Chapter 23 – Side Way Evolution (Patreon)

With the trial fresh in his mind, Tom launched himself into a game of tag, and actually enjoyed it for the first time since his reincarnation. Participating in an activity that wasn’t leaving him doubled up in pain was surprisingly cathartic, and he suspected that in his current state of mind he would have probably liked monsters versus heroes. That was how much he had craved some normalcy. The advantage of tag, if he wanted to be delusional about it, was that it might be able to help with the acquisition of skills. If he looked at it cross-eyed, then he could kind of see how it could be part of the process of acquiring a dodge ability.    

The initial thrill wore off quickly, however, and Tom’s brain returned to the challenge of making himself stronger and, unfortunately, tag was extremely inefficient at achieving that goal. The fact that his current full pool of fate remained unused was annoying him. He had allowed it to build up so that he could double dip in the trial, but that only worked if he actually used the resource. Participating in this dumb children’s game meant the point of fate he had generated post-trial had been wasted.  

Then again, like the coffees, this diversion was necessary for his mental health. The last twenty-four hours of relative time had been brutal.

Pa caught him, so Tom held up a hand and faked clutching at his stomach. Because he was thinking about fate, he noticed that Pa’s reserves had dropped to around half. He had started using fate, like Bir. On the other hand, Tom hadn’t yet spotted any unexplained accidents or seen the larger kid outperforming everyone else. What he was doing with the power was a mystery, and Tom wasn’t about to break character and ask. Revealing that he could sense fate levels was suicidal as far as he was concerned.

“Ta, are you okay?”

Tom nodded, then shook his head and pretended to double over like his gut was playing up:

“Um… I…”

“If you’re feeling unwell, then go.” Pa pointed toward the nearby toilets.

With an alibi set, he retreated to the boy’s restroom and went straight to the cubical which was the furthest from the door.

This time he would also push for the title to trigger.

Today was the day, he was sure of it. During the morning, he had felt the two spells were close to evolving together. They almost didn’t need any help, but his reserves were full, and with a flood of directed fate the merging was almost certain to be successful.

He slammed the bolt of the door home to give him privacy and then pulled down his pants.

Cuts cris-crossed his legs; deep, dirty ones. Hopefully, there would be one infected enough for his purposes. He had actively smeared dirt from the compost pile into each of them and then had left them to fester for the last twenty-four hours. That should be enough. With a critical eye, he examined the state of each of them. As he wanted to push for a sideways evolution, for his title to trigger, the wound chosen needed to be perfect.  

Tom frowned as he studied them. He was glad this stage was effectively over, because the compost was apparently performing as badly as the other attempts. It was probably a natural outcome of the enhanced healing on Existentia, but it was still annoying. All the cuts on his left thigh were healing cleanly. He shifted his attention to the right and sighed in relief. A handful had signs of infection. Red skin spread out from three wounds, while a fourth had visible pus.

“You,” he whispered to himself, examining it carefully. There was the yellow pus leaking out the edges, visible dirt embedded in the wound, dying skin and even angry red spreading out half a centimetre from the injury.

It was perfect.

Squeak.

Tom froze at the noise of the toilet door opening. Images of horror films filled him. A man with a knife hunting the defenceless child. The victim hiding in a cubical and lifting their feet so they wouldn’t be seen.

The person paused at the entry.

Clang.

The door slammed shut and then footsteps started toward him.

Adrenaline surged and he tensed, ready to pull up his pants hurriedly if they got too close. He knew he was being ridiculous; that the mental images he conjured were fake. But it was coming toward him, and what if this was his precognition affinity blending through into reality?

You’re being ridiculous, he told himself even as his mind game played strategies to fight back or slide under the walls to the next stall to avoid the enemy. Not that anything he could do would help against an actual assassin. This was not Earth. He was not a mouse trying to escape a cat, instead he was the only daisy left in a hippy convention with a sign saying pick me. Against anyone, competent or not, if they were rank ten or above, he would be helpless.

It was too early to react, so he did nothing. The cubical’s door, at a minimum, would buy him a second.

The footsteps paused three doors away from him. Then changed direction. There was the sound of a cubical door slamming followed by the noise of a stream of liquid landing in the toilet.

