March 20th, 629

  “Well, isn’t that something…”

  Umara muttered as she viewed the two screens in front of her. On them were two different views of the same thing.

  The disease of the Verks Marquisate had only spread more and gotten worse, despite the efforts of Iron Legion and quarantine measures. Umara figured it would happen, but she still couldn’t help but remember how confident John was that it would. His confidence turned out to be correct. If the Scourge could plant it in one place, they could plant it anywhere, and clearly they were intent on using the Verks territory as a testing ground. They wouldn’t possibly allow it to be quarantined.

  It confused Umara that the disease hadn’t been found outside of the territory yet. She had thought they would spread the disease as much as possible, but it remained confined. John hadn’t explained why since she hadn’t asked, and if she was being honest, she didn’t really care.

  Matters of the broad picture she left to John. Not only did she not have his ability to plan, manage, and scheme, but she didn’t want to cluster her attention with matters that would hardly benefit from it. She wanted to focus on the things that would benefit them in the future, and she understood full well that her greatest strength, one of the few things she could best him at, was sheer power and Authority.

  Part of bettering herself involved exactly what she was doing now.

  Spatial magic had been put on the back burner. She had gone through just about everything her family’s grimoires could offer and had developed enough magic using Zirion’s spells. While she couldn’t say that she hit a plateau, the gains that could be acquired by looking into other fields of magic were greater, even if purely by virtue of versatility.

  She knew she’d have to do it in the future, and with their growing power level and increasingly dangerous encounters, she’d have to do it well. A warlock who could heal was a force multiplier, the most valuable member of any team. While Jaya and Ilinca had some degree of healing magic or alchemy, the need for an advanced healer on the Desert Eagles was becoming more apparent. John said that he had been keeping his eye out for potential recruits, but the pool of people who could match them was slim, not to mention if they were trustworthy.

  Not that Umara wanted him to find someone. She wanted to keep the Desert Eagle platoon small, and she wanted to know how to heal because she didn’t want to have to trust another person to do it correctly. Learning healing magic herself would serve both ends, not to mention that ever since she had developed her Aura technique, healing magic had come painfully easy to her.

  Healing magic was all about knowing what was wrong and fixing those wrongs. Problem was, knowing what was wrong often took magical precision. It was easy to see that someone had their chest sliced open. It was not easy to see different layers of skin, the destroyed blood vessels and nerves, the damaged cells, the broken bones, the microfractures, the bruising, and more.

  The most advanced healing magic required more detail than most mages could ever garner. John had talked about understanding the finer things about the human body, like how it was made up of many trillions of cells, all of which with a myriad of functions, and all of the science that went into how they worked. He could only ever explain the more broad concepts, like how the body maintained a balance of acidity, how chemicals and minerals were distributed, how muscles actually moved, how nervous signals were sent and how hormones affected growth and development.

  The human body was an incomprehensible mess of chemistry that not even John’s world had fully understood despite entire industries being centered around it. Umara knew she couldn’t hope to match that. However, she didn’t need to know all those things to do something about it. All she had to do was be able to see the problem at hand, fix it, and enable the body to return itself to equilibrium.

  She had already learned the basics, and she was extremely good at it by now. The advanced spells had come just as easily as the basics, the difficulty only coming in learning the spell itself, not its execution. After that, all she had to do was ask Luna for some grimoires from the Church.

  She had gotten her hands on those spells not long after their wedding. It had been Luna’s gift. Now, after working on those spells and absorbing that knowledge for long enough, Umara finally decided to take her expertise to the field. She had left the estate a few days after John had his scare with that lesser god, leaving him be so he could lock himself in his workshop and work on the Beacons. Apparently, as dangerous as it had been for him, it would be even more dangerous for her. He didn’t want her anywhere near his systems until he could clean them out, so she decided to create a little distance for the time being.

  And then she chose to go to the second most dangerous place she could be. The disease, dubbed the Violet Madness disease, could infect even her according to the past several months of study. Only the most powerful were capable of shrugging it off. The disease had incredible potency, and a lot of research had been conducted on it by Iron Legion.

  Umara had grabbed Jaya for her alchemy, and when the two of them arrived, they had been allowed access to an utterly massive archive of information. They were given a summoner assistant as well, one solely dedicated to the task of digging through the archive for information they needed, because they couldn’t.

