Arcanist In Another World-Chapter 36: Act of Healing

What are you doing?, Valens asked himself perhaps the tenth time as he watched the pair of Priests holding their hands over a man who was bleeding from a gaping hole around his stomach. They seemed to be in utter focus as golden light spilled from their fingers, washing the wound with what appeared to be condensed lifemana.

There was an odd semblance between the two young women. Long, brown hair stuffed under a thin cloth that covered most of their heads, barely leaving a strand or two in the open. They wore loose, white robes that had but a single patch around its back. Another symbol, just like the double-headed serpent of the Duality Guild, but this one instead depicted a single eye, completely black, stabbed through the middle by a golden sword that spattered crimson blood across the half-closed eyelid.

“Is that supposed to be a religious symbol?” was Valens’s first question as he and Celme silently watched the Priests' work while waiting for Marcus to get the other, more immediate cases in a row for Valens to handle. “Rather ominous, don’t you think?”

“They are from the Church of the Golden Sun,” Celme stared down at the wounded man who was lying senseless over the stretcher. “That sword there is their signature.”

“What about the eye?”

“It belongs to the Eyeless,” Celme shrugged. “Supposed to be a Herald of the Shadow back in the Second Age. They say it used to rule a good part of the Broken Lands, but not much is known about the earlier ages as the Churches don’t go around spreading their intricate secrets for all the world to hear.”

“Eyeless, eh?” Valens tipped his head, curious. “Isn’t the Broken Lands the common enemy? Why would you keep things from each other?”

“That… is not how things work here,” Celme said tiredly. “Where did you say that you’re from again? Some faraway place, I remember, but I can’t recall if you’ve mentioned a name.”

“I didn’t,” Valens said with an innocent smile. “As I can’t remember where it was, but I’m positive it was a far… far away place. Quite the distance from here, I’m sure.”

“See?” Celme shook her head. “That’s why they keep the information sealed. Because everybody has secrets.”

Yeah, that’s fair, I guess.

“So then.” Valens decided to change the topic. “From what you’ve said I get that this religious order, the Church of the Golden Sun, is supposed to have quite the history, is that so?”

“Yes.”

“Dozens of years. Perhaps hundreds, which means centuries’ worth of experience?”

“True.”

“All the time in the world with the System, I daresay?”

“That’s… correct.”

“So why then, rather than managing the arteries torn under that wound, are they trying to drown this man under a sea of lifemana?” Valens pointed a finger at the Priests.

In the short time since they’d arrived here, the white, almost pristine interior of the tent had transformed into a scene of brutal torture. Blood had pooled underneath the stretcher. Painted the warrior’s golden armor into a sickly crimson through which jutted out parts of the man’s guts like thick worms.

If he’d been awake to witness and live through this all, then Valens was sure the experience itself would change something fundamental in the man’s brain. A pained memory was one thing, but being traumatized in the name of healing was a sin to the craft.

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A terrible sin that he couldn’t just ignore.

[Priest - Level 23]

[Priest - Level 25]

When he checked the pair once again, the System showed the same thing to his eyes. These were indeed Priests, the so-called healers of the Melton Kingdom, the supposed masters of the field. But to Valens’s eyes, they seemed more like a pair of first-years that didn’t quite know what to do with their hands.

Playing with your patient. Not caring if he’s in pain or not. What sort of twisted mockery of the art you’re performing here?!

“I told you that you’re not going to like it,” Celme said with a scowl. “The divine skills are given only to the pure souls. The Sinless, we call them, and as you can see their levels are not that high. It’s forbidden for them to join the Rifts, and even in the Broken Lands they’re only allowed to stay in the safe cities.”

