Chapter 24 – Additional Planning (Patreon)

Tom didn’t want to dwell on the unsolvable, but he needed a solution to progress Heal Organs. No, that wasn’t right. He needed a way to progress it safely.

There were no simple answers, and there was no way he was going to use his current method on his heart or brain.

That was a definite no-go.

Trying home surgery on them could kill him instantly, but even the other organs were problematic.

He understood how skewed his understanding of human biology was. There was lots of experience with magically fixing what, on Earth, would have been deadly wounds, but there were no years of study to give him a theoretical basis of how everything connected together. Without innate enhanced healing and a ready availability of spells, he didn’t know how far a normal body could be pushed, which was basically what he had now. There was nothing in his Earth years that could help him. He had barely finished high school, though he had to admit his marks had been good for the amount of study he had put in.

Tom forced his mind back to the moment and shook his head as he remembered various facts from Earth.

Intestines were one of the streams of work under heal organs. They didn’t sound as dangerous as the heart, but even with his education he knew experimenting on them wasn’t safe. As he understood it, if they were breached and not healed properly, sepsis would kill you in a day or two. Not safe for experimentation. It was the same with the kidneys, liver, and lungs. They were all critical and represented the same challenge: a nick might not kill him immediately, but a failure to heal them promptly could have dire repercussions. These were not injuries that he could leave untreated for hours while practicing ineffective magic on them. Or maybe he could do that. Maybe they were safe to experiment on, but the issue was that he didn’t know.

And it wasn’t even like Heal Organs was the only problem here. The other pathways he needed to develop had their own difficulties to overcome. Mend Bone, at least, would not be life threatening to train. But if he broke a bone, how could he hide that issue for an entire day while he worked on his spell-craft?

Replenish Flesh and Blood would run into the same issues as Mend Bones. If the risk of discovery hadn’t been an issue, if he had been in a safe space, it would be a simple matter of bleeding himself out to a critical - but not fatal - level. The body was as good as designed to allow that, because, as you lost blood, your blood pressure dropped, which made it easier and easier to seal up the wound. However, he didn’t have hours or days where he could hide away to carry out that type of experiment.

Purge Foreign Substance, he decided, was probably the easiest and safest to progress. It had its own set of problems, but it he could source materials and went about it carefully, it should be trainable intraday without being noticeable.

If he could obtain the resources he needed.

Tom looked around the isolation room with added interest. He doubted they would include a roadmap like they had if it couldn’t be used. Everything within reaching distance had been catalogued, but that left a lot of space that he hadn’t explored yet, and that included a row of cupboards at the roof level which caught his eyes.. There was no ladder to reach them, but this place had been custom-built. Their very presence screamed ‘I contain secrets’.

It was time to discover what was on those inaccessible shelves. Hopefully, they would contain something useful, because he didn’t want to depend on the trial to progress his spell-craft; he also had no desire to be attempting to progress multiple affinities in parallel. Exactly that would happen if healing gets restricted to the trial. Then he would be doing crafting, skill, and healing in the trial and something like lightning outside it.

Although…

A thought occurred to him and he almost smacked himself in frustration.

What was he thinking, rejecting the idea of practicing healing in the trial? While his time and fate were spoken for there, his mana wasn’t. Besides, working on the more sensitive activities under the protection of a GOD’s shield was just sensible. It was an obvious place for taking risks, especially since April could probably hurt him in the right ways if he asked. She was very accommodating like that.

While he had a kernel of an idea, he had to do the detailed planning. First, Heal Brain. What would it take? What do I need to do? He asked himself. He flipped open the folder and audibly groaned. “That’s bloody ridiculous.” He said and then glanced quickly at the door to confirm the room was still sealed. The stone at the top of the door glowed in a comforting manner. With it confirmed that he was safe from outside gaze, he returned to studying. “Why is it so complicated?”

He felt like hitting himself in frustration. Thirteen base trash spells and then seven mergers were required to get this single subskill of Heal Organs. “How is Heal Brain by itself twice as complex as Heal Cut?” He asked and no one, of course, answered his question.

