SSS-Ranked Surgeon In Another World: The Healer Is Actually OP!

Chapter 424: Godly

Bruce finished awakening and stood up.

With a slight smile he flexed his hands, then his arms, rolling the motion through his shoulders.

There was an energy moving through him now, a strange one, unfamiliar, but not unpleasant. He could feel it running under the surface of his soul-body the way warmth runs through a body that has just stepped in from the cold.

It took him a moment to understand what had changed.

The mist.

It was no longer only eating him.

He stood still and paid attention. The mist still pulled at his edges, that draw had not stopped, not entirely. But now, alongside the pull, there was something else. The mist was also feeding him. Pouring into him. Strengthening him. It was doing both things at once, taking and giving in the same breath, and the strangeness of that made him frown. His soul now possessed natural resistance against that corrosion.

Kael saw the frown.

"You’ve noticed huh?," he said. He sighed, the way a teacher sighs at a slow but willing student. "Good. Then I’ll explain it once."

He gestured loosely at the grey expanse around them.

"This mist isn’t a separate thing. It’s not weather. It’s not a hazard the realm put here to trouble you. The mist is the realm. It’s the energy of the Soul Realm itself, just thickened, condensed down until you can see it and breathe it. Soul energy. That’s all it is. The whole realm is made of it. The mist is only the part that’s gathered thick enough to notice."

Bruce nodded slowly.

"And it eats souls because."

"Because that’s its job." Kael shrugged. "Listen. The Soul Realm exists for one reason. It exists to purify souls. When something dies in the physical realm, or the mind realm, its soul comes here. And here, the soul energy slowly strips it down, wears away the identity, the memory, the self, until there’s nothing left but a clean, blank soul. And that clean soul gets sent back out. Reincarnated. Born fresh into one of the realms to start again, with no memory of what it was before."

He spread his hands.

"That’s the cycle. That’s what this whole place is for. The mist is corrosive because purification is corrosion. It’s supposed to eat you. You arriving here and being eaten is not a malfunction. It’s the realm working exactly the way it was built to work."

Bruce looked out at the drifting grey, and at the dim shapes of souls scattered through it, and something cold settled in him.

"But," Kael went on, and his voice picked up, "if you can use that energy, if you can pull it in and turn it into your own strength while still defending yourself against the part that wants to purify you, then you don’t get eaten. You get fed. You take the thing that was supposed to destroy you and you make it grow you instead." He grinned. "Do that, and you’ll make a fine awakened soul."

Bruce nodded again. He understood it now. The double sensation, the pull and the push, the taking and the giving, was the mist doing what it always did, while his newly awakened soul did something it had not been able to do before. Resist. Convert. Use.

...

"Anyways," Kael said. "Do you know how I figured out you were an Ascendant?"

"No."

"Because you can move."

Bruce waited.

"Look around you." Kael swept a hand at the grey. "Every other soul out here. The hollows, the half-hollows, the ones still clinging to themselves. None of them really travel. They drift. They sit. They wander a few steps and stop unable to go further. The thick soul energy in the Mistlands suppresses them, it presses them down, keeps them weak, makes it nearly impossible to cover real distance." He pointed at Bruce. "But you walked. For hours, probably. You crossed a great stretch of this place. With difficulty, sure, but you did it. And most freshly arrived soul that hasn’t even awakened yet cannot do that."

He folded his arms.

"So I knew. A soul that can move that freely through the mist is a soul that’s an Ascendant, someone who came down here from the physical realm or the mind realm, on purpose, with their body still alive somewhere on the other side."

"And the body being alive matters."

"It matters more than anything." Kael’s tone went a little more serious. "Think about it. Normal souls come here because they died. Their bodies are gone. Their existence has already obeyed the law, live, die, then enter the Soul Realm. They belong to the cycle. The mist purifies them easily because they have nowhere else to be."

He pointed at Bruce again.

"You didn’t die. Your body is still sitting alive in the physical realm, breathing, or it would be, if your soul weren’t here pausing it. You came here without dying first. That means your whole existence is against the cycle. Against the law of life and death. Against the law of reincarnation. You skipped the dying part. And because your body is still alive, your identity is still anchored to it. It’s intact. It’s whole. And a whole, anchored identity is hard for soul energy to purify. The mist can’t get a proper grip on you. That’s why you lasted long enough to find me."

Bruce absorbed that.

It explained a great deal, why he had been able to walk for hours while the souls around him only drifted, why his memory and his sense of himself had stayed clear far longer than the hollows’, why the mist had been eating him slowly rather than all at once.

"And now that you’ve awakened," Kael continued, "it’s harder still. You’ve got will and aura now. You can hold your own shape. The mist will keep trying, it always tries, but you can stand against it." He paused. "If you’d failed to awaken, though, it would have been a different story. Sooner or later the mist would have worn through you. Your identity would have come apart. And you’d have turned hollow."

"The mindless ones."

"The mindless ones. A hollow is a soul that’s lost its identity but hasn’t finished dissolving yet. No memory. No self. No name. Just," Kael’s mouth twisted, "hunger. A hollow craves identity, because it doesn’t have one anymore. It wants what it lost. So it goes after souls that still have a self. That’s all that’s left of it. Hunger."

Bruce was quiet for a moment.

"Anyway," Kael said, shaking the mood off. "We’ll need more awakened souls before long. A handful of us, gathered together, that’s how you draw the harvesters here, to this stretch of the Mistlands. One soul on its own isn’t worth their trouble. A group is."

"So," Kael said. "What’s your soul talent?"

Bruce had been turning the answer over since the awakening. He had read the second imprint. He had felt the power of it bloom. He had let the meaning settle into him while Kael was explaining the mist.

"Writer," he said.

Kael blinked.

He looked at Bruce. He looked at him for a long moment, the lazy grin sliding off his face into something more like disbelief.

"Writer?"

"Writer? Just that?"

"And how," Kael said slowly, "do you plan to fight with that?"

Bruce only sighed.

He did not answer the question, and he did not correct Kael either.

The truth was that the talent’s full name was not simply Writer. The imprint had read [Sanare Veritatem] and what had unfolded from it, as he understood the words, was something he had privately named Godly Writer.

It had Godly. The same word that sat at the front of his body talent, [Godly Healer].

And from.the info he got after awakening, Bruce could tell it was a very good versatile talent...

He had noticed that immediately, in the quiet after the awakening. His body talent and his soul talent shared a root. Godly Healer. Godly Writer. The first imprint and the second imprint, the body and the soul, rhyming with each other across the core of his being. They were not two unrelated powers. They were two faces of the same thing, whatever that thing actually was.

But Bruce did not say the word Godly out.

He had known Kael for a very short time. Kael had, by his own cheerful admission, considered eating him barely an hour ago. Bruce liked the guy character, there was something honest in how openly he showed himself, but liking someone and trusting them with everything were different matters. A talent called Writer sounded weak. Harmless. Easy to underestimate. A talent called Godly Writer invited questions Bruce was not ready to answer.

So he let Kael keep his scorn. Writer it was. For now.

He can think whatever he wants, Bruce won’t hold anything against him, after all he’s the one that guided him on the path of awakening his talent... With him telling him just writer it’s only natural he thought like like that...