Though each individual application of [Bio-acceleration: Tissue Culture] wasn’t too intense, having to use the skill each time I began a new cycle of infection was quickly taking its toll on me. By the time of the 38th cycle, my body was feeling physically tired, as though I’d been running a long marathon when I scarcely had the training to do so. Still, I persevered, using the skill as much as possible, although the latest cycles had been noticeably more taxing than the first few.

Despite my exhaustion, however, the more academically-inclined part of me had taken particular notice of the fact that excessive usage of mana left a physical exhaustion, as opposed to the mental strain commonly portrayed and propagated in the vast majority of fantasy universes. It was yet another point in favour of mana interfacing with biological life, although in this case it wasn’t the effect that was being made manifest on biological life – rather, utilisation of mana came at the expense of a strain to my body.

Oddly enough, though, [Bio-Analysis] performed on my own tissues hadn’t revealed any notable changes in any of the parameters I tested that couldn’t be explained by what I already knew. Sure, my heart rate and respiratory rate were on the upper range of normal, but that could simply be due to the stress of the situation, as indicated by my increased sympathetic drive. Likewise, there wasn’t any notable hypoxia in my tissues, no changes in tissue acidity, nor any alteration in ATP expenditure from baseline proportional to the perceived strenuous effort I was putting in.

In all respects, it seemed almost as though an unseen and unobservable factor was causing my fatigue, something outside the scope of my – and possibly Earth’s – knowledge of biology. It was yet another detail I had overlooked, with how easy working with Slime cultures had been.

I stepped away from the side of the bench currently filled with petri-dishes, letting the skill run its course while I attempted to rest and regain some mana passively. I glanced at Aksal, who had been mostly subdued for the past few hours, watching me with a quiet intensity. Arlett had once more fallen asleep, Prisca sitting beside her by the floor, the dark rings around her eyes a clear sign of her worry as she stared at her sleeping daughter.

“Soon,” I spoke up, for the first time in awhile, attempting to reassure them. “Another hour at the most, and the vaccine should be ready.”

The word probably meant nothing to them, but Aksal nodded at me all the same. It was now late at night, about three hours past sundown. I stepped over toward the window, resting against the glass, peering out into the distance as I tried my best to relax.

During my time thus far in Vergence, I hadn’t really explored all that much of the local geography. Outside of my little home laboratory and Aksal’s store, there hadn’t been much I paid any attention to. Now, without any other experiments to work on save for creation of the smallpox vaccine, I found myself unfocused.

I wasn’t too worried about whether the treatment would work – the latest passages in sheep tissue had been more efficient, and back-infections against my own skin cultures had taken a reciprocally longer time. Magic or not, the virus had been attenuated for human infection, indicating its usefulness as a non-pathogenic vaccine. While the literature on the smallpox vaccine in terms of modern immunology was understandably lacking, Arlett had only been symptomatic for a day, and there was some evidence to suggest that the vaccine given early on had good enough efficacy even if the recipient was already carrying the disease.

Besides, Aksal's and Prisca's descriptions of the time course of disease pointed toward this variant of smallpox having notably slower kinetics than what Earth's had. That would give a better chance for the vaccine to be effective in treating Arlett, even though she was already in the symptomatic phase. In the worst case, I could set up serum immunoglobulin transfers between myself, Prisca, or Aksal to Arlett once our adaptive immune responses kicked in. Given the time-course, I was confident that even if the vaccine failed in treating her, we would still be on time to administer purified immunoglobulins from our sera before the disease reached end-stage.

I sighed. Another ten minutes, and I would have to infect yet another batch of sheep cells. Already, I was looking forward to when this would all be done, and I could finally harvest my final inoculum, vaccinate Arlett, Prisca, Aksal, and myself, and return home for a good night’s sleep. There were still experiments to be done next morning, when the cultures of Slime-bro’s membranes I had started earlier today would be ready. Completion of that project would mark my first successful scientific foray in this new world.

Idly, I looked up into the night sky.