He tapped the names of the spells and frowned. His anatomy knowledge was unfortunately lacking. Luckily, he knew from his earlier reading that there was an appendix of anatomical explanations at the back. He quickly flipped through to it. When he noticed it initially, he had firmly rejected the idea of learning it as an unnecessary time sink – after all, why would he want that type of technical knowledge when magic solved everything? In fact, he had wondered why such old Earth information had even been included in the first place. But now that he was engaged in the nuts and bolts of building the spell, the inclusion made a lot of sense. There was only a single sheet of paper covering the topic of the brain, but it was written in size eight text with lots of miniature diagrams. It felt like it was supposed to be read with the aid of a magnifying glass, but he put his complaints aside and absorbed what it had to teach him.

Armed with the requisite knowledge, he went back to the hierarchy sheet, and understood exactly what was happening. For the brain, there were five analysis components - presumably because mucking around in someone’s brain or, worse, your own, without knowing what was actually damaged was dangerous.

The first of those skills was Macro Mapping, which caused him to wince slightly. It was needed because the brain was not like bone or muscle. If a chunk of it was detached, you had to restore it to precisely the right spot or the neuron connections wouldn’t work. Any damage had to be rebuilt exactly as before, or you would be doing brain damage to the person.

In addition, there were four more equally important, but less dramatic, analysis tools that covered all the components necessary for brain health. They checked the health and functioning of the blood-brain barrier, the integrity of brain fluid, located dead and dying cells and, finally, one that functioned on a level below cellular to locate broken synapses. From his primer, Tom knew how vital each of those steps were. They could, he also understood instinctively, be developed without hurting himself.

That changed things, Tom realised.

At least for Heal Brain, over half of the development did not require the trial. The entire diagnosis suite of spells, along with the ones that were concerned with fluid health, he could safely test on himself.

The enormity of what he was planning struck him. Momentarily, he lowered his head and cupped it in his hands. He was almost five-years-old, and starting a project that wouldn’t be complete for months, potentially for years. It was a massive undertaking, but not one he would relent on.

But the child in him (and the man too, he admitted after a moment of introspection) wanted results now. Heal Cut, when it was created, would be useful for his fighting.

Tom was very glad he had focused on it first.

Ideally, he would want the same level of utility from his next set of spells.

Another thought struck him, and he felt like hitting himself again. The process of developing his spells was the same situation that April had highlighted with his skills. The order he did it in would influence how long the process took. It was almost certainly why she had explained the skill acquisition in such detail.

That meant there were multiple consideration on what to do next. What could help immediately? And what would help him gain his abilities the fastest? Both were important, but the first was ultimately limited by his eight mana. There was no way he was going to get the resources to do brain surgery in the immediate future, or fix a heart, or even mend a shattered bone. What was useful didn’t matter; instead, he needed to focus on finding the optimal path to lower his time investment.

Once more, his eyes were drawn back to the hierarchy sheet.

That the first eleven lines were dedicated to Heal Cut.

Internally, he whistled.

Although there were coincidences, the orphanage setup was meticulous, and Heal Cut being at the top of the page felt deliberate. The order was not random. The positioning of Heal Organs proved that. It was right at the bottom, with brain and heart being the last two within that section.

It wasn’t a series of hierarchies, copied down blindly from the experience shop. Instead, it was a roadmap, a plan that the readers were expected to follow from top to bottom.

His eyes went back to the top of the sheet. Purge Foreign Substances followed Heal Cut, and after it Blood and Muscle Replenishment. That was the order he would follow, with one change. In the trial, he was regularly bleeding to death, which meant conditions were going to be perfect to experiment with Blood Replenishment. He would take advantage of that within the trial, and outside of it he would focus on Purge Foreign Substances. Energised, he set about memorising the wireframe diagrams for Marrow Overdrive and Emergency Pressure, which were two of the four spells that fed into Blood Replenishment. It took him half an hour to embed them both in his memory, and he planned to use the future isolation room sessions as a refresher to ensure they were well and truly ingrained by the time of the next trial.

With that done, his eyes turned to the cupboards above him.

