Reborn Healer Chapter 2

My parents didn’t talk to me about that one strange day at all after it happened. Maybe it was because I was supposedly still too young to understand what was going on, but I suspected there was something deeper to it.

If nothing else, it pushed me even harder to learn how to read. During the first year, I hadn’t made many inroads towards reading because I just had nowhere to start. At least with language, I could use context clues. The books we had at home had very few pictures that weren’t diagrams or maps, and while I could guess at a few things based on that, it was nigh impossible for me to associate the strange, unreadable script with words.

Now that I had this alien text in front of my eyes, though, that changed. I could blink it in and out of existence with a thought, new instincts baked into my body guiding my mind. With some trial and error, I gained a rough idea of how to navigate around it. If this had been a game, it would have been a fairly bare-bones stat screen. To start off, I didn’t have stats. That only made sense, though. Reading about people or playing characters that had stats was one thing. Living it out was another.

Other than the one screen, though, I couldn’t really get much out of the screen. There weren’t any sub-menus or anything like that, and while the stranger’s voice—which never changed—helped me understand what I was seeing, it didn’t provide any explanations.

At first, that seemed to be the end of that, but I quickly figured out how I could use it to my advantage. This screen was my Rosetta Stone. Since I could understand the spoken language, I could correlate what the voice narrated to the text.

I hadn’t been the best at learning back on Earth, but things were a bit different when I was willing to put in effort and indeed had no choice but to. It wasn’t like there were social media sites and mobile games to distract me here.

From the moment Aria and Vallis determined that I was safe to start moving again, I started trying to read, using the easiest-looking book we had. It was slow going, that was for sure. The words weren’t English, obviously, which meant that I had to cross-reference my stat screen for pieces of the alphabet to slowly piece together each individual word. 

It was here that my constant efforts to learn and understand the spoken language started to bear fruit. Since I knew what a good chunk of words meant, I could use context clues to discover more of the language.

Gradually, I picked up the ability to read what I eventually realized was a regional encyclopedia. I greedily devoured it once I started to gain more than a toddler’s understanding of what it meant, though I had to reread a good number of sections multiple times to fully understand what was going on.

The grammar was just different enough from English to consistently confuse me, so it did take a few months of reasonably diligent study for me to pick it up, but I was able to gain a decent grasp of the area around me. While a lot of it was nice information to have, it was largely unimportant to a toddler who had yet to leave his house.

The second book proved to be much more interesting than the first. This one’s title translated roughly to A Primer to Defensive Magic. It had been immediately interesting to me from the point I’d been able to read titles, but it was the kind of thing that I wanted to be able to actually comprehend in full when I read it, so I’d practiced the language for a while first.

I was glad for it. Though it had taken me a good three months to get to the point of even picking the book up, I knew I wouldn’t have been able to comprehend a word of this when I had started. Now, though, I was more than capable of understanding.

The primer provided some sorely-needed context for some of the parts of my stat screen.

Cores were the center of magic. They described something like an extra organ that humans had here, though whether that was a physical organ or something more spiritual was unclear. Everyone was born without the connection to their core, but undergoing a ritual of sorts would unlock it.

For me, that “ritual” had been my father casting a spell on me. Rebind Soul, had it been called? I wasn’t sure what that had done, but it had stopped the pain. I could tell that it hadn’t been a permanent fix, unfortunately. Every now and then, I felt a strange twisting within me, as if the forces that had torn me apart on the inside were stirring again. It hadn’t gotten nearly as bad as it had on my birthday yet, but it was more than a little concerning. I hoped Vallis would be able to help me with it again if it came to it.

Anyway, the point was that even with my awakening, I still didn’t have an active core. Though the primer was specifically about defensive magic and thus touched on the fundamentals less, it did explain a fair bit of them.

Not having an active core was normal. It was there, but it was dormant. According to the book, I would have to form it myself through meditation and… “mana condensation,” whatever that meant. There were a few meditation techniques listed that gave some hints towards it, but they weren’t very specific about the mechanics.

A core was necessary to cast magic. The higher the level of magic, the higher the level of the core required. According to the book, there were theorized to be nine tiers split into three groups of three, though the eighth and ninth were largely relegated to stories.

The three groups were called various things by various groups, but they could roughly be broken down the same way.

Basic: Beginner, Initiate, Adept. These were typically achievable by anyone with a “mana-capable soul.”

Master: Master, Highmaster, Grandmaster. Less than one in a hundred people with the ability to use mana made it this far. Now that I read this, I remembered a few names in the encyclopedia that had been preceded by “Master” or “Highmaster.”

Legendary: Saint, Sovereign, Divine. Though this was an introductory book and thus less clear in its explanation of higher-level magic, it touched on these just enough to impress on me that they were extraordinarily rare, so much so that a list of those who had reached the Saint tier in defensive magic could fit into a short list in this book itself.

By the time a person reached the highest tiers, it seemed like they were more living legend than human. When the book referred to the Life Saint or the Reaper Saint, it did so with a level of reverence on par with that of a religious text. It rarely used their names, either; it seemed like their titles were more important.

