One evening, while taking a break from adapting a fairly complex paralysis spell, Caen tried to cast a mend spell on the stump he'd Mimicked. There was a slight chip on its side.

  Nothing happened. The spell imprint—the part of a visualization that let him monitor the stability of his spell construct—indicated that the spell had been cast successfully. Still, there had been no outward effects whatsoever. This shocked him. It reminded him of the day he'd tried using an awakened tree's Blood-healing affinity to heal the members of a Cutter team. The spell imprint had indicated that the spell had been cast each of those times as well.

  He ran through a decidedly short list of Blood-healing spells, and each time, his spirit and mind executed the spell components with uncharacteristic ease, but there was no physical result. The spell imprint indicated otherwise. He tried to recall what had happened on the day he'd used the sedation spell on that awakened tree, but since he hadn't been paying attention, he couldn't remember anything useful.

  Casting a sedation spell revealed the same problem: flawless casting, no results.

  This specific effect often happened in Blood-healing when a caster's knowledge of their target was lacking. With the exception of certain diagnostic spells, Blood-healing spells required a thorough understanding of their target's anatomy. Fortunately, this could be remedied by extensive diagnostics, and he wasn't too surprised to find that this included trees, or more precisely, awakened Planar plantlife.

  Caen met another wall at this point. Diagnostic spells or basic Blood-healing scans usually required contact with certain crucial points on the body. For most humans, it was located somewhere on the chest region or midriff, occasionally on the spine. For trees, though, well, Caen had no idea.

  He tried different parts of the stump and could not find a single crucial point. The roots that extended above ground gave him no different results: a very small and concentrated picture of just one section of its anatomy.

  Caen used this spell on himself just to be sure he was doing it right. Whenever he placed his hand on his sternum, his mind was filled with images and depictions of his entire internal structure. Casting the spell while touching one of his limbs, however, gave him just a small picture of that patch of flesh.

  It seemed that the crucial part of these trees was neither their stump nor the roots above ground. To verify this, he went about scanning many stumps. It was the same thing every time. And they, too, were ‘resistant’ to any spells he cast.

  Why then had the awakened tree attacked him back then? Caen found this very mysterious.

  Caen rushed down to the sawmill. The sounds of tools grinding into wood and axes chopping lumber into smaller pieces were all around. A thin layer of sawdust hung in the air. Excluding the colossal kind he'd seen with the Delver team, there were two kinds of trees in the Odaton-plane Plane: a brown stout kind that was unawakened, despite having an above-average resistance to being cut. And the awakened kind with green bark.

  The timber had been piled several feet high; one section for the brown and another for the green. Caen walked over to a stack of felled awakened trees with their branches still intact, grabbed a wooden plank for a stool, and placed his hand on the green trunk, close to its branches.

  As far as Caen knew, Blood-healing required physical touch, and it of course did not concern living things alone. Organic dead matter still fell well within its purview. Autopsies and general examinations could be performed on corpses for experimental or investigative reasons, though some stories claimed otherwise.

  “Hey!” a man with thick arms and a paunch shouted to Caen. “What are you doing here, cherche?” That was a base-Ortrilian word for ‘young man’. Caen had never heard it used in a polite context before, and even now, there was heat in the man's voice.

  Caen took out four meal tokens from his pouch and tossed them to the man. The man caught them, hesitated, then muttered something under his breath as he walked away.

  Caen spent hours there casting his diagnostic spells. With nothing to Mimic, it was slow going for him. But he was used to this. He persisted through each failed cast and slowly made his way through, scanning several portions of the tree trunk. Nothing he touched was a crucial point.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  After bribing another miller with a few tokens, he tried several other logs and found nothing crucial.

