Rules of Biomancy: A LitRPG Healer Fantasy

'Okay, listen, I understand you might be a little mad at me, but if you think about it, we both share the blame here.'

If Elijah had been able to take a moment to process the words being mumbled into his mind, he would've denied that assumption fiercely. At the moment, however, he couldn't. His eyes allowed him to see nothing, his ears provided even less with the immense wind, and he didn't dare open his mouth to speak. He knew Grace was beside him, his magical senses able to break through the harsh winds, but what she had planned was beyond this knowledge.

He only knew one thing

They were falling. They'd been falling through utter darkness for more than ten seconds, and there was no end to it. Not that he would appreciate an end to his fall, as any sudden deceleration meant both of their deaths.

'But, hey, look at this way. That you were surprised by the sudden challenge means that I bent the rules even less! That means the potential reward can be increased. But only, like, if you survive and stuff.'

'Dawn, can you help me with this?' Elijah asked, ignoring the Dungeon's words as he sent the duck a schematic of a heavily modified sunflower grouping, altered to have their heads be two meters thick, shock absorbent, and with very little else to the plant.

Incredibly impractical to grow in the ground, most likely unable to survive a single day without constant maintenance, but they could increase their chances of surviving the landing massively.

'Yes!' came the reply from the duck, and off they went.

Dual-Channeling of [Breathe Life] and [Accelerate Growth] has been activated! Current cost: 130MP/sec

His Core lurched at the sudden pull. Elijah just about ordered it to shut up, as he pulled a piece of the living fabric from his right sleeve and started the process. With the amount of Mana being supplied from both him and Dawn, it grew rapidly, expanding beyond his palm within the first second, and only growing even further afterwards. Within another five seconds, it was nearly covering his entire body, and in the three after, when his Mana reservoirs were already halved, it was close to enveloping Grace as well.

Grace, not seeming to understand what was going on, however, fought the entangling flower-head, making Elijah wince as the drain on his Core increased. He tried to shout, to warn her, but even he couldn't hear his voice.

A pain shot through his chest a second later, as his reserves neared the last drops, but he fought through the pain. Far below, which in reality would be very close very soon, he could feel other sources of Mana.

Though his work and Dawn's work had only reached one point five meters in thickness, and the internal structure wasn't optimized to absorb force from a specific direction, they had to make due. Spreading out his body further, to hopefully distribute some of the pain, Elijah closed his eyes and readied himself.

'The Dungeon made some other comment, but he ignored it.

"Enough!"

What he didn't ignore, however, was the sudden emptying of his air from his lungs, as they rapidly slowed down in their descent. It wasn't from reaching the ground, as his magical senses still insisted they were a dozen meters above the grass, but from the wind that was suddenly pushing harder against them,

Grace.

Strings of white mana floated in the air in front of his eyes, as the Wind Mage shot out more Mana at once than he'd ever seen her do before. Hundreds of MP, what must've been half of her total reserves, expended in two seconds.

Elijah had spent months adjusting to such a massive expenditure. Grace had gone a step further and improvised.

A dangerous move, one which required immediate medical attention, but that privilege hadn't been granted. Though their speed had been severely decreased, momentum still carried them downwards, and those final eleven meters to the ground took no time at all.

Pain flared through Elijah's body the moment they reached it, and that small bit of air which had reentered his lungs got pushed out once again. Something was, without a doubt, terribly wrong with his ribs, his left leg shot streaks of pain through his body, and his head felt like it was being hit with a sledgehammer repeatedly, but he could still think.

My name is Elijah, I am too old for this, and I'm not seeing double.

The initial check on his mental abilities looked to be in good enough order for him to function in the short term, meaning he forced himself to sit up and inspect the other person.

"Grace," he wheezed out, his throat unnaturally dry and his lungs having a hard time accepting air. The sound of cracked glass could be heard as he dragged himself over to the Wind Mage. It hurt, but Dawn had already manifested on his shoulder, digging small roots through his body to resettle what he now knew were pieces of a rib poking his left lung, so that didn't matter to him. "Can you hear me?"