The full moon was bright tonight. Astronomy had never fascinated me all that much, but some of my peers in university had been borderline fanatic about the subject. I couldn’t tell my constellations apart, but without much else to occupy my time, I might as well start trying.

Then, something struck me as odd, and the more I looked, the more it bothered me.

I hadn’t paid all that much attention before, as single-mindedly focused on my experiments as I had been. Now that I was making more than a cursory effort to study the night sky, though, it was immediately obvious that something was wrong.

“The stars…”

Unlike other fantasy worlds that mostly depicted vastly different constellations than what people on Earth were accustomed to, here on Vergence, there were no stars in the sky.

“Stars?”

I turned toward Aksal, mildly startled, having almost forgotten his presence as my mind wandered. “There aren’t any stars in the sky,” I verbalised my thoughts, pointing behind me with a lone thumb. “Vergence doesn’t have stars?”

He furrowed his brows. “I’m afraid I’m unaware of the term, lad.”

“Stars – back in my world, there were an innumerable number of little suns far, far away from our planet, appearing as bright little dots in the distance. But how…” My thoughts scattered, I let my voice trail off after the incomplete explanation of the topic, mulling over what little I knew about stars.

There were no stars – and again, it made no sense. I barely heard the puzzled sound that Aksal made, affirming that stars were an utterly foreign concept to them.

Vergence had a single sun and moon, with similar lengths of days and a lunar cycle almost indistinguishable from Earth’s. Why, then, did stars not exist? How could a moon be created, without some other chunk of solid mass flying through space colliding with the planet to give rise to a moon in orbit, held by the planet’s gravitational pull?

Stars had captivated the hearts and minds of humans over the eons. Beyond their more whimsical roles of fascinating the minds of scholars and philosophers about what lay outside our mortal reach, shaping our early mythology through Gods and Goddesses named after constellations, they also had more practical aspects of being set celestial points of references for navigation in the early days without compasses.

To me, though, the real intrigue behind stars and other celestial bodies was their immense importance to biology as a whole. As expected from a [Biologist], really.

Without stars, life literally could not exist. Outside of hydrogen and helium that came shortly after the Big Bang, every other element in existence came from stars or other celestial phenomena in one way or another, whether it was from within dying low-mass stars, the intense supernova of a collapsing star, the merger of neutron stars, or some other process that I hadn’t come across during my brief reading into the subject the one day that I had been curious. Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and every single trace element existing within everything from a simple bacterium to humans… in one way or another, we were all derived from stars.

If that was the case... had life transmigrated here, in the same way that heroes were summoned to this world? Was this the result of terraforming by some unseen, and long since forgotten progenitor species of humans or other form of biological life? Or had magic somehow ruptured a hole through dimensions itself, drawing the elements that couldn't exist here into this world?

Of course, I couldn't deny the possibility that the elements of the periodic table were already here on Vergence to begin with. For all that I knew, there might not even have been a Big Bang that kick-started the universe here, seeing as the absence of stars likely indicated that Vergence was separated from the world I was used to by an unfathomable distance across dimensions.

There was also the possibility that magic could have imparted far greater assistance in shaping early organic life, in the same way that Slime-bro had demonstrated an aptitude for locomotion, intelligent behaviour, and learning despite there being no way he should be capable of such, going by his cellular structures alone. There were only two things that were absolutely necessary for early life to propagate: compartmentalisation, and an informational polymer that would allow for replication and inheritance of functional information. Slime splitting couldn't be explained in any way that made biological sense on Earth. Was there a chance that early life could have similarly been allowed to bypass this natural barrier through the assistance of magic?

Heck, did any of that have any meaningful significance, or was all this just one bizarre occurrence out of many? Was I reading too much into things; ascribing meaning where there was none? Hell, wasn’t there even a possibility – infinitesimally small, but still one – that everything in this world was just a simulation of a single isolated planet, the stuff of numerous science fiction novels? Would I one day wake up, and find out that I'd been dreaming the whole time? Would I be back in the lab, fighting for every last data point and praying for statistical significance?

