Chương 124: Chapter 114: The Fortress of Life

Henry did not show up the next day. Lira was worried at first, but she decided that she had done everything she could about him... Other than killing him, that is, and she wasn't willing to do that. So she resolved to trust that Pallan's misdirections would work. In the meantime, she returned to trying to consolidate her medical knowledge with the Life Is a Fortress theory. And for that, she needed to understand the white knights and red peasants that lived in her blood by observing them in action.

The first task was simple. She would repeat one of Tony's experiments so she could lend some credibility to his claims. She dropped some of her blood onto a clean surface that she had scrubbed with soap and boiled water, and then activated Small Life Watch.

"Pika. Cipos. Syneth. Picos. Kalaba." It was her first time seeing the creatures living in her blood. The white knights were larger than most of the other creatures she could see around them, with irregular shapes that seemed to constantly change as they moved around. The red peasants were much more numerous and more uniform, appearing as small, round discs that drifted through the droplet of blood.

She could see other red creatures somewhat similar to the red peasants among them that behaved differently from the red peasants, clustering together and slowly forming a mass. Lira watched for a while, trying to understand what she was actually seeing rather than simply fitting everything into Tony's metaphor. There were countless other tiny living things that she could not identify. As with anything else she had observed with the Small Life Watch spell, her blood was an entire ecosystem.

After a while, she started to notice some of the red peasants drying off and slowly dying as the clotting continued to spread. So she decided to restart the experiment. This time, she chose a not-so-clean environment filled with egg-shaped and snake-shaped creatures. As the drop of blood hit the plate, the difference was immediate. The tiny creatures already present started moving among the red peasants. Lira watched as one of the white knights changed direction and moved toward one of them.

It surrounded the invader and began consuming it. Lira leaned closer, fascinated. Another white knight moved toward a different invader. Soon, she could see several of them actively hunting the tiny creatures from the environment. The white knights were not simply drifting through the blood. They were responding to the presence of the invaders. Tony had been right about at least this much. The white knights really did seem to defend the blood against foreign living things.

Sadly, the numbers were not on her blood's side, and slowly, the knights stopped moving one after another. It was perhaps to be expected, as the single drop of blood she tested was isolated from her body. After this experiment, a wave of sweaty teens led by Lyth showed up to her library, having just finished a sword training session under Deren, and Lira figured that she needed to go back to her duties.

She still spent the rest of the day sporadically observing the small cut on her finger under the Small Life Watch spell, using her mana-obfuscation bookmarks as cover. Whenever she checked it, she could see the red peasants gathering around the damaged area, while the smaller creatures she suspected were responsible for clotting clustered together and formed a barrier over the wound. The process was slow, but the damage gradually became covered until a scab formed over it.

She could also see a few invaders using the breach in her skin to break in, though she couldn't tell what happened to them since her own skin and the blood clotting stopped her from observing anything that wasn't at the surface level. This whole experiment made her believe that Tony's Fortress analogy was accurate. The white knights fought the invaders, while the red peasants and their smaller companions worked to repair the walls.

It was not a perfect explanation, but it was far better than all the old medical theories she had read before. With that basic idea on hand, it was time to consider it alongside everything else she knew about medicine and magic. So she did a lot more reading and thinking, trying to arrive at as many coherent conclusions as possible. Her goal was not to discover the truth of life in its entirety, as that was far beyond what she could accomplish with her current knowledge or even within her lifetime.

Someone else would need to dedicate their life to pursuing this knowledge. She didn't believe she was the right person for the job, as her inclination was never toward the art of healing, and she knew for a fact that she would get distracted by her next idea as soon as she had a working healing spell. No, she only needed to make sense of the confusion she had encountered during her first attempts at researching medicine. The first thing she was ready to throw away was humor theory.

If there was some truth to the discipline, it would be too difficult to prove, and it was contentious even among scholars, as many of them seemed to disagree with one another about how the humors actually worked. More importantly, Lira had now seen her blood working hard to kill invaders and repair damage, so the idea that health depended on maintaining some kind of mystique balance seemed counterintuitive. Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

She decided to use her Divination spell to get a book that would help her confirm or deny this conclusion.

"Ladar. Linasara. Oshkan. Cognar. Turat." The spell settled on a memoir by an accredited physician who had healed thousands of people.

