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Of Arms and Arcane: Chapter 200
🕑 Added 2025-02-28 15:57:56 +0000 UTCWhen I made my way to the fort’s dungeon, I found Dad and a few other men looking down at a man in chains. And for some reason, that man looked familiar. After tilting my head while looking, things clicked in my head.
This was the knight who I ran my spear into his head through his eye. Yet, here he was with an eyeball in the socket that I was damned sure I had destroyed. Even if someone reattached his eye, it would take days to restore its function, but it looked like this man’s eye was regenerated. Regenerating lost body parts was the very, very expensive work of skilled healers that took months. This just did not make sense.
But as I studied him longer and looked at him, I felt something was wrong… it was his eyes. Even though I could see his chest rising and falling with each breath, the light of life, or maybe consciousness I see in people and even animals, was not there. The lights were on, but nobody was home.
I stepped up to Dad to make my presence known. “What’s the deal with him?” I asked, gesturing to the chained-up vegetable before us.
“He was the only one of those knights with glowing swords that we managed to capture alive… if you can call this alive.” Dad said as he gave the man’s foot a light kick. But there was no response. “When we found him, he was just lying there, and his sword was no longer glowing.”
By now, I knew that those glowing swords had something to do with their regeneration, but I wondered if something went wrong when healing from my spear to his head. “Huh… last time I saw him, I put my spear in his head. Did the fort’s healer take a look to see what's wrong with him?”
Dad just shook his head, “At the moment, you are the only person in this fort with healing magic. The fort’s healer caught a stray bolt to the head while he was in the healer’s tent. Maybe you can see what is wrong with the man.”
I just shrugged and stepped forward to give it my best shot. I chanted a diagnostic spell and put my hand on his head, letting the mana from the spell flow into the man, and that's when I found the first oddity. My mana entered him way too easily.
During my Healer course back at the Academy, after hours upon hours of dry theory, the diagnostic spell, Scan, was the first spell we learned, and we got to test this spell on everything that could be considered alive before we even got a chance to use it on another person. That meant I scanned horses, cattle, and bunny rabbits all the way down to an ant that had been glued to the table. Yet, even the any I scanned gave me more resistance than the man before me.
After I was done scanning his whole body with my spell, besides some old scars and signs of small kidney stones, he was healthy as a horse. Finding no immediate answers, I concentrated on his head, seeing that that was where I stabbed the man.
As I concentrated on his head, I started looking for any fresh tissue growth. What I found was a suspiciously pointed patch of fresh tissue growth in the shape of my spearhead. But other than that, his brain was whole and healthy.
As I was thinking about what else to test, an idea came to me. Medical science in this world was not as advanced, mainly because magic could solve most woes, so they did not know the finer points of why and how the body did what it did, and I cannot claim I was much better.
But even with my layman level of medical knowledge and anatomy from my previous world, I knew that the body operated by the brain sending almost undetectable electrical signals to and from the brain. All I needed to do was sense those signals. I had a theory, and I was not afraid to test it on this bastard who invaded the fort.
To accomplish this, I had to add some Instinctive magic to the mix. Thankfully, those in the cell with me were not mages, so they might not pick up on what I was doing. When I was exchanging information with Professor Sageira, she trained me on how to use instinctive magic as most magic beasts do, which needed me to sense the element I was using. After I got the hang of it, I could sense the elements in my surroundings if I concentrated hard enough. So that was what I was going to do now, I was going to try to sense the electrical activity in this man’s brain.
I asked for the man to be tied to a chair, and when the man was ready, I stepped behind him, grabbed his head with both my hands, and cast Scan again, but with a twist. As the Scan Spell entered the man’s body, I isolated the mana from the spell only to his head while I concentrated on sensing electrical signals in the man’s head.
After a few minutes of hard concentration, I got nothing. I am guessing the electrical signals flowing through the body were just too minute for me to sense, and it did not help that the man was a fucking vegetable.
After brainstorming for a while, I thought maybe I could use external simulation to get a reaction, so I asked one of the men standing around to squeeze one of the fingertips of my test subject, enough to cause pain.
When he did, I thought I saw the ghost of a reaction, but I could not be sure it was just my wishful thinking. So, I asked my newly appointed assistant to do it again, and once again, I saw the ghost of a reaction. But I still did not trust what I saw. This will take some testing.
After the better part of two hours, I was drenched in sweat and low on mana from nonstop use of Scan. But despite my fatigue, I had a huge ass smile on my face because I may be the first person in this world to perform an Electroencephalogram (EEG).
It took me concentrating to the point that I was sweating bullets, but I did it, I was able to sense the brain activity when my subject was subjected to external stimuli. Those stimuli involved inflicting pain by squeezing his fingers, poking him with a needle, and slapping his arms and legs. We also tried running a feather across his skin and ticklish areas, waving a torch in front of his eyes, shouting at him, and even having him smell the inside of one of the men’s boots.
Each of these actions made different parts of his brain light up for me, and after seeing what lit up and what did not, I had a hypothesis on what was going on.
After wiping the sweat from my face, I turned to Dad and said, “I think I know what is going on. I suspect that after I stabbed and destroyed part of his brain, the glowing sword regenerated the damaged part. But the brain is something we do not really understand, so I can only speculate that the brain that grew back is just that, the brain, but maybe the memories stored in the part I destroyed could not be regrown. But that is just my opinion. I could be wrong.”
Dad tilted his head in contemplation, “If what you say is true, then this man may be useless to us.” he signed.
Seeing that Dad was rather bummed out, I steered the subject. “So, what intel did we get out of the other prisoners?”
