Chapter IV.XIII (4.13) - Rejuvenation and Restoration F

  “What do you think happened to Kateshi?”

  “I heard she picked up a plague from a patient over the break.”

  “But she quit before the semester even finished.”

  “No way she’s actually dead. Definitely an administration issue. Academy probably wasn’t paying her properly.”

  “I don’t know, but it sucks. She’s really good at healing.”

  “My buddy just finished Rejuvenation and Restoration C and she said the new professor’s a real hard ass.”

  “Of course a buddy of yours would be looking there.”

  “That’s not what she meant!”

  “You hear he’s an Elite?”

  “Rumor says he’s done dungeon delves, just like Kateshi.”

  Kizu sat uncomfortably as he listened to the dozen of other students gossiping about Taroe. Nobody knew exactly what had happened to Professor Kateshi. And it was far better that it stayed that way.

  This wasn’t Kateshi’s old classroom, but somewhere entirely unfamiliar to Kizu. And he was honestly grateful for that. The less reminders he had of his old professor, the better.

  “Hey, Kizu,” Ione said, taking the seat next to him.

  “Hey, Ione.”

  Unlike her usual routine of slouching and napping, Ione stared forward at the front of the classroom. There were a dozen tables set up there and her eyes lingered on them. Each table was covered in a white sheet.

  “I…I think I need your help,” she finally said. “I’m…not well recently.”

  Kizu stopped himself from letting out a sigh of relief. He had been trying to find a way to tactfully bring it up. The few attempts he’d started had been shut down by her. If she was coming to him, then maybe he could finally break through to her.

  “Ever since that fight in the World Dungeon, I haven’t felt fully like myself,” Ione continued. “Occasionally I’ll blink and find myself standing a few meters away from where I last remember, or I’ll miss half a conversation with someone and they’ll be looking at me funny. I keep hoping it will go away. But…it’s getting into my dreams now too. I-I can’t even sleep properly anymore.”

  It was affecting her sleep? No wonder she finally broke down and asked for help. He took a few seconds to gather his thoughts and consider her situation.

  “Do you remember the witch Chiame?” Kizu asked.

  Ione’s dark eyes darted to him, then back to the front of the classroom. “Yes. I never met her, but you mentioned her while we were in the jungle.”

  “I think she did something when she died. Somehow a piece of her soul is embedded in you. At least, that’s my theory. I’m not an expert soul mage by any stretch, but I’ve seen something similar to that before.”

  “Where?”

  Kizu hesitated. He glanced around. Nobody in the class seemed particularly interested in their conversation. All of his classmates continued to be consumed in gossip about Taroe and Kateshi. Still, he decided to lower his voice.

  “I have something stuck to me. A parasitical soul fragment.”

  She met his eyes. “Where from?”

  “I told you about the Kitsune and the seals.”

  “Briefly.”

  “There’s one more thing that I didn’t mention. Well, there’s a lot of things more. But one thing that’s important. The aurora in the north is possessed by a river of souls. And one of them has stuck itself to me.”

  “An oversimplification,” his parasite soul spoke up in his mind.

  Kizu felt his skin prickle. It was impossible to tell when the thing was listening in on his conversations. How much of his life was the soul privy to?

  Ione considered. She eyed him up and down. “Does it also interfere with your life?”

  “No. It’s hands-off most days.”

  “Lucky,” she muttered.

  Before they could continue the conversation, Taroe entered the classroom.

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  “Let’s bring it up to Professor Knoff later,” Kizu whispered. “I’ve been helping him with a project for his own soul damage.”

  Every conversation halted mid-sentence as the door slammed closed behind Taroe. He frowned and scanned the crowd, as if searching for something. Despite now being clad in a brand new academy professor uniform, the Elite still remained as disheveled as ever. He scratched his beard and Kizu watched fleas hop off him. One of the students in the front row yelped in terror as the bug landed on her.

  “You’re the Rejuvenation and Restoration F class?” Taroe asked.

  There were awkward mutterings of ‘yes’ as the class didn’t know whether or not the question was meant to be rhetorical.

  “My name is Taroe. I suppose it’s Professor Taroe as of now. Your headmaster requested that I come here and teach you this semester.” He paused. “You all don’t know anything about healing, right?”

  This time the class muttered ‘no’ in an equally awkward response to the potentially rhetorical question.

  “We’ll start with the basics then. Healing a body is complex and extraordinarily dangerous. A fool messing with this sort of spellcraft can cause irreversible damage. More people die every year from medical malpractice than from elemental spells. Incompetence kills. Never make assumptions. Never attempt originality. You come to me with any natural injury and I can patch you up. You come to me with failed restorations and you’ve irrevocably altered the make-up of your body.”

  “What if I had my hand chopped off?” one student called out.

  Taroe grunted at the challenge. “I’d need the hand and the stump. Stitching limbs back together takes talent and speed, but I’ve done it plenty.”

  “What about scars? Could you fix an older injury?”

  “Depends on the scar. The body will naturally build itself around wounds. That can complicate healings but it’s hardly impossible.”

  “Plague?”

  That made Taroe’s frown deepen. “It depends. Modern plagues are usually magical in nature, which adds a layer of difficulty to them. They’re designed to be incurable. I am not a plague medic, so that is outside of my authority but they’ve been cured before. More common illnesses are simpler, though still far more complex than the surface wounds you’ll learn how to fix in this class. ”

  “What about head injuries?” Kizu asked.

  Taroe blinked then looked Kizu in the eye.

  “I amend my statement. I can physically repair any injury. However, I cannot promise to restore you to your previous state of existence. I am not a mind mage. I restore flesh, not memory.

  “My point remains. Don’t push yourself in this field. Don’t attempt anything you haven’t been specifically trained for. Don’t be idiots.”

  Taroe waved a hand and the table in front of him changed. Or rather, the cloth on the table changed. Suddenly, there was an object under it. A human shaped object. Students looked at each other, nervous.

  “Back to my original statement. We will be starting with the absolute basics.”

  He pulled back the cloth and revealed the head of a corpse. Several of Kizu’s peers gasped and many averted their gaze. Someone near Kizu muttered about being sick.

  “Stop that. This isn’t even a true cadaver. It’s a replica I’ve created. I don’t trust any of you with actual flesh. Now get over here and choose a body to examine.”

  Each of the other tables swelled as a body appeared under their cloth.

  The students reluctantly approached, Kizu and Ione among them. They started poking at the replica bodies and uncovering.

  “It’s naked!” a student gasped, backing away from an exposed female corpse. Others then started snickering.

  Taroe’s eye twitched. The grumpy Elite looked on the edge of exploding at Kizu’s classmates.

  “Are you pubescent? The juvenile maturity of an infant. You expect to learn the basics of anatomy and physiology without ever being exposed to a body? What mind mage was powerful enough to put you under such an idiotic delusion? Get over yourself. The next person to laugh I will personally put on the table for the next class to dissect.”

  That silenced everyone.

  “Who’s going to break the news to him that he actually teaches juveniles?” Ione whispered to Kizu. He bit his lip to keep from grinning.

  Taroe’s eyes narrowed in their direction but apparently nobody else heard Ione so he let her comment slide.

  “Each body is unique to the others. I want you to go through and make a list of notable traits on each table. Basic observational skills. You will not exit the classroom until you hand a page of notes to me. Start. Now.”

  It took a few minutes before the class finally got into a groove and the students mellowed out again. Taroe clearly intimidated them, but he didn’t seem to care about them so long as they weren’t acting immature. He sat on a stool in front of the classroom door and read a book, completely uninterested in them.

  “Well, what do you think?” Kizu asked Ione. “What’s unique about this one?”

  “Male. Fracture along the second lowest left rib. Missing three teeth, an incisor and two molars. Unnaturally black hair which implies dye, likely an attempt to conceal his age. Feet are lopsidedly sized. More than what is normal.”

  Kizu gaped at Ione. “Seriously? You barely glanced at it.”

  She shrugged. “It’s not hard to notice when you know what to look for. Humans are animals like any other. I just can’t summon one.”

  “Why are you in this class?” he asked. “You tore that thing apart with your eyes.”

  “Kizu. I could have the brain of the greatest surgeon in the world and I’d still be standing right here next to you. Knowledge is useless if you don’t have any affinity for magic.”

  “How do you know you can’t cast a healing spell? Have you tried?

  “Yes. It was a disaster. And I know regardless of that anyway. Sene casts healing spells.”

  “You don’t have any overlapping affinities?”

  “No.”

  She clearly did not want to discuss it further so Kizu let the topic drop.

  Thankfully, Taroe hadn’t created a particular challenging first quiz. The differences between the bodies were pretty obvious and clear. Kizu suspected the actual lesson was more about getting them accumulated to working around corpses. And, with Ione by his side, Kizu managed to sweep through the analysis faster than anyone else.

  With a glance at Kizu’s page of notes, Taroe dismissed him early from the class with a grunt.

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