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Chapter 44: High Priest Sh'kteiro
🕑 Added 2025-08-05 12:03:02 +0000 UTCAt the healing tents, Caen sat on a stool, Mimicking Ergen’s Spirit-healing affinity. His father was in the middle of a cleansing session, as were many other healers here.
Caen cleansed his spirit and was pleased to note that he was getting much better at working with a boosted affinity. The passive augmentations, though temporary, were of immense help here. He spared the time to perform a few Spirit-healing exercises.
Ergen was speaking quietly with another patient. Caen grazed his father’s spirit affectionately before leaving for the section of the tents with the Blood-healers.
He worked with them for an hour, helping with mundane healing. It was engrossing work. He set broken limbs, cleaned wounds, stitched a few, and applied salve to the less severe burns. He also helped apportion healing potions to the injured—apparently, someone had donated a few to the healing tents. These were very expensive, and the elderly healer he'd met on the first day was actively supervising their usage.
While working triage, he Mimicked a stern-looking woman in her twenties. She worked with a team of mundane healers, mending deep gashes sustained from ant mandibles. She moved around a lot, but Caen did the best he could to keep her in view. After linking their affinities, he cast spells on himself to relieve his lingering soreness. Then he joined her. He soothed the burns of others with beautiful, beautiful magic. Mended scrapes and cuts easily. He worked slowly, however. Blood-healing was one of the more delicate disciplines, requiring an even softer touch than Spirit-healing.
A Blood-healer offered to take a look at Caen’s burn, but he declined politely. He’d already applied salve to it here at the tents. His grimoire held a Blood-healing spell that could heal low-degree burns, but he’d never been able to cast it. He looked forward to doing that now.
The matronly woman from yesterday handed him three and a half tokens. It was the first time he’d seen one of these half tokens. Other than being half the size of the regular beads, they were virtually indistinguishable.
Outside the healing tents, Caen executed some stretches.
After a quick lunch at the cafeteria, he hurried down to the Aperture, humming to himself as he attuned ambient mana.
Later, he would go check out the workout field he meditated on this morning. There would no doubt be lots of active thread clusters there. But right now, he was more interested in Mimicking those awakened trees. Specifically, the tree stumps.
A portion of the Plane’s front zone was occupied by resting combatants. But more importantly, it was littered with tree stumps, many of which would provide him with an easy and generally safe avenue for practicing Mimicry.
Within the Plane, he made his way past people standing around or sitting on benches or the green sand of the front zone and chatting in the dark. He sat with his back to an ordinary tree stump as he connected with a green-barked stump in front of him.
The soul structure overlaid the stump and flowed beyond, deeper into the ground, and stretched across the ground. Two thread clusters were active, but only barely. This was one of the most interesting things about all the Planar creatures he’d observed with Soul-sense: they very often had more than one thread cluster active at a time. He’d noticed this in some humans as well, particularly Ereshta’als. He knew only of two ways to use more than one discipline of magic at the same time.
The first was multicasting, which entailed using several spirit patterns simultaneously. It was incredibly complex and technical, and Caen personally knew only a handful of people who could do this. The second was through the use of manifold spells. These were spells that utilized more than one discipline of magic in their construction, such as an illusion that seemed realer than reality itself due to a combination of Dream-guarding, Blood-healing, Vibration magic, and Gleam magic, or a flight spell born from Kinesis magic and Wind magic.
Caen spent some time isolating the less prominent thread cluster in the tree’s soul. It gave him the utterly bizarre impression of… ’damp comfort’. This was particularly different from the impression he’d received before, which made him suspect that this might not be an affinity for Blood-healing.
There were three immediate options to his mind, but he decided to come at this from a different angle. The clearest impression was that of damp comfort, but there were other vaguer ones. There was also a plethora of complex sensations. Caen focused on the whole and tried comparing them to every single one of his own affinity clusters to see if any similarities stood out to him.
His Blood-healing cluster felt rigid, of course, but he still took the time to compare the two thread clusters and identify distinctions between them. Before moving on, he stopped to quickly pen down his thoughts in his notebook, along with diagrams.
His Flora cluster felt immediately flexible to him, but he still compared it with the tree’s. The similarities weren’t immediately apparent, but the longer he examined their individual elements, the clearer they became.
He moved on to Body-enhancement and found the distinctions all the more apparent. As he moved through each of his thread clusters, he would circle back to his Flora cluster, and the similarities between his and the tree’s stood out all the more. By the time he was done, he felt as though he’d gotten a better sense of what a Flora magic thread cluster felt like.
He Mimicked the tree’s Flora magic affinity. This one felt strong, too, which was unfortunate. All the Flora spells Caen knew––weak ones, the lot of them––required leaves or blades of grass, and there were none in here.