She didn't reply in words but instead with a low moan. A clear sign of pain, though the fact that there was a sign to see meant it could've been far worse.

Turning her around so she was on her back, using the strength Elijah barely had left in him, he quickly went through the checks. Her voice worked fine, with half-formed words, her eyes weren't dilated, but there was some superficial bleeding on the side of her head, but it hadn't been too deep. A best-case scenario, in terms of possible head trauma from falling several hundred meters.

"My hand," escaped her lips, causing Elijah to skip looking at her core to glance towards her arms. The left looked fine, but the right was… not as good. "Hurts."

"That you can still feel it after a dislocation is a good thing," Elijah said, trying to be delicate as he touched the forearm. The thickness of mana in the air allowed him to Flesh Bond to peek inside the swelling flesh. "There's trauma to the capitate and the lunate, and they're pushing against everything else. I can fix it, but it'll hurt. Bite down on this."

He ripped off another part of his sleeve and gave it to her before increasing the flow to the dislocated bone. He would've offered some form of fast sedative, but the cracked glass he'd noticed before had turned out to be most of the vials that had been brought along. The liquid fire and most of the poisons hadn't shattered, but anything that had any chance of helping with the pain now coated his robes.

The sleeve would have to do.

Putting pressure on the hand from the joint, he slowly but effectively pushed the two pieces back into place. There was obvious damage from the manipulations, and the flares of pain were likely worse than anything Grace had tried before, but he didn't rush it. With an audible pop, the small imperfections were dealt with, and the hand was healed, albeit with some swelling.

"I'm not doing this again," Grace muttered, after spitting out the cloth and trying to sit up before falling back down. "Stomach hurts."

"It's bruising," Elijah explained, already on it. Not as quickly as he had to control his own wincing from Dawn's work on his body. He outright stopped for a second when the final piece of a rib was dealt with. "That should do it."

Without waiting for her to inspect his work, he fell back onto the giant sunflower head. Adrenaline had kept him moving, but the healed trauma to his body was catching up to him. He needed rest, wanted rest, but there was so little chance of that happening now.

"Nothing that'll kill me now," Grace muttered, briefly sitting up to check on her limbs before joining Elijah on the sunflower once again. "Now… what the fuck was all of this about?"

'Before you answer her, I think she should also understand the context of the situation, and how we should both be—'

'Just shut up for a minute,' Elijah cut in, suppressing the connection so he didn't need to hear whatever response the Dungeon came with. "The Dungeon offered me a chance for more power by doing some sort of challenge. I figured that it wouldn't be a bad idea if we had a few days to prepare and everybody else was fine with it, but she didn't let me explain that condition before she created a hole beneath our feet and nearly killed us."

'It was only a two-kilometer fall. If you'd been a little quicker on the uptick, neither of you would be injured.'

The sheer audacity.

"... At some level, I'm not sure whether to be angry at you, her, or just both of you," Grace said, after a moment of contemplation. "Maybe I'll just stick to the safe side, and be angry at both of you."

'See? She gets it.'

'I don't think she does,' Dawn chimed in, with her wisest opinion yet.

"What is this place supposed to be anyway?" Grace asked as she shakily got back up on her feet. Elijah followed her, putting most of his weight on his right foot to lessen the ongoing pulses of pain from his left. "There's wind in here."

With his vision no longer muddled from the fall, and his mind finally able to focus on something other than their immediate health, they both began to observe their surroundings. Like the fake forest from before, there was no obvious ceiling to be seen, a fake, black sky being seen above them. Distant stars in the forms of white dots, some hazy clouds, and a moon hidden behind them, though Elijah knew in his heart it was all an illusion.

It must've been, since the illusion of natural scenery broke just thirty meters ahead, where walls of seemingly endless height stood. They were cut with precision, the walls having ninety-degree corners exactly, each turn looking sharp and immaculate. Along with that perfect smoothness, it was obvious there was foul play.

And by the number of corners and the lack of ability to look far into each possible route, Elijah began to have a bad feeling in his heart.