Of course that’s what they were here for. Tom wasn’t sure why he had jumped to other conclusions. It was probably the impact of the trial trauma, because logically there had been no reason for his paranoid reaction. Everything told him that, since an entire species had been eliminated for overstepping the bounds and interfering with a competition race, the assassinations had stopped. The only time they had occurred since was when the reincarnated person had been an idiot or, in that one memorable case, not even informed of the danger.

Ignoring the person emptying their bladder, he rehearsed in his mind what he needed to do.

Today he was merging the spells.

With a tiny bit of focus, the two desired spell forms crackled into his awareness. They had no mana in them, but they hovered over the wound, ready to be infused with his magic and to do their thing. One was to sterilize the wound, and the other to remove dead tissue. In his head he imagined the two spell-forms coming together and their sum becoming greater than their individual wholes. Combined, they would form a single spell perfectly. That was what he wanted. The mental image was firm in his head. They would merge, and then his title would trigger to cause a sideways evolution. That is what he wanted and what he expected to happen. Eighty percent of his fate, thirty-six in total, exited his chest. For a moment, it hung in front of him and then it split, with half going to the spell and the rest to his brain.

Mentally he shuddered when he saw that and tried not to think about the fate reprogramming how he thought; instead, he imagined it as a helpful force making small tweaks. There would be a bit of inspiration here, some calming and focusing chemicals released there, and a whole host of other little changes that together would add up to a material benefit.

Over to his right, the person left without flushing or washing his hands, and silently Tom counted to sixty. He had spent the fate; now he was giving it a chance to work, because it was well known that using it early could let it build to a larger advantage. If you wanted an arrow to miss, you didn’t want to rely on fate to protect you when it was already on a direct course to your heart. It was better for fate to act before the arrow was released, because you never knew where the most effective path to stop that arrow might come from. Something as simple as the archer bending the tail feathers when pulling it out could negate the arrow’s accuracy with only a point of fate. If you waited until the last moment, the ways you could be saved might be reduced to something freakishly unlikely, like a bird accidentally intercepting the arrow and killing itself. Shifting probabilities that much and that late required a ton of fate.

When the door shut, with over sixty seconds having passed, he began the merging process, hoping this time it would work. The two spell forms were very similar, which made overlaying them harder than if they had been different. Energy lines did not play nicely together when they got close to each other. He untangled the strings carefully and forced them to run in parallel. For structural areas, fusing was required, and for that he applied pressure to make them bond into a single line rather than having them wrap around each other but stay separate.

A minute passed as he struggled with the process.

Sweat ran down his face and his armpits were soaked.

The partially-merged spell form shuddered and threatened to break up multiple times, but his focus always got to the right spot in time to stop it from unravelling.

His creation stabilised, and he sighed in relief. He studied the spell form he had created thoroughly. It was different from the diagrams he had memorised, so he made a few tweaks to get it closer to what he was expecting. If he squinted, he could see the original spell forms, but otherwise the merging was complete. Carefully, he checked the structure to make sure that each of the thick connections was smooth without any lumps.

He discovered a mistake. There was an issue with the frontal brace, a thick curved line like the front of a ship. At a cursory glance it appeared to be merged, but when he inspected it, there were actually two strings of energy twisting around each other. He corrected that error, then checked and re-checked the rest of the spell form. That was lucky, because there was another problem - a minor connection, where a merging had occurred when it shouldn’t have. With a flex of his will, he reversed the fusing and restored the spell to the structure he needed.

There were no further issues.

What he had created was surprisingly stable, and it took very little concentration to hold it together, which gave him hope that he had been successful. Just like he would have done with a system spell, he mentally directed it down to the wound. Then he brought it to a halt five centimetres above his destination. There was one final step to do before he tested the spell.

With a frown, he pulled out the toy knife he had taken to carrying around. The tip was sharp, and he pressed it down at the start of the injury and then pushed it deep and yanked it along the cut.

It opened the wound right up, and both blood and yellow pus welled out of it. There wasn’t a lot of liquid, but, because of the infection, there was more than a cut that size should have produced.

Dispassionately, he watched the bleeding and noted the pus and dead flesh. Then he infused six mana into the spell and slammed it down on the cut.

There was no flash of light, but he could actively see the magic working. There was a fresh surge of blood but what had come through was cleaner, even if it carried flakes of jerky-like flesh away.

Ding.  

Tom smiled as he studied the wound.

It was not healed, not by a long shot. But was it purified? Yes, the cut was now clean. It was as though it was freshly-made, instead of being a day old and infected to boot.

