Chương 126: Chapter 116: Pseudo-Healing Grimoire

Lira woke up feeling better than she could ever remember. The aches and pains that were part of her daily life as a scribe turned spy, the ones she had mostly stopped noticing, were simply gone. Her mind felt clear and sharper than usual, and her whole body felt energized. She went through her morning routine. She bathed, ate breakfast, and dusted off the library with her dust-gathering enchantment, checking first that no one was around to see her using magic.

While she worked, she turned the previous night over in her mind. The spell had worked. It had healed her completely. She had felt energized while it was active, then had been hit with a wave of exhaustion once the effect wore off. Now, a full night's sleep later, her body felt considerably healthier than before. The dull muscle ache she had after climbing multiple buildings while spying on Henry was gone.

So were some of the smaller effects of her poor diet and irregular sleep; the tiredness she had simply learned to live with ever since joining the palace. That part, at least, was a benefit. She was not about to complain about feeling this good. But the spell was not without its problems. It was too broad. She could not go around casting something that healed everything and anything every time she got a scrape.

Even setting aside how wasteful it would be to use a spell this strong on something this small, there was the matter of the exhaustion afterward, and she still had no idea what repeated use would do to her over time. And she had no intention of finding that out the hard way. This spell had to be the proof of concept, the cantrip she could build the rest of her healing magic on top of, not the thing she actually used.

She already knew, from every other spell she had made, that magic worked best when it was aimed at something specific. The body was not a singular problem that needed to be solved. It was thousands of smaller ones stacked together, and trying to solve all of them at once with a single spell was not practical. She needed specialized spells. One for each situation, narrow enough that she could trust what they would and would not do.

She rushed into her alcove, got out her father's lexicon and one of her spell-crafting journals, and began writing. She started with the base she already had. General Healing Yorad. Kalaba. Cipos. Body. Life. Amplification. A cantrip that indiscriminately healed everything. Lira stared at it for a while. There was something almost elegant about how little the spell needed. Body gave it the target, Life gave it the fundamental concept she wanted to tackle, and Amplification told the magic the desired effect.

The problem was that there was nothing in the spell telling it where to stop. If the magic could identify something within the body that was imperfect, it had every reason to improve it. The spell acted as if she would have to clean the library from floor to ceiling each time a child spilled his drink. That was useful, perhaps, when she wanted to heal everything. Beneficial, even, every once in a while. Dangerous, probably, if overused. So her first idea was to directly upgrade it. Controlled Healing Pika. Yorad.

Kalaba. Cipos. Frushum. Mind. Body. Life. Amplification. Control. A spell like this would allow her to actively visualize the healing effect and restore only what she wanted to be restored. The addition of Pika would connect the spell to her mind, while Frushum would give her control over how the amplification was applied. At least, that was the theory. It would grant her considerably more control, making sure that only what she wanted to happen would happen and reducing the chances of unwanted side effects.

Lira tapped the end of her quill against the page. Unfortunately, the more she thought about it, the less comfortable she became. What happened if she visualized something incorrectly? What if she remembered the shape of an organ incorrectly? What if she imagined two bones as being connected when they ought to remain separate? What if she accidentally made something unhealthy? She could not simply trust her imagination to know what the inside of a body should look like.

It was a good idea, and a better healer than she could probably make it work. If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. She wrote a memo for later: Revisit and maybe pair with a body divination spell. And with that, the idea was shelved. She turned the page, starting anew. Cure Disease Yorad. Kalaba. Cipos. Luneth. Velar. Body. Life. Amplification. Purification. Clarity. This one was more straightforward.

It was a combination of her healing cantrip and her self-cleaning cantrip. Luneth was always a dangerous thing to add to a spell, as it caused the deletion of whatever the spell deemed undesirable, just like that, completely gone from existence. And thus, any spell using such a concept needed to always be paired with Velar, Clarity. By adding Velar to the cleaning spell, it allowed it to remove dirt from her clothes without ever touching the dye woven into the fabric.