"A maze," Grace concluded, before he could voice that opinion himself. "Not a maze-like structure, caused by a three-dimensional cave system being complex, but an actual maze."

"Looks like it," Elijah agreed. Reaching down, he rested a hand on the blades of grass that covered the ground. A quick pulse sent through the root system, along with a request about the positions of their brethren, yielded little help in understanding how large the maze was. "Can you sense an exit, through the wind?"

"Not even a little," Grace replied. "It feels akin to scoping out an entire forest. There's no end to it."

Every passing moment made it clearer how deep in trouble they found themselves.

"Perhaps we could escape the way we came?" he suggested, looking upwards again. The illusion of the sky stopped his eyes from seeing the true ceiling, but maybe his or Grace's magical senses could aid them? "Climbing two kilometers upwards would be a headache, but not an impossibility."

"Maybe not, but I can't find it." Grace countered. Listening to the winds and not finding their target wasn't enough to discard the idea, however, leading to the Wind Mage sending out blasts to see if anything could be detected. It was fruitless, however.

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'Not to ruin the mood, but I did close it back up. Didn't need the tunnel for more than relocating you, after all,' the Dungeon unhelpfully supplied, after watching them struggle for several minutes.

"Our mood was ruined the moment that we were forced into this," Grace commented when Elijah relayed the words to her.

'That's fair, I guess,' came the response. 'Can you mention the potential rewards to her again? I feel she's not considering the benefits of this enough.'

"She's saying you're not thinking about the rewards we could be getting," Elijah relayed once again. If eyes could kill, he knew he would've died then and there. 'You promised me a boost in power if we completed this challenge of yours. I'm guessing it's the same for her?'

'Oh, yes! I'm still not too sure what to actually give her, since any direct manipulation from my side would just kill the girl, but I might have something that could get the job done…' Elijah wasn't sure how to accurately describe what he saw in his mind's eyes, but the vision of a Dungeon rummaging through old cupboards felt appropriate enough. 'Hah! Does your friend know the old common tongue, by any chance?'

"As long as I don't have to pronounce any of it, yes. Why?"

'Thomas, that old human mage I mentioned before, had this awful habit of leaving behind books when he visited. He usually replaced them whenever he came back, but there are still a few dozen from his last visit. None of them outright discuss the Wind Affinity, but there are several about the ways to build your Core to align closer to elemental Affinities.'

Grace froze halfway through Elijah repeating the words, eyes widening and mouth moving without words coming out.

"Thomas," Grace slowly said. "Thomas, like Thomas Aumar, the Archon who basically invented the School of Arcane Understanding and created the framework that's been used for the last millenia for both constructing multi-layered enchantments and doing progressive overloading on asymmetric Cores?"

'Oh, right, he did do something like that, didn't he? Couldn't stop bragging about how smart he was, yet he somehow couldn't figure out how to tie a knot properly. Very strange, that fellow.'

The notepad and pen were out by the time Elijah confirmed the identity of the old mage, and the following questions were endless in quantity. How many books were there, what were their titles, could Grace have them all, and, if not, could she choose which of them she'd get? And, if she couldn't have them all, could she copy their contents and then give them back?

'She might be related to him, with how she's acting right now. Or is this the usual personality to expect from human mages?'

'She is merely excited,' Elijah replied, deciding not to deliver every comment from the Dungeon. Grace's mood had improved, and that was all there was to it. 'Forgetting all the potential boons from completing this challenge, however, is there no chance at just forgoing it all and returning to the outside world?'

'Oh, it's too late for that, sadly,' the Dungeon said, lowering her cheerfulness once she noted Elijah's mood. 'Rules are rules and all. If you want to get out now, you need to get through the maze and all the obstacles, including the big guy. After that, the exit will appear.'

'And you're not showing the way through the maze.'

'What's the point of a maze if you know the route beforehand?'

At the very least, the Dungeon was becoming predictable with her opinions.

