The Sixth School.

Chapter Four: Alena…

Alena calmly looked down at the newborn baby as she bawled in her arms. “Congratulations, you have a healthy baby girl,” She stated, her lips tilting upwards for the briefest of moments before they once again straightened. The woman who’d just given birth smiled at the news as she reached out for her child. While the new mother seemed natural in her actions, Alena had picked up on the look of disappointment that had fleeted past her expression for a second. In this remote village in the mountains where hunting wild animals was the main source of sustenance, sons were considered to be more precious than daughters.

Alena didn’t really care. Having been all around this world, she had seen all kinds of attitudes towards both sons and daughters, both good and bad. Most were driven by the need to survive, others were relics of old tradition, and some the product of religious beliefs. She’d learned to detach long ago. As such, she didn’t falter in the least as she handed the child to her mother. With a calm demeanor, her hands began to move through the air as she weaved a healing spell to restore the woman to full health. Barely five seconds of maintaining this spell was all it took to completely heal the woman. With nothing more to do here, she turned around and left.

Alena moved in the direction of the setting sun on her way to her own house. As she walked past the small wooden huts, she couldn’t help but study the people around her. The men all had well-built bodies with defined muscles that made them look like they’d been carved from stone. The hard lives that these people led didn’t allow for any of them to be the thin string-bean-like figures that were commonplace back at the magi academy. Their skin was bronze from long hours of exposure to the sun and almost every single one of them bore scars as a result of their hunts. The animals in this forest weren’t the kind to be easily hunted. Alena was familiar with many of their scars because she was the reason that they were scars and not fatal wounds that took their lives.

When she first came to this city, many of the men looked down on her. Being a largely male-led tribe, women didn’t command a lot of respect. The way that she dressed didn’t make the situation that much better. At the start, many of the men thought that she’d be an easy target. Some approached her and tried to woo her. Others tried to be more forceful in their approach. To the first group, she would respectfully decline their advances. Those in the second group were all in the ground right now. Alena doubted that any of those men, both the respectful and the more uncouth, would be so daring if they had even an inkling of just how powerful she once was. If she was still at the height of her powers, then with a wave of her hand she could easily flatten not only this village but the very mountain it was on.

A cold glint flashed in Alena’s eyes as she thought of this. If not for the betrayal by people she had thought to be her friends, she would still be at the height of her powers. Her eyes glowed for a split second as she did a scan of her own body. It had been ten years and still close to ninety percent of her mana pathways were destroyed. At the back of her mind, Alena knew that she should be proud of herself. Just losing thirty percent of one’s mana pathways is enough to cripple most magi. Ten years ago, she’d been ambushed and left with ninety-nine percent of her mana pathways wrecked. The fact that she had even managed to slowly restore just ten percent of her mana pathways and still use magic was a feat that would shake the whole of the magic world if it was ever found out. Still, the cold flames of hatred that burned within her heart wouldn’t allow her to indulge any feelings of pride. Until the ones that had done this to her were made to suffer the kind of pain she did every day for the past decade, then she had no business being smug about anything.

As she looked around at the people and the small buildings, Alena couldn’t help the wry smile that tugged at her lips. Ten years ago, had someone told her that she’d be here. She who moved in the top circles of the magical world, serving as a healer in some remote village in the mountains, she’d probably think it to be a poor joke. These ten years, however, were a lesson in humility for the great Alena. A long sigh left Alena as she pushed the thoughts of her past to the back of her mind. Revenge was still a very far-away goal for her. This village was her new reality for the moment and she’d learned to accept it. Her start in it had been rough, no doubt. But as the years went by and the number of lives that she saved piled, she became among the few women that would get nods of respect and acknowledgment from everyone in the village, both men and women.

