Chapter 23: Healing Magic Part 5

“Good morning, Milady! Are you excited for the party tonight?”

Mere moments after slapping the prince, I found myself back in bed. Surprisingly, he didn’t say a word after I hit him. While I was hoping for a quick death, I was expecting confusion or some questions, but instead, he struck me dead before I could even land a second blow. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was something I coded into the game, and if so, why?

Had I been trying to discourage violence against the prince? It was possible, considering that killing him would trigger the bad ending, where I would be cursed with eternal torture (if that was even part of my game and not exclusively of this world). I laughed as I imagined multiple prompts asking me if I was really certain I wanted to hit him, only for my attack to utterly fail to kill him.

Still, this all served as another reminder that I was dealing with NPCs rather than actual people, and that lesson was only strengthened when I returned to the infirmary for some more practice. While I had initially appreciated their lack of questions, I now realized that their dialogue was preset. When I approached, they gave a brief introduction and explained how they got hurt, but there was no variation. Their wording was the same as it had been the previous day, and they weren’t so much speaking to me as info-dumping. They didn’t question me or anything else because their only purpose was to shoot out exposition. Likewise, when I finished healing them, they each gave the same line of thanks as they had done the day before, and then disappeared as soon as I looked away.

Thus, the day progressed much as the previous one had. I healed the first fifteen patients, albeit with slightly improved efficiency, but still had no chance of curing the last five. Though my proficiency with Regenerate had already begun to show signs of improvement, the spell was ultimately incapable of treating them, as its purpose was only to accelerate natural healing. Thus, while it could allow someone to regrow a lost limb in under an hour, it struggled with large open wounds or damage to internal organs, which bled so profusely that the individual was likely to die before the spell finished. Heal and High Heal were better options as they instantly closed the wound. However, because they were beginner and intermediate class spells, respectively, they lacked the power to treat those types of injuries.

As a result, the remaining five patients were beyond me. The first of these students had been stabbed completely through the abdomen with a spear. Healing him would require me to both close the wound and repair the organs in the seconds after I pulled out the spear and before he bled out. Likewise, the other four each suffered from wounds that could not be cured with my current level of healing. If I tried, my efforts would have merely exacerbated their injuries and probably killed them, though in truth, most of them shouldn’t have been alive at all. They each clung to life by a thread, and yet, no matter how much time passed, they grew no worse. Their wounds seemed to exist solely for the sake of allowing me to heal them, and thus, they’d wait for me for as long as it took.

Still, today was not the day I’d be answering their prayers, so I went back to my room to study and found that Logos had been right. Certain sections of the textbook made far more sense now that I had more experience healing a wide variety of wounds, but it still wasn’t enough. Deciphering the rest would take a lot more time and practical experience, so I quickly established a routine. In the morning, I’d go to the infirmary and practice healing the patients. While I still couldn’t handle the last group of them, my experience and reading gradually meant that I could heal the first fifteen faster and more efficiently. Afterwards, I’d return to my room and try to use what I’d learned to figure out more of the text until the prince eventually showed up to kill me. Then, I’d do it all again.

It was a rather slow and repetitive process, but I couldn’t complain too much. I knew going in that reaching mastery level could take decades. I had even heard that some spellcasters became stuck for years at a time without making any progress. Compared to them, I was doing well. I was sure there would be places where I would get stuck, but I was progressing at a steady rate, with no more than a day or two passing between breakthroughs. However, the most surprising discovery was not related to healing magic, but rather to the patients.

Their repetitive dialogue had made it easy for me to see them as little more than NPCs. That, combined with my own anxieties, led me to largely ignore them, but after hearing the first idiot’s story about his paper cut for perhaps the hundredth time, I couldn’t help but mutter, “Why would you do something so stupid?”

“Because I loved her.”

Those words nearly knocked me off my feet, as I realized that these NPCs, as I’d taken to calling them, were actually capable of speech beyond their opening and closing dialogue. I had just never bothered to speak to them, and while I would typically prefer to work in silence, healing took time, and I was starting to get bored. I was also a bit curious about how some of these injuries had occurred, even this idiot’s papercut, so I decided to ask. The story I heard not only confirmed that he was an idiot, but also gave me a truly devious idea. Though escape may have still been far away, I had all the time in the world to indulge in a bit of vengeance like a true villainess.