Healing did not come suddenly.
It came in inches, earned through months of stubborn repetition.
Lucien stopped marking days on bark tallies. Time lost meaning when every sunrise brought the same rituals: morning inspections of bandages, evening scrubs of bloodied tools, endless pots of boiling water steaming the huts into haze.
Cleanliness became law.
Not a prayer.
Not a hope.
Law.
Hands scrubbed raw with ash and boiled water before touching a wound.
Scrubbed again between patients.
Scrubbed after.
Every scrap of used cloth fed to the fire immediately—no exceptions.
When someone forgot, Lucien said nothing.
He only watched.
And when black rot followed the lapse, no one forgot again.
He knew an enemy existed.
Invisible.
Silent.
Merciless.
It traveled on fingers, on cloth, in droplets of water.
"Something lives where eyes cannot reach," he said one evening, staring into the steam rising from a cauldron. "But it dies to fire and vigilance."
The goblins listened.
The kobolds listened.
Even the skeptical beastkin listened.
Fermented alcohol became the next unbreakable rule.
It burned like liquid fire on raw flesh.
Patients screamed.
Some begged him to stop.
Lucien poured anyway.
He watched the results instead of the tears.
Wounds flushed with the sharp liquid festered less.
Fevers broke sooner.
Survival crept upward.
From barely half…
To seventy percent.
Then eighty.
Finally—ninety.
The healer's huts no longer reeked of sweet rot and death.
They smelled of smoke, crushed herbs, and clean, sun-dried cloth.
People still died.
But most lived.
That quiet shift changed everything.
It was a still afternoon months later when Luna spoke.
She was small, even for a goblin—barely reaching Lucien's chest. Sharp yellow eyes, always watching from the edges, always silent.
Until that day.
She stood beside him while he ground dried leaves, hands trembling.
"I…" She swallowed. "When I was sick… long ago… before you came… I ate fruit from the bitter tree. The fever went down."
Lucien paused.
Slowly turned.
"What fruit?"
Her description was clumsy—color like old blood, skin rough, taste that made the tongue numb.
Lucien closed his eyes.
Yard's memories stirred—not construction sites this time.
Pharmacies. Bottles with warning labels. Plants rendered into pills.
Not perfect recall.
Fragments.
Enough.
"Show me," he said.
They gathered everything the forest offered.
Fruits that stained fingers purple.
Roots that bled white sap.
Leaves that curled when crushed.
Bark that peeled in bitter strips.
Anything edible.
Anything that numbed, burned, or cooled the skin.
They tested cautiously.
Small doses.
On the willing.
On the desperate.
Failures came first—and often.
Some mixtures did nothing.
Some worsened fever.
Two refugees died retching black bile.
They recorded every detail on bark sheets: what was eaten, how much, what followed.
Two months dragged past.
Lucien's frustration grew sharp.
"This is too slow," he muttered one night, pacing between drying racks of leaves.
Then he stopped.
No.
It wasn't slow.
It was reckless.
He had been chasing Yard's world—assuming the same plants, the same reactions, the same rules.
But the soil here drank mana.
The plants grew twisted by it.
Life itself bent differently.
Lucien exhaled, long and slow.
"I don't need his answers," he whispered to the empty hut. "I need ours."
They stopped copying.
They started watching.
Adapting came harder than copying.
But it worked.
They found a pale root that, when boiled into tea, reliably cooled burning skin.
A red-berried vine whose crushed leaves drew pus from deep wounds.
A gray moss that, dried and powdered, slowed bleeding.
Not cures.
Not miracles.
Control.
Bodies stopped cooking themselves from inside.
Wounds stopped racing toward rot.
Patients lived long enough for flesh to knit.
Survival climbed again.
Ninety-five percent.
The village changed.
Not into a fortress.
Into something safer.
Hunters returned with meat instead of corpses.
Children played longer.
Trust took root—slow, cautious, but real.
Creatures from deeper territories arrived.
Some wounded.
Some merely starving.
They stayed.
Because this place worked.
Because here, wounds no longer meant sentences.
Lucien never declared himself leader.
Yet every eye turned to him when choices came.
Goblins.
Kobolds.
Beastkin.
Scaled exiles.
Horned wanderers.
All different.
All breathing.
All alive because of rules no god had handed down.
One night, Lucien stood at the settlement's edge, watching new torches flicker among the trees—another group arriving, guided by rumor.
Walls stood higher now, braced properly.
Medicine waited in clay jars, labeled with careful scratches.
Knowledge grew—imperfect, hard-won, theirs.
Magic could heal faster.
That truth still stung.
A single spell could close a gut wound in heartbeats.
But spells demanded mana—and mana demanded obedience to the gods who granted it.
This path demanded only effort.
Relentless, bleeding, exhausting effort.
And effort forged something magic never could.
Unity.
Lucien clenched his fists, nails biting into healed palms.
Deep in his mind, the voice remained silent.
It didn't need to speak.
Lucien had already taken the next step.
The world beyond the forest—still blind, still arrogant—had begun to shift beneath its feet.
And it did not yet know why.