Alena's gaze moved from the men to the women. The first and most stark difference between herself and the women in this town was the conservative manner in which they dressed. The clothes they wore covered everything from their necks to their ankles. The only skin they showed was their arms and this was probably only because it was much easier to work without the sleeves getting in the way. When Alena first came to this village, the women had the harshest critiques of the way she dressed. Names like slut and whore were constantly tossed around. Unfortunately for all of them, much like the barks of a dog, Alena didn’t really care about what came out of their mouths. One woman tried to get physical with her for acting like a tramp, according to her. Alena sent her to keep the uncouth men company in the afterlife.

Most of the women around had soft curves in all the right places. Alena, however, could also see the subtle signs of the tough life they led. Their skin was nowhere near as flawless as that of the women back at the magi academy. And while not as pronounced as the men, even their muscles were more toned than that of the women in the academy. Much like the academy, there weren’t any overweight women in this town. But while the vain women in the academy had an almost endless list of magical ways to deal with their weight and remain aesthetically pleasing, the women in this town simply didn’t have enough to eat to grow overweight. Saving up for the future is a lesson painfully learned through the starved corpses of those who had nothing set apart for tough times to come.

After a ten-minute walk, Alena reached the house right at the edge of the town. The large building was a long house with several rooms inside. Ten families could easily live inside with some room left over. In the whole town, it was the biggest house, even bigger than the town head's house by far. But while it was huge, it actually doubled as the infirmary for the whole town. When the men went out to hunt, they usually did so in groups. The groups could be as small as five men and as big as a hundred-plus men. In such times, the chances of multiple participants being injured weren’t insignificant. On several occasions in the past six years, there have been times when the building was filled to capacity and some of the injured had to be placed in twos and threes in the same room. Alena only made use of three rooms in this massive building as her own. One she used as her storeroom for medicinal herbs and the simple potions that she put together. The second was a lab in which she still carried out whatever rudimentary magical research she could still carry out in her broken state. The final room was her bedroom.

By the door to the house, she was met by Shalia, the town head’s daughter and the apprentice that had been forced on her. The young girl had strawberry red hair that framed her perfectly proportioned face. Her large doe eyes, small button nose, and luscious lips placed her firmly in the position of the town’s top beauty among the younger generation. If Alena wasn’t in this town, then the caveat ‘among the younger generation’ would be taken out of the title. Something that Alena knew bothered this young girl. Being daughter to the Town’s head she had grown used to being the center of attention wherever she went. The fact that Alena seemed completely indifferent to her and treated her just as she would anyone else always bothered this little princess. The only reason Alena suffered her presence was because, despite her rotten attitude and narcissistic tendencies, the girl was a diligent worker. Not having to tend to all the menial tasks her work required was enough of a boon for Alena to keep the girl around.

“Are the herbs ready?” Alena asked the girl that had fallen in step beside her as they moved towards her laboratory.

“Yes,” Shalia briefly confirmed with a nod.

“Preparations?” Alena went on.

“Cleaned and sorted,” The answer came swiftly and concisely.

“Anything else to report?” Alena asked as she pushed open the door to her lab.

“That boy's mother came around again, “ The girl replied in a clearly disinterested tone. “She wanted to know how he was doing,” Shalia added.

“What did you tell her?” Alena posed as she came to a stop before one of the two workstations in the room. One of the two workstations had all kinds of runes and artificial mana pathways carved onto it. The other workstation was just a table. It was to this second station that they moved to. This second station belonged to Shalia. Alena knew that the girl resented not being given a more ‘magical’ workstation to work with. Alena had set the condition that until she was certain that she could handle all the herbs even with her eyes closed, the table would remain her workstation. This, however, was a lie. Alena had secretly assessed the girl and Shalia didn’t have even a lick of magical aptitude. Even with the most advanced magical workstation in the world, she wouldn’t be able to do anything more than she was already doing with the table before them. She knew that if she tried to explain this to the girl, the spoiled princess would have none of it. As such, she trained the girl in such a way that, when Alena left, the girl would still go on being the town’s healer.