  After getting settled in, Umara spent plenty of time putting her magic to the test.

  First she studied how it reacted to different kinds of magic. She made great progress, and at this point in time, she had figured out how to kill it directly. The only downside was that only she could personally do so, and it wasn’t easy work. She couldn’t just fly around the infected villages and wipe out the disease in every person. She had to find a cure, a spell or a substance that could eradicate the disease within the human body.

  What she was seeing now was a possible way to do that.

  In front of her was a screen created by Psykic illusions, a standard terminal screen. It scanned the unconscious patient in front of her, bringing up a view of the disease acting within the bloodstream.

  The other screen was created by her own magic, giving her an actual direct view of the Violet Madness and its actions. It utilized a branch of light magic within the Fire Element, allowing her to literally shine light on the subject and view everything going on inside. What she saw, like the flowing cells and their shockingly fast actions and reactions, was determined by her level of precision with the spell.

  That meant she could see everything in perfect clarity. More than that, she could experiment on it, manipulate it. Being able to kill it came with the knowledge of how to affect it. Once she accomplished that initial milestone, progress skyrocketed.

  “What did you find?”

  Jaya asked from the side, a concoction steaming with reactions in front of her. Although not a master in her field, Jaya would be important in allowing them to create cures. She was more educated in what John called chemistry, which was basically the same as alchemy, despite how many times he had tried to convince her they weren’t.

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  “This spell lets me hamper its rate of division. John was right in that it was a living organism, a bacteria. So although its vectors range from bloodborne to airborne, this form of life can indeed by tampered with by most types of healing magic. Now, if I can just tune this spell…”

  Umara focused, the spell circles above the unconscious patient slowly turning and adjusting. Some runes fell into place while others faded away, plucked out and rearranged by precise magical tendrils.

  Her Aura flooded the patient and the spell, both of them reacting to her changes in different ways.

  Umara watched in real time as the Violet Madness was hampered. By using the frequencies of the disease’s magical signature, she could affect it and only it. Then, all she had to do was resonate with those frequencies and change them with her own.

  The only tricky part was that this disease knew how to try and fight back.

  By utilizing the host’s own magic, it was able to keep itself resilient. That meant the stronger the host was, the more difficult it was to prevent the spread.

  The person before Umara was ordinary, and so she had no trouble doing what she wanted. But the resistance could still be detected, which said enough about how potent the disease was.

  Across the span of about half an hour, Umara flooded the body in front of her with healing magic, resonating with the entire body and the Violet Madness within it. Then, with enough tuning, she saw the disease refuse to divide any longer.

  Each bacterial cell became inert, its functions halted. Umara couldn’t find a single portion of the body where it continued to propagate.

  Which meant her spell was a success. She smiled, tuned the spell a bit more, and then shut it down.

  “Found it.”

  “Found what?”

  “The spell we need. I just halted the activity of the Violet Madness within this patient. That means we can allow the body to kill the disease itself. Its immune system will work with our help. Even conventional healing spells can aid that.”

  “Or concoctions. I’ve made a few potent ones that target the disease using the same principles your spells do. Sector Four found some herbs that work well against the disease, so I’ve mixed those in with some Water Crystals.”

  Umara nodded, logging down her spell formations. They could surely use some more work, but she planned on taking this success and beginning treatment on at least the ordinary. They were the majority of the carriers.

  After handing it off to her assistant, who would send it to Wonderland so they could start the enchanting process, she went back to her patient and recast the spells.

  The primary function of the spells she handed off was to slow and halt the rate of spread. However, the reverse could be done as well.

  With a quick test, Umara was able to multiply the spread of bacteria in her patient's body. It was only done for a few seconds and localized so as to not noticeably harm the patient, but it was enough for a test.

  A basic function of the spell, not one Umara was impressed with. She knew the real importance of the spell was in its resonance.

  Resonating with the disease meant much more than just allowing control over it. Resonation itself was a way to tap into the state of an object. A thing’s frequency was a reflection of its state of being. Umara wanted to use that principle.