"So the maze is large enough to house multiple threats of several varieties, along with a 'big guy' that I can only assume is a boss-class creature of some sort," Grace concluded, as they went through what they knew. "Any hints about the nature of the beasts?"

"She mentioned using 'screamers' and 'kitties,' though I can't say what those might refer to," Elijah explained, cursing his lack of preparation for the monsters inside the dungeon.

"Well, 'kitties' could refer to any of the hundred feline-related monsters that have been documented in the Dungeon, but 'screamers' are harder to place. Maybe a banshee-variant or one of the mutated sirens?" Grace muttered, the words seemingly more for her benefit than Elijah's. "Whatever beasts were chosen to challenge us, we need to be ready for them ahead of time, meaning we need a better system for noticing them. I'm keeping on my senses for wind to detect movement, but there's already proof that the Dungeon can fool me, meaning we need you to… Why are you looking at me like that?"

We weren't too terrible, Aleksi.

"Just sorting out the logistics as well," Elijah lied, not needing to be seen as a proud parental figure right now, even if he might've been a little impressed with her ability to assess a situation so objectively while under high amounts of stress. "As you said, relying solely on your abilities to survey the wider area wouldn't be effective, and leave us open to attacks that could've been avoided, meaning that I have to pick up the slack. This would then entail mapping out a larger portion of the maze, or the entirety of it, without leaving us susceptible to attacks stemming from moving around."

In essence, the time had come to create another network, this one more powerful and responsive to the world around it. Instead of the simple grass that covered the grass plains of Serenova, Elijah had to adapt the blades inside the Dungeon, making them obey his every command while they worked together to create a consistent and accurate mapping of where they were.

Not a trivial task, but the continued usage of Breathe Life allowed some ideas to start forming in his head.

"Drink these," Elijah ordered, searching through his inner pockets and finding the remaining vials. "They'll help with the pain and accelerate the healing process for the internal bruising."

Grace offered no resistance, downing the vials in seconds before sitting back down and letting him work.

'Dawn, I'll need your help keeping things stable,' Elijah ordered. The duck leapt from his shoulder in response, sitting beside him as they both began to focus on the small patch of grass in front of them.

With the higher density of mana in the air inside the Dungeon, the budget for what they could modify and improve upon, without cutting down on other areas, was significantly higher. That helped make the grass more durable, make them smarter, and stop the old problems of constantly repeating messages because they were too stupid to understand that they had heard them before.

But that hardly mattered for now, as the base instructions still needed to be defined. What were the core goals for these new variants?

Well, the general goal was to have a map of the maze, collected through knowing the positions of each blade of grass relative to the other blades of grass and relative to Elijah's current position. That then required that each blade of grass knew what brethren were nearby and connected to them. The precision here didn't need to be more than a handwidth, since the repeated connections would average out in the end, but Elijah still needed that defined. If the entire memory was spent knowing the distance to the exact millimeter, nothing else could fit.

Regardless, there came another issue. If each blade of grass were supposed to know which of its brethren were nearby, and it would store this information within, who was expected to gather all of this information and piece it together? Elijah certainly couldn't do that, since any sample size that couldn't be held in his hand would most likely cause a severe migraine, meaning that a secondary unit had to be put into play.

Much like what he had done in Serenova, the grass blades would be gathered together into different sections, the size of a section dynamically growing or shrinking depending on the density and workload learned through previous experiences. These control units would then have priority access to each other, where the processed product of each section could then be pieced together by a third unit to create the final map.

Where would this third unit be, however? That was the easiest question yet, seeing as Elijah was wearing a rather fitting vessel for this task.

His robe, which he had created through a flower a little more than a month ago, was perfect, even. It required very little in terms of mana to maintain its form; it was more than open to modification, and some general tweaks made it possible for it to easily form a persistent connection to the secondary units.

'I am ready,' the robe informed him, the primitive mind inside growing smarter by the second, as the testing data was transferred. Within seconds, a crude map was shown to him in his mind, with a white dot signifying his position, a red dot for Grace, and white lines defining the walls of the maze. 'Is it good?'

