The Priesthood

A month had passed since they first started their combat training with magic. Every day they would practice, duel, and then practice some more, all this under the supervision of Sirius, who kept pushing the novices near their breaking points.

He would, if he had to, punch the teachings he had to offer into every single one of them. Sirius would do it without questions asked; he would do it because it was his duty to do so, and he took his job seriously.

No slacking, no missing lectures, for he would himself go and find those that tried to skip even a single lecture; he would drag them by their necks and force them to practice even if they were ill, even if they had just woken up. He didn’t care about such things as sickness or being tired.

They would have time for that later; this last month of rigorous training is what would save the lives of many; this was so that they could proudly do as the Angels asked them to do. To carry the burden of the weak and defend them.

And on the last day of that month, Sirius held his last lecture in the Dueling Halls, as he always did. With his eyes, he measured every single one of them and would simply nod and then say, "This will do."

They were dismissed; their studies of combat with magic were now done. However, he demanded to have a word with Kanrel and Yirn and urged them to enlist as inquisitors after their graduation.

Sirius batted their shoulders roughly and dismissed them as well; it was his time to return to the capital, where the House of Truths was located, the very building that served as the headquarters of the Inquisition.

To Kanrel, it was amusing that at the same time the inquisitor left, there was a sudden disappearance of three students, one of whom was a novice like them. Rumors circulated among the students that they had run away because of the stress caused by expectations put on them by their parents and the system.

Some even suggested that they had fallen victim to rouge Priests or that the novice had accidentally teleported them into another dimension. None of those rumors made any sense, but Kanrel had his own theory: Soon after their departure, there were no longer cases of graffiti calling his mother a heretic, so the inquisitor must have done his job and gotten rid of those that would spout such things.

And through sheer accident, Kanrel found out why Yirn was often so late; one day he came looking for him and knocked on his door, and the young man had opened the door, shirtless and covered in sweat; his muscles were glittering in the light because of it.

"What were you up to?"

Yirn was breathing heavily and then flashed that dashing smile of his.

"Lifting." He then opened his door so that Kanrel could see what he had in his room. There were heavyweights, dumbbells, and such; Kanrel could hardly name half of the things present in his room.

"Yviev was right..."

"What?"

"Nothing, nothing at all. You do your thing; I’ll wait for you at the laboratory."

"You sure? I could teach you some advanced lifting techniques; start training with me, and then you could easily carry people around or chairs." Yirn said, and then flexed his muscles. But Kanrel was already running off.

"You can change your mind anytime!" He heard Yirn yell after him.

Sure, one could say that lifting was something Kanrel practiced quite often, but lifting for Yirn meant a very different thing than the lifting Kanrel practiced.

The next day they already had a new professor to teach them; this time it was a professor of advanced medical magic. Lena Forsvarn was her name, and she practiced her medicine in the Academic Hospital of the Academy of the Heavenly.

Her research into medical magic had been groundbreaking, and thus she was stationed at the academy by the Priesthood. There she would spend her time further honing her craft and advancing her research with constant patients and simulations that were possible because of the magic that she had developed.

Her understanding of the human body was astonishing, but it was no wonder, for she used to actively work in the busiest hospital in the kingdom, the Royal University Hospital located in Lo' Gran.

It was also rumored that she did something that many would never do: on the dead, she would perform something called an "autopsy." This way, she could theorize the reasons why the person had died, and she could also poke around the body to figure out what was inside.

And now this legendary woman stood before them, a frail-looking woman in her late fifties.

"The practice of medicine is a greatly misunderstood craft; it has not been about hexes and unknown alchemical mixtures for a long time now; yet even among you there is a fool or two who still believe in the ways of long ago."

"I am here to fix that misunderstanding, and I am going to fix it in a way that will leave you more tired than a battle or running a marathon."

"Medicine is about the scientific way of diagnosing the patient so that we can figure out a scientific answer to their problem, be it a disease or an injury. To make such decisions, I will try to teach you something one should study for years before becoming even remotely proficient at it."

"In three months, a sergeant can teach the king’s soldiers enough so that they aren’t completely useless on a battlefield. In three months, I can teach you to at least be cognizant of your own lack of knowledge."

"Even then, we have to put theory into practice after just a month of lectures."

"I require absolute obedience and for you all to listen and soak in the information that I will teach you. If you fail to do so, you might cause more deaths than is necessary in the last two months of this course."

"Sure, it might be that in the past six years, you’ve had many lectures about medicine, but that is just the surface of one of the least understood things in the world: the human body."

"The books you studied are possibly all wrong, and the professors that taught you have no idea about magic the way I do."

"If any one of you wants to argue with that, you can do so after these next few months; until then, shut your mouths and listen to those who know better than you do."

