Ear

A splatter of bile soiled the floor of the limestone cave as a young woman hung for dear life to a stone column, heaving breaths breaking the otherwise silent space as she slid down onto the floor.

“Dammit. I really hate puking and it seems to be all I do in this damn cave! That, and dying”.

Trying to get up hadn’t been the best of ideas, the vertigo easily overcoming her with nausea and dizziness, resulting in her current situation.

“One more time” she sighed as she closed her eyes.

The lattice had worked, the bone cells slowly starting to fill the gaps within the canal’s walls. Alice quickly traveled through the three semicircular structures of the inner ear, searching for defects and not finding any; satisfied, she moved down the spiral of bone they were connected to, sending her power to the membranes within as she passed, hastening their repair.

Finally, she found herself in the large, submerged field of hair-like receptors she had found some hours before; most of them were destroyed, their stalks broken by the storm of sound that had ripped through her eardrums.

Only a few of them were still intact, sending electrical signals to the brain, only for those to be lost in the silence of the pathways that lead to her brain. She immediately concentrated on them, watching closely how they swayed in the water-like lymph, following the vibrations reverberating throughout the auditory system and sending signals based on those movements.

I hope that what I’m trying to do is going to work.

Alice moved away from the healthy receptors and quickly found a broken one, the cilia floating away, attached to the base only by a few shreds of tissue. She focused all her attention on it, her power ever so slowly building strands of the material, roping the loose end back into place and irrorating it with nutrients. She felt a bit of life coming to the microscopic organ.

The cell started swaying to the vibrations like her healthy siblings, floating in the fluid filling the place.

Yet, the effect wasn’t there, the cell as silent now as when it was dead.

She brute forced it.

Alice briefly left the hair, heading to her well of power. There, she reached inside the barrier, slowly spinning out a thin thread of warmth and holding it firmly as she travelled back towards the ear.

Finding the newly repaired cell, she carefully attached the thread to it, feeling the power permeate the floating reed and finally witnessing the first signal sent into the network of nerves.

Alice smiled while floating around, admiring her new opera.

Absolutely beautiful. She said to herself before looking around the veritable wasteland she was in.

Do I really have to do it for every single one? Oof. I better get to work then.

The rest of her day was spent in a state of fugue, traveling to and from her core, carrying thin threads of power which she attached to each cilium she repaired. She only stopped when a small spike of pain broke through her state of flow, informing her of the limits of her body and mind.

Sadly, despite her dedication to the tiring work, at the end of her day only a small part of the ‘field’ was returned to its previous state.

Once fully conscious, Alice quickly ate a bit more, before crawling towards the carcass of the evolved screechling, the bone knife firmly in her hand.

“I don’t have anything else to do and I’m not that tired, it’s time for some old-fashioned investigation” she said as she plunged the knife deep into the cold flesh of the creature, easily parting its skin and showing the rigid muscles and sinew underneath. Her coordination with the left hand had begun improving after the many trials she had been through.

Compared to the normal screechlings, the muscles on the evolved creature were far more developed, particularly the ones connected to the wide wings of the monster which, if it had survived the bout, would have probably been strong enough for it to actually fly, instead of simply gliding through the air.

“All these changes after a simple sip of the water? What the Heck. I bet the salamander had been drinking it for a long time, given how big and strong it was. Also while that one had some sort of electrical power; this one had a sonic attack. I wonder if the monsters have a domain like I do. I have Life, maybe there is Sound, Electricity and many others? Or maybe it’s simply random? Or connected to their nature? After all, salamanders normally have electro receptors, I think, and the screechlings are damn loud. I wonder. Anyway, I would love to know how the heck it managed to produce that horrid sound”. She murmured while carefully flaying the creature, its skin far sturdier than the hides she had previously acquired.

After she set aside the hide, promising to try and cure it later, she dug deeper into the body of the monster, cutting away the best-looking pieces of meat while searching for something hinting at the changes it had been subject to.

“The lungs are huge, at least I think they are, almost every other organ has been pushed down to make space for them, that’s crazy! And what is this?” Alice had just began looking at its wide throat when she felt a sensation akin to the warmth she had come to expect every time she used her power.

She carefully dug into the flesh until her fingers hit something hard and smooth. Lodged within a complex structure of cartilage was a cloudy round crystal about as big as a pea.

Alice brushed off the blood coating it and admired it in the light of the pool, feeling its insides positively humming with power.

“It had a core! That’s how it managed to scream that way, there is no other option. I wonder if I have one. Not that I’m gonna be able to do anything with the information”. She paused, looking at her knife.

“Did the salamander have one? And if it did where is it?”