If he was right about the hierarchy, there had to be a way to inject the contaminants into himself somewhere in this room. There was lots of storage space up there. They ringed the room, including directly above the doors.

“I wonder what treasures you contain?” he asked out loud. Given the attention to detail that had gone into constructing these isolation rooms, there would be something up there for his purposes. He was sure of it.

The isolation room, Tom realised, had disturbingly high ceilings. They were at least a metre higher than ones he was used to on Earth. A typical adult, without the enhanced attributes they got in Existentia, would not have been able to leap and touch it. That was how high they were, and the challenge he faced was far more substantial than that. After all, he was only a short four-year-old.

The roof was five body lengths above him, and there were no convenient hand or foot holds to assist a climb. Not that he would trust this physique to be successful at something like that, anyway. He needed a different method.

With his brain in solution mode, his eyes roamed the room.

He sharply inhaled and then, with a mental apology to Dimitri his eyes settled on the toy boxes. Stacked appropriately, those three represented two body lengths of the missing height, and they would provide a stable base for additional construction. Then there were the containers for the weapons and the small climbing framework in the corner. If he combined all those elements, he would be able to stack them high enough.

With a sigh, he poured out the content of all three toy boxes and stacked them, two on the bottom layer and one on the second. They were extraordinarily light, given their bulk. They were each almost as high as he was, and fifty percent longer than that again. The climbing frame was placed on the boxes, and then above it went the weapon containers to get the last metre.

The makeshift structure soared above him. It kind of had a series of steps, then ropes to climb, then two more steps.

Experimentally, he pushed.

It wobbled alarmingly, but didn’t collapse. If he was an adult, he would have climbed it without hesitation, backing himself to keeping everything balanced, but he didn’t trust this body.

Tom ran the calculations and decided that so much instability was not acceptable. He switched the position of the weapon boxes and the climbing frame. It lowered the height slightly, but he would still be able to access the cupboard’s lower shelves.

When he pushed, it didn’t wobble, but if he overbalanced, it would still collapse. Tom disliked the design of the climbing frame being off the ground.

He dismantled it, and this time stacked the toy boxes vertically, before pushing the weapon containers up in a hazardous mess on top. It was a complex process. The weapon containers were stacked and stood on to shift the top box, and then the climbing frame was used to push the weapon containers high enough.

Finally, he used the wire frame to get up, reorganised the weapon containers into steps, and nodded appreciatively at what he had created. It was solid. If he jumped up and down, it wouldn’t collapse.

Having prepared as much as he was going to get, he climbed the last two steps. When he looked back, his feet were two metres off the ground. Tom wasn’t too concerned. Even if he fell, he knew enough to protect his head, and even if he broke his legs, he would be able to crawl to the healing crystal to fix himself. Opening the doors was awkward because his head got in the way, but that was the only difficulty. Curiously, there was no lock, latch, or anything to stop him from accessing the cupboard. He had been expecting some sort of mana lock, or a physical puzzle to solve, to stop the younger children from accidentally opening it up. That lack troubled him.

In some ways that was a bonus, because it let him gain access easily.

But if it contained what he hoped, why was there no security?

He frowned.

If they weren’t secured, then… He wondered if he was breaking into empty storage space and then mentally shrugged. He would find out. He leant backwards and swung the doors fully open with the edge of both, brushing his chin and nose.

He sighed in relief. On each of the cupboard doors were was a big red danger sign, including skulls and bones. It screamed stay away even if you couldn’t read.

Neatly underneath the warning symbol was a label.  

Warning. Deadly materials contained inside.

No items from this cupboard may be removed from the isolation room.

The isolation room will remain locked until all contents are returned, and the cupboard securely closed. Failure to do so in a timely manner after session ends will result in adult supervision being summoned.

Note: Due to the sensitive nature of the substances, these cupboards are only restocked on a quarterly basis. 

That sounded both ominous and promising. Tom couldn’t reach the top, top shelf but he could see the bottom two, and they were both filled with bottles and vials.

Excitedly, he reached out and grabbed the closest one and pulled it out to let him read the small label.

