Raymond sighed, having subjected Cluma to some sort of diagnostic spell. "I used to see injuries like this from time to time in Synklisi, when children of rich parents took up delving. They buy fancy equipment, but don't have the stats to back it up. The armour did exactly what it was supposed to, spreading out the force of the blow, but you didn't have the endurance or health pool to absorb it. I'm afraid your arm is broken, your skull is fractured and you have a couple of smashed ribs. Not only that, but shards of rib have punctured one of your lungs. You're lucky they didn't hit your heart."

Cluma didn't answer, concentrating on the more important task of breathing as Raymond followed up with a [Major Heal]. The details of her injuries didn't matter to the spell, which simply made things better regardless of what was wrong. No, the diagnosis wasn't for his benefit. It was for ours. He was blatantly trying to shock us into less risky behaviour. Not that I agreed with him...

"Surely it isn't a stats problem. With my buff spells and her enchanted ring, all three of her physical stats were around a hundred. Not much different from the monster we were fighting."

I'd got a broad idea of what had happened; the monster had swung its tentacles blind, catching Cluma by surprise. She'd sliced off one, dodged the second, and tried to block the third with an arm. It seemed a reasonable move; her wrist guard wouldn't be damaged by an attack of that magnitude. But that was where things had gone wrong. Her block had failed, the attack forcing her arm back into her chest instead, breaking both arm and ribs and launching her backward into the wall, where she'd impacted her head, leaving her semi-conscious.

As nasty as the injury had been, she hadn't ended up with [Survivor], so it hadn't dipped into the reserves that came from me casting [Endurance] on her even before the potions.

"Hmm... Okay, that is higher than I assumed. Perhaps the issue was one of weight?"

It was true that stats did nothing about weight, and Cluma was certainly on the petite side for a rank three delver. And while I tended to think of tentacles like whips, the boss's appendages had been thick and heavy. The boss itself obviously weighed far more than Cluma.

But she'd been hit by the hydra's tail, too, which was even heavier, and walked away uninjured. She hadn't smacked into a wall afterwards, and the tail was thicker, so it had been a full body experience rather than a focused blow. I could see how it might not have been so damaging.

The healing magic eased Cluma's breathing, and her pained expression faded. "Sorry," she mumbled.

"You don't have anything to apologise for," I said. "That's the first time a monster has reacted so resolutely to an invisible attacker. It caught us both by surprise."

She didn't look any happier. Nor was she fully healed, but she wasn't far off; Raymond's animalite staff provided a substantial boost to his magic.

"She'll need to stay in overnight," supplied the aforementioned Raymond. "I'll be able to finish her healing tomorrow, but I suggest you try to avoid taking any further injuries until the day after."

"We always try to avoid taking injuries," I grumbled, but my heart wasn't really in it. I wasn't giving Cluma empty platitudes; I really didn't think she'd made any bad decisions in the fight. At most, she could have rolled with the blow instead of trying to stop it completely. If there was a bad decision, it was that we were in the fight at all. It was a fight against a monster on the level of an ogre, and I certainly wouldn't want to take a blow from one of their clubs. We'd fought the smaller versions, but not the boss, with its higher mental stats. We had fought the earlier bosses, but they lacked the tentacles, and hence the ability to make sweeping attacks behind themselves against an invisible opponent.

It was the risk we'd decided to take. We knew we were delving deeper than we should if we wanted to play safe. Accidents happened. They'd probably happen again. I was damn well going to improve our contingencies, though, starting with binning all my existing potions and replacing them with rank three versions, now that rank three was no worse for alchemical poisoning than rank two for either of us.

Well, maybe donate, rather than bin.

"Want a bunch of mana potions?" I asked Raymond.

"Huh? Why?"

"Now that we're both rank three, we should be carrying rank three potions, but I've got a stockpile of rank two stuff. No point wasting it, if someone else thinks they can make use of them."

"I think that perhaps my subtle attempt at pointing out you shouldn't rely on equipment went over your head, but I wouldn't say no. Next time the idiots at the institute blow something up and two dozen of them turn up here wanting burns healed all at the same time, a supply of mana potions would be useful."

