After the success of the trial spell, Professor Marth's team shared with the other healers the details of their discovery. Finding the cure wasn't a contest, but a priority for the whole Kingdom.
Thanks to the new and vital piece of information, the research began anew with the different teams sharing their success as well as the numerous failures. Those who tried to get rid of all the parasites in one go, had a high mortality rate compared to the healers cleansing one limb at a time.
The great numbers of worms, coupled with the high finesse required to control the dark energies without inflicting collateral damages, forced the researches to abandon projects that aimed for a single session treatment.
After a trial and error experimentation, it became apparent that the best approach was a different spell for each limb, arms, legs, chest and head. When Marth told him that their team was going to develop a tier five spells, Lith went back studying the other kinds of parasites, letting them do their job.
He had still a limited knowledge of tier four, whenever the discussion moved to tier five, Lith was able to understand only the general terms, there was nothing he had to offer anymore.
After eleven days, Marth's team had successfully converted the trial spell in four new spells. After testing their efficiency, curing several patients with a very low mortality rate, he went to inform Varegrave of their success.
Those days, the Colonel was often gloomy, no matter how many progresses the researchers did, he had never forgot his foolish bet with the King. The moment the cure was found, it would also be his last day.
When Marth finished his report, Varegrave went pale, his lunch made several attempts to escape the stomach and get back to the plate, but a few glasses of Dragon Water to celebrate the good news managed to calm his nerves.
"I'm impressed by your amazing results, Professor. The White Griffon truly deserves the title of 'cradle of the healing arts'. To think that less than two weeks ago we were considering the idea of incinerating the whole region." Varegrave shuddered.
The thought of so many innocent lives lost only because of his incompetence, hadn't allowed him to have a single good night of sleep since Lith's arrival.
"Just out of curiosity, did Lith help you develop the cure as well?"
"Oh, no. By the gods, if he managed to do such a thing, we would have a second Manohar at hand. Heavens know if one isn't already too much."
Varegrave nodded. His fate was sealed anyway, he decided it was best to understand the scope of his mistake, rather than live his last days in fear.
"It is odd, though. From your previous report, I understood that it was him discovering the key element for the cure and proposing the method."
Marth pondered for a while, searching for the right words to not appear arrogant or ungrateful towards his own student.
"Indeed he did. But saying 'there is a flood, we need a dam', is different from actually knowing how to alter the terrain and engineer a facility capable of getting the job done."
"I'm sorry, Professor, but you lost me at 'he did'. Do you mind to dumb it down for me?"
"Well, it's actually simple. Lith's diagnostic skill is the only thing he has on Manohar's level. He identified the plague's source and then understood how, at least in theory, it was possible to cure it. Yet he had no idea how to do it.
If he was a true genius, he would have assembled four or five tier four spells he already knew and attempted a makeshift cure. Luckily, he knows his limits and the importance of teamwork, so he came to me for help.
Long story short, his core idea was correct, but it was just a vague idea. Turning it into reality was beyond his capabilities. Not to mention how difficult has it been to make it actually work."
As most warriors, Varegrave had always had limited interest in healing magic, but since in the last month it had become his bread and butter. It was now a topic that piqued his curiosity.
"Not to be rude, but what are you saying doesn't make much sense. I read his file. I know he is the only S rank healer that appeared in the last five years. Otherwise, how do you explain that all the great magicians assembled here, you included, didn't manage to do the same, despite the gap in age and experience?"
Marth sighed deeply. He wasn't a prideful man, yet admitting to be inferior to a child always proved to be vexing for his ego.
"It's a matter of vision. All us old coots have taken bad habits during the years, and Lith is our wake up call. Since light magic has replaced medicine, we stopped asking ourselves questions that in this case proved to be vital.
We do not care anymore why a liver doesn't function properly, we just identify what's making the patient ill and fix it. We got so used to light magic's simplicity to became uncapable of thinking outside its boundaries.
Since Lith's arrival, he showed us how important was the knowledge of anatomy for regenerative magic, and now, being the only one that spectated to autopsies, managed to caught what we all stupidly overlooked.
He is considered a S rank talent, because while being taught to, we also learn from him. The lesson Lith has been imparting to us old fools is that science and magic are two aspects of the same thing, and that by relinquishing one we can't develop the full potential of the other."
***
Meanwhile, now that the light magic parasite was off the list, Lith was experimenting the cure he had suggested Marth on the victims of the fire and water parasites too. (AN: the parasites that cause spontaneous combustion/freezing when using the respective elemental magic.)
Thanks to Invigoration, he was capable of cleansing an infected in a matter of minutes.
Before asking Marth's advice, Lith had already verified on his own that the method was feasible, leaving most of the glory to the rest of the team. True magic allowed him a surgical precision in handling darkness magic, even inside the body of another human.
Killing a single worm or hundreds at a time was only a matter of focus for him. Whenever Solus would grow fond of one of their experimental subjects, he would cull the parasites in his body to prolong his life and prevent her to further delve into depression.
While Marth and the others were still busy creating a spell anyone could use, Lith had already discovered two important things. The first was that fire and water parasites could be treated the same way as the light magic ones.
The second, was that water parasites had a much longer reproductive cycle compared to their fire cousins. By checking the mortality data of the four different kinds of parasites, he noticed that water and magic blocking parasites were the ones causing the least amount of deaths.
Unbeknownst to him, only two had been created to infect the soldiers, while the others were intended to be used on the population of the Blood Desert tribes and Gorgon Empire respectively until they had completely submitted.
– "If the cure I have devised works for three parasites, I can hope it will work also for the fourth type. Based on what Varegrave said on my arrival, until a way to eradicate the magic blocking parasite isn't found, they will not let me go.
In a world like this, where quick transportation and communications are entirely magic dependant, the little critters can cause the fall of whole nations, bringing them back to the stone age.
It would be like if on Earth someone controlled a bacterium capable of sapping electrical current. Let's hope I am right. I can't wait to get out of here." –
The magic blocking parasite was the one Lith knew the least about. Since its victims were kept in a separate space created with dimensional magic, he had no way to interact with the infected without the supervision of Colonel Varegrave.
Most of them were powerful mages, that following the loss of their powers had been brought to the verge of insanity. The most common cause of death among the fourth group of infected wasn't the parasite, but suicide.
The second one was the constant rioting, which frequency was only getting worse with the passing of time. The medical ward was isolated from the external world, aggravating the feelings of helplessness and despair that had taken a deep root in the heart of the patients.
The few times that Lith managed to have access to the secret ward, the guards needed to be forewarned to have the time to restrain the residents before his arrival. Once he arrived, he had little time at hand and no privacy, so he could not conduct any experiment.
Now that the other threats were under control, Lith decided it was the right time to convince Varegrave to take out at least an infected from the secret ward and set up a separate tent for his studies.