“Awful!” Valens nearly cried as he clutched the tails of his new robe, dragged himself over to the stretcher, and gazed down at the pair in the manner of a Lecturer ready to reprimand a class of ignorant students. He then jabbed with a thick finger into the man’s gut when the two young women looked strangely at him. “See that? That’s blood, friends! Blood of your patient, pooling over the guts! Spilling through the bones! I admit your lifemana is stitching those veins back, but why must you torture the poor man like this?! Haven’t they taught you how to manage a simple hold? Surely you must’ve learned a basic tourniquet!”

“Valens, stop!” Celme yanked at his arm, but Valens wasn’t having it.

“And this!” he yelled as the squirming muscles of the man slowly pushed the tip of a rusted spear out of the wound. “Rust can be as dangerous as the wound itself. It’s not something you can cleanse with lifemana. Not unless you give the patient constant care in the following weeks. Where is your sanitizer? Where is the crystal water? Or is that what you want? To keep him bedridden—”

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“I told you to stop!”

A fierce force grabbed him tight by the arm and pulled him away as easily as though he weighed nothing. Valens found himself facing Celme after a second, eyes squinted with… fear?

“Why—” Valens was about to ask when the flaps of the tent parted with the tip of a golden sword. A man came barging inside, cast a terribly large shadow over Valens that made him feel tiny like a cat. “Oh,” he muttered when it dawned on him. “That’s why.”

“Who dares to raise his voice in this tent?” the mountain of a man growled with a hard voice. Valens could barely see his face, as he was clad in golden plates from all around, glinting there inside the tent like a human-shaped sun. He had the same eye symbol carved over the right side of his chest piece, which made it easy to form the connection.

[Templar - ???]

“It’s nothing,” Celme said almost sheepishly, bowing her head and urging Valens with a hand to do the same. “My friend got too excited for a second. My apologies.”

The man eased his hold around the sword and glanced over to the Priests. “Priestess, is this true?”

“I-It’s nothing,” one of the Priests yipped. Her green eyes were as saucers as golden light continued spilling through her fingers, but it was the way she nearly jumped at the sight of the giant of a man that caught Valens’s interest. She looked equally surprised to see him.

A Templar? A Knight of the church, then?

Valens couldn’t see the man’s level, which meant he was a high-level warrior who completed his First Trial. Besides, even Celme nearly trembled at the sight of him, which told a lot, as the Berserker had quite the hot head over her shoulders.

This must be a bodyguard. That golden sword and armor surely fit their Order. I wonder if he wore golden unders as well?

Valens shook his head as he called for Apathy. Felt the invisible web settle over his emotions in the Resonance. It was with a cold detachment that he gave the warrior a small bow. “Pardon my manners.”

“Keep your quiet. There are men here in need of attention, and you’re hindering the work of God,” the man said as he swept him with yet another biting glance, before turning and exiting out of the tent.

The moment he was gone, Celme’s shoulders sagged with relief. The pair of Priests resumed their work after taking long sighs of relief. Valens, instead, was thankful for Apathy as it stopped the streaks of fury trying to spill into his mind.

“That was a lot of crap!” he said in the end. “Are these people mad? Can’t they see—”

“We’re going.” Celme took his arm. “Or that stubborn tongue of yours is going to get us both chained in the dungeons.”

“Wha— I didn’t do anything!”

“I said we’re going.”

Then she dragged him out of the tent.

……

It took a bottle of real, sloshing water, a set of glares from Celme with her shapely brows and near-crimson eyes, a line of groaning men stretched in a row before an empty tent that needed immediate attention for Valens to squash his anger down and focus on the real job at hand.

Which was to fix patients.

The monotony of it was something he dearly missed, he found, when Celme and Marcus dragged a man who had a nasty scar running down the side of his chest. Instincts kicked in as quick as gears in a well-tended mana rail, and soon he was checking the wound with the tip of his finger, wincing at the primitivity of the situation without his usual tools at his command.

“Desperate times, eh, Marcus?” he smiled at the man who stood by the side, rubbing at his left leg with that same grimace on his face. He looked up at the mention of his name, and his scowl further deepened. “Don’t worry. I’ll check those hangers of yours in a minute. Once I’m done with the lot here.”

