Chapter 27: Healing Magic Part 8

I’m not sure if I explained this earlier, but a spell’s class basically defines how difficult it is to learn. However, this classification system was made by humans, so it is not absolute. Spells of the same level can vary significantly in difficulty (though some of this variety comes down to the natural affinity of the people trying to learn it), and there can often be multiple spells of a single element that take roughly the same amount of effort to learn. For example, High Heal and Blood Fountain are both intermediate-class healing spells, meaning that learning either one of them would probably take a few years. Given that there was some overlap between how the spells functioned, it wouldn’t take twice as long to learn both, but it would still take a lot longer than learning just one of them.

Restore and Tears of the Goddess were like that. Because I’d already mastered the former, learning the latter wouldn’t take quite as long, so I wasn’t starting from scratch, but the two spells sat on completely opposite sides of the complexity curve. Restore was considered one of the easiest master-class spells to learn, which partially explains why I managed to learn it so quickly in the first place. However, Tears of the Goddess was a completely different beast. It was nearly mythical.

Few saints bothered to study healing magic, as they believed that their powers were a gift directly from the goddess, but even amongst those who did, most only managed to learn this spell late in their lives after decades of study. Of course, I didn’t expect it to take quite that long. Even if Restore was a relatively easy spell to learn, I had still pulled it off several times faster than I expected. I suspected that was a result of both my own natural talent (talent I had no idea I had) and the environment I found myself in. As Logos had warned me, most other high-ranked healers and I lacked experience treating less serious wounds, and that significantly hindered our understanding of healing magic and our ability to improve. However, here I was presented with a wide variety of ailments every day.

Thanks to that, I was probably the most experienced healer in the entire country, but that didn’t mean what came next would be easy. Learning this final spell would still likely take me years, and while I had all the time in the world, I wasn’t sure if my sanity would last that long. I was truly risking my mental health all for the sake of avoiding an NPC’s guilt trip. I really was a pushover, but knowing that wasn’t gonna be enough to stop me, so I grabbed one of the arrows off the ground and went off to stab it into the prince’s leg.

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

So surprisingly, the prince has very little defense for physical attacks. Even with my barely-trained arms, I still managed to stab him in the leg before he killed me. Of course, I wasn’t trying to kill him. That would’ve resulted in me being cursed forever. Still, I wanted to hurt him, and an arrow to the knee seemed like a good way of doing that. He’d certainly looked surprised when I’d done it, though I did wish he hadn’t entered his kill-mode quite so quickly. I wanted more time to enjoy his shocked expression.

Regardless, it was time to get back to my usual routine, though it had changed a bit. Restore allowed me to heal the next four patients, though their treatment was a much more involved process, as they each required special treatment. However, bringing Sally along with me turned out to be a big time saver, as she was able to handle a lot of the more physically demanding tasks for me. Then, I’d return to my room and study an even larger textbook. I’m not exactly sure why I had the book needed to learn this spell in my room already, when I had absolutely zero chance of learning it as a student. Still, I didn’t complain, as it saved me from having to make a trip to the library.

As I repeated this cycle, I began to see some hopeful signs. Treating the four idiots was gradually becoming easier and less demanding. After almost six months of treating them, I found a way to use Restore to force the spear, arrows, and poison out of their body, vastly reducing the time I needed to spend healing them and giving me more time in the day to study. Still, there’s only so much time you can spend studying before you need a break, so every few days I decided to find a new way to mess with the prince.

I would show up covered in blood and say Holly attacked me, claim to be pregnant with one of his friend’s kids, or just start setting stuff on fire. I set a lot of things on fire. For example, the academy’s entrance hall was lined with portraits of every past king, each of which dated back to that specific king’s reign. They burned quite easily.

Surprisingly, the prince didn’t seem all that mad when he showed up a few minutes later. I figured he would just kill me without a word, as he had done so many times before, with a look of pure and delicious rage on his face. However, my prize was far greater than that. Instead of getting angry, the prince fell to his knees and began to openly weep as he watched the legacy of his ancestors go up in flames. This was certainly unexpected, but still deeply enjoyable. I laughed at his pain. I cackled like a madwoman, and as I did, he looked at me in terror. I couldn’t blame him. Even I was surprised by just how far these loops had pushed me, but that didn’t mean I was going to stop. Instead, I pushed him further.

“This is all your fault,” I whispered into his ear.

That, apparently, was a step too far, as the prince’s sorrow and fear were immediately replaced with unbridled rage. He lunged at me, and for the first time ever, he didn’t use his divine magic on me, though I still died quite quickly.

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

“How pathetic,” I whispered quietly to myself. The prince’s reaction to the burning portraits had been downright normal. He had properly mourned the loss of the legacy he was so obsessed with until I tried to pin the blame on him. That was the one thing he couldn’t accept, so he lashed out to silence me. It was utterly childish, and as I thought back to our time together, I realized that this had been a common pattern with him. He had always blamed those around him whenever he messed up. Even this loop had all started because he chose to focus on my supposed reaction to his cheating rather than accept that he had been the one who messed things up in the first place.

His reaction ticked me off so much that I avoided interacting with him for a while after that. I know that might sound impossible given that escaping him was impossible, but thankfully, Sally had a wide range of sleeping aids on hand. All I had to do was take one before the prince arrived, and I’d sleep through everything. Unsurprisingly, he seemingly had no problem executing me in my sleep, and while I wanted to blame the game for that, it still ticked me off just a bit.

Still, not messing with the prince gave me time to reach intermediate-class wind magic and beginner-class void magic. If all went well, I wouldn’t need them, but I had a lot of time to work with, so why not spend it making a backup plan?