This morning Askos came to me along with his sister, the other Nothrune in the clutch. Her name was Erica Junior, because of course it is. I am just going to call her Junior because calling her by my own name would be weird.

Anyway, Junior is just as, if not more, talented as her brother, though much less determined. If anything that helps her as she doesn’t blame herself for her own failings. Frustration and rage might help if you want to hurt someone, but healing is a different story.

I taught them the basics of standard healing, the whole use the blueprint the soul provides thing. It’s cheap, simple, and nearly impossible to mess up bad enough to hurt someone. Well, it is still possible for the spell to backfire and you can get sick from that, but that is something all mages have to deal with sometimes.

After walking them through the motions I made a couple bodies with several injuries of various severities and had them start treating them under the scenario of a life or death situation. I was puppeting the bodies and would know immediately if, when, and why a body died, and if left alone all of them would die. This was to both help them improve their skills of both healing and diagnosing, if they don’t heal the worst injuries then the body will die and they will have to start over. All the while I was subtly guiding them to the right conclusions and ideas via Lace.

Though neither even came close to succeeding, the injuries were never the same twice and much too extensive for them to actually heal with their meager skills and mana pools, both of them did accomplish something. Junior took to the exercise incredibly well, trying again and again, only stopping when she had no more mana left to expend. She was calm, patient, and collected through countless failures, always making sure to know exactly what was going on before acting despite the fact that it sometimes takes more time to diagnose the problem than the body has left to live. Askos got increasingly irritated every time he failed, making him increasingly reckless and more likely to try and brute force things. He almost never did a full diagnosis and went straight to figuring out which vitals were injured and brute forcing them fixed. It is a viable strategy in life or death situations like that, he just has nowhere near enough mana to actually pull it off.

Once it got to the point where one in three spells were backfiring due to him getting frustrated and not putting in the attention he should I had him take a break and talk to him for a bit. I explained to him that of course he was going to fail, he is a beginner and I’m not exactly going easy on him with this exercise. After talking to him for a bit he calmed down enough to get back to work, he still took every failure personally, but less personally.

He’s probably going to be an adventurer of some kind when he grows up, he fills the stereotypes at least. Hot headed youth with memories of a past life, a drive for power, a dead parent, and a budding desire for revenge.

As for the other group of people I am teaching, they are doing pretty well. I have them working different things at different times of day.

In the morning they work on their fine control over plants by trying to complete various obstacle courses with thin strands of a rather flimsy material. If they touch the edges, even the bottom edge, the strand would be destroyed and they would have to start again. There are several courses like that, each one harder than the last, but only the last one really matters. It is the longest one out of all of them and allows for no margin of error, I won’t be satisfied until all of them are able to quickly and reliably pass that test.

Around noon they work on quickly forming useful objects, like armor and weapons. I want them to be able to instantly form weapons and armor at the slightest hint of danger, and I want that equipment to be of the highest quality.

In the afternoon they are working on training with the gear they made that day, primarily by beating eachother with it. We have healers on standby in case someone gets injured, but the healers are under orders to only fix injuries that have a chance of causing permanent harm, the rest they have to heal themselves.

They get short breaks to eat and take care of other bodily needs between each training set and they get a break at the end of the day before bed. I have decided to make this a type of bootcamp after having the idea explained to me. At first I was worried about them burning out, but with their zealotry and their fervor I doubt they will become emotionally burned out, physical burnout is easily fixed, and I want them to be able to function despite being mentally burned out.

Once they reach a frankly rather arbitrary level of control over plants I will integrate all of my plants into their body while evolving them into a form more suited to make optimal usage of those plants. It shouldn’t take too long for the first couple to get to that point, mostly because a couple of them had quite a bit of skill going into this, but after that I have no idea how long it will take. I should make sure to show up, observe, and offer guidance where it is needed at least once a day until all of them get there though.

They have taken to calling themselves my Paladins, or maybe other people started calling them that and they decided they liked it. Regardless, anyone talking about them refers to them as being my Paladins so I think the name is going to stick around.

Other than that I spent my downtime working on that book I am supposed to write. I decided to write a detailed book about anatomy. Mostly trying to get everything I know about the subject onto paper, which is made easy by the fact that I can imprint my thoughts onto paper as fast as I can think them. I figured it would be easy enough to make an encyclopedia of the biology of various creatures, should only take me a couple days to finish it.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.