In the village hall, Lee stood at a podium surrounded by all the adventurer mages he had found in the past two weeks. By now, all of them had acquired the life affinity and were ready to learn from his spellbook.

He scanned the room with a smile as everyone present settled into their seats, waiting for him to speak. While there were a lot of adventurers in this small village, filling it to capacity, the rarity of mages was definitely letting itself be known.

Lee had estimated that there were around five hundred to six hundred adventurers stationed here in Lopus. As he guessed, most of them were not mages. Back in Neldam, Lee had learned that around one in every two hundred people had the capability to learn magic, and out of those mages, the odds of them having both Earth and Light mana were slim.

The main issue he found was the Light mana. While he had known that it was rarer to have either Light or Dark, he didn’t know how ‘rare’ it was.

Thankfully, it seemed that the odds were skewed in his favor, as mages seemed to be popular in the Adventurer’s Guild. It made sense, as having magic greatly improved your combat potential. Lee could attest to that personally. If he had to guess, the military was also teeming with mages. Hopefully, there would be enough of them willing to learn to make a dent in the number of the Healer’s Sanctum.

All in all, in the small room, there were six mages ready to learn his healing spells. Jeremy stood near the door, writing and reading from what he recognized as a copy scroll as he began his speach.

“As promised, I am here to teach you healing magic. Originally, I said that I would let you learn from my spellbook.” Lee paused and watched as the faces in the room began to look distrusting.

“If you’d still like to learn from my spellbook, you’re all free to do so. But I thought you all might like to be personally instructed by me to learn how to create healing magic on your own. In the future, if you succeed, you’d be able to teach others.” Lee smiled as he watched the distrustful faces turn to astonishment.

Seeing that nobody was going to speak up, Lee carried on. He withdrew his old notes from Neldam, which had his previous lesson plan, and began rattling off information—both old and new. From cells, bacteria, blood, organs, bones, marrow, tendons… everything he could think of. He explained how they worked and what they did. How illness worked, how the virus’ worked, how his spells targeted these, and how they themselves functioned.

As expected, everyone in the room, including Jeremy, was dumbfounded. Little tiny microscopic animals made you sick? Preposterous! But the results made them believers. Earlier in the day, he had found someone special. Someone he had been searching for along his travels. Someone with cancer.

Lee gave Jeremy the signal and, after a minute of coming to grips with what he had just heard, slowly opened the door to let someone inside. An older adventurer, aged in the mid to late forties, strolled into the room. The whites of his eyes were yellow, caused by jaundice. The man had liver cancer, probably from drinking too much alcohol during his adventures, but Lee would never know.

Lee motioned for the man to join him by the podium as they had planned and cast Touch of Remission. The mages in the room slowly stood from their seats as the silvery life mana left Lee’s palm and inserted itself into the man’s chest, then slowly coated his entire being. After a little more than three seconds, the slivery glow dimmed and extinguished.

Lee took a step back, beaming, and looked into the man's eyes. “You’re healed—no more cancer.”

Lee withdrew his small hand mirror from his Hidden Cache and held it out for the man. With a slightly trembling hand, the man raised it up to his face, revealing perfectly healthy eyes, removed of all jaundice.

During this time, Lee snuck in a Medical Attention scan just to be a thousand percent sure of his success.

As the man gathered his emotions, Lee turned to face his ‘students.’ “I have a skill that allows me to see the health of anyone I see. This includes the HP of the person and their health issues, such as cancer. This healthy gentlemen is now cancer-free.”

“This is the true power of what I just taught you. With knowledge, you can create spells to heal not only HP, but illness. Where I’m from, illness is the leading cause of death—far outstripping any physical harm. This is what healing is all about.”

He scanned the room and held up his hefty spellbook by the chain as a notification appeared.

Lee stood motionless as he read through the prompt provided. His heart swelled with both pride and relief. He gripped the chain of his dangling spellbook tightly as a single thought came to mind.

I don’t need to hurt myself anymore…

If those he taught healed, their healing would be considered a part of his own. This meant that his class quest would increase without him having patients. If one of his 'students' healed, he could get a fraction of it for his class quest.

After a little bit of time thinking, after the relief of not having to hurt himself for his quest settled into place…

This… this is overpowered…

There was no doubt in his mind that this was objectively overpowered. Although currently, he didn’t have many ‘students.’ What about when he had a thousand? Ten-thousand? A hundred thousand? He was going to live forever as long as he didn’t get snuffed out by some random monster or person. This would only continue to snowball and get out of hand the longer he stayed true to his goal.

