Caen had joined up with the Cutter team that he'd met Guinevere in some days ago, but she seemed to have moved on to a different team. After Caen had mentioned his interest in joining up with a Delver team, the team lead had explained that she could only recommend him if he demonstrated exceptional skill, and that would still not guarantee whether or not he got selected to join one.

  And so, in the days that followed, Caen held back much less as he killed ants. He flickered Soul-sense and tore into planar creatures swiftly. Between the clear vision of his speculon, how much physically stronger his new workout routine was making him, his well-practiced combat techniques, and the magic-disrupting effects of flickering Soul-sense, there was very little danger. No ants sprayed him with their acid. It was usually over before they could.

  The real challenge was coordinating his footwork as he moved around other combatants and dead ants. His body was often unempowered, and Caen zipped about, plunging his glaive through ant carapace.

  He attended to wounds during each lull, using mundane healing. He'd been working on the problem of using the trees’ Blood-healing affinity to heal humans. It was an interesting problem. He understood human anatomy sufficiently; he was a human himself, and some of the spells were even tailored to affect humans in particular. Yet whenever he cast a spell, be it on the tree stumps or another human, the spell just didn't work. It was the equivalent of casting a sedation spell on a rock. The spell, despite having been perfectly cast, did not have any effect.

  Over the days, he'd managed to verify that diagnostic spells worked easily enough on humans. The trees’ Blood-healing affinity didn't seem to restrict that. But nothing else worked. Caen needed more test subjects with whom he could work on the problem for hours on end. If only there were a clinic in here.

  Guess I'll just have to bribe those two again.

  “Caen,” Muirid, the team lead, called. “A moment, please.”

  Caen jogged over. “What's up?”

  “I’ve put your name on a list,” she said. “It's not a promise of anything. If there's an opening or a need for another Delver team to form up, someone will find you and let you know.”

  * * *

  Over the next few weeks, Caen fell into a routine. He helped out much less with the Cutter teams now that he'd gotten recommended. After his boosted workout routine every morning, he spent long hours at the front zone, Mimicking the stumps and working on shortening the time it took him to do so. And just because he couldn't help himself, he adapted a few Blood-healing and Flora spells as well. He also dedicated hours each day to magical exercises with and without a boosted affinity. The core four, Flora, and a few other disciplines.

  Telling affinities apart via soul structures was becoming easier and easier as he studied them extensively. He had started noting subtle changes in his soul structure whenever he cast a spell, and he began looking out for these changes in the souls of others.

  By 12 and 6 every day, he would rush down to the command tent and wait outside for Sh'kteiro's ping. The Planar light was an odd sensation. The warmth he felt was not on his skin, but on his speculon. Almost within it, in fact.

  Sh'kteiro had described it as a gateway to the Plane of the Speculant Eye. Caen had rephrased that in his mind as the means through which every person of Edict heritage interacted with the Plane. Caen kept his goggles on all day now, using his speculon alone to see. All through the day, he denied his regular eyes their sight and focused his attention on what it meant to “pull in” light from this world.

  He'd asked his mother if she could also project light from her speculon, and she'd said that she could, but she'd never found any use for it outside of ceremonial worship. Over the years, Caen had witnessed these ceremonies several times at Vishnen, but of course had been unable to see anything. A part of him looked forward to that now.

  She explained the experience in similar enough words to her brother's. She'd learned to see herself as a conduit, as an avenue through which the Planar light could be emitted.

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  When Caen had asked both of them if they saw themselves as conduits through which the light of this world entered into the Plane, they'd said no.

  Sh'leinu said that there was nothing special about the light from this world, and Sh'kteiro said that the Plane of the Speculant Eye had no need for baser forms of light.

  This was interesting to Caen. Planar light, according to them, did not reside in his speculon but in the Plane itself. However, when regular light was pulled into his speculon, it remained there and did not return to the Plane.