The same principle should apply here, targeting the invaders but leaving the body cells intact. The question then became: How would the spell recognize what was an invader and what was not? Thankfully, Lira already knew the answer to that conundrum, since the body already seemed to have a mechanism for doing exactly that. She had seen it with her own eyes, the white knights attacking the invaders but not the red peasants. They could distinguish between things that belonged and things that did not.

Lira did not need to tell the spell what an invader looked like. The spell just needed to follow the body's own distinction. Lira circled Velar in her notes. This was why that singular word was the most versatile concept in her arsenal. It made the entire combination feel much safer. The spell was specialized, and it had safeguards built into it. She felt confident enough about it to move on to her next idea. Mend Bones Yorad. Cipos. Kalaba. Terran. Hano. Body. Amplification. Life. Earth. Connection.

She remembered reading that bone was closer to earth than it was to flesh, and that farmers had added it to their farmlands as fertilizer for generations. Life and Earth together made sense as a way of pointing at bone specifically, rather than the body as a whole. The last word gave her more trouble. She had first considered retrieval, something about pulling the broken pieces back to where they belonged. But the more she thought about it, the less it felt like what she actually wanted.

She was not just retrieving a bone. It was more like reconnecting something that had become separated. Lira flipped through her father's lexicon again, checking the available concepts before eventually settling on Hano. Connection. A broken bone was still bone. The problem was that its pieces were no longer properly connected. The spell therefore did not need to create a new bone or retrieve the old one.

It needed to amplify life within the body, focus that process on earth-related material, and restore the connection between the separated pieces. She looked at the five words again. Yorad. Cipos. Kalaba. Terran. Hano. Body. Amplification. Life. Earth. Connection. They fit together neatly. Hopefully, she would be able to imprint it without much trouble, given the introduction of a new word. She turned the page again in preparation for the next spell. Close Wounds Yorad. Cipos. Kalaba. Riveth. Hano. Body.

Amplification. Life. Aperture. Connection. Much like the Mend Bones spell, this one needed a new word, something to describe the wound itself. What was a wound but a gap in the skin, an opening for the blood to spill out and invaders to come in? an aperture. The rest of the spell followed the exact same logic as the previous one. The body was the subject, Amplification strengthened Life, Riveth defined the wound as the target, and Hano would reconnect what had been separated. Lira smiled slightly.

With her knowledge of how the body naturally closed off wounds as the tiny red cells clotted and closed the gap, this would make the spell far more efficient than if she just visualized a needle and thread application. With this spell, she should be able to scab over any wound in a matter of seconds. She could technically repair any internal damage as well, provided the body could handle it on its own in time.

She took a brief pause from her research and checked that neither Henry nor Lyth had shown up yet before returning to tackle the last spell she had in mind. Blood Restoration Yorad. Cipos. Kalaba. Maha. Coopar. Body. Amplification. Life. Water. Containment. Blood loss was one of the causes of death most physicians she had read about had complained about, especially with bloodletting being such a common practice.

She had seen the truth about blood and understood without a shadow of a doubt that the substance was essential, no, integral, to health. So referring to blood as Life Water went without saying. And she had been using the same structure for all the healing spells, starting with Body. Amplification. Life. That left her with one extra word to work with. At first, she considered adding Retrieval again; it was one of her go-to words to use, but the idea of already spilled blood returning to the body felt unsafe.

She had watched the blood dry as part of her experimentation, after all. So she settled on Coopar as an extra descriptor of blood, something that belonged to the inside of the body, something that could not live long outside of it. She imagined that such a spell would restore the body's reserve of blood through both accelerated natural production and magical conjuration. Similar to her book restoration spell, the caster of the spell needed to provide some but not all of the missing materials to make more blood.

This meant that casting this spell could leave her dehydrated. Luckily for her, she had a spell that could allow her to absorb water. She never used it since she had access to clean water, but it could come in handy, especially if she was able to absorb moisture from the air or from the grass. She sat back and looked at the pages. One was shelved as it needed further development, and for the other four, she was satisfied with them and ready to imprint and test them, this time on something other than herself.