'Indeed it is,' Elijah congratulated the mind. In theory, everything would now be working; the schematics for each type of unit had been implanted in the first patch of grass, and they were eager to spread using his previous designs. There was nothing else to it. 'Go.'

'Freedom!'

'Show them our peaceful ways!'

'Let none else stand!'

Ignoring the battle cries of the blades, Elijah leaned back and allowed his eyelids to rest momentarily. An hour of work in the blink of an eye, with only quick bouts of rest to let his mana recover. It should've been around night-time on the surface now, but there was little chance of him sleeping at the moment.

'Dawn, could you—' Elijah began, but the duck had already read his mind. Using her expansive internal library of different plants and their adjacent properties, she'd modified a small apple tree's fruits to have the caffeine levels normally found in a rather strong cup of tea. Biting into it, he was pleased to discover traces of chamomile as well. 'Some day, we'll spend a month straight refining the schematic for this fusion so this can grow independently.'

A dream for the far future, but one Elijah hoped could be realized.

"I smell something," Grace muttered, getting back into a sitting position after being half-asleep. The mild sedative and healing accelerator he'd given her seemed to have worked, since there were barely any flinches of pain in her movements. "Can I have one of those?"

Dawn made the small tree throw one of the apples at the Wind Mage, while Elijah connected to the manifest system to look at the progress. Just as planned, the higher levels of mana in the air had turned a rapid spread into a terrifying one, most of the blades in the open area they sat in already being converted, and the ten or so offshoots already being entered. It was as if they were walking in each possible direction in real time, the possible turns and twisting routes being revealed to him.

Even if he didn't know the true size of the maze yet, there was a chance that this whole debacle wouldn't be such a headache after all.

'Oh, that's a neat way of applying Biomancy to real-time monitoring,' a certain voice commented, looking into his mind where the map was still forming. 'There are a few corners cut, sure, but with unclaimed Mana as fuel, it would work without a problem.'

A compliment alongside some criticism.

'What do you mean by unclaimed?' Elijah asked, as a finger inside the mental space poked at the map.

'The design assumes it can pull the mana out of the air without issue,' the Dungeon explained, creating a mental manifestation of a large hand to make the map become fuzzy and regather itself. Elijah could feel his robe complaining about the extra workload. 'Which is fair, since any regular person with a Core wouldn't notice any difference, but it's a different scenario for more primitive constructs. Without that little orb that allows cheating for prioritization, it becomes a more even playing field. Or, well, no, the field goes back to being dictated by logic, which makes claimed Mana stay with the ones with more willpower. Which is me. Just look right here. Your connection to the system is passively boosting the little rebellion up the ladder, but the further out they go, the smaller that boost becomes until… it doesn't matter.'

Just as pointed out, the spread didn't continue at its previous pace, and only four turns in did the progress stop entirely. Elijah could feel how the grass fought for control, how they grasped at mana to convert their future brothers, but it was for naught. Like small fists against diamond, the effort proved futile.

And, again, when he took a step in the direction pointed out, the grass gained a step more of push, causing initial celebration before that same wall was hit again. Elijah briefly thought that such an act could still work, if the claimed area could hold their claim, but the converted grass in the other direction quickly began to give out from being deprived of their source. With the higher budget, the maintenance costs increased, and they starved rapidly.

That issue could potentially be delayed on a small scale by modifying the schematic to distribute Mana internally, allowing those on the outskirts to survive longer, but that wouldn't scale for long.

'A fun, little puzzle, isn't it?' the Dungeon commented with glee. 'I had issues like it, back when I started.'

'I assume you found a solution?'

'More just a work-around, until I got powerful enough to crumble any resistance I met.'

Great.

Elijah briefly began to accept he needed to start on some changes, to increase how far he could see, but that project was temporarily halted when he looked at the map again and saw something new.

A red dot from the north.

'Oh, she finally noticed you! I was wondering when she would hear you.'

"Grace, wake up," Elijah said, loosening up his shoulders in preparation for what was to come. Two more red dots had appeared next to the first. "We have company."