was reluctant to practice time healing without a Master or above healer to supervise and advise him.

  Of course, this did nothing to deter him from working with his other affinities. If he couldn’t refine his skills the traditional way, he would simply have to create his own. It wouldn’t be the first time, and unlike pure combat, mage craft was a subject he was always delighted to lose himself in.

  He had learned basic healing skills in his classes at the Academy, but those skills were mostly focused on the absolute fundamentals as well as what to do in emergency situations. He had also received more advanced healing lessons from his mother. Those lessons had focused on teaching him advanced methods of keeping people alive, not on making that process painless.

  Doing his best to put half remembered theory into practice, Eli followed the signals he could sense through nerves and vessels, tracing the patterns and feeling the connections. He recalled what he knew about the circulation of blood and mana. The alchemy of the brain and other interesting theories he’d heard about from healers he’d known and books he’d read. Some of those theories were ahead of his current time. While he did not believe it would be smart to outright flaunt these new or yet to be discovered techniques, he also did not want to handicap himself in the name of discretion. Perhaps he could get into research early, or drop a few well placed hints and speed up some discoveries?

  He felt the boar buck under him, and shifted his weave to try and identify where he had gone wrong. Knocking the boar out again, he cut another line into its flank. It was a process of trial and error, and he could feel his technique being refined with every pass. Was what he was doing potentially cruel? Sure, but the boar was no sapient beast, and it wasn’t like he was getting some sort of sick satisfaction from wounding the animal. He did not know if that made his actions any better, but at least he knew where he drew the line, and he stuck to it.

  He remembered that during his academy years there had been an ‘operation’ carried out by a faction of students who had gotten it into their minds to ‘liberate’ a bunch of the live subjects that were used for demonstrations during healing classes.

  Their argument had been that the animals didn’t deserve to be captured and held against their will, and that it was cruel to keep them locked up and breed them just to ‘hurt them’ when they never even had a chance to be free. Many of those same students’ families kept indentured servants on multigenerational contracts, many of them children. They had not liked that being pointed out at all. Then when the disciplinary council asked them for an alternative or a workaround, the group had no useful suggestions or ideas.

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  Had that stopped them? Of course not.

  The ‘liberators’ as they’d termed themselves had ended up splitting the student body into factions. Factions that unsurprisingly mirrored political, economic, and historical divisions in the empire at large. The groups began to push beyond mere rhetoric, protest, and petty acts of vigilantism and had eventually escalated into violence. The whole thing had spiraled so far out of control that by the end of it the crown court had needed to get involved.

  That whole bit of stupidity was disruptive, divisive, and entirely preventable. Especially since Eli was planning on being on the disciplinary committee this time around. He would need the status as much as the reputation. That coupled with academic excellence and his social position should give him the room he needed to maneuver and act upon some of his future knowledge and plans. But those plans were not for now. No, for now he needed to push himself and refine his skills.

  Eli shook of the memories and got back to work. After a few more cycles of wound, suffocate, heal, wound again Eli released the beast. It staggered upright, dazed but alive, and bolted into the dark. For some reason the healing magic was coming to him so much more naturally than it ever had in his past future. Something to think about. Just like he needed to rethink this whole catch and release thing.

  It was fine, if slightly wasteful to just catch and kill a bunch of mundane animals, let alone the ones he had worked on. Catching them and then letting them go, however, would be dangerous.

  Eli considered the boar he had released. It was not a true beast in the sense that it had no inherent magic. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t be hunting them in numbers though, and then using them to practice his magic. It would be dangerous to keep releasing them. The more mana a beast possessed, the smarter, sturdier, and more dangerous they were overall. Beasts learned, gained insights and evolved.

  What Eli was doing was essentially capturing the mostly mundane boars, and then saturating and refining their bodies with mana, over and over again. Sure, that wasn’t his intention, but ‘Break and Rebuild’ was one of the few publicly known body refinement processes, simply because it was impossible to hide.

  If a soldier was injured during a battle again and again, being healed each time it happened, they would begin to notice that the most affected areas were stronger. If there was sufficient repeated trauma then the effects would be more pronounced. People would become more flexible, more durable, more beautiful. Burn victims who were fully healed over repeated treatments would find their skin softer, more pliable, less visibly damaged by things like age weather and hard work. Wealthy scions who were injured during sparring or combat would be healed and come out of the experiences with improvements that couldn’t otherwise be explained.

  Endless abyss, there were even entire healing Houses dedicated to skin tempering as cosmetic treatments for unawakened and non-combatants. Sure healing wasn’t free, but there were enough wealthy and well connected people to make it an industry on its own.

  Too many people could afford to have a healer completely restore their injuries for the method to have any chance of staying hidden. It was so ubiquitous that many houses had ‘Break and Rebuild’ as their main body refinement technique.

  With animals the results were even more pronounced, and infinitely more dangerous. Eli releasing even a single boar that was essentially an artificially enhanced, body tempered, half-step mana beasts into the wild was already pushing it. Releasing the scores of them he would be working on over time into the border wilds would be creating a problem much bigger than just wasted meat.

  However, killing them and then leaving their carcases just anywhere was also not ideal. Not only would it leave more proof of passage than he cared to, but beast carrion would attract other beasts and create unpredictable disruption in the natural ecosystem of the area.

  He supposed could get the meat butchered in town. It would probably be good for the economy, but the idea of giving handouts to Aria’s father displeased him. He could have it butchered by one of the house cooks. It might get back to his parents that way, though, and he would rather not lie to anyone, or add that risk of discovery to his already robust list of concerns.

  Another option was to hire someone to open a market stall for him on certain days. There were hunters that were familiar with butchery, though catching the game was still their main profession. He would pay them to process the meat and sell it for him, then play it off as their own finds. Of course that would require he had some way to get his catches back to town, and in good enough condition that the meat wouldn’t be wasted. More pressingly, it would require him to know a hunter trustworthy enough for him to feel comfortable getting into business together. He was sure they were out there, but he had neither the time nor the inclination to go find them.

  He wished he had paid more attention to such things the first time around, but as his governess had once told him ‘wishes were not actions, and only one of those was sure to get results’. For now, he would need some way to store the meat until he could do something more productive with it.

  A bag of stasis was the answer. He’d made them before. It would essentially be a larger, more complex version of the pouch his mom had given him for his fifth birthday. He’d bag the beasts he killed; the enchantment would keep it fresh so he wouldn’t even need to hassle with the draining or harvesting, then he could slowly offload his kills when he was in a better position to do it discreetly.

  Perhaps an upgraded privacy enchantment too. Ideas swirled through his head as he tracked down the next would be victim of his healing magic.