They were questions far out of my subject of specialty – as things were, I knew precious little about the many proposed theories of abiogenesis; never mind the astrophysics, nuclear physics, and chemistry involved in the processes taking place during the early days of the universes before life ever existed, leading up to the creation of the first proto-cells deep within the sea floor. I could continue raising conjecture after conjecture, but finding the fundamental truth was impossible with the information I had.

Still… how had I missed all of this for so long? It had already been a month since I arrived in Vergence! Had I been that engrossed in my research, so adamant in plucking apart the secrets around a topic as mundane as Slime membranes, that I neglected to notice something as obvious as the stars being missing? Had I gone straight in for the molecular-level details, that I neglected to appreciate the gross anatomical structures?

“Lad?”

I felt a firm hand being placed on my shoulders, and I stiffened reflexively. Aksal stood behind me, looking at me searchingly, although with a tinge of worry.

“Never mind,” I said, both brushing my stray thoughts aside and reassuring Aksal. I had to stay focused.

While the answers to those questions could potentially have great importance in shaping my theory of how magic related to life, they weren’t immediately relevant to the task at hand. Like the Maxwell equations that birthed almost the entirety of modern physics by collecting the observations of dozens of past physicists into an elegant set of equations linking electricity, magnetism, and the nature of light together, I was certain that this would be yet another observation out of many, that would eventually fall into place once a unifying theory of magic and biology finally hit me. Failure to see the whole picture now didn’t mean that inspiration wouldn’t eventually strike me. In time, things would start to make sense.

Right now, what mattered was starting the 38th passage of viral infection.

I dragged my barely-rested body over to the culture, and repeated the exact same crude harvesting protocol I had carried out for the past eight hours.

Just two more cycles to go.

-o-o-o-

In the end, the actual vaccination had been done without much fanfare.

I simply loaded a needle and what passed as a syringe with a dose of the virus that had been thrice-purified through Slime-bro’s membranes to remove any cellular debris, disinfected the site of the injection with alchemical spirit, heated up and cooled the tip of the needle for sterilisation, and introduced the vaccine through an intramuscular injection at the deltoid.

Naturally, that once more woke Arnett up, causing her to wail loudly. While Prisca attempted to calm her down, I turned my attention to Aksal.

Huh. Fancy that. The [Alchemist] had already rolled up the sleeve of his garment, presenting it to me, after I prepared the second dose of the viral inoculum.

“Not saying I understand what you’re doing exactly, but you look like you know what you’re doing,” he said, reading the questioning look on my face. “This… it’s harmless, right?”

I shrugged. “Full disclosure? Probably,” I said. “I’d say ninety-nine percent odds that it works, based on the results of the back-infection. In the worst case, the virus might remain pathogenic, but it’ll be less bad than what Arnett has.”

That was the danger of using attenuated vaccines. I would have loved for something more sophisticated, possibly mixing a subunit or killed vaccine with an immunological adjuvant, but with the tools at my disposal that was impossible.

He snorted, entirely dismissive of the chances that things might go awry. “Better that than dead. Come on, kid, I haven’t got all day.”

Well, I’d take that as consent. Come to think of it, I had sort of neglected that bit of proper medical procedure in the frantic rush leading up to this point. Another reason why I wasn’t a trained clinician, I supposed.

A quick jab, and Aksal was now vaccinated. I loaded another syringe, presenting my own bare shoulder, and handed the syringe over to Aksal.

“Inject within the muscle bulk itself,” I told him.

For someone who had never done the procedure before, or even heard of the concept of vaccination, Aksal did surprisingly well. I winced at the spike of pain – those needles were a lot blunter than what Earth had – but really, it was nothing in comparison to the agony that would otherwise come from contracting magical smallpox.

“Thanks,” I said, taking the syringe from Aksal, before clamping down on the injection site with a stray bit of fabric now repurposed as medical gauze.

Next was Prisca. Within moments, she too was immunised. I collected the stray bits of used laboratory equipment and early passages of viral inoculum together. Those would need to be treated as biohazardous material and disposed of appropriately.