"Pika. Linasara. Cognar. Coopar. Nagla." As the knowledge flowed into her mind, she noticed that the author had slowly started to doubt humor theory throughout his long life. He noticed how patients weakened considerably after bloodletting, and a lot of weak patients would die shortly after.

His first conclusion was that patients who looked too thin shouldn't be bled, as a double reduction was harmful for them, even when bloodletting was the standard remedy for their ailment, before he eventually dropped the practice altogether and focused only on herbal remedies. It wasn't a concrete disproof of humor theory, but it was good enough for Lira. That book also led to the second point of contention: food and herbal remedies.

If everything was alive, then it stood to reason that everything living needed to eat, which meant that food had to be important to health. But that also meant that both her blood and the tiny invaders needed to eat. Did that mean herbal remedies worked by strengthening the blood or by weakening the invaders... Perhaps both? Lira did not know, but at least this was something she could test.

She used Book Divination again, with the intention of finding a source that could confirm whether food or herbs could help defend against disease.

"Ladar. Linasara. Oshkan. Cognar. Turat." The book that was picked out was one of the books she requested from Grandpa Waxy, and it contained a list of herbalist's recipes. Among them, the author claimed that onions and garlic were good against the common cold. Lira had no idea what specific invader caused the common cold, assuming the illness was caused by one at all, but she could still test the effect of garlic on tiny living things.

She headed to the kitchen, picked up a fresh clove of garlic, turned it into paste, and added some to stagnant water before activating Small Life Watch.

"Pika. Cipos. Syneth. Picos. Kalaba." Some of the tiny living creatures in the water began dying after coming into contact with the garlic, while others didn't seem to react to it. This did not prove that eating garlic would cure a cold, but it did prove that at least some natural foods could harm some of the invaders. That meant herbal remedies could have a real effect, even if the people using them had no idea why. The next point of confusion was cleanliness.

After washing her hands with soap and scrubbing them thoroughly, the number of living things on her skin was reduced considerably. The claim that cleanliness reduced disease therefore made perfect sense. If the tiny invaders were responsible for disease, then reducing the number of them on the body should reduce the chances of them entering it. But then why would some healers claim that too much cleanliness was harmful? Were those authors simply mistaken?

Lira used Book Divination to find a hint that could help her answer that particular question.

"Ladar. Linasara. Oshkan. Cognar. Turat." To her surprise, the spell led her to a history book rather than a medical one. The book described an order of assassins who used to consume small doses of poison so that their bodies could become accustomed to them. They would gradually increase the amount until they developed resistance and could survive doses that would have otherwise killed ordinary people. Lira stared at the passage for several moments as the implications began to form in her mind.

If the account was true, then perhaps the white knights and red peasants could adapt to repeated invasions and become stronger after each victory. It was like drilling soldiers. A fortress without trained soldiers would fall more easily than one whose defenders regularly practiced fighting. That gave her a possible explanation for why excessive cleanliness could be harmful.

If the body needed some exposure to tiny invaders to strengthen its defenses, then completely eliminating them from the environment could prevent the fortress from training its soldiers. Of course, that was only a theory, and Lira knew by now that finding an explanation that fit the evidence was not the same as proving it was true. The assassins could have been wrong, the historical account could have been exaggerated, or the resistance could have had nothing to do with the poison itself.

Still, it gave her another piece that fit the puzzle. It reconciled seemingly contradictory ideas like "cleanliness is good" and "cleanliness is bad." The fortress was not a passive structure that simply endured attacks. It had defenders that fought invaders, workers that repaired damage, and perhaps even a way for those defenders to become stronger through experience.

A lack of cleanliness while the fortress was already weakened by an invasion or a wound could be disastrous, while excessive cleanliness might leave its defenses unprepared for a sudden barrage of new invaders. Add the benefits of good food and proper rest, and Tony's model became surprisingly coherent. It could explain multiple contradictory medical understandings that different physicians had developed through trial, error, and lived experience.

It might not be a perfect representation of the truth, but Lira was no longer trying to discover the absolute truth of life itself. Unlike during her first week of research, she was now using Divination to answer specific questions and looking for a theory that could explain what she had observed.

She had created spells with far less knowledge than this before, and she was already afraid that digging any deeper would uncover another contradiction and collapse her understanding all over again, pushing her further away from a working healing spell. This was good enough. It had to be good enough.