A Result Unlike the One Expected
Vespara opened her eyes on the floor and, for a while, simply stared at the ceiling. Her body was lighter than it had been before she slept, yet her mana still scraped the bottom of the well. When she pushed herself up on her elbows, her shoulders ached. Even a body that had attained eternal youth and immortality, it seemed, did not find a hard floor any kinder than a bed.
"Next time, I'll see that I make it to the bed before I lie down."
She murmured it into a laboratory where no one could answer, then braced a hand on the table and rose. Her legs trembled a little, though not so badly that she could not walk. Only after she had opened her research journal and taken up the pen did she realize she had meant to begin the record before she even sat. Vespara drew out a chair, sat, and started with the date and the hour the spell formula had been completed.
She remembered the last moment she had checked the clock. From there she set down the flow of magical power, the order in which the patterns had closed, and the changes that had appeared in her flesh. The hand writing those lines stopped because of the face reflected in the mirror opposite.
Would the wrinkles have returned by the time she woke? It would have been a lie to claim the thought had never crossed her mind. Vespara set the pen down and drew the mirror closer. She studied the corners of her eyes, worked her mouth, then swept the black-and-white hair that had spilled beside her face back behind her ear.
"Beautiful, however many times I look."
Her gray eyes narrowed in satisfaction. It was unmistakably the face of her youth, and yet it felt a little stranger than memory. She had spent longer looking into books than into mirrors; that was only natural. She turned her head to take in her profile as well, and only then set the mirror down.
"Heh. Back when I was at the Central Magic Academy, I used to receive confessions just for breathing."
In the days she had belonged to the school as both researcher and mage, a great many people had come looking for her. She would make time because someone wished to speak of research, only to have flowers thrust upon her; she would take a visitor for someone proposing a joint study, only to be invited to dinner before anything else. After a few such occasions, she fell into the habit of asking their business first.
Women had been among them. Vespara glanced briefly down at the tip of her pen. Faces and names had gone hazy, and yet the image of one woman—ears already flushed red before she had even begun to speak—lingered strangely in memory.
"I think I may have been a little stirred, back then."
She had refused her all the same. At the time there had been a calculation she could not solve, and even after the woman left, Vespara had gone straight back to examining that calculation. That she should only now grow curious about the feeling of those days drew a small smile from her. The research was finished, and already her thoughts were wandering.
"There will be time enough to look into that sort of thing. First, I finish this."
Vespara turned her gaze back to the journal. That she had regained her youth was certain. That she would not age from here on, and that she would survive whatever damage she suffered, she had not yet confirmed. Being convinced a theory was sound and observing its results were different matters. Had she failed to tell the two apart, she would never have come this far.
The first observation began with a small wound. Vespara looked down at the shallow cut she had opened with a dagger and frowned. It was the sting she had expected, but meeting it in a young body did not make it welcome. The hand that had been writing paused, then moved again.
"I really do hate pain."
A magic for regulating the sense of pain came to mind, but she soon shook her head. For now she needed to confirm the state in which only the spell formula of eternal youth and immortality was at work. Layer another magic over it, and it would grow difficult to tell which had produced which result.
She checked the time and waited. Before long the edges of the wound began to blur. Vespara drew her chair in and sat, narrowing her eyes so as not to miss the change. After some five minutes, the trace was hard to find. As she turned her hand over to examine it, the corner of her mouth slowly rose.
"Good. At the least, it is working in the direction I designed."
The observations that followed, at the level of minor injuries, yielded much the same. The time required for restoration varied, but it never passed ten minutes. Vespara wrote down the results and spread the design of the completed spell formula beside the journal. It was a phenomenon that fit her hypothesis: record the form of the youthful body, and return whatever had been damaged to that form.
That alone, however, did not settle every question. Restoration had occurred even when her mana was nearly gone, and there had been no additional consumption she could feel. Whether this meant the formula drew on some other power, or that it ran on so little mana she could not detect it, she could not yet determine.
"Up to here, minor wounds. If I insisted this result confirmed immortality as well, I would have to take back every word I ever spoke to my students."