“I told her what you told me to tell her,” Shalia replied as Alena picked up the herbs on the table one by one and closely inspected them. “I told her that the boy is still in critical condition and can’t receive any visitors,” She added.

Alena nodded in acknowledgment before speaking. “Did you wash this blood berry in the same water as the ice flower?” Alena asked. She didn’t miss the way that the girl before her winced at her words. When she first began to work as her apprentice she would usually try to lie about things like these, thinking that Alena wouldn’t know. It didn’t take long for her to learn that if Alena was asking a question about herbs, it was because she already has the answer. Still, despite her wince, the girl nodded, knowing that she’d already been caught.

“I’ve told you time and again that the chill in the ice flower neutralizes the herbal potency of the blood berry,” Alena stated in a cutting tone. There was nothing that Alena took more seriously than magic and all its fields of research. She knew perfectly well that the girl didn’t want to be here. The only reason she was here was because the town head saw the value of a healer. He knew that someday, Alena was bound to leave and so had repeatedly urged her to take in her daughter as his apprentice. The girl herself had never had any interest in being a healer. Alena, however, didn’t care in the least how the girl felt about being a healer. Now that she was working under her, she would do things right.

“I’ll get another,” Shalia quietly replied as she turned around ready to head to the storeroom.

“While you are at it get more sickle grass, I told you to leave it in shade to slowly dry off, not direct sunlight. Once it leaves the ground, direct sunlight turns the grass poisonous. Just because it takes hours to dry doesn’t mean you can cut shortcuts,” Alena stated. “This coiling thorn vine is full of your blood, you clearly weren’t listening the last hundred times that I told you that warm water is a simple way to keep the plant from thrashing around. Exposing your patients to your bodily fluids is a quick way to add more complications to the treatment process if not outright killing them.,” Alena explained. Alena didn’t miss the scowl that slowly formed on the girl's face as she took apart the mistakes Shalia had made with the close to fifteen different herbs on the table before them. She, however, didn’t relent. So much so that, by the time she was done, the girl stomped her way out of the room. Alena couldn’t help but frown as she noted the fact that the girl had made a lot more mistakes with the ingredients today than was usual. Why that was? She didn’t know. 

Letting out a small sigh, Alena moved towards her own workstation. Placing a hand on a crystal orb at the side of it, she poured in a bit of mana to turn it on. This workstation was barely more than scrap compared to the ones back at the magi academy. The enchantments carved onto it weren’t anything out of the ordinary and could only exhibit the most rudimentary of effects. But while the enchantments were only basic ones, the fact that they had been carved on ordinary wood and could be worked without the whole thing either blowing up into splinters or burning to ash in an instant was a feat that would floor all jaws in the magi academy. Alena always had mixed feelings about this workstation. She was a once in a thousand years genius in magic. Even without being vain, Alena had enough self-awareness to realize this. However, even she knew that without the injuries that she had suffered, she would never have been able to figure out how to carve artificial mana paths in normal wood. It wasn’t until her own body was damn near completely broken that she figured out just how much mana could burden weaker bodies. As she slowly tried to rebuild her mana pathways and coax her now frail body into using mana, she slowly figured out a way weaker bodies could use mana without being immediately destroyed. As such, while it wasn’t anything impressive as far as enchantments go, the workstation before her was still a revolutionary invention in the world of magic.

Like water flowing along a channel, Alena watched as blue lines of mana flowed along the artificial mana pathways carved into the wood. Even though she had seen it more than a thousand times before, she still carefully observed both the way the mana flowed in the carved pathways and how it interacted with the wood around it. In a way, despite being just a table, the wood before her was a perfect representation of her body. Mundane wood was just as frail as her own body when it came to handling magic. By observing the mana move along the wood and the various effects it had, Alena could draw parallels and perhaps figure out ways to increase the speed of her recovery, or at the very least avoid making it worse. 

