A day had passed. Andromeda laid against a tree and poked at the fire in front of her with a stick. It was early in the morning and she was still sore from the fight. Eli had been in and out of consciousness since he collapsed so Andromeda laid him out on the outer layer of her robe. She didn’t care much if it got dirty as she could just purify and mend it later.

She reflected on her actions to this point, it seemed so clear to her before so why couldn’t she find the reasoning now? She couldn’t summon whatever thought was in her head that convinced her that things wouldn’t end up this way. No one was dead, but that didn’t help her feel any better. She gave Eli a trauma that he might never live down and several others were injured with nothing to show for it. Did she just lose it for a moment?

A strong wave of melancholy washed over her, surely White inside of her was going through much the same troubles. She had to suffer through all of it without any input.

Andromeda looked at her hands, the white discoloration clear as ever and just as strange as the first day she saw it. She wondered what she was.

Not figuratively, but literally.

Was she human? The mutations she had undergone suggested otherwise. Her eyes glowed like a beast possessed, her hands belonged to another being entirely (one that resided in her mind), her body seemed to try and kill itself at the drop of a hat without her ring, and even then she had to continuously burn off mana just so she didn’t break down anyway.

Then there was whatever Ferdinand and Rapture had done to her. They changed something about her and created White in her mind, and if that wasn’t the true nature of it then the truth couldn’t be more innocent. There was nothing about White that she regretted, but she hated that White had to suffer for no reason just because of the whims of another.

Then there was her healing. It was something that people in this world can’t do, by all accounts they were perfectly normal people. So that only left the possibility that she wasn’t. Being from another world should have been enough to prove she wasn’t normal, but having that as well was too much.

She thought back to her earliest memory after she came to this world. She remembered wandering through some halls in a blur, then exiting out into a large room of some kind and speaking to someone. It was all fuzzy and hard to remember. She knew now that mana could affect the mind and disturb memories, and she went through a lot of overdosing on mana between now and then.

After that she felt blinding pain, then she didn’t remember anything until she woke up on the table at Rhys’ clinic. Critically, she didn’t remember how she got here. If somebody brought her here and for any reason in particular she didn’t know. The only clue she had was that Argo said she came out of the mages wing of the King’s Manor. A place only mages were supposed to be.

Her literal only clue was a king that was now dead. Literally killed that same day within hours of her sudden appearance. That wasn’t a coincidence.

It just made her think, what was she, really? Was there some purpose in being here? She shook her head, there were more important things to think about right now and moping about the paradoxical nature of her existence wasn’t going to help.

Right then she and Eli were parked in an alcove created by a giant tree’s roots being exposed to the air. Andromeda found this spot not long after she took off from the site of their fight. She was strong enough to carry Eli for a while but couldn't continue that for very long. Rather than take the risk of making camp next to the road she marched into the woods and found this place.

Since then she had been waiting there for Eli to wake back up. Over the course of 24 hours he had improved enough that she was sure he would wake up soon. She hadn’t been idle while she waited. Given that Eli was injured from the fight and neither of them had anything better to do with their time she took her time in healing him.

As she had come to learn, healing was painful for her. Eli had a few small nicks and scratches all over from the beating, but he had three more serious injuries to deal with.

He had a gash in his head, presumably from when he was struck with the shield, that was the smallest of the major injuries, but because it was so close to his head she was concerned he might have a concussion. When she healed that she felt pain that was bad enough to leave her laying on the ground for several minutes before she could move again.

It did confirm that the pain she experienced was proportional to the damage she was healing. Milo’s leg practically disabled her for hours, Ferdinand’s finger was equivalent to having the wind knocked out of her, and a gash like this was somewhere in the middle in both damage and pain. What wasn’t great was that the pain she felt wasn’t directly proportional, small feats of healing were at the very least incredibly painful.

