11 - Leaves on the branches

It's been two weeks since the three of us cooked together for the first time and my mother, Milla and I have grown very close because of it, increasing our interaction a lot since then.

When I'd come home from work, Milla would flash a big smile and immediately hold out a small corn cob doll for me, beckoning me to play with it.

As I didn't have much idea of how to play with a girl her age using these 'toys', I started using the fairytale stories I knew from my previous life and started acting them out in the middle of playing with Milla.

“Hurry up, Princess Milla! The ball is almost over, and midnight is coming!” I exclaimed, holding up an inverted bowl as if it were a king's crown. “If you don't escape now, the fairy godmother's magic will disappear, and the sparkly dress will turn into... old rags again!”

Milla, who was spinning the doll in the center of the room as if she could see the doll dancing for real, asked me worriedly. “But what about the crystal slipper, Kael?” she asked, laughing. She asked, laughing. “Shall I leave it or take it with me?”

I made a serious face, pointing to the corner of the room. “Leave it, if you don't leave now, the spell will wear off and all this will be undone!”

Sensing the tension, Milla laughed out loud as she made her doll run away, running across the room as if she were fleeing from the tower of a castle, leaving behind an old slipper as the “slipper”.

After her doll returned home and the spell was broken, Milla was curious to see how it would develop.

Looking around, I noticed that even my father and Finn were looking at us with interest, while my mother looked at us with sparkling eyes, completely different from Finn's bored expressions or my father's sleepiness when I first came into this world.

Over the last few days, playing out these fairy tales with Milla has piqued the interest of the whole family, making our play almost like a play for them.

“And now Kael? What's going to happen?” Milla looked at me with sparkling eyes while I just shook my head at her and replied.

“Now it's time to make dinner, I'm starving...” I laughed as I rubbed my belly.

Hearing what I said, the color faded from Milla's and my mother's faces, while my father rolled his eyes laughing and Finn cracked a small smile on his face that no one noticed.

“I knew it!” my father said as he laughed. My father said as he laughed. “You always do that, you wait for the story to get to the most interesting part before you stop and say you have to go and make dinner!”

If it were up to them, I'd be telling stories all night to pass the time, so I had to invent cliffhangers in the stories so I wouldn't have to stay here so long, after all, I didn't have endless stories.

Fortunately, my body was now much more energetic.

With two weeks of good meals, not only was my Mana recovering faster, allowing me to heal more people and practice more magic in my spare time, but my physical body was also developing better.

I hadn't started exercising yet, for fear of hindering my body's recovery, but just the nutrients available in my meals were already building muscle and storing a little fat in my body.

No divine physique or anything like that, just enough so that I no longer looked like I was malnourished and the bones that were visible on my body were no longer there.

The only problem I still had was that I'm very short.

At 14 I was still 1.40 m (4'7"), which made me much shorter than other boys my age.

In a medieval world where someone aged 16 was already considered an adult, being so short was a big disadvantage.

But I believe that with proper nutrition this will resolve itself over time.

During those two weeks, the popularity of our 'clinic' spread throughout the city.

People who couldn't afford more expensive treatment, or who didn't need more expensive treatment, started coming to our store every day to be treated.

Although our town wasn't one of the largest in the kingdom, it was still a relatively large town for a world in those days.

A city of 8,000 people was no joke.

If you considered that only 0.5% of people needed medical treatment every day, that would still be a whopping 40 people every day.

Sure, the number could be higher or lower than that, there's no way of knowing, the only thing I did know was that my average number of daily patients was around 5 to 7 people a day.

Considering that some still tipped me out of gratitude, every day I was going home with an average of 16 copper coins.

Of these 16 coins, 8 coins were used to buy food for us and the remaining 8 coins were saved to buy a bed and some furniture to make the clinic more cozy.

We could even close down my father's pawnshop, but surprisingly, people who came for treatment at the clinic became curious about the things for sale in my father's store and some took something home, increasing his store's turnover along with the clinic.

So we just reorganized the store so that one thing didn't get in the way of the other and everyone was happy.

The bed alone cost a grand total of 50 copper coins, with some waiting chairs and a curtain to give the patient privacy costing another 30 copper coins, leaving me with just 32 copper coins left over.

Which may seem like a lot to spend, but the patients' reaction was very good.

Those who previously felt bad about having to lie on the floor to be treated now had a comfortable bed to lie on while I carried out their treatment.

People with injuries in sensitive places had a curtain to give them privacy so they could receive treatment without anyone looking at them.

And those who wanted to wait to be treated after I had recovered my Mana now had comfortable chairs to sit in, instead of having to leave the clinic and go wait elsewhere.

These small changes have made the place much more pleasant to see and be seen in, which has greatly improved patient opinion.

As word spread more and more about our clinic, people from farms and small villages around the city started coming to me for treatment too.

If it hadn't been for my better nutrition, I wouldn't have been able to see even five patients a day.

Now that my Mana took an hour and a half to recover, 30 minutes less than it did two weeks ago, I could see 8 patients every day if I had to.

Normally I only limited myself to 7 patients a day so as not to overburden myself with a 12-hour workday if I had to see 8 people, but for this I was finding a better alternative.

With so much magic practice every day, it was only a matter of time before I got even better at using [Levare Vitae] to heal people.

Each time I performed the magic, I paid more and more attention to the branches of the magic tree and made small adjustments to each branch to try to improve the effect of the spell.

Depending on the degree of the patient's injury, I would reduce the thickness of the spell's power branch so as not to waste Mana on it, making me recover the Mana spent in even less time.

If the injury was very large but not so serious, I would increase the range of the spell's area of effect, but I wouldn't change the intensity of the spell, so that less Mana would be spent in the process.

In the five branches of this spell, I had run tests on all of them to find more efficient ways of healing people.

With 7 patients a day over 14 days of work, I had 98 opportunities to test each of the spell's branches, so now I was confident that I could use [Levare Vitae] in the best possible way to heal people.

I didn't even have to speak the name of the spell or make hand signs, so even if someone saw me healing other people, without any means of actually seeing the spell like my eyes, they wouldn't even know which spell I was using.

Now, as I looked at the little boy with the arm leaking blood, I shook my head in exasperation.

Who in their right mind gives a sharp metal sword to a nine-year-old to play with unsupervised?

But I didn't say anything about it.

My job was only to look after the boy's wound, not to teach his parents how to look after him.

For a wound caused by a sword cut, the wound site was small, but a little deep, which meant I had to adapt the spell to heal with high intensity in a small area.

I had already used the spell in this way dozens of times while looking after patients, but this time I wanted to try something new.

While practicing magic at home, I thought about the possibility that just as the spell's tree has branches with ramifications for how the spell would act, can't the branches of this spell also have leaves?

What could a leaf do for the spell?

And if that leaf were to be placed on different branches, what different effects could that leaf have?

Thinking about trying to save Mana, if I put a leaf on the branch responsible for using the patient's life force to heal the wound, wouldn't it be possible to use a larger part of their life force as fuel for the healing process instead of using my Mana as the main fuel?

That way I'd spend less Mana on the healing process and I could increase the number of patients I see each day even more!

It's time to test it out.