Alena had just begun to get engrossed when the door to the lab opened once more and Shalia walked back in with a tray full of the various herbs that Alena usually used to wipe down the boy. The break in her concentration forced Alena to stop with her observations for now. She, however, wasn’t bothered by this. It had been a year since she’d last drawn any new inspirations from the workstation. When the girl came to stand beside her, Alena quietly picked the first herb from the tray and placed it in the center of her workstation. Part of the reason workstations were so useful was because the runes and enchantments carved onto them could draw on the ambient mana in the air to supplement the magi's own. Also, with some spells already carved onto it, she could activate them like flicking a switch on and off. Something especially useful in her case in particular as it allowed her to skip the strain that the use of magic usually put her body in.

Picking one herb after another, Alena made quick work of preparing them. A water-repelling spell to dry the washed sickle grass. A restraining enchantment to hold the coiling thorn vine while she took out its thorns. A chilling charm to keep the ice flower from losing its medicinal potency. Activating one enchantment after another, she barely spent more than a minute dealing with each of the herbs. In ten minutes, she was done correctly dealing with each of the herbs that Shalia had made a mistake in preparing. “Tomorrow, I’ll need you to go gather some more sickle grass, the bark of the nightmare willow, the roots of the fire rose, and some snapping flowers if you can find any,” Alena instructed, completely ignoring the scowl on the girl’s face. She knew that the girl hated being made to prepare all the ingredients manually when Alena could easily do in ten minutes what would take her hours to accomplish. Alena completely ignored the girl’s disgruntlement. “Remember, there’s no point in picking any of them if you do it wrong and destroy them,” She cautioned. “Take your time and do it right,” She instructed before waving the girl off. “You can go home for the day,” She dismissed her.

After the girl left, Alena spent another ten minutes closely observing the flow of the mana through the wooden table and the effects it had. As had been the case for much of the past year, she didn’t glean anything. After ten minutes, when she was certain that Shalia wouldn’t be coming back for whatever reason, Alena turned and walked over to a wall. Looking at it, there was no way to visually tell that it had been modified. Unless one knew how to activate it, they wouldn’t think of it as anything other than a mundane wall. Touching a certain part of the wall, Alena poured in a bit of her mana before waiting. There was no button to press, lever to pull, or hole to slot a key in, the trigger for the secret mechanism would analyze Alena’s magical signature to confirm if it was the right one before triggering. In places with advanced magic, this wasn’t that big of a security measure as there were ways to either fool the mechanism or even bypass it entirely. Here in this remote village, however, it might as well have been an impregnable bank vault.

 Nothing opened, there wasn’t any secret compartment behind the wall. Instead, a dense, milky-white fog started to seep out of the wall. Inside every room in this building, at the top four corners, there are small, round, metallic balls, no bigger than the tip of one's pinkie. Even with her new skill set, carving a recording enchantment on wood would put a little too much strain on the wood. It wasn’t that the recording enchantment itself was all that advanced. Instead, it was a matter of thresholds.

A good way to think about it would be like a string that can only bear a certain amount of weight. Past this weight, the string would snap. A recording spell, while not too advanced, was a little over the maximum weight allowed by wood, so to speak. While with her method the material used wouldn’t immediately explode into smithereens, it would slowly degrade over time. Wood would char, rock would crack and crumble away, metal would slowly overheat until it melted, and so on.

These were recording devices that constantly monitored the room they were in. Most of the time they were inactive as the rooms were empty. Whenever she had an in-patient, however, she would use them to monitor their condition. This, however, was the first time that Alena was using the metal balls to spy on someone. It took some time but eventually, the milky-white fog coalesced into a white screen before her. Moving with practiced ease, her hands weaved runes in the air that sunk into the white screen connecting it to the four round balls in the boy’s room.

