A Spiritual Advantage

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Nessa sat down in her sitting room, a number of papers sprawled around her. Being a dilligent student in the academy and expecting to be working in the Onmitsukido where she would likely have had to go on long covert missions, where being by herself would mean that a knowledge of first aid was paramount. Her life had, in the interim, of course taken an enormous change of trajectory. Her first aid knowledge learned during optional classes had been useful while she had been a human. That had been the first time she had applied her knowledge and as a result was able to fix up the injuries of that weird korean girl who had refused hospital treatment. That had been an excellent start into the world of first aid, but now what Nessa would be attempting would be wholly more complicated. Reconstructing an entire arm would require more than simple first aid skills. Such a thing could only be done by healing of a spiritual nature.

Luckily, her Kido book had some healing Kido within it, and so this was as good a place as any to start. Not only did it have Keikatsu but it also had a somewhat academic treatise on the nature of how exactly healing kido functioned. Nessa had a white board before her, and was using it to copy out diagrams in the book. It was important to learn the theory before you put these things into practice. It appeared that Keikatsu worked backwards; it would heal the deepest injury within the user's capability, reconnecting bones, then muscle then fats and tissue and finally skin, in that order. Nessa had a picture of the various layers; it made sense, to her. If you healed the skin and then weren't able to see the damage beneath, then there would be internal bleeding, which no-one wanted. It was better to turn a serious wound into a shallow wound than it was to get rid of it only to have it open back up under strain, especially in a fight.

She drew a diagram showing the energy flow of the kido, based on the description given in her textbook. If Keikatsu worked the same way as general healing did, it seemed that this would be the way it worked, with energy flowing from the practitioner to the core of the wound. The practitioner would probe with their reiatsu and then knit together any broken apart flesh. There was a passage she struggled to understand about reiryoku-reishi equivalency, but after reading it several times she noticed that there was some kind of formula; she realized that this was in fact an aspect covered by the spell itself. Reading on it was clear that this portion referred to the actual regeneration of any lost tissue or blood. It wasn't something she had to be too concerned with yet as long as she knew its function. It appeared that the healing energy would start at the core, regenerate anything that needed it and move outwards, regenerating and then knitting together until the spell ended or until the practitioner ran out of energy. For small wounds it looked simple enough.

Nessa had a large carving knife that usually resided in her knife rack in the kitchen. She looked at the back of her forearm, smooth and pale and white. This would be... Unpleasant. She sighed, and took the sharp knife and drew it across her forearm with a hiss and gasp of pain. A bright red line formed, in stark contrast to her porcelain skin, and began dribbling blood. She looked at the book. Well, here went nothing, she supposed.

She engaged her reiryoku, forming it in the same way as she would while generating any kido, but this time with the intent to heal, restore, regenerate. It was more akin to a bakudo than a hado, obviously. The green energy engulfed her arm. Nessa wasn't completely sure what to do next and in her panic, the spell sputtered and went out, much like a car stalling. Oh bother. Her arm was still bleeding, though it wasn't an enormous cut. She tried again, this time formulating in her mind what she needed to do. First she would regenerate blood, using the mechanism of the spell, then knit together the muscle she had sliced, followed by the skin. Simple. She formed the Keikatsu once more, and let it seep over her wound, first generating red blood cells and plasma, and following that, she knitted the muscles of her arm together. It itched like something else. After they were all fixed up, her skin began to knot itself. It took monumental focus with such a strange, unknown kido but she had done it. It appeared that she had acquired the basics of healing.

heavy is the Hole in my heart