Tier 2 Frotoic Acid

Warning. Extreme caution is required when using this. A single drop is capable of eating through an arm.

Tom stared at the label.

It was tier two!

And it was deadly.

It was way too powerful for him to even consider using. A single drop in the wrong place would kill him. If it could burn through an arm, it could do the same to his skull.

His eyes flickered over the rest of the labels. Almost every one of them had the skull and bones warning.

Strong Alkaline Nectar – Tier 3,

Bottled Flame – Tier 2,

Lodeaye Contact Poison – Tier 2

There were all deadly. They were the type of materials that should have been secured behind lock and key with a security guard in front of them. These items were far more dangerous than he had been imagining when he had constructed his tower to gain access.

Instead, they had been undefended and he, in his tiny, pathetic child’s body, had got access within five minutes.

Tom could feel the fury building in him. What were the adults thinking? What the hell were they doing, leaving this so accessible?

Sure, four- and five-year-olds probably lacked both the curiosity and the ability to build the structure he had. That was kids his age, but ten-year-olds were locked into this room, too. Bored ten-year-olds were left in here, and there was no way they wouldn’t spot the cupboard and climb up to investigate it.

The level of irresponsibility was breathtaking.

He wanted to smash heads in. He could feel the red haze rising, but there was no target for it, so it ebbed and flowed as much as it built. It receded slightly but did not disappear rather it settled deeper inside him.

Tom shuddered at the feeling of both the rage and the fact there was nothing to direct it against. Whenever his thoughts even got close to thinking about a young child getting access to this acid, he almost lost control.

Every errant thought made the fury rise, then discover a lack of valid targets and be forced to drop back down.

He felt beyond sick. 

Tom stared at the deadly vial in his hands while another wave of fury subsided. Nope, keeping this near him was too risky. With trembling hands, he returned the vial to its spot and then slammed the doors shut. Everything contained there was too dangerous to be in easy reach, given the emotions heaving through him.

The incompetence was disgusting. There wasn’t one thing capable of killing someone; there were dozens and potentially over a hundred. Nearly everything was lethal, and while there were warning labels, he knew for a fact Bir and Pa couldn’t read and might not even recognise the danger.

If they got their hands on even one of these bottles and splashed a drop onto their skin, they could die.

In a shell-shocked trance, he checked that the cupboard was closed properly and climbed down.

His fury had not dissipated.

His arms were trembling, and there was a pressure that filled him.

It was the room’s fault.

If it was better, there would be no risk. He couldn’t think. The anger was a living thing, it could not be denied. He grabbed the climbing frame and tried to throw it, but it was too heavy. He crashed back on his bum, bringing it down on top of him. The corner struck his mouth and teeth.

He had to destroy.

He wriggled desperately out, breaths like he had just finished a sprint. He wiped his mouth and saw red tinted saliva.

Those bastards, what were they thinking, running these sorts of risks?

He screamed at the roof. The tiny helpless rational part of his brain was thankful for the privacy and sound cancelling.

It was the room’s fault. He kicked the toys on the ground, then tipped the structure he built over. The noise of crashing objects made him grin in feral delight. His back complained at the force he had put through it. Naturally, he ignored it and flipped a toy box over to the music of a larger crash.

Emotions ran thick. He punched a wall, once, twice a third time. The plaster didn’t dint.

The injustice of them so causally putting so many lives at risk. It wasn’t right.

His next punch left red droplets. Despite that, he still threw a fifth. His hand throbbed, and he suspected he had broken bones in his fist along with the skin, but he didn’t care.

“Why would you? Why would you, you fucks!” He spun and roared. Toys were thrown, weapons scattered, but he forced self-restraint and managed to avoid the book shelves.

“How many have you killed?”

There was no answer. He stopped hitting the walls. It was pointless, and kicking the toys achieved nothing. This was not an enemy he could beat.

The rage vanished.

Tom collapsed onto the ground and angrily wiped away the tears that had come with his fury. He didn’t know what had happened. The anger had not been his, and the lack of control… he shook his head. That was terrible.

He had to find out what that was about and do something to manage it.