What she meant to confirm next was whether a lost part of the body would be restored as well. Vespara opened her left hand and regarded it for a long while. While she had been watching small wounds vanish, the next verification had seemed easy enough. Looking down at her own finger, her thinking changed.
"And there I was, going on about distinguishing confidence from recklessness."
What would her students have said, had they seen her? She started to lift the corner of her mouth, then let it fall. According to the theory, it ought to return. But she was in the midst of verifying that theory. After hesitating a long while, Vespara decided she should at least lessen the pain first, and turned her gaze toward the bookshelf.
If it was a magic that dulled the sense of pain, she remembered one. It was a spell formula that regulated the transmission of sensation, and the structure itself was not a particularly difficult magic. She found the relevant volume, opened it, and copied the necessary portion into the journal. She would be applying it to a body that had already changed; she could not simply cast a formula she knew without thought.
Vespara revised part of the pathway of magical power. The adjustment was meant to reduce the cost and avoid interference. She marked the altered sections so they could be told from the original.
When she applied the magic, a faint blue light wrapped her body. The light soon sank, but an afterglow lingered longer than she had expected. Vespara closed her eyes and concentrated on the flow of power. The spell formula of eternal youth and immortality at her chest was reacting, very briefly.
"There is contact. Not a collision, I think..."
She did not press on to the next step at once. She recorded the reaction. Even after the flows of the two formulas had settled, she waited a little longer, but nothing abnormal showed on the surface. Vespara added a line noting that she would have to confirm whether this judgment held, and pushed the book aside.
To continue the verification was her own decision. A short while later, one finger was missing from Vespara's left hand. She had undertaken the cut herself, yet the moment she saw what her hand had actually become, her breath caught hard in her throat.
She tended the wound and laid her hand on the table. She looked at the place where the finger had been, turned her eyes away, and before long was looking at the same spot again. While she wrote the starting time into the journal, the tip of the pen scratched the paper.
There was a problem with sensation as well. The magic meant to lessen pain was turning it into an altogether different pleasure. Vespara recorded the reaction as a side effect. That the damage confirmed by her own eyes and the signals her body sent did not agree left her uneasy.
"Wait. This is not the reaction I specified."
Vespara halted the experiment and pushed the dagger well away. Two things had to be confirmed now: whether the lost finger would return, and why the pain-regulation magic was behaving contrary to her intent. She had no thought of pressing on to further tests while she held an answer to neither.
Ten minutes passed, and the lost finger did not return. Even the slowest of the earlier minor wounds had been restored within that span. Vespara checked the clock and read her records over again. She considered first whether she might have written the starting time wrong, but it was no error of that degree.
Another line was drawn beneath the note of ten minutes. Vespara reached without thinking to take the paper in her left hand, then stopped. In the hand that had meant to move as usual, the empty place caught her eye. If it never came back, would she have to live like this from now on? She drew the reaching hand away and shifted her gaze to the design.
Is this as far as it goes?
The moment the thought rose, her mouth went dry. If regaining her youth and restoring minor damage was the whole of it, she could not give it the name of eternal youth and immortality. The instant she had completed the final pattern came back to her, and with it the sight of herself laughing on the floor. Vespara crumpled the corner of the design without realizing it.
"It is not yet time to draw a conclusion."
The words were not meant for anyone else to hear. She smoothed the crumpled paper and traced, with a fingertip, the observations she had written earlier. That the answer she wanted had failed to appear did not mean the facts she had confirmed vanished with it. The minor wounds had been restored. This damage had not been restored within the same span. That was as far as she could speak with certainty now.
Vespara opened a fresh page of the journal. Difference in the degree of damage. Difference in the time required for restoration. Interference from the pain-regulation magic. She set down the possibilities as they occurred to her, each in its own place, and left beside every one a mark that she did not yet know.
"It will not do for me to be the first to take fright at a magic I made myself."
Her voice was still stiff, but at least what she did not know had grown clear. A page lined with questions that demanded answers was far more familiar to her than a shapeless fear.
