Chapter 247 - Mind and Space! Part-1

{15th July 1992}

{Rigel's POV}

The visions shifted without warning, as if the tome had reached some invisible seam and turned a page that weighed more than just paper. I felt the shift distinctly, like stepping from a tiled corridor into a library where sound is expected to behave.

—

A skull illuminated under lamplight. The hair shaved to stubble, chalk lines marking arcs above the ear. Dhanvantri drew his wand like a glowing stylus: a crescent traced over the temporal bone. He didn't use his magic to make the cut as he guided his mana to softened tissue, a low hum that eased skin away from bone like warm wax.

Then he used a scalpel to cut, slow, careful, precise. This was the first time I had seen him use a scalpel, as he was more used to just waving his mana to do its thing. As a matter of fact, the wand was also a recent acquisition, the earlier visions didn't have the focus in scope yet.

Blood welled, dark and slow. He caught it with a runescribed cup beside the head. The scalpel seemed magically enhanced as it sliced through the bone like butter. With careful hands, he removed the disk bone protecting the brain. Grey matter gleamed beneath, coiled like a pale river folded upon itself. The injury was visible as the blood drained away: a bruise spreading through gray matter like leaked ink.

He didn't heal it with a wave this time. He mapped with his mana, like a comb walking across the cortex, sensing electrical storms and only finding silence, noting where memory connections had been, where language had gone mute. Then he sank a filament of mana—so thin it seemed impossible—through the bruise, and he studied the links, the brain was already too far gone. Now it was time to study how these electrical impulses stored the memories and what makes someone, them...

—

A second mind was on the table. Not injured by a bruise this time, but injured by magic. The residue of the new charm he was developing to hide the memories lingered like frost patterns on glass, pretty and wrong. The memory connections throughout the brain had been torn and reknitted out of order, it wasn't a pretty sight, but the charm was effective. Someone would need to reknit these connections back together to gain access to any memories. A perfect charm to hide his experiments from the world.

Dhanvantri painted a circle over the patient's brow and stamped three runes in a single breath with his mana alone. Memory here behaved like a bundle of reeds—snap one and others bend themselves. He loosened what had been knotted with brutal efficiency, not restoring—just re-sequencing the edges to try and restore the flow of electrical impulses. The patient's breathing hitched slightly and then stilled. The healer marked something on a notebook: '''Even weak Obliviation leaves brittle marks on the connections—repair must be done slowly as not to break through the patient's tolerance. Observed tolerance of nerve cells in the brain is about a third of the nerves anywhere else.''' He didn't mourn the loss that couldn't be restored.

—

The next brain had a residue of Curse-scarring. Not the slow rot of minor hexes; the taste of curse mana was metallic, like rusted iron. Cruciatus residue, the darned spell damage was what he had been trying to fix when he started this project, but protecting memories from a charm that sets the pain nerves on fire all over the brain seemed almost impossible. The body had never received any pain, yet the mind lay tattered. Pain pathways were stamped into loops, and the patient trembled even now with no stimulus.

—

A dementor-touch coma. The patient lay with eyes open and unfocused; the breath was shallow, regular, untroubled, as if sleep had forgotten the exit. Soul-loss left a vacuum that ordinary magic couldn't fill. Dhanvantri tried everything, but the electrical impulses were there; they just didn't carry any mana with them. The patient was lost despite his hardest attempts.

—

The accident happened when he least expected it to.

He was working alone, the night sounded different when no one else breathed in it. The ritual circle was drawn on the floor from an earlier experiment. The anchor-line on the floor still pulsed faintly from attempting to siphon the soul back from a dementor.

He leaned over a new patient—another one without a soul—when a tremor ran through the floor. Not an earthquake, but the ritual circle reacted to his attempts to push the man's mana through the electrical impulses. The anchor-line resonated with the patient's damaged memory circuits. A thread of mana seized him. Not his body—his mind. A pull similar to an apparatus yanked him. For one beat, he was standing at the table; on the next beat, the world folded, and he was somewhere else: chill air, the smell of moss, stone underfoot. His hands were still wet with someone else's blood. The mana had taken him, not far away.

He didn't panic. He took inventory as he looked down. He was present—mind and mana both—but his body persisted down there, in the chamber, breathing without him, though his actions were paused. He thought about moving, and his vision zoomed, and the partial amount of mana he had was extinguished as he flooded back and collapsed on the ground.

—

I nearly tripped as the memory and feeling of a piercing headache hit me. The feeling of being disconnected from your own body was both disturbing and freeing. I looked down and noticed that Nalini was unconscious, her eyes had rolled down into the back of her head as she lay there trembling. I looked through the notifications blinking in front of me.

...

[Nalini Patil Mind Break Achieved]

[+1 to Charms]

[Nalini Patil Mind Break Achieved]

[+1 to Charms]

[Nalini Patil Mind Break Achieved]

[+1 to Charms]

...

'Right, might have overdone it a little bit.' I thought as I looked through the other notifications.

...

[Learned Secret Mana arts: Healing threads]

[Learned Secret Mana arts: Healing charm]

[Learned Secret Mana arts: Anchored Mind]

---