  Caen spent days thinking more deeply about this.

  * * *

  “How do you even get this much food?” Vensha asked as she took a piece of fruit from the array he'd laid out on a mat. There were two bowls of porridge, some legumes, and a bowl of oats, which had been sweetened with milk and sugar. Salted sliced potatoes as well. Caen had even splurged a little to get a portion of meat.

  “The kitchen staff have started warming up to me,” he said. They'd recently been giving him food after each little session, helping out in the mornings, and some of them had started sneaking in extra food into his purchases as well.

  “How much does it pay to work at the kitchens again?”

  “Don't waste your time,’’ Zeris answered. “It’s one token every twelve hours.”

  Caen had even received his payment. “I only work there an hour and a half daily, though,” he said as he performed a Blood-healing scan on Vensha. His affinity was currently being boosted by the tree stump beside him, and diagnostic spells worked fine. He'd spent the past few days casting Blood-healing diagnostic spells on members of Cutter teams and Zeris and Vensha whenever he could pull them away.

  The issue with using non-specialized spells on a different species other than human should not have applied to him, yet he still couldn't get past that sense of impropriety after casting the spells. If he were trying to use Blood-healing on a tree, this would make perfect sense. But Caen was a human casting spells on other humans. The spells worked on him fine, but not on others. And not on the trees.

  So he'd taken to focusing on scanning targeted body parts of other humans and using Blood-healing modifiers as well. He'd needed to learn several of these in the past few days and practice them extensively. Scanning spells, even when cast poorly, did not harm their target, but there was never a good reason in Caen's opinion to shy away from honing his skills.

  He'd started stacking these modifiers to the spell bases of his Blood-healing spells, and at first, they hadn't had any effect either. But continuously alternating between full scans and more targeted ones, followed by casting very small-scale and targeted spells with several modifiers, had started to help him overcome that sense of impropriety.

  It required spell after spell after spell. He was fortunate that he had Zeris and Vensha to help.

  The very small-scale spells took, but larger ones did not. This was good progress.

  He was a ‘human’ with experience casting Blood-healing spells on ‘members of his species’. Caen had spent some time pondering this all week. He had a good grasp of human anatomy and had used a great deal of these spells often enough. He'd started learning his first Blood-healing diagnosis spell at the age of seven.

  In all honesty, Caen didn't think that a problem like this should have been possible. Of course, a human would have difficulty healing a tree, just as treefolk would have difficulty healing a human. But Caen was caught in a weird place, being a human who was Mimicking an awakened tree's affinity, despite having only ever healed humans.

  He'd taken a break to load up on some more food, and Aunt Vensha had laughed about some of the stories spreading around camp concerning Caen. They said he'd gone into the healing tents pretending to be a healer and beaten up a few injured combatants who owed him meal tokens. Another story detailed how he'd set fire to a bunch of tents afterwards.

  Caen continued his work, casting the small-scale spells on Zeris and Vensha, slowly building up to using larger ones. He brought out a knife and asked Vensha if she minded making a shallow incision on her palm. She obliged, and Caen tried to mend it, employing modifiers.

  The spell was cast, but still had no result, expending his mana and willpower for nothing. Vensha mended the wound herself. She had an average affinity rating in Blood-healing, since she was a Body-enhancer. They were sister disciplines after all, and you couldn't have high values in one without the other. Also, her father was a really good Blood-healer who had tried to give all his children a basic education in the healing arts.

  Caen spent some more time working on the problem. He repeated his small-scale spells and got a better understanding of what modifiers might work better.

  When he tried again, Vensha's new incision knitted before his speculon. Vensha cheered lightly, and Zeris joined in, even though she could hardly see anything in the dim lighting of the Plane's moon and roaming Attacker teams in the distance. Caen bowed cheerfully, after which he and Vensha turned to look at Zeris.

  “Yeah, that's not happening,” Zeris said. “Keep that knife the fuck away from me.”

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