He began to isolate the tree’s Blood-healing thread cluster without issue. It was much more prominent than the Flora cluster and gave off the same impression as before. Inverted moreness.
Just as with the Flora cluster, he began comparing the tree’s Blood-healing affinity with every one of his affinities, taking copious notes in his notebook of the differences. Once he had come to get that sense of what a Blood-healing cluster felt like, he began Mimicking the tree’s affinity. But as soon as he started doing this, his boosted Flora affinity started reverting. He clamped down on it, and it stabilized, but then his Blood-healing cluster began reverting, too. He clamped down on that one, and the Flora cluster continued to revert once more. Try as he might, he couldn’t preserve them both. It was so pleasantly infuriating. But if anything, this made him suspect that he might one day be able to Mimic more than one affinity at a time.
In the meantime, however, he focused on working with what he had. He abandoned the Flora magic affinity and began working on acquiring the other. He cast a Blood-healing spell on himself the moment he was done. He barely felt the cool sensation spread over the burn on the side of his face and neck, since he’d already applied salve.
Caen took out the much smaller grimoire he kept in his bag of holding and flipped through it in search of that Blood-healing spell. He spent the next few hours carefully adapting it to his spirit and mind without the aid of passive augmentations. Handling an affinity this strong without that instinctive understanding felt odd, but he made do.
Adaptation was vital to spellcasting. It was essentially the process of tailoring the spell components to one’s spirit and mind. The spell schemas, as contained in componeums, entailed generalized guidance and direction. Each person interacted with spell components in a unique way and thus needed to spend some time adjusting those spirit patterns and visualizations to themselves.
While he worked, he felt something that made him flinch and sit up straight. His speculon felt… warm on his forehead, almost hot even. But there was something else beneath that.
He felt that something again. It was like a signal of some kind. A pulse. Something pinging off him, off his speculon, and bouncing back in another direction.
Caen whirled his head in that direction. He found a very large group of thickly armored combatants, decked in specialized gear, walking towards him. They all had goggles on. Some slung rifles across their shoulders, others, various cutting weapons and humongous shields.
Everyone in the front zone was staring.
But Caen’s attention was drawn to a man at their center, dressed in a cream-colored monk’s habit with the traditional curls of Edict attire. He wore his white hair in a top knot. There was a mischievous smile on his light brown face, a speculon on his forehead. Sh’kteiro, his mother’s elder brother.
“Uncle Teiro,” Caen declared in Olden Vishic, getting up and approaching the group.
“Hello, Ar’Caen,” his uncle replied coolly in the same tongue. The armed men surrounding Sh’kteiro parted as he moved to meet Caen.
They hugged. Caen was taller than him by quite a bit, and broader still, but he always felt… smaller around the man. “Was that—did you do something to me just now, Uncle?”
Sh’kteiro patted Caen’s arm fondly. “I was hoping to find you later this evening, but the Eye has caused our paths to converge, it seems. And about your question, well… walk with me.”
Caen followed, and the team of very well-armed and dangerous-looking individuals—of which there were forty—flowed past them both, leaving Caen and his uncle to trail behind. This had to be a Delver team. Caen hadn’t seen one yet, but they fit the description.
“I’ve been doing that to you for the past fifteen years, actually,” Uncle Sh’kteiro said with that mischievous smile on his face. He’d once told Caen that he’d spent his entire youth practicing how to make that smile look both serene and mischievous at the same time.
“That’s some commitment,” Caen remarked.
“My little sister told me that you had a surprise for me.” Sh’kteiro gestured at the goggles on Caen’s face. “But it seems I might have figured it out already. When did your specul—”
A member of the Delver team walked backwards, interrupting him. “High Priest,” she said gruffly.
“A moment, Caen.”
As his uncle and the armor-clad woman exchanged a quiet conversation, Caen smiled to himself.
Since discovering this new ability, he’d met with four people whom he strongly suspected were above the Attuner stage of magic: Healer na-Moon, Farmer Brah’m, the strange serpent visitor at Uncle Vai’s mansion, and Magister Fermien. The effects of Soul-sense were sometimes noticeable to Attuners. This had caused Caen to worry that anyone above the stage of Attuner would immediately be able to tell whenever he used Soul-sense on them. He’d started to exercise caution as a result, but this was something he needed to know.
Uncle Teiro was at the Percipient stage, just above Attuner, and this had been so for over fifteen years, nearly as long as Caen had been alive.
Caen unfurled his existence, activating Soul-sense. A bright blur overlaid the faint image of Sh’kteiro’s body. A murky sheen that gave him only the impression of looking through a misted-up window beyond which the light shone. There was a low, nigh imperceptible, crackling, distorted sound.
Sh’kteiro turned to face Caen very slowly, smiling in amusement, an eyebrow raised. “Now, what was that?”