"Don't worry, it didn't go over my head," I answered. He had a point, but it wasn't completely black and white. The Emerald Caverns had sizeable stashes of heavily enchanted weapons and armour now, and I'd heard some other cities with deep dungeons were thinking about copying the idea. Besides, rank three was what we should be using; that's what rank we really were.

Although, as I took the mana potions from my [Item Box], I did have another interesting thought.

"When you heal someone, how does the spell know what to do?" I asked. "Especially if it's regenerating a limb or something."

"The spell knows what should be there," shrugged Raymond. "Don't ask me how. It's literally magic."

But the 'how' was what I was interested in. Did it read our DNA and extrapolate from that? Did the System record what everyone looked like before an injury?

"Are there injuries that can't be healed?"

"Well, yes, obviously. A rank two [Heal] won't regenerate anything that the body couldn't theoretically do on its own. A rank three [Major Heal] can recover entire missing limbs, as long as it's cast within a reasonable amount of time. If an injury is years old, it becomes permanent, and can never be healed."

Well, that was interesting. Not DNA then. It could be the System theory, but I had another one.

I'd repeatedly chopped limbs off recently, and watched the way I still had a soul of a leg existing where my flesh leg would have been had I not just let Grover hack it off with an axe. My soul had grown into my catkin ears. Would it likewise disperse from a lost part over time?

"Umm, can I get a [Major Heal] too?" I asked, invoking [Detach] and [Item Box] under my helmet to remove my fake ears, then using the second and third stages of [Detach] to sever them completely. Expecting the itch after my last experience of completely removing my ears, I managed to keep a straight face and barely even twitched. [Soul Perception] confirmed that my fluffy soul ears remained, and I could always reattach the fake ones if, as seemed likely, this test didn't do anything.

"You didn't say anything about being injured," he commented suspiciously.

"I wasn't. I'm just interested in how it works."

He shrugged and chugged one of my potions, then blasted me with magic.

"Huh?" he commented in surprise as he focused on nothing in front of him. "What does it mean, 'working'?"

I didn't respond, on account of the way keeping a straight face was suddenly the last thing on my mind. I was, in fact, left clawing at my head, trying to tear my scalp off. Luckily for my scalp, my helmet was in the way, and I lacked the presence of mind to remove it.

"Whu? What did you just do?" exclaimed Cluma from her bed, where she'd been dozing and not really paying attention to the conversation.

I continued not to respond as the itch grew until it became my entire world. It had its own continents, oceans and weather systems. There may have been a moon.

"Hey? Are you okay?" asked Raymond, targeting me with whatever diagnosis spell he'd used on Cluma earlier. "Missing ears? No you don't..."

"You just did some sort of stupid experiment on your ears," stated Cluma flatly. "Seriously. Time and place!"

"I wasn't expecting it to... to... argg!" I gasped. There was a pair of painful pops and a sudden release of pressure. The itch immediately died away as if it had never been.

ding

Skill [Regeneration] advanced to level 6

For becoming an inspiration to xenophiliacs everywhere, [Test Subject] awards 5 soul points.

"What the heck just happened?" demanded Raymond, his professionalism slipping for a moment. "I just got a class level and soul point for performing a class related feat for that! And I've never had the System give me a 'working' message before!"

"It just means you did something unusual and the System took a while to process it," I said, panting. Also, I'd confirmed how healing magic decided what it needs to heal. Alas, I couldn't tell him, because it was soul related.

"I just healed you. How was that unusual?" he asked, so I activated [Item Box] to remove my helmet.

I could see with [Mana Sight] exactly what the healing spell had done. I now had catkin ears not of fabric, but of flesh and blood, perfectly overlapping my soul. Not only that, but my head had been rewired to support them, sprouting new blood vessels and nerves. The 'working' bit was probably the spell working out how to 'heal' my missing ears without carving a chunk out of my skull to make space.

