The Lost Doctor's Soul - Chapter 23 - Learning under candlelight
When ‘morning’ came, the storm outside had grown fierce enough I could constantly hear it even a level underground.
It took a while to adjust to the dim room barely lit by a few small candles. I saw Vildost sleeping in his full outfit, his hat over his face. Nisha was on the floor, I couldn’t see him well, but I could hear his snoring loud and clear. And Kanako was still fast asleep wrapped up in blankets on another one of the beds, head uncovered this time so I could see her peaceful face.
I thought I woke up the earliest, but then I noticed Arashi sat huddled in a corner, glaive within arm’s reach, blankly staring at the room door.
I guessed it from the dark circles under her eyes, but it looked like she didn’t sleep much, if at all.
Exchanging a nod of greeting with her, I slowly sat up, stretching my still-tired muscles.
[Why are you awake so early? Go back to bed, there’s nothing to do anyway…] I heard Starlight grumble in my head, and I decided to just ignore her as I got off the bed.
Now that this group knew about me being from another world, I could ask questions that would be ‘the most basic common sense’ in this world.
Going straight to Arashi, I asked her about the ‘confluences’ and ‘waves’, hoping to learn more than ‘storms that occur throughout the world’ and ‘monsters attacking periodically en masse.
“Confluences… are essentially battles in a great war.” was how she explained them. That didn’t help.
“I don’t know if this is what everyone believes, but my people see ‘confluences’ as clashes in the war of the gods.” she tried to explain again.
“Do ‘gods’ actually exist here? I mean, can they be seen and do they interact with the world?” I asked, curious about that point. Was it a god who brought me here?
“Yes. Do they not in your… world?” she asked.
“My world has a god… Well, every religion believes in a different god who rules the world, some believe in many gods working together, my own religion is mono-thestic and believes in a single omnipotent and omnipresent entity known as ‘God’ that created the world… There’s no solid evidence that any god can interact with the world or be seen by mortal eyes.”
Arashi just stared at me, and I realized I failed at communication. Taking a page from Nisha’s book, I tried again. “We believe in gods, but there’s no solid proof they exist.”
She nodded at that. “Interesting… Do you not have people who receive power from the divine?”
“No. More than that, there’s no such thing as magic either. I mentioned this last night, but only the concept of magic exists.” I replied, sitting down next to her.
She and I talked for a little bit longer… well, I mostly talked and she replied a bit.
I decided that I could learn more about her health as I’d be the party’s doctor, and what I heard was rather worrying.
Aside from the chance of going berserk in a fight, her biggest side-effect was a constant feeling of pain. This pain grows clearer when she tries to sleep and has made her unable to fall asleep naturally anymore.
She either has to use medicine or meditate through the night. To avoid dependance and reduced effectiveness, she only uses sleep medication when meditation becomes too difficult.
Thinking about this, I understood why she was so desperate to cure this affliction that she’d risk her life looking for illegal necromantic tools. It also made me think about how I could help her… my medical knowledge didn’t offer any new solutions she wasn’t already trying.
I considered that her affliction might be magical in nature if it was on her ‘soul’ and not a specific part of her body, but I had already been close enough that my anti-magic affected her, and it seemed to have done nothing. So at best, it could possibly be a short term relief, but unless I could separate my anti-magic from myself, it wasn’t very viable.
Not wanting to bother her much more, I got up and left the room, looking around the shelter before the others woke up.
The door led to a decently lit and fairly long corridor, where I could count no less than sixteen doors that seemed to lead to rooms like ours.
If each room could comfortably hold six people, then a bit less than a hundred people could easily take refuge here! A lot more if they filled every room to capacity and put people in this corridor.
Considering this village only had a population of a bit over 400, that was quite good for just one of the shelters. And seeing how comfortable this place was made it feel more real that confluences and waves were consistent occurrences that the people fully adapted to.
“First time in a dinky village’s storm shelter?” this corridor wasn’t as empty as I thought, as I heard a woman’s voice call out to me. I was surprised at how quiet she was that I couldn’t distinguish her footsteps from the sound of the storm outside, despite my very good hearing.
[Armin, you need to get away from her, right now!] I heard Starlight’s frantic voice. [Do NOT let her see your face! LEAVE NOW!]
I was so shocked hearing so much panic from her that I froze for a second, barely stopping myself from turning around.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to be in your way.” I quickly muttered an apology, before ducking back in to our room, surprising Arashi and even waking up Nisha and Kanako when I rushed in.
“Did something happen?” Kanako asked, clutching a dagger as her eyes darted around.
“I don’t know, Starlight suddenly-” said devil rapidly appeared when I said that, wearing the more-normal clothes from our first meeting. “You can’t leave this room till the storm’s gone.” she immediately said, jabbing a finger at me.
“What do you-” she interrupted me again, as she blurted out. “That was Soliaras, an inquisitor! She was the one who led Millar to the ruins and killed him!”
What? A chill ran down my spine and I heard someone gasp. The murderer of my body’s last owner was so close… and they almost recognised me. What the hell…
“Woah, sooo… there’s someone who wants ta kill you in here with us?” Vildost groggily called out as he held his head, tumbling out of bed. “That’s… bad, right?”
“Thank you so much for the valuable insight~ Are you going to suggest that rain might be wet next?” Starlight sarcastically replied, rolling her eyes. “You’re welcome!” he replied back, and I could almost feel the psychic damage she took from that.
“Do we attack her?” Nisha of all people suggested instantly taking things to the extreme. “That would be a fitting course of action.” Arashi got on board too quickly!
“Now hold on, isn’t that a bit extreme?” I called out to stop them.