Satisfied, he used his remaining two mana with Triage Cut to close the large wound more firmly. The two sides of skin immediately closed over to leave an angry red line with gaps in it, as though it had only been partially fixed. It didn’t take a doctor to conclude that it was not even close to being fully healed, even if the bleeding had been stopped.

He sat on the toilet, wiped the blood away and waited the six minutes for his measly eight mana to regenerate. Then, after another Triage Cut followed by Heal Cut, the angry red lines disappeared.

With a flush, the evidence of his bloody work vanished down the toilet.

Grinning, he left the restrooms and went to the dining hall. He could barely restrain himself from going to confirm his success, but for appearance’s sake he decided not to sneak out to find an isolation room. He could wait until tomorrow.

When he reached the converted gymnasium, the others were already seated, so he got his food, making a point to just grab vegies and a dinner roll, then went and joined them. These items would be easy on the stomach and help his alibi further.

At Pa’s inquisitive look, he rubbed his stomach to indicate it had been sore. He was not sure the other boy believed him, but, as the information in the isolation room kept telling him plausible deniability was all that was required, that was what he gave.

Tom picked at his plate and practiced his new spell to remove the other cuts on his legs. Then he went to bed and, twenty-one hours after hearing the ding, he turned up for his next session in the isolation room.

The moment the door shut he almost danced over to the ritual to check what the ding had given him. A single point of fate was invested in increasing the chance of the ritual finding what he was looking for. He triggered it, and an instant later the screen updated.

Spell: Purified Tissue Minor – Tier 0

This spell purifies the wound of natural contaminants to allow cleaner healing.

Sideways Evolution 1: May be focused to force out larger impurities*.

*Contaminants must be at or below the tier of the spell to be affected.

Tom jumped up and down in excitement. 

His title had come through and added extra functionality to the new spell.

The spell was only slightly better than complete trash, so he didn’t care that the sideways evolution was weak. He was celebrating the fact it existed at all.

This was the future. There were fifty plus merges required to get Touch Heal, and if every third merge gave him a sideways evolution, it was possible that his tier zero spell might have a dozen additional functionalities tacked onto it. This one was not, when he thought about it, a bad addition to have.

If he was struck by shrapnel or an arrow, the spell would allow him to push the foreign objects out of his body. It was definitely a niche application, but if there were a dozen similar niche applications then, if suddenly combined, they could become a broad upgrade applicable to most situations. It was possible he could emerge from this process with Touch Heal being two or three times better than the base that everyone else could purchase.

Tom grabbed his spear and started on his forms. He practiced them daily, trying to capture what he had seen in the trial. As he went through the motions, he considered his next steps. With this latest acquisition, he had all three skills that were required to be merged to create Heal Cut. Based on his experience, that process would take a little under a week, and after that he would need to make a decision on what was to come next.

There were another four pathways to complete before he could create Touch Heal, which was his current magical objective. “What were they again?” he muttered and paused his movement to recall the precise names. “Heal Organs, Mend Bone, Purge Foreign Substances and finally Replenish Flesh and Blood.”

Those were the four spells he needed to learn, and he thrust forward with his spear, overbalancing slightly as he expressed his frustration by trying to put in more power than usual.

The problem he faced was the steps required to create the base level spells rolling up to those high-level versions.

“The core issue,” he told himself out loud, “Is that the perfection method requires practice.”

And that was the crux of the issue.

It required practice.

To obtain the skills, he needed a ready access to broken bones, or people with a spear through their guts, or those close to death due to blood loss.

And that was a resource he lacked. There was no hospital he could volunteer at or an animal or monster farm to at least give him a warm body to experiment on.

His canvas, his practice dummy to date, had been him.  Progressing Heal Cut had been simple. All that had required was a dagger and a willingness to hurt himself. Knife wounds were safe to self-administer. He was not about to kill himself by accident especially since he was careful where he cut, and the cuts were also easy to hide.

For that particular spell, he had an unlimited supply of injuries to heal.

These other four paths were fraught with real danger.

How could he safely damage his organs?

Shit, he thought, that spell included the heart. How the fuck would I about damaging and then healing something like that?

With a curse, he stopped his practice to think more deeply on the issue. Brain, heart, blood - they were all kind of critical to his desire to continue living. Hurting himself to develop those skills seemed less than ideal.

Was there a better way?