Vespara withdrew the magical power she had been feeding the pain-regulation magic. Yet even after the flow was cut, the aberrant sensation remained. She waited, meaning to confirm whether it was merely a residual effect, and then felt a reaction repeating at her chest and straightened where she sat.
The flow of the formula she had newly used was still there. At first she thought her own sensing was at fault. But the more she set it against the design, the more clearly another structure could be read in the very place where only the spell formula of eternal youth and immortality ought to have stood.
"So it was not merely passing through the same place."
She opened the original of the pain-regulation formula once more. The two magics were not moving independently of each other. She remembered the afterglow that had lingered even after the blue light sank. She had trusted a flow that only looked stable, and she had trusted it far too quickly.
Vespara pressed her lips shut. Relief at having found something, and displeasure at having missed it, arrived together. Even so, she could not yet erase just any structure she pleased. Lay hands on it without knowing how far the binding reached, and she might disturb even the formula she had first completed.
Time passed amid records and comparisons. Partway through, Vespara drank some water and ate a little of the bread that remained. Hunger, and research that refused to go as she wished, were separate problems. Chewing the hard bread, she recalled dishes she had read of in travelogues, then let out a short sigh.
"I had meant the first meal to be a little more splendid than this."
With something in her stomach, her head cleared a little. Vespara brushed the crumbs away and took up the pen again. There was no reason to abandon the journey. There were simply more things she would have to learn before she left.
The observation record she had first opened grew to several pages, and time passed until she no longer bothered to count how often she had checked the clock.
As the watching lengthened, she saw that the damage remained exactly as it was, while the formula's reaction was changing at a steady rate. At first she had put it down to another magic having mixed in, but the change went on even when she was not moving her power at all. Vespara laid side by side the patterns she had recorded at intervals.
The same portions were shifting their places, little by little. It was not a shape swaying at random. It advanced in a fixed direction, then drew nearer again to the original arrangement. She opened the first page of the journal and confirmed the hour the formula had been completed.
"Surely it is not reacting to damage alone..."
Before she could finish, the formula at her chest brightened.
Vespara dropped the pen. The flow that had been creeping along until now joined all at once and spread through her entire body. She had not supplied the power herself. Braced against the chair, her posture set, she watched the change unfolding before her eyes.
The severed finger was coming back.
Vespara could not take her eyes from her left hand. Even after the restoration ended she was unable to move for a while; then, slowly, she closed the hand and opened it. The finger that had not been there a moment ago moved at her will. Only after she touched it with the other hand could she let out a long breath.
"...It came back."
Her voice came out smaller than she had expected. She closed the hand once more, then looked at the clock. Soon her gaze dropped to the first page of the journal. While she checked whether she had misread the figures, her lips slowly parted.
It was the hour the formula had been completed. A day had passed, and the same hour had come round again.
"...Time."
She wrote the word and drew a long line beneath it. A single result could not establish that the same thing would happen every day. But it was enough to form a hypothesis that some condition other than the earlier restoration of minor wounds had been at work. The strength went out of her stiffened shoulders. A laugh nearly rose, and then, remembering there was still something left to confirm, she drew herself upright again.
Vespara examined the magic that remained in the restored body. In the instant the flesh returned, the bound formula had been reconstituted along with it. She compared the flow she had been recording right up to the restoration with the flow as it stood now. The pain-regulation formula, grown faint when she cut off its supply of power, had come clear again.
She had already severed the supply of magical power to the pain-regulation magic. Even so, that structure lived on beside the formula of eternal youth and immortality. The restoration of the flesh had not erased it. Rather, it had set the structure back whole, as though it had been meant to occupy that place from the very beginning.
For a while Vespara regarded the design without a word. Whether the form of the body she had meant to record had come to include the later magic as well, or whether the two formulas had been woven into one and now sustained each other, she could not yet tell. What was plain was that she could not pass off the earlier aberrant reaction as a momentary mistake.
On a fresh page she drew the patterns of the two formulas side by side. Beneath them she set down the structure she actually sensed. The third drawing matched neither original.
"...What, exactly, did I complete this time?"