“What happens now?” Prisca spoke up, fidgeting slightly, once silence had taken hold.

“Now, we wait.” I sat against a chair, rubbing against my forehead tiredly. Repeated [Bio-analysis] and [Bio-acceleration: Tissue Culture] had taken its toll. “The three of us will be fine to leave, since we’ve only just been exposed to the virus. Arlett will need to be quarantined though, at least until the marks disappear and she’s no longer contagious. I would suggest that for now, she stays here at Aksal’s.”

“I’ll stay with her.” Her eyes were adamant and hardened as she glared at the [Alchemist], and I knew there was no shaking her resolve.

He shrugged. “Suit yourself, Prisca. Do you need me to tell Pierre that you two are here?”

She hesitated. “I hate to trouble you… I mean – I brought Arlett here, and I –“

“None of that here, Prisca,” he interrupted, scoffing loudly. “I get it. If it were Kylan who had the Curse… Deities above, I’d do the same thing you did.”

“Aksal…”

“Besides,” he continued, giving me a meaningful glance. “If it turns out that our friend here really can cure the Blighted Curse, it’d all be worth it in the end.”

I nodded, even though he hadn’t explicitly asked the question. “My skills suggest that your Blighted Curse is close enough to smallpox that the vaccine I prepared should work. Give it a few days. If you develop any symptoms, find me immediately. I’ll come over to talk about alchemy once Arlett’s sickness is resolved.”

“Find you?” He frowned. “You’re leaving already, lad?”

I yawned, stretching out my sore limbs. How did magic even cause soreness, when there weren’t any changes in cellular parameters? “I’ve got experiments running. Besides, there’s nothing else we can do now but wait.”

I moved toward the door, but stumbled clumsily mid-step, cursing. Aksal caught me reflexively, stabilising me, as Slime-bro hopped his way over to my feet, peering at me with an innocent, curious look.

“Easy there, lad,” Aksal said slowly, but with a firm voice. “You’re in no condition to move now. I won’t pretend to understand a thing you did back there, but you’ve been using your skill for the past few hours, yes?”

It was official, magic sucked. Now that the sheer necessity of the situation had gradually lifted, tiredness was all that remained. Aksal shook his head, overpowering my protests. He manoeuvred a chair over, glaring at me with a piercing look.

“Sit.”

Yeah, experiments could wait. There wasn’t a way I could get home in this state. I hadn’t pushed my magic this hard before, and now it was really starting to kick in.

“Honestly,” he grumbled. “Youngsters these days; using your skills like they’re nothing. Mana exhaustion can’t kill you, but it’ll make you feel like right shit. What level are you even, kid?”

Mana exhaustion? That certainly described what I was feeling.

‘Five,’ I almost said automatically, but paused. Now that he mentioned it, that too had changed.

At some point during the past eight hours, my level had once more shot up. I was now Level 8… and I had gained two skills.

How did any of that even work? I had been stagnant at Level 5 for the past two weeks. Did mana usage directly correlate with the rate that one gained levels? Or was this some kind of Dungeons and Dragons-esque situation, where experience points were awarded based on complexity of the task? If so, who the hell was the Dungeon Master? Those Five Deities of Vergence?

Again, this was yet another sign that I had been focusing too hard on the damned Slime membranes, that I hadn’t properly considered the salient facts about Vergence. Classic scientist’s mistake to miss the forest for the trees.

Well, nothing more to it. The names of my new skills popped up into my mind easily, as though they had always been there all along: [Manipulate Protein], and [Analyse Physiology].

The former did exactly as the name told: I could force the modification of proteins of my choice, or even cause their biosynthesis, in a contact-dependent manner.

Unfortunately, from what I could gather, the rate at which it occurred was nothing impressive. It would take prolonged contact to give any effect, meaning that I couldn’t dump a truck-load of mutated p53 or hyper-activated Ras and hope to give someone cancer with a single touch, or create an insoluble fibrillar mess within target cells in the way an Alzheimer’s plaque might develop.