She left the tiny stone inside her makeshift water basin and crawled into the pool, searching with both her eyes and her hands for something similar to the crystal.

Only after scouring multiple times the bottom of the pond did she surrender to reality.

“I wonder if it’s just a coincidence, or if the water ate the core” she said, pouting a bit as she squeezed inside of her usual resting space; quickly falling asleep while clutching the tiny, humming object.

Two days later, Alice was still working on the restoration of her hearing.

The work had become somewhat automatic as she kept streamlining the process in order to reduce the strain it had on her mind.

It had worked, her progress showing in the field hidden inside of her right ear.

She had just finished emptying her well into more of the cilia when an idea appeared in her mind. Alice thought about it while numbly munching on the last chunks of meat that remained from the slaughter, casually throwing the scraps into the pool.

I wonder if I can use the core as a battery. After all it is filled with power and right now it’s just standing there. I cannot hoard it just for the sake of it.

She reached for the now clean little rock, bouncing it in her palm before focusing on the feeling it emanated, trying to connect to the power hidden inside it as she did with her own core.

At first, there was resistance. The tiny crystal too different and strange from the usual sensations coming from her well.

The power felt alien and distorted as she tried to grasp it, moving in a perpetual wave-like pattern and changing length and frequency as she pushed it around.

When she finally grabbed a thread, she didn’t feel the usual warmth she had come to expect from her well, only a steady hum came from it as she brought it into her own body, her cells synching their movement to the tune as they came into contact with the wave.

When she finally reached the ear, she tentatively connected the line to one of the sound receptors, trying to mimic what she had done for the previous ones. This time, the thread didn’t sink inside of the cellular structure, quickly fading from view; instead, it seemed to progressively coat the surface of the cell, slowly moving to the ones next to it as the line she had laboriously drawn all the way to her ear started getting larger and more defined, tiny threads constantly adding to it as the magical energy coated the entire space inside of her right ear.

Okay, I don’t know what happened.

Only after a few experiments did she form a general idea of the process.

It seems to be something temporary. I can’t just leave the core and go my merry way. It has to be in contact with my body to work and it only works on one ear, probably because it’s so small.

It also doesn’t do anything for the dead cells, for those I need my own power, what it does, though, is increase the reception of the ones that do work. That’s so fricking cool.

She also found out that, once the connection was established, as long as she was in contact with the sphere, she could turn it on and off with little more than a thought.

As soon as she was decently sure of her findings, she immediately tried crafting something that could hold the core while keeping it in contact with her body.

Silk instantly proved impossible with her lack of another hand to properly knit it into anything useful. The hides were also a bust, as she didn’t want to be in contact with something that would slowly rot with time.

Finally, she resorted to the only other material she had left. Bones.

She picked the flattest piece she had, probably the scapula of one of the screechlings, and started slowly smoothing it on the floor, obtaining a somewhat rounded rectangle of bone, no more than six centimeters in length.

In its center, she carefully dug a divot deep enough to house the tiny sphere, while she bored two holes in the sides through which she passed a thin line of silk cut away from her main bundle.

In the end, most time was spent trying to tie together around her neck the two ends of silk, in a way the pendant was flush against her skin while still not cutting into her flesh.

When she finally did it, Alice was covered in sweat and a few tears of frustration were slowly drying on her face.

Sadly, she also had to manually reform the connection to the new core, which certainly didn’t help improve her mood but, when she did it, the thread of soundwaves was finally locked to the receptors of her right ear.

For the next three days, Alice spent most of her time awake but in a deep trance, repairing her hearing receptors and connecting small amounts of her power to them.

She only went out of the cave once, in order to replenish her dwindling food supplies and even then, only after her right ear was healthy enough for her to walk without feeling nauseous.

I wish I could do the same with my arm. She briefly thought, soon glancing away from the almost healed residual limb, her eyes a bit teary despite her efforts.

After that brief break. She started working on the as of yet unhealed left ear, focusing not only on its reconstruction, but also on imitating, this time with her own power, the effect the sound core was having on the stalks.

It took her hours upon hours of trials and failures to finally find the correct way to replicate the strange coating.

Only at the end of the third day did the magical construct finally click into place, an extremely thin net of mana threads that was able to self-propagate due to its fractal nature.

A sizable chunk of her power had gone into the permanent construct, but she was nonetheless extremely happy of her progress.

A few moments later she was asleep.

You have reached Level 10 in the Biomancer Class.

With your power, you have managed to permanently boost your auditory capacity. You have learned the skill Enhanced Hearing. You will be able to hear a wider range of sounds more clearly.