Anyone who’d been in her line of work for as long as she had, would have known that the boy was a goner the moment they laid eyes on him. On the day that they had brought the boy's mangled body to the infirmary, Alena had been certain that he wouldn’t make it through the night. Heck, the fact that he’d still been alive at the time was a miracle in itself. Still, her pride as a healer wouldn’t allow her to give in without a fight. As a healer, she’d been fighting death for so long that by now it was almost instinct to her. Healing magic, herbal remedies, and alchemical potions, she had pulled out all the stops to try and save the boy. In the end, however, it was all to very little effect. Both the magical spells and alchemical potions barely had any effects on the boy, it was almost like ninety percent of the magic leaked away and only about ten percent had any effect. Only the herbal remedies seemed to have any real effect on the boy. Unlike the other two options, however, herbal remedies weren’t as fast in their healing process. A herbal remedy can staunch bleeding and disinfect a wound just fine. It, however, can’t close up an open injury as fast as a spell or a potion would.

By all indications, the boy should have died. And yet, somehow, despite hanging by a thread, he stubbornly clung to life. His life was like a lit candle caught in the middle of a blizzard. By all indications, it should have been snuffed out. It, however, just simply wouldn’t go out. After three days of teetering on the edge, hanging between life and death, the boy opened his eyes! In the state he’d been in, Alena had been expecting him to be comatose for quite some time. So one can imagine her shock when she’d been on a routine visit to heal him and she opened the door to find him looking at her curiously.

Alena may have lost her powers, but the keen intuition of one that had risen to the heights of power that she once had was still with her. In the time that she had been working as the town’s healer, she’d encountered everyone in the town at least once or twice. While she may not know everyone by name, she did at least have an impression of them. So why was it that, as she looked into the eyes of the boy, she felt that she was looking at a stranger? The face, although badly disfigured, was familiar to Alena. The eyes, however, were of someone she didn’t know. Part of what made Alena such a gifted mage was her unending curiosity and tendency to trust her instincts. And at that moment, her instincts had been shouting to her that something was going on with the boy. That’s when she modified the small balls. From just monitoring for any serious changes in the patient, she had instead made them record him day and night.

If there’s anything unusual about the boy, however, the several days of surveillance had failed to uncover it. Most of every day was spent sleeping, which, given his condition, wasn’t all that surprising. Alena, however, was nothing if not persistent. When you can’t find any big clues, then focus on the small clues, is a maxim she lived by. As such, she had been studying the boy’s behavior whenever he was awake, both from up close and through the surveillance. The boy seemed to have learned at what times to expect her as he would usually be awake around these times. Other than those times, he’d usually be asleep. As such, she didn’t have to study a lot of the surveillance recordings, to begin with.

So far, despite her persistence, the only odd thing that she’d managed to pick up about the boy was that, whenever she left the room, the boy’s eyes would first look to his extreme left, almost like he was trying to see something right at the edge of his vision. After that, his eyes would start to move almost like he was reading something in the air. There would always be anticipation whenever he did this, which, for some reason, would always turn to disappointment. After a few minutes, however, this behavior would stop and he’d drift off into sleep. Alena was yet to make heads or tails of why he’d do this, and so chose not to jump to any conclusions. Until she had more to go on, she’d just keep observing for the time being. Given that she was going through almost twelve hours of recording, the images on the white screen were moving at sixty times the normal speed. That way, it’d only take her a minute to go through an hour of tape. The fact that the boy spent most of this time sleeping, only made this process that much easier as there wasn’t much to glean when he was asleep. Alena had thought that this would be like all other days and that she wouldn’t get anything from the recordings. Today, however, something was different.

Given that the recording was playing at almost sixty times the normal speed, she almost missed it. Alena was forced to wave her hand to rewind the recording back to the right spot and then play it at normal speed. The different thing about today’s recording had nothing to do with the boy, instead, it was the fact that the door to the room opened at a time that it wasn’t supposed to. Given that she was the only one that usually visited the boy, the door to the boy’s room only opened at specific times. Those times being dawn, midday, and at dusk. This time, however, late into the afternoon the door to his room slowly opened…