Now, the threat of the Healer’s Santum was ever more worrying. If they somehow discovered he was capable of this, it was over. They would send their equivalent of nukes toward him in an attempt to get rid of him. The more time that goes on, the more powerful he would become.

He was interrupted from his thoughts as Jeremy coughed aloud, jerking him back into the present. Everyone looked at him with a little bit of worry.

Lee began to wave everyone forward to let them learn his spells as he continued to think about the future…

—------------------------

When Jeremy and Lee arrived at their small camp, Jeremy informed him about Meriah and Kooco's progress.

During these past two weeks, Meriah and Kooco have not been with them. No matter what Meriah had been going through, she wasn’t welcome to travel with them any longer. Instead, she was sent ahead of them. She had been given a token of some sort from Jeremy, apparently some kind of identifier of his noble house, and she was heading toward Felispar with Kooco to begin the setup of Lee’s arrival.

“They’ve had little to no issue on the road, but they’ve passed numerous adventurers heading here---An abnormal amount. Also, she wrote that she passed a contingent of knights—likely those from a local lord or lady.”

Lee nodded along as he sat down to work on some more enchanting. Over the last few days, he had grown more accustomed to it. While each item still took a decent amount of time, he had begun moving on to other enchantments. Self-cleaning and Self-repair were the two main targets.

The ‘Self’ part of the enchantment was its own glyph, which added an extra layer of difficulty. So far, he had only managed to successfully make a single item with the enchantment—one of the small cloth bags he had bought.

“I was told that the local lord or lady would be sending people to deal with the issue here. Any news on the depths?” Lee asked as he wielded his enchanting wand and hook, diving into his work.

Jeremy shook his head with a grimace. “Just more casualties. They’ve been sending fewer and fewer people down there, as nobody has made any progress with stopping the statues. The last major news was another sighting of the dog-like monster. The adventurers are still connecting their guild for information on what it could be.”

“Any messages from Fatalina?” Lee asked, throwing aside a failed bag. It’s quality not high enough to withstand the mana infusion process.

“Not as of yet. Are you expecting something?” Jeremy pried.

“Yeah. She said she’s inform us about when the local lord of lady was coming to help. I assume it’s those knights, but better to be safe than sorry.”

Jermey shuffled awkwardly, then sat down next to Lee on his furs. Lee paused in his work, and glanced over to see Jeremy's troubled face. He put down his tools and waited for him to speak.

“Where did you learn… all of that information about healing?” Jeremy eventually asked.

That… was a hard question to answer. To Jeremy, Lee must have looked like some genius, an untapped font of knowledge. To Lee, this knowledge was mostly second-hand or from his general education.

“I’m sorry, Jeremy. I don’t think I can tell you that. Just know, that I wasn’t the one who discovered any of the information—only the healing magic part.” Lee said.

Jeremy clearly understood, but it looked like he was still dying to ask a question. Lee waved a hand, encouraging him. “There’s no harm in asking a question. I’ll just tell you if i’m not going to answer.”

After sitting for a moment, Jeremy resolved himself to ask. “Is your country… more advanced than ours?”

That caught Lee off guard. Not in a good way, either. Lee stared at him, trying to gauge whether or not this was out of curiosity or from something Lee had let slip.

“Do you want me to be honest?” Lee asked, getting a nod in reply.

“In most departments, yes. In some others, we are far behind. Why do you ask?”

“Well… That information about ‘cells.’ There is no way we could have figured any of that out. You said they’re tiny, unseen to the eye. There have been attempts to learn about illness and sickness. We have tried. But even with vision enchantments or spells, we discovered little. The only explanation is that your country has things we do not. You also act strangely. Seeing some things as new or interesting when they’re normal. Perhaps you’ve moved past what we have and have better things.” Jeremy shrugged, seemingly confused and worried at the same time.

Lee tapped his fingers on his knees as he thought about how to reply. “Why does this matter?” He eventually decided to ask.

“I think we should strive to be better. To advance and make life easier for everyone.” Jeremy said.

“Comparision is the thief of joy. I will not sit here lie to you. Where I’m from, we have many things you do not. But, you also have things we do not, nor will ever have. They’re just different.” Lee left it at that and started working on his next enchantment.

As Jeremy rose to leave, Lee left him with a final word. “When I leave your country and move on to the next, I’ll tell you a secret. I think it will answer a lot of your questions. If things go to plan, I’ll even introduce you to two of my friends. You’ll get a lot of answers from them.”