“She murdered two people in cold blood, we need to be cautious.” she bluntly replied, and I couldn’t argue with that much, but “That doesn’t mean we can just attack her.” it was still too extreme.
With a bit of back and forth we eventually decided that avoiding the killer would be a good course of action for now. Kanako asked Starlight to see what the killer looked like and she waved her hand across the empty air… but nothing happened. However, the others reacted to that nothing.
“She’s from the temple of law!?” Kanako blurted out, wide eyed. “Why would she murder someone? Wouldn’t she be scared of divine retribution?” That… complicated things.
“As if. You think a god would keep track of every little thing in their temple?” Starlight scoffed. “Unless their inquisitors or bishops personally deal with them, priests and clerics can still keep the power of their god even if they’re the worst blasphemer.”
“I can’t see it.” I sighed, remembering that I couldn't perceive magic in the slightest, even illusions, as part of my anti-magic.
The devil groaned, looking at me like I just asked her to paint my fence for free. “She’s a tall, silver haired, one eyed, paladin-type in full white and gold platemail. You’ll recognise her the moment you see her.”
“So why did she kill Millar? And what about the monk?” I asked, not seeing how things lined up with the events I heard about.
“Monk?” she asked back. “I don’t know about a monk. The last thing I knew was that ‘priest’ was going to lead Millar to some ruins to find some long lost records for me.”
I quickly filled everyone in about what I heard about the monk attacking first then ‘disappearing’.
“Of course it had to get more complicated… you need to get out of this shabby village as soon as the storm’s gone.” she replied, pressing her temples. “And it just had to be a priest! If I go looking around, they might notice me, so someone else should get out there and investigate.”
“Are they that strong?” I had to ask, I didn’t think Starlight was weak, even if I didn’t feel too threatened by them. “No, of course not. But if I use any powerful magic, those annoying mutts will start sniffing around.” she callously replied, waving me off.
When I asked her to clarify what she meant, but instead of answering she brushed me off and said she’d talk about it later. The first thing we had to do was find out anything we could about the priest, how many people she had with her, and the general situation of the shelter.
Sighing, I looked around the room. Kanako was the sneakiest one here… but priests are particularly suspicious of infernal blood, so they’d investigate us if they noticed her. Arashi wasn’t very subtle, and Nisha was… too straight forward?
“Oh, I’ll go~” Vildost casually offered, before rolling off the bed and landing on his face. “Damn, you reallly gonna sneeak up on me like that, flooor? I thought we had a deal…”
It’s not that I didn’t trust this new friend of mine, I just… had no confidence in him.
With no better options, we sent off the hungover cowboy and waited.
During this time we had a small chat and I learnt that this island, Vetus memoria, was a tiny independent city-state effectively in the middle of the world that served as a valuable trading hub between nations.
The island has two ports in the city and a port in the south, like I saw on the map from the first merfolk. The southern port was called ‘Deporter’s port’, apparently, and it was very… unofficial.
These guys came via that port because there are no taxes on it… everyone in the party is pretty much broke. While this would be ‘illegal entry’, the city doesn’t really do anything about it because it still leads to some business for the village of Noffan.
Individually, everyone here hoped to get to the city and find some way to go to Lariatne, be it by getting hired by a ship, working in the city to earn fare money, or sneaking on board as a stowaway.
That reminded me…
“Can everyone use magic?” I asked, wondering just how common it was. Kanako was the one who answered. “Well, no. Everyone has mana, the foundation of magic, but a lot of people either don’t have enough, or they don’t have the talent, or they never get the chance to learn.” she explained. “I know a decent bit of projection and a little bit of enhancement magic.”
“I see… projection magic. Is that projecting images, or magic that creates projectiles?” I asked, not sure how impressive that was, and all I got was a blank stare in response.
“Ah right, you’re from a world without magic…” she chuckled, scratching her head.
At that point, Starlight let out a sigh as she laxly laid on one of the beds, looking over at me as she propped her head on her palm. “She thought your anti-magic was Apotropaic magic… she’s not the most reliable teacher. I’ll only offer this once, do you want me to explain magic in this world?” I chose to listen, because who else would know as much about magic than the ‘seeker of knowledge’?
Summarising everything she explained;
There are 8 broader branches of magic, and 23 schools of magic. Each school of magic focused on a specific application of magic, with some amount of overlap.
It was a long lecture, but I’ve condensed all the information in this table.
It’s a lot of information to take in, and nowhere near everything I need to know about magic, just the bare basics for now.
“If someone was responsible for your soul ending up in Millar’s body, they used the rarest school of magic, Soulmancy. And they must have been at least intermediate with it to bind a soul to a body so well.” Starlight explained. “I’m not sure about why you have such a strong field of anti-magic around you, though… maybe if you let me take a ‘closer’ look at your body we could experiment a bit~”
“No thank you.” I groaned, rolling my eyes at that.
“Ouch.” she monotonously replied, shaking her head. “On a serious note, if that anti-magic field is something you’re constantly outputting, it means that you have an incredible amount of mana. If you could stop casting that anti-magic, then you’d be able to use that mana for something else.” she chuckled.
“What? So I could learn magic?” I replied. It’d be a lie if I said I wasn’t interested. It’s magic!
“Or it could just be that something’s completely disconnecting the area around you from the weave. In that case, there’s no way to tell what the source of the power is or if we can even tamper with it without a lot of research.” she added, pouring some cold water on my excitement.
Interrupting this conjecture, the door flung open and a freshly drunken Vildost came staggering in with a bottle of alcohol in his hand. “Heeey, how’re you doing? Hooolding up well?” Great, he was drunk again.
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