Hell, I even needed to know the exact structure of the protein I wanted to create or modify. Every Biologist knew just how much insanely more difficult it was to have a protein whose function made sense, rather than ending up with a nonsensical mess of a chain of amino acids that did nothing at best, and killed the organism at its worst.

It was also an alteration of the proteome, but not the genome, meaning that the effects wouldn’t be permanent. Once the protein was degraded, the effects of the skill would effectively be terminated. Additionally, it seemed to only work on others, and not on myself.

Guess there wasn’t a chance of me becoming Captain America or Wolverine any time soon. Shame.

Well, I was certain that the skill would have a use at some point. I’d survived long enough without it as a biologist of the mundane variety. Besides, it would broaden my experiment repertoire to include loss-of-function and gain-of-function studies without the annoying intermediate steps that normally took forever to create the perfect protocol for the experimental model in question.

On to the next skill. At first glance, [Analyse Physiology] was a more focused version of [Bio-analysis]. I wasn’t stupid enough to test it out now, as fatigued as I was, but it seemed to allow an intuitive understanding of a physiological state of interest at the whole-organism level at a cursory glance. Unlike [Bio-Analysis], however, its effects didn’t extend to the level of a single cell, being capped out at the level of a system. In many ways, it was the reverse of [Bio-analysis]: by knowing the state of the organism, I could work backward and infer what was going on at the minute levels.

Oddly enough, this skill could be used to study myself. Why, then, did [Manipulate Protein] not work in the same way? For that matter, why did I gain two skills simultaneously? And where were those ‘archetype skills’ Aksal spoke of? The inconsistencies were piling up, but there was still no sole unifying theory to resolve all of them.

“Kid?”

Ah… right. I had forgotten to speak.

“Eight.”

“E- eight?!” he spluttered. Even Prisca looked taken aback, her head snapping toward where our conversation was taking place. “How in the great Deities’ names are you even still conscious?”

Huh. A much stronger reaction than I expected. “Is something wrong?”

“You’re wrong, that’s what!” He stood up, agitated, pacing around, visibly astonished. “Eight… it’s been hours! I thought you had to be at least Level 25 to use your skills for that long – and you were summoned together with the Hero, so you have to be special – but… eight?”

Yep. I was definitely missing something.

“Gods above… I’m a Level 27 [Alchemist], and I can barely brew ten potions in a batch before mana exhaustion sets in!”

He was Level 27? That was surprising; I vaguely recalled Tycelius making mention that Level 12 – Shinya’s level on his arrival – was about average for common soldiers and adventurers, although I had no idea what more elite members were like. What was Aksal doing in a village like this?

Levels, mana, skills… they all made little sense on their own. Ten potions, versus forty cycles of [Bio-acceleration: Tissue Culture] – how could they be compared?

“What’s a normal limit for skill usage?” I asked curiously.

“Bah… those damned fools at the capital – nobles, I swear –“ Aksal began yet another tirade, before he sighed, taking it upon himself to educate me in my ignorant ways. “When I was Level 8, even a single potion left me winded. Three uses of [Appraise Reagent], and just over ten of [Magic Missile] were all I could give.”

“Huh.”

I mused over that latest scrap of information. Certainly, an attractive hypothesis was that I already knew what I was looking for each time I used [Bio-analysis], and had a desired outcome in mind in terms of hastening a natural state with [Bio-acceleration: Tissue Culture], and so expended less mana with each use of my skills.

Was it that mana expenditure correlated with how much magic had to ‘fill in the gaps’, so to speak, in translating what the user of the skill didn’t know into a concrete outcome? Was it also easier for me, since I was working from the basic building blocks up, rather than from the perspective of a whole organism in the way that [Appraise Reagent] might be used on an herb?

The hypothesis was sound, but the problem lay in testing it. Without any logical quantification system, there was no way to definitively tell.

For now… I was tired. Thinking could come another day. I closed my eyes, and before I knew it, drifted to sleep right there on that chair.