His finger squelched into the broken skin, already forming blisters across the wound that oozed with rotten pus. Some sort of present from the Necromancer’s horde, surely, one that was wicked and slippery in nature.

“Already seeped into the blood flow,” he muttered when he managed a Lifeward over the man’s body. Tiny globs of sickly yellow spheres were coursing freely through the veins, stabbing at the organs like little, stubborn needles. “Infected, too, which you’d expect from a wound like this. Some sort of rusted weapon, I’d say, and a good amount of foul mana in the mix.”

“Can you treat it?” Celme asked as she kept the man nailed to the stretcher with both hands.

“Can a bird fly? Can a mole dig through mud?” Valens said almost furiously. “This is nothing for a Resonant Healer. Can’t say the same thing for those Priests of yours, though, I’m afraid. At that rate it’ll take weeks for them to go through a dozen people. Sloppy work, my Master would’ve said, and mind you he’s a rather gentle man with budding healers.”

Valens sent a Lifesurge through the crack of the wound, down into the bloodstream to flush the rusted bits out of the blood flow. With his recently gained stats, lifemana basically roared forth from his mana pool, thicker than ever, hungry for anything that didn’t quite fit with a healthy Resonance.

“Hold him still,” he said when the man jerked up at the sudden stab of pain. “This’ll be over quick, but quick has a different meaning depending on the occasion.”

Once the blood flow cleared just enough for him to work around the wound, Valens managed a stitch over the arteries to stop the bleeding, and moved onto the rotten, necrotic skin tissue covering the wound like a host of fuzzy colored stubs of fleshy mushrooms. He tore them off as one might cut out the moldy parts of a cheese block, then flushed the area with a Lifesurge before nursing the skin to grow and close out the opening.

His stitches were done in perfect precision, barely leaving out a tear in the otherwise smeared skin. The frequencies were still somewhat scattered over the Resonance, likely since he hadn’t had the time to clean out all the rust bits from the blood flow, but it would suffice for now, and give the man enough time to heal with his own Vitality and Endurance stats.

Pretty useful stats, when you think about it. The only reason why the poor guy hadn’t died right after a wound like that.

“Get this one out and give him some water,” Valens said as the groaning man blinked all of a sudden, patting his now-fixed belly as though he was searching for that giant gash. “It’s not there anymore, buddy. Go on, then. Get a move on. Work those legs out a bit. I don’t have the time to go over the procedure and into the details.”

“I’m… healed?” the man croaked, pulling himself, wincing, up on his feet. He swayed for a moment before he righted himself with a hand over the tent, gave his head a good shake, and glanced back at Valens with questions in his eyes. “You sure? That sort of wound—”

“Next!” Valens waved at Celme and Marcus while ignoring the man. He turned to his back and got himself a cloth and a bottle from the excuses of tools they’d provided him in the name of healing supplies, poured some water over the stretcher, and wiped the bloody stains mostly for his own sake.

I’m going to be sick to my stomach after all of this.

He cracked his neck as he prepared for the next one, trying to act as professional as one can be in this primal world, treating this as another story he would tell when he got back to his own world and his Master.

Trying to stay hopeful here, Master. Not everything can be this bad, right?

The flaps of the tent parted, and Valens raised his head up to take a cursory glance at his new patient, only to frown when a familiar figure came in sight. Golden plates and a golden helm. A mountain of a body with just as big a sword hanging from his belt. That eye symbol painted over the side of his chest piece.

“Oh,” Valens muttered. “It’s him again.”

“A damned Healer in these lands!” the golden warrior barked at him while Celme and Marcus flinched nervously. “This is blasphemy! You will answer the Bishop. All of you. I will personally see to it.”

Valens pinched the bridge of his nose. He’d been just out of that dark cave for a minute, and he was already beginning to miss it.