"Well?" he asked, not seeing anything odd. I glanced at Cluma, who was wearing her usual tilted head of confusion. I guess my new ears must look exactly like my old.

"My 'fake' ears. Take a closer look."

He did. Then he poked and prodded them a few times. I felt them flick, not behaving any differently to how I was used to. I wasn't fooled, though; putting aside what I could see with [Mana Sight], I could hear the blood flowing through them.

"They're... real?"

"Yup. You 'healed' them. And if that worked, you can use the same trick to regenerate limbs that were lost too long ago to heal normally."

"How in the... You know what? I don't care. If you feel like explaining, please do so to Carys instead of me."

"Just think of it as a free class level and soul point," I giggled. To be fair, it required a rank five enchantment, and an arm would run into the same difficulties as my tail. Worse, in fact, because what would a scaled down arm look like?

"True," he sighed, and left the room in a way that suggested he really wanted to storm out but couldn't think up a valid reason to.

"He might not want you to explain, but I do," demanded Cluma. "What did you just do this time?"

"With the rank five biological integration enchantment letting me hear through my fake ears, it was getting harder to think of them as being fake. I made a guess at how healing magic decided what to heal, and I turned out to be right. My body thinks it should have catkin ears now, so with them missing, a healing spell 'healed' them."

"That's... weird. You're weird. Nothing you do makes any sense!"

"Not nothing. I mean, the cereal I made this morning was pretty normal."

"This morning, yes. But you even turned cereal into one of your weird experiments before."

"Well, putting that aside, you rest up. We'll take tomorrow off, and the day after..." I paused.

"What? Why do you look so guilty?"

"Given the rush earlier, I forgot to leave a beacon. We'll need to start from floor one again."

Cluma sighed. "Boring. At least the first floors were smaller. Now that we know what we're doing, we should easily be able to get back to where we were in a few days."

"Yeah. It's a waste of time, but it could be worse."

Cluma shrugged, then flopped back down onto the mattress. It may not have been on the level of Lord Reid's furniture, but it wasn't stuffed with the same hay as the last time I'd been here. They'd had upgrades. Perhaps straw was considered too unhygienic for a hospital. "Are you going to do the same thing with your tail?" she asked with her eyes closed.

"Probably."

"Why? Aren't you happy with the way you are?"

I paused to think. I had a few acquaintances who disliked or felt outright disgust at their bodies back on Earth. Normally it was because their body was the wrong gender, or too fat. Oddly, I'd never met anyone who was disgusted at the age of their body. Why weight but not age? People were weird, but maybe in this case, my sample size was just so small that I'd never met them.

In this world, I'd never met anyone in that situation. Was that sample size again, or was it Law? Heck, if I was right about healing being based on soul, should soul and body not match, wouldn't healing magic fix any problems of that sort?

In any case, having met those who were actually unhappy, I understood my own position well.

"Yes. I'm perfectly happy. But that doesn't mean I don't want to change things from time to time. Experiment or try something new. Perhaps it comes from the way I've already had two completely different bodies, so the concept of modifying things again isn't a complete unknown. I don't have any aversion to changing myself."

"Huh. Okay, I can kinda see that. But you're still weird."

"And proud of it."

Cluma snorted as she failed to suppress a laugh.

"What's you opinion?" I asked. "Do you want me to stop?"

"It's not that but... It makes it feel like you aren't taking beastkin seriously. Like you think a bit of fur is the only good part of us. Especially given what I drank for you."

I winced at that as the guilt bubbled up again. "That didn't really have anything to do with species," I pointed out. "I'd have refused to sleep with you regardless of what species you were."

"I know. Well, there's no point you hanging around here all day. Go swap your tail out, buy us a bunch of wood, and do whatever else you wanted to."

Yes, that was all stuff I could do today. There wasn't much point in me staying here; Cluma and I worked and lived together, and hence spent most of our time together. I could leave her alone for the rest of the day.

So of course I sat down at the edge of the bed and started drawing up vague house plans as she rested. I wasn't going anywhere.