  The only reason she knew of the principle was because of John. He utilised resonance in most of his work. Resonance was the whole reason that Beacon was capable of allowing a lesser god to commune with him. The Magnitude Frequency was the basis of Elemental Crystal production. Resonating two Crystals together allowed them to push and pull on each other, the foundation of the Mana Engine.

  Resonance was a way of the world. Frequencies were everywhere, in everything. It was in rocks, the ground, the air, light, sound, all forms of energy, and more. Naturally, living beings weren’t exempt from this. In fact, frequencies had a far more profound effect on living beings than something as mere as a rock.

  Umara had only used frequencies in her combat magic so they would become more potent. It helped her focus them, amplify their power. It was why she could punch so much harder than others of her level, and with a fraction of the energy input.

  But now, she was figuring out how to use them in her healing magic as well. Not just to amplify power, but to afford her healing the kind of capabilities only Sovereigns were well known for.

  A major difficulty in healing, considered the wall blocking the path to becoming a master healer, was regenerating limbs. If an arm were gone, no amount of healing could bring it back. It would only seal the wound at the cut.

  That was because basic and advanced healing spells only aided the body’s natural functions. Accelerated healing was only just that. It didn’t afford the body new abilities, and in a way, didn’t actually directly heal. The advanced spells were just better ways of accelerating the healing process and fixing the more minute wounds, things like rearranging bones and sealing severed organs. They were better than basic spells, but couldn’t be considered different. Just more refined.

  Now, Umara was seeing another path forward, one that she was sure nobody in the world’s upper echelon would ever tell her.

  She could use frequencies and resonance to capture the normal state of the body, using the blueprints already dictated by a person’s DNA. Then, by adjusting it, she could prevent the body from healing over a severed limb and instead force it to generate based on the template she fed it.

  Would it be the same exact as the original severed limb? Unlikely. She still wasn’t a Sovereign and her spells could only be considered prototypical compared to theirs. But in her case, anything was magnitudes better than nothing. Having a weak arm was better than having no arm.

  Being able to regenerate limbs at all would open the doorway to so much more. Instead of merely aiding the body, she could supercede the body’s own healing outright and generate the flesh and tissues. Without needing the guidance of the body’s own functions, she could apply far more power than otherwise, removing that invisible limit on healing that plagued so many other healers. It would multiply the efficacy of her healing.

  On top of that, this disease, the Violet Madness, did things that most healing spells couldn’t. John had told her that if she was going to study it, she needed to learn from the disease. She couldn’t see it as evil. She had to see its utility, its abilities beyond the veil of infection and pestilence.

  The Violet Madness was capable of tapping into the power of the host it infected, using their power for itself. It then transformed that power before using it to propagate. It was efficient and effective, far more than any healing spell Umara had ever heard of. It used hardly any energy, and more importantly, could empower even ordinary people, turning them from weaklings to slightly stronger weaklings when they were overcome by madness.

  It was similar to the Nephilim, except it didn’t corrupt them. It only tampered with their hormones and poisoned their bodies

  Umara intended to figure out how it did that. There was magic at play, being cast by the disease in ways she couldn’t yet detect. It was obviously unconventional, and it was precisely that which she wanted to know. She wanted to harness this new way of ‘healing’, and she wanted to base her spells around it.

  She had already taken the first step when she learned to manipulate the bacteria, slowing down and accelerating its growth directly. She had figured out how to manipulate the functions of life using resonant frequencies. Now, she just needed to decompose the template that the bacteria’s frequencies hid, learning how it worked on a deeper level.

  Once she did that, she’d take another major step toward the Great Barrier altogether. She could feel it. Her soul was telling her that this was the path forward.

  “Sorry lady, just a little while longer.”

  Umara muttered to the person underneath her spells. The patients had volunteered for experimentation in exchange for being taken care of nicely in Iron Legion facilities. But it had taken a great toll on them. Umara was careful and often brought no harm to her patients. Other warlocks were not as capable or precise as her.

  Still, she had already developed what could be considered a cure once Wonderland got the enchantments right. It wasn’t great, but it was far more progress than they had garnered before she got there. She wasn’t concerned about rushing the process. She wanted to learn. That by itself would bring all the results she wanted.

  Soon, not only would she be able to cure the Violet Madness, but the comprehensions she would gain from it would make her healing unparalleled behind the Great Barrier.