Kate caught the small crystal Ajax lightly tossed to her. Despite this all being planned out she didn’t have to fake the look on her face as she looked at the crystal. It was small and took up less than half her palm but light shone brilliantly off its polished edges. She knew that the amount, transference rate and anything else a mana crystal might do was tied in how it was cut.
That was not to say that all crystals that did the same thing looked the same. Every crystal started off as a plain storage device if it was mined correctly, the cutting and polishing that followed had to be done by someone with the right skills and experience to get a desired effect. The blue gem in her hand looked very much like a small rectangle with the corners shaved off.
Kate could already see one of the two teachers that were meant to be looking over their work start to make his way over to the group, his eyes fixed on Ajax. She had been a lot more active in the morning than usual and had already run through four hundred points of mana so she started to draw mana from the crystal.
The feeling of drawing mana was a weird one. As the mana in the crystal was unaspected it left her feeling like someone poured cold water through her veins. Despite this she could feel it settle in her body and start adapting to her own mana, in a few seconds her mana pool went from four hundred to six hundred.
“What is going on here?” the teacher asked.
“Kate and my brother have been nice enough to put me up at their home until I find myself some different arrangements so I brought her a thank you gift.” Ajax said as Kate opened her palms to show the small blue crystal, though it looked much duller now than when it was full of mana. Get full chapters from 𝙣𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙡⁂𝔣𝔦𝔯𝔢⁂𝘯𝘦𝘵
“I see, in that case you ca…” the teacher started herding Ajax out when he interrupted him.
“Did you already draw it all?” Ajax asked as he reached for the crystal.
“I may have gone through a bit more mana than I usually do this morning, that leg wound was infected and it took a bit out of me to clean it out.” Kate didn’t have to make anything up there, she didn’t know how long the stubborn bull bestial had waited before coming to see a doctor. Had he waited any longer it would have been cheaper to cut off the leg and heal the stump and with the Healing Union when it came to free healing cheaper was always chosen.
“I haven’t had many chances to work with cleansing wounds so I might have pushed a bit far.” Kate looked down at the floor.
Ajax had picked up the crystal and started flooding it with mana. The process took a little under ten seconds before the crystal was filled with four hundred points of mana. It even changed color to a bright red as it started deaspecting the new resource.
“Here you go, in about twenty minutes this should be good to go again.” he placed it back in her hand. “I can do a couple more if you have some handy.”
The offer had piqued the interest of the others witnessing the exchange. Considering his young age, dumping out four hundred mana wasn’t impressive but offering to dump twelve hundred scaled quickly.
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“We don’t have crystals for use around here.” she said, sticking to the plan.
“I don’t mind sticking around if you want, I got nothing to do today.” he said before taking a deep breath and almost choking on it. “ Could even count this as training for acclimating to unpleasant smells.
Everyone frowned at that. It's true that sick people didn’t smell particularly nice but it wasn’t to this extent.
“Teacher, can Ajax stay to refill the crystal?” Kate asked.
“Now Kate you know the rules we have on others learning from us.” he started the usual spiel. “If he was willing to sign up to learn it would be a different matter.”
Kate knew that with how little people volunteered in such a backwater place the Union was always in need of healers who would take the ten year follow up contract.
“He wouldn’t be learning anything, not only is Ajax an adventurer who came back from his first delve yesterday but he isn’t even a chanting caster.” She knew that the second part would be the nail in the coffin for her argument, after all the Healing Union only taught chanting healing.
“Oh , alright then.” the teacher huffed out. “But you have to look after him.”
Her last statement moved him from a potential student to a nobody as far as her teacher was concerned, not only that but their plan had worked out wonderfully. The unforeseen problem was the look her two friends were now giving Ajax.
Both girls were from poor families who had gotten lucky enough to have mana so a young handsome delver was something they would be very much interested in. Considering how physical signs of aging slowed down from stats after the apprentice period they had no way of knowing they were almost a decade older than him, not that it would dissuade them.
Ajax didn’t pay much attention to anything and let Kate drag him over to her work area where she then brought over an extra chair for him. From there the day had gone very slowly but he was anything but bored.
The first patient that came in had a rather nasty cut to his arm. In this world doctor-patient confidentiality would make for a good joke but Ajax still stuck with the idea from his old life and tried to tune out anything that didn’t have to do with healing.
When Kate started working on it he felt a strong current of light mana pour out and over the wound. Unlike when he had used light mana before it didn’t just cover the surface but instead it was infused into the damaged flesh. From there he could feel how it both cleaned the wound as well as started fusing the flesh back together.
Knowing what he did from his past life he theorized that cleaning out a wound with some alcohol might actually lessen the mana cost when it came to these non-infected wounds but he kept that to himself and would only mention it to Kate in private.
After the cleaning the mana started moving differently than anything he had seen before. Unlike the other spells he had seen casters throw out this spell didn’t have a set pattern for the mana to follow but nor was it free like his own spells.
If he had to compare it to anything it would be much like a complex racing circuit from his old world. The circuit in itself was much less constrained but the cars followed a specific path when racing. The difficulty most likely came from the healer having to design the track for every procedure.
It was three hours before something different came in. During this time he had filled up the crystal two more times but he still had over one thousand mana because of his regen. That was when the first case of poisoning came in. It was just a stupid kid who had tried to show off to his friends and chugged down two bottles of hard alcohol.
The spell this time was composed of holy mana, unlike light mana holy mana didn’t heal by recreating and accelerating the natural healing process. It instead focused on identifying, isolating and destroying anything that it identified as an outside agent. The more interesting part of the process had to be the way it revitalized the liver.
Unlike the light version he could feel that the holy mana was’t replacing the damaged parts of the liver with newly grown ones but instead undoing the damage. This did make him wonder if there might be a holy spell that could revive someone after a light spell repaired their body but this wasn’t a question for right now.
The other thing he noticed was the huge cost associated with casting anything containing holy mana. Despite not having tested out himself he knew that this mana type would be a pain to level, not only because he would have to work with poisoned or infected wounds but also because it would drain his mana like nothing else.
To make matters worse he also now knew that his glove didn’t have a gem to correspond to this type of mana. He couldn’t say he was all that surprised, after all finding something with holy attributes would have some serious implications but he was also somewhat disappointed in the fact.
He had refilled the crystal a total of five times in his stay at the clinic before Kate’s shift came to an end. A carefully made request saw him with privileges to accompany Kate for the next few days as a mana battery while he waited to be notified of his team's next delve.