"Now, let us begin... As I said, the human body is one of the least understood things about this world...”

These were the very lectures that Kanrel had most anticipated; this was the thing he felt he needed to learn the most. Through understanding medical magic and the human body, he could then delve deeper into the hypothesis he had about body transformation.

Because when he had to reconstruct his face, he soon had a thought: if regenerating muscle, flesh, and skin didn’t take as much effort as he had thought, couldn’t he then be more liberal with how he regenerated a body part? Couldn’t he then grow, let’s say, a third arm?

The possibility of this intrigued him greatly, but if he wanted to move his hypothesis any further, he would have to understand something he didn’t know enough about. The human body.

During those four weeks, he completely immersed himself in medical magic and studied it; he read up-to-date books about the topic and carefully listened to every word that Professor Forsvarn had to offer; of those, he wrote exact notes, and unlike himself, he often asked questions about the things that she taught them. Like the many bones and muscles of the human body and the thing she had called the "nervous system".

Of course, she would patiently answer his questions when they were relevant to the current lecture.

In his free time, Kanrel would seek out the professor to ask even further questions, usually those he did not get answers to during the lectures, and then she would answer those questions, usually while hurrying toward the Academic Hospital.

Sadly, there wasn’t a way for him to practice unless he decided to do self-harm, but causing oneself pain wasn’t something he was ready to do just to figure out how to close a wound a bit quicker. So he instead spent his time reviewing his notes and conversing about the things that they had learned with Yirn and Yviev.

They weren’t as excited about the lectures or the contents of them, especially Yirn, who would’ve much rather continued under the guidance of inquisitor Sirius. Alas, medical magic was part of their curriculum and something they had to get some sort of understanding of.

After those four weeks, Kanrel felt that he had scratched just the surface of it, and he would need to dig deeper than just that surface to find out the answers he needed. And as if as a blessing, that opportunity was given to all of them: a period of intense work at the Academic Hospital that would last for two months. They’d get to practice the things they learned in theory with constant simulations until they learned the basics, like how to stop bleeding, how to close a wound, and how to fix a broken bone.

For this, they would be divided into groups of five because of the lack of simulation chambers. And of course, they would mostly practice using these simulations that would give them realistic medical issues that they would have to diagnose and then try to solve, but according to the professor herself, if and only if your group did well, they might be allowed to practice on an actual patient.

And that was something Kanrel wanted. A simulation could never offer as much as the real thing.

On the last day of theory, they were set with their first mission: form groups of five members, then register your study group and all the members of it at the Academic Hospital. The next morning, they would have to announce themselves at the hospital at exactly four in the morning.

Every day, they would have to stay awake for twenty hours and sleep for just four hours. This was to make sure that the novices got a realistic experience and understanding of how a real hospital works.

This schedule would be the reason why many would much rather do almost anything else than practice medicine. The pay was poor, and the patients and their families were often not that understanding of the stress that a doctor or a nurse had to go through in their day.

At least the normal doctors and nurses could think of themselves as heroes, as they might’ve saved another man from certain death. Those who practiced medical magic, on the other hand, wouldn’t get to celebrate; for them, there was no such thing as "heroism". For them, it was all about duty and the vows they had taken. And of course, the possibility of research that could contribute more to saving lives than performing thousands of life-saving surgeries in one's lifetime.

Kanrel himself doubted that he would go down that path; he just needed enough information and practice to try his hypothesis out. This was all for his own duty for knowledge.

Now at the Academic Hospital with a team of new and old acquaintances, they registered their team and the members of it. Kanrel, Yirn, and, of course, Yviev, but also two people he hadn’t ever talked to before. Yviev apparently knew the two of them somewhat well. Wen Kaiw and Uanna Wektet, two female priests, who held themselves with such pride that it was difficult to tell if they had truly gone through with the Ritual.

But it was quickly made clear where such an aura of pride came from; they were both nobility, and that had rubbed off on the very way they were even now.

Now that they at least knew the names of each other, Kanrel offered them information and codes about medical issues that they most likely would encounter within the next two months.

To the surprise of Kanrel, they accepted his offer in an instant, thanking him profusely and calling him “the Son of the Herald".

Kanrel lay on his bed once again, going through his notes. There was so much he had to remember, so much he had to think of, and so much more that he didn’t know of. There weren’t many hours left until he would have to wake up, so at last he put down his notebook.

Tomorrow morning he would be tired, and there was nothing he really could do about that; it was better to get used to it. Because along with his despair would come another feeling, exhaustion, and it would last through the coming months and maybe even a longer time. But he was ready to sacrifice, if just for a little more information that could be useful to him.