That was the kind of story that could make my brain go crazy with all kinds of theories and possibilities had it been fiction—but it wasn’t. I had to figure out how to get myself onto the map before I started to even dream about that kind of greatness.

The book also mentioned offhandedly that a mage’s soul wasn’t necessarily the only path that a core would take, but it didn’t say much else about it. I figured that was probably the domain of another manual.

Before I could go about learning any of the spells in this book, I had to create my core. After a few weeks of reading it to make sure I wasn’t missing anything, I decided it was time to give it a try.

Apparently, it was more normal for kids to start awakening their core whether on purpose or by accident around the age of five, but there was no detriment to doing so earlier. From scanning this book, I had determined it held a great number of healing spells, which I very much was interested in. 

If there was a way to learn how to manage my condition myself, I wanted to find it. The phantom pains of that haunted me in my dreams almost every night, and I could tell that I hadn’t seen the last of them. I was going to have to be self-dependent one day, and I couldn’t rely on my father here to always have the answers, especially when he was so often not at home. What if my second birthday rolled around and the same thing happened and he wasn’t there to help me?

That meant sitting in silence and focusing on nothing but the energy flowing within myself for hours on end every day. At first, I thought it was just a load of bullshit. On Earth, there was no energy in any human’s body except for what one’s heart provided.

A few months in, though, I sensed it. Just a hint of electric warmth jolted through me, flowing through me in dim, fleeting bursts. The second I noticed it, my focus doubled in intensity, and it was much easier to catch the next instance. Then the next.

“Yes!” I shouted, pumping my still-tiny fists.

“Ren?” Aria asked, raising her voice from her study. “Are you okay?”

“Fine!” I replied.

I was more than fine. I was ecstatic.

It was a long process. I could go hours doing nothing but focusing on my breathing and paying attention to my body between those bursts of energy, and even slightly failing to try to manipulate the energy meant it would disappear instantly. Once I figured out how to move it, though, that part turned out to be near instinctual. Maybe that had to do with the body I’d been born into.

Bit by bit, week after week, month after month, I pulled in more of that energy. Slowly, I began to gain a sense of the accumulating store of electric energy within me, just below my heart.

My second birthday came while I was working on accumulating that energy—that mana. I had fallen asleep while meditating sometime during the day, and a massive, mind-melting jolt of pain shook me out of it.

I woke up screaming, bringing both of my parents running. They’d been more prepared for it this time—Vallis came and cast the same spell again.

“You’re okay,” he told me, patting my head gently. “You’re okay.”

The words sounded like they were as much to reassure himself as they were for me, but I didn’t mind. They were nice nonetheless.

I continued my mana collection afterwards. The pain seemed like it wasn’t going to be a one-time thing, but there wouldn’t be anything I could do about it unless I could cast the same spell Vallis could.

On a chilly fall day when the trees outside our house were shedding crimson leaves in droves, it happened. Two of the pulses came at once, and I caught them in the same manner I’d been beginning to get used to, and the warmth within me stayed.

Without warning, the same sensation exploded into my veins, tracing a diagram of my body from the inside out. It burned, but not nearly as much as the sensation of my insides being ripped apart had. There was a different intensity to it, though, a weight that pressed down on me until my vision went black.

When I woke up again, I was lying on the ground and drenched in foul-smelling sweat. This was part of the process, I had read—increasing core tiers resulted in changes in the body, which meant expelling some impurities and burning fuel to reinforce parts. It was a good thing that my parents had grown used to me being more mobile than most kids my age were, so much so that they didn’t question it if I bathed myself.

A voice congratulated me as I awoke, text I could now read perfectly scrolling across my eyes.

You have advanced a mage core to the Beginner tier.

I grinned. The warmth within me had stayed there in my veins, and it felt fantastic. Even if the benefits of this core were minor, I saw the world like an entirely different human. Colors were brighter, sensations sharper, the world more… vivid.

Was this what life was supposed to be like?

Even as I basked in the glow of my new core, though, I could tell that something was wrong. It was like I had another limb that had gone missing. Part of me was supposed to be here, and it just wasn’t.

Something was definitely wrong. While the book wasn’t necessarily the end-all-be-all of magical knowledge, it had explained roughly what I was supposed to be feeling with respect to the core. While the warmth and flow of magic through me was definitely right, it had made no mention of a phantom limb sensation, nor did it mention anything about the way my core felt slightly out of space.

Had I done the procedure incorrectly? It didn’t feel like I’d screwed anything up, and I’d followed the book’s instructions almost down to a letter. 

My other guess was less pleasing. If my core was the reason my father had needed to use Rebind Soul on me, it was possible that something was just wrong with me.

Frowning, I opened my stats again.

Name: Ren Kane

Core: Beginner (Mage) / None

Spells: None learned

Skills: None gained

I read over it again, my frown deepening. The book hadn’t said anything about this short of calling it nearly impossible, but the explanation for that empty feeling was listed right there. 

That shouldn’t be possible, I thought. I have two cores.