Thankfully the pain she felt healing was not physical to the best of her knowledge. Besides the stress she felt from the pain there didn’t seem to be any damage to her body. The exception being the bleaching on her fingers from healing Milo, though that might be a special circumstance she didn’t understand yet, or it might just be a result of doing it for the first time.

Whatever the specific circumstances were, she pushed past the pain eventually and looked at Eli’s second Injury. His left arm was bruised from the elbow to the shoulder on the inside. She had no idea what caused this injury specifically, but assumed that he must have somehow torn his bicep lifting that hulking sword the bandit’s boss had. In the stress of the moment his adrenaline was probably preventing him from feeling the pain. It didn’t help that he went into shock almost immediately after so she never got a chance to confirm.

The fact that he swung the sword hard enough to embed it in solid metal meant that there was considerable force behind it. The Fight or flight response was one of the scariest things about human biology so it didn’t surprise her that he managed to pull it off.

With this one Andromeda wanted to try something else. In her mind there was no reason that Refutei couldn’t be used. Mending and healing at this point were basically the same technique so she reasoned it should work the same here.

Once she applied Refutei Healing to his arm it started pulling itself together, what scared her at first was the lack of pain. However the answer to her fear manifested itself when she tried to move, she was completely numb all over her body.

She couldn’t feel anything at all. When she tried to move her arms they moved, but there was no feedback to her nerves.This was a dangerous position to be in, if she wasn’t incredibly careful she could bite her tongue or gash her head on a rock. After several minutes of slowly moving her numb body she negotiated it to the ground and laid there.

The lack of input to her nervous system made it hard to gauge the time, but she guessed that an hour had passed before she regained the majority of feeling in her body. She could still feel the pins and needles all throughout, but she could move without risking injury to herself.

This was an interesting discovery to say the least. Compared to the blinding pain from regular healing the numbness was preferable, but the lack of control she had was equally as bad. Even if she was in agonizing pain she still had the ability to move with some degree of control, even if it was traumatic to do so.

On the positive side, it managed to heal Eli’s arm. If she could master that skill to a degree where it didn’t endanger herself then it would be incredibly useful.

While she was going through these painful trials, White was busy in her head taking notes and asking questions for their imagined notes. White’s speaking skills had progressed a bit, now she was able to basic sentences with relatively few mistakes.

Can we stop hurting please?

It seemed that White wasn’t thrilled about the pain any more than she was. The way she chose to communicate had grown to be a mash of different things. As she laid it out it was just as much effort to make words as to express pure feelings.

If she wanted to give a general idea than the pure emotions was what she used. If she wanted a specific concept then she used words, however she also figured out how to make pictures and sounds in their mind. The one she was most familiar with though was the poking she loved to do at the wall of her mind, she tried to avoid that one unless she was annoyed.

“Sorry, just a little more…” Andromeda whispered. White sent a wave of sadness along with a few annoyed taps to express her thoughts on that.

Eli’s last injury was the worst, and the source of the most confusion. The bones in his right hand were broken, all of them. She had noticed that he had done some kind of strike against the bandit’s leader, but she wasn’t sure what it was because she was still getting up.

The problem with that is that he shouldn’t have been able to mangle his hand like he had. On top of his fingers being broken they were bent in all the wrong directions and bruised throughout. Literally the only way it could have been worse was by having his bones break through his skin. Even that was saying something because it looked like his hand was a loosely put together pile of flesh and bone.

Andromeda could already tell that even attempting to heal this all at once would leave her out of commission for hours. She wasn’t sure if this was technically worse than Milo’s leg, but it certainly wasn’t far from it.

There was a way she could work around it though.

One night, not too long after she arrived at Cylas, she was reading the mending textbook she had brought with her from Argo’s house. She didn’t think she’d have much to learn from it considering how well she could mend already, but that wasn’t the case.

One of the later chapters described methods of making mending easier on the user in the case that it was draining their mana too quickly.

“As a student of magic and mending, you may come to find that some projects are too complicated or draining to finish. Understand that mending as an art requires an eye for specificity, just as an artist needs to understand what brush they need to apply the right strokes, you too need to know what is needed and when.”

What that meant is that sometimes mending the entire thing all at once wasn’t the best option. She already applied that to a certain degree by only healing certain injuries at a time, but those were isolated and separated from each other until now. Here they were all intertwined and connected. If she had tried healing him of everything all at once… Well, she wasn’t sure she’d survive that herself.

In this case she had to isolate the individual injuries, she also had to consider that Eli wasn’t going to take this well either. While she was healing his less drastic injuries she could tell that he was feeling some of the pain. Not enough to rouse him from his apparent coma however.

A small part of her, probably White, felt bad about using Eli as a test subject to practice her healing. But she reasoned that he would be happier with his flesh and blood all in the right places rather than them being anywhere else.

Her first goal was to try and get the fingers in the right general location. This required a bit more than direct healing, instead she manipulated his fingers while she healed so that they moved right.

While it was indeed painful beyond all rational thought, it wasn’t anything that she couldn’t push through unlike before. This time the healing felt like the worst possible version of a body ache rather than the whole of her body being subjected to white hot, nerve shattering agony.

Once she had got his fingers into the right place and took the required few minutes to adjust to being alive without pain again she returned to work and got started on the actual bones themselves.

Her knowledge of internal anatomy wasn’t perfect, but she knew there were a little under 30 bones in the band, all intricately connected in such a way to allow the dexterous movement they are capable of. He had somehow managed to break pretty much all of them.

Whatever he did must have been with an ungodly amount of force, or something else she didn’t understand.

Andromeda went from finger to finger and slowly healed each bone, taking a minute or two between each to recover her strength, then moving to the next. The whole process took nearly an hour without considering her breaks between each bone.

By the time she had gotten done with that she was exhausted, and she wasn’t even done. Now that she had made his hand resemble what hands look like she could finish the job.

Bruising was a result of blood being under the skin, depending on the reason and severity bruising could range between benign or indicative of serious damage.

Considering it was in his hand, this was more serious. Important nerves and blood vessels were in the hand. While in her heart she was hoping that healing it using magic wouldn’t leave lasting effects, she couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t.

This time she tried another trick she learned from the book.

“One simple technique that might assist in your efforts comes from a surprising source. The medea describe a technique by which they pace their healing in consistent pulses, called “beats” in their terminology. Instead of a constant flow of mana they use a pattern reminiscent of the beating of a heart. While the Medean understanding of this technique is perhaps antiquated, the results are well proven among mages. By staggering pulses of mana while mending you can drastically reduce the stress on mana your mana reserves with only a moderate reduction in speed and efficiency. Understandably, this technique is called “Pulse Mending”.”

It made sense, there seemed to be some kind of connection between the heart and mana. She remembered a mention of the flow of mana in a person’s body synchronizing with their heart if left alone long enough. So she tried it.

It took a little bit of practice to get the technique down, she had to re-teach herself how to start and stop a flow to make it work. But after a few tries she got the right rhythm down and started work on Eli’s hand.

Interestingly, it seemed that this technique resulted in much less pain. It still felt like she was getting punched in the stomach a few times a second, but in comparison to before it was a breeze. The level and constancy of pain she was starting to acclimate to was becoming a growing concern, so much so that White agreed on an instinctual level and sent out waves of concern and fear.

She pressed on through the pain and continued until the swelling was gone and the bruising was almost completely removed. There was some work left to be done underneath the skin because the bruising would start reappearing in small splotches after she had healed it, but besides that it was almost completely healed.

Having exhausted herself completely by that point, she sat back and laid her head against the soft roots of the tree below her. At that point even cold hard stone would have been comfortable. Her body was so completely tired that it was a struggle to keep her breath moving.

It didn’t take long for her to fall asleep on the forest floor. The allure of sleep at that moment was so strong that it almost felt unnatural.