Reality only proved different from what Raven thought it would, during the trip we weren't attacked or followed by anyone on our way to a secret base whose entrance was a ridiculously large tree.
For a secret base to have its gate inside the trunk of an ancient tree with a radius of three meters and more than fifteen meters in height, it doesn't seem to be very effective. I admit it's very stylish and the rune matrix used to protect the base is quite different from normal and this increases the base security, I still find it strange.
A secret base should be under a rock and not a tree which makes a lot of noise and takes considerable time to open and close.
Even though the tree's roots serve as a great alarm combined with runic arrangements and the tree's live trunk helps to hide the base entrance, it's still a bad idea to make a base like this.
In this base all items and the necromancer's body were delivered to a specialized team for this type of occasion, there were mages of the element of death, life and light on the team.
They are ready to investigate, store and completely destroy any material or body that is involved with the element of death or divine power, even without being able to see it is highly unlikely that someone like the red sparrow does not have some amount of divine power within their body.
It would really be useful to be able to see any kind of divine power, these things are quite dangerous. When our team was taken to the infirmary to undergo a clinical analysis to both see if our bodies are ok and there is not even a hidden problem caused during this mission, but I also think this is a way to search us without saying that they think we are thieves.
I wouldn't be surprised that our mounts are going through a similar process, but the only person on our team who isn't going through it is our leader, Raven. She went directly to a meeting with the leaders or leader of that base.
The goat might have done a good job on my body, but the light and life mage did a better one. I felt like a new man after going through her treatment, I felt my vitality was overflowing what was wrong, according to her the extensive treatment she gave me not only took away all the energy of the death element that was only hidden in my body as well as healed all the damage it caused.
The damage she was referring to was not common injuries like an injured organ or damaged bone which are types of hidden injuries, according to her the death element that hit me has the property set to wither, which in my case means that my body was not 'hurt' but that my energy was being wasted.
The element of death can't just devour my life force, but it can expel it from my body. Victims of this type of elemental energy tend to turn into a withered form in their body from the sudden loss of life energy.
When hit by a large amount of this death element energy your body does not break it is exhausted causing the target to not be able to exert force on your body to fight, and in cases where the death element is too strong or concentrated it tends to causing those contaminated to use up their energy too quickly and causes your body to recover it more slowly than normal.
This energy is so vile that if you exhaust yourself while you have a small amount of it hidden in your body, it will take advantage of this moment of weakness to put you in a coma and kill you, preventing you from accumulating energy inside your body, this element death really is sinister.
After my turn to be healed was over I was basically kicked out of the ward to a basically room, the only furniture was a table and sticks chairs if it wasn't for the large size of the room, I would have thought I would be interrogated now but no one else entered the room in addition to my team members one at a time.
"Feeling better now, Ulric? The target's death element literally knocked you down, and now we know that asshole was truly vicious."
If it hadn't been for Mia asking me this, I would have believed I was being the target of a bad joke, but in the room, there is only Mia and Milena who is extremely quiet and reserved.
"I didn't realize how much it was affected by the element of death until the moment it left my body, that healer really is competent compared to a certain person."
"I'm glad everyone will be healed now, but it wasn't Jordan's fault. He specializes in physical wounds not purification, if our wounds were an amputated arm or a pierced organ you would see what a good healer he is. During one of the assessments of his skill that I saw, he reattached a leg back to the victim's body in record time and the leg was good enough to withstand some physical stress, usually even after repairing an injury like this the patient normally does. doesn't have the ability to run for his life."
There's something wrong with this story.
"Did you cut someone's leg to time the time they took to heal their leg?"
"Yes, but it wasn't a person's leg, it was a magical animal's leg. Did you really think we'd cut off a person's leg just to test Jordan's skills? You have been thinking too much of the cultists and now your mind always goes to negative thoughts, people like us do not use human beings for experiments, remember that even slaves in our realm have rights and cannot be used in experiments like this."
I feel like I've now been the butt of a joke, the mischievous smile on Mia's face shows how much fun she's having correcting me.
"What kind of magical animal did you use?"
"It was a jade forest lizard; they look more like alligators than drakes they are born in a forest in the western part of the kingdom. They can at most reach level three, but even then, they are not that good mounts so they are only used as level one and two mounts, usually traders use them to carry common goods as their skin is tough enough to resist some attacks from other magical animals of your level."
"I don't know much about how healers train, but now I believe they use magical animals, but are they just used to trill wounds or all areas of study for healers?"
"A healer could answer this question in detail, but as far as I know many healers start training on injured animals and only after gaining basic mastery of magic are they allowed to use them on humans who are generally poor. Because of this, many healers have good ties to temples that do charities, even if the healing is not perfect those who don't have the financial capacity to pay a healer will not complain about a novice's work."
"Even superficial healings can cause a lot of problems for the patient and don't think I'm saying this as a woman who doesn't want to have scars unnecessarily, but a person has already suffered partial loss of mobility because an incompetent healer wrongly healed a cut."
"I feel really lucky that I didn't get hurt too much when I had less money, now that I believe I have enough to hire a good healer."
"Don't think money will save you from an incompetent healer, in a crisis you don't know what kind of idiot will try to heal you. This will happen a lot in war, at this point most mages who have any healing abilities are being recruited from experienced to novice. The healer units in the spawn are basically going to be a game of chance."
I didn't expect Milena to join the conversation.
"Looks like you've had bad luck before, Milena."
"Yes, it was when I was part of a group of adventurers in the capital. I was a little younger than Ulric, but when my group went on a mission to exterminate a nest of magical animals, I ended up getting ambushed because some idiot fucked up."
Milena lifted a part of her armor to show her belly, there was a very small scar above her waist line.
"Had to spend a fair amount of money to get her to look like this, I was pierced by the claws of a shadow element magic beast during the quest. Our scout had not detected that there were magical beasts in that nest, my injuries were minor to my organs and this saved me from dying from internal bleeding."
"Having her stomach ripped open tends to be deadly for an early-stage gray core adventurer, the healer managed to stop the bleeding and close the wound after a while, but the idiot did a very messy job. I had a lot of trouble because of that, but looking back I was really lucky he didn't have to fix my stomach or I would have died because he sure as hell wouldn't heal me properly."
"Even after being healed, I had pain problems because of poorly connected flesh, my waist became a weak point in my body. During close combat training I only needed to be hit once in this region for my body to start twitching, many people will suffer from this kind of problem after the war, Ulric, there should be a better way to train healers in the realm."
"Milena is right, Ulric, novice healers will make many mistakes during the war, but afterward they will either become competent healers or give up the profession. There will be a lot of blood and death in the wards during the war, not everyone is able to take that kind of pressure."
I really don't feel that excited about what's going to happen in the next few months, not that I was excited before, but I felt more relaxed when I thought I wasn't going to directly participate in the battlefield.
With each passing day I feel that this war is going to be bloodier and crueler than I expected.