SSS-Ranked Surgeon In Another World: The Healer Is Actually OP!

Chapter 423: Soul Talent Awakening

Something shifted at that very moment... Bruce felt it, It was small at first. A slight tightening. A faint pressure behind his sternum where, in the physical realm, his core would have sat. Then the pressure spread into his shoulders, down through his chest, into the soft architecture of his soul-body and as it spread, he felt himself firm up.

His edges, which the mist had been thinning, suddenly held.

He felt the draw stop.

The mist around him kept moving, kept brushing his skin, kept doing whatever it had been doing but it was no longer eating him. It could not reach him anymore. He had a wall now, not made of anything he could see, but real. A wall of himself.

The will had woken.

A second later, almost at the same moment, he felt the aura come.

That one was different. It did not tighten inward. It pushed outward. A soft radiating presence that extended a hand-span past his soul-body in every direction, then settled there, holding its shape.

He could feel the mist hitting the edge of it and parting, flowing around him rather than through him. He could feel the swirl around Kael in a different way now, like he could feel the shape of it from inside, the way water reaches against another current.

Bruce’s mind, which had been narrowing for hours under the mist’s pressure, suddenly cleared.

The drumbeat he had been holding; the I am Bruce Ackerman mantra which he had been repeating to barely hold his consciousness together slowed down and stopped completely. He did not need it anymore. The anchor was no longer outside him in a repeated phrase. It was inside him. The will held what the drumbeat had been holding.

The serenity came down on him like cool water.

For the first time since arriving in this realm, he was safe.

A new perception opened.

It was not a sight, exactly. It was something more like a corridor, a path of view that ran inward from his attention, leading down into the core of his soul where, before now, he had not been able to look. Kael had said the imprints lived there. Bruce had not understood, at the time, what he meant.

He understood now.

He followed the path.

He went past the layers he was used to, memory, identity, the texture of his own thoughts and went further, into a stillness that felt very old. The kind of old that predated his current life. The kind of old that maybe predated any life he could name.

At the bottom, there was a small space.

Inside the space, three words.

They were written in the air the way starlight was written in the night sky, not on any surface, but there, clearly readable, holding their own shape against nothing.

The first word was bold and clear.

The second word was also bold, but slightly fainter than the first.

And the third word was blurry, half-formed, as if seen through fogged glass. He could see that it was a word, that something was written there, but he could not read it. It was extremely strange...

He looked at the first word.

It read:

[SANATIO DIVINA]

Bruce was not a language expert.

But he had lived, in the physical realm, for a long time. He had traveled. He had read more than most men read in three lifetimes, and his photographic memory had kept all of it, every page, every signpost, every label on every old artifact he had ever happened to look at. He recognized the shape of these letters. He recognized the flow of them. This was Latin.

’Latin.’ He frowned, briefly, at that. Latin was a human language. A specific human language, from a specific place on Earth, invented at a specific point in human history. There was no reason, none that he could think of, why a language his species had created in a particular era of a particular planet would be imprinted on his soul from before his soul could possibly have known the language existed.

He filed it away.

The translation came to him with a little effort. Sanatio meant healing. Divina meant divine. Divine Healing. Or something close to that. Holy healing. Healing of a sacred kind.

He remembered Kael’s words at once.

’The first imprint connects to the body. Your body talent.’

His body talent in the physical realm was [Godly Healer].

The connection was immediate, undeniable. Divine Healing and Godly Healer were close.

They were not the same name, exactly, but they were the same concept. The first imprint was the deep, soul-level root of the talent he had carried in his body for years.

He had been using this imprint his whole awakened career without knowing it was there. The body talent he had thought of as his, earned through awakening, had actually been written into his soul before he was born. Maybe before this life was born.

It was strange and Bruce was left speechless

That was a thought too large to handle right now. He set it down.

He took a breath. The breath here, in this inner space, did not move air but the motion of it settled him.

After reading the first imprint Bruce was excited as to what the second imprint will be...

Taking a deep breath, he moved his attention to the second word.

The second word read:

[SANARE VERITATEM]

Bruce thought about it for a moment, working through the Latin slowly.

Sanare meant to heal, or to restore. The verb form. Veritatem meant truth, in the accusative case. The object of the verb.

’To restore truth. Or, perhaps more loosely, to heal truth itself.’

Bruce frowned.

He read the words again. He turned them in his mind, looking at them from different angles, the way he had once turned difficult diagnoses in his head during his surgeon years. The translation was not hard. The translation was clear. It was the meaning that was strange.

To restore truth.

He knew that to awaken his soul talent he had to comprehend this, so he went into it, thinking hard...

What did that mean, as a soul talent? Healing was a familiar concept, his whole body talent was built on healing. He had healed wounds, healed diseases, healed cellular structures of both the living and the space of the living universe. He had once healed entire bodies back from the edge of death. He knew what healing was. He understood healing as a mechanism.

But truth was not a body. Truth was not flesh. Truth was not something one could put back together with knitting bone and re-threading nerves. Truth was an idea. A condition. A state of how-things-actually-were.

How could a talent restore that?

The thought turned over in him.

’Does this mean to rewrite truth?’

He did not mean it the way it sounded. He meant, if truth could be broken, somehow, in a way the soul realm recognized, then restoring it would mean returning it to what it actually was. Putting it back to its real shape. Healing it. The way he had healed bodies back to their natural form.

But to do that, you would have to be able to see the real shape of truth in the first place. You would have to know what truth was supposed to look like, even when reality was telling you something different. You would have to be able to correct reality back toward what was true.

That was...

That was a strange power. A frightening power, if it worked the way it was reading.

As he thought this, as the meaning of the words finally began to settle into him, as he stopped looking at the symbols and started understanding what they actually said

Something exploded from within him.

It was not a sound. It was not light. It was a pressure, sudden and total, blooming outward from the core of his soul where the imprints lived. The space inside him filled with it.

The path of view he had been walking down to reach the imprints widened all at once, and the second word, SANARE VERITATEM, flared bright, the bold lines of the Latin going from clear to incandescent, and the brightness fed back into him through the path it had opened.

He felt his soul-body, sitting cross-legged in the swirl, change.

The aura that had only just settled at a hand-span around him expanded. The will that had only just woken sharpened. He felt himself, all of him, become more real, more present