  Very early the next morning, Caen went into the Plane and walked up to an awakened tree that had been sawn into. The Cutter team responsible had not yet arrived, so Caen waited some distance away from even the holes that surrounded the tree. He Mimicked its Blood-healing affinity and cast a diagnostic spell on one of its roots that slightly breached the soil. The spell took easily, and though Caen had braced himself to retreat at the first sign of trouble, the tree's soul structure remained calm. Also, his scan revealed that these roots were, of course, not crucial points. He sat down and waited, using the time to continue adapting that fairly complex paralysis spell.

  When the Cutter team arrived, the team lead informed him that he counted as an add-on, regardless—meaning he wouldn't get any meal tokens until after his second hour with them—but still let Caen help with setting up their equipment. Setting up the shielding disks that were attached to the trunk to protect them from the branches took a considerable amount of time, which was perfect for Caen. As he worked with team members, he got ample opportunities to verify that the trunk of the tree was not a crucial point either.

  He was worried about trying the sedation spell again because the last time, the tree had injured several people with its branches and attracted far more ants than usual.

  He convinced Aunt Vensha to come with him, and she brought her party members with her.

  “Whenever he has food to share, he finds my niece,” Vensha was telling Amni, “but once it involves putting my life in danger, I'm the first person he calls.”

  “I have plenty of stale bread and dried fruit, if that's what you want,” Caen called back as he poured an inert solution on his hand. He'd told the party members that he was working on something that might have a harmful effect on the tree.

  Having Mimicked the tree's affinity, he touched the roots, already casting that sedation spell again. He paid attention this time and noticed that the spell imprint indicated the spell had been cast, but there were still no results—even though he'd cast it perfectly. And like clockwork, the branches began flailing chaotically. Several whipped towards him with blinding speed, but Amni was there in a moment, shield raised as she repelled the whips. The rest of the party gathered around her, some rebuffing the branches, while the rest demolished ants with brutal precision. Caen handled as many ants as he could without raising any eyebrows. He'd spent the last six months of his life following them into the Planes, and they knew what he could do better than most.

  “Trellam's hairy armpits!” Mafrolem swore. “What exactly is inside that thing you concocted?”

  “As though you'd know anything about Chymistry,” Amni said, slapping the back of his head.

  Vensha put an arm around Caen's shoulder. “You offered dried rations?”

  * * *

  The next day, Caen spent a few hours in the healing tents. Mimicking the affinities of other healers had become easier with time and practice. He could pick out the distinct features of affinity clusters representing Blood-healing and Spirit-healing now. As always, it was refreshing to use magic with relative ease and simplicity. He made sure to avoid healers and even auxiliaries from the Drenlin tri-clinic that would recognize him. While he was known as a very unusual abject, seeing as he could cast magic, his lack of speed and frequently collapsing spells had given him something of an uncertain reputation back home.

  By noon, he sat by the low wooden fence surrounding the command tent. The guards there watched him curiously but had gotten used to his daily visits. Sh'kteiro had left instructions for them not to bother him.

  With his eyes closed, he watched the world with his speculon, his focus sharpened to a fine point. Then he felt that warmth on his speculon, Planar light pinging off it. The sensation was strange, and even after days of meditating on it, Caen had still not accustomed himself to how it felt. The second ping came soon after. Caen sat there replaying the sensation over and over again.

  * * *

  After his experimentations with the trees, Caen had not discovered their crucial point yet, which left the roots underground.

  Being able to view the soul structures of the trees, he could see that the roots always shot down at an angle, such that there was always so much more of the roots’ length well beneath the ground than was visible.

  He'd been in a tunnel with a Delver team before, and there'd been numerous roots lining the walls and ceilings. Perhaps one of these was a crucial point.

  Caen would have to get into a Delver team, go into a tunnel, and scan a tree's anatomy. He'd asked around at the Courtyard, and a few team leads had directed him to an administrative staff member who had explained that Delver team members were either hand-picked at orientation or recommended by individual team leads.

  “And how do I get recommended?” Caen asked.

  “Join a Cutter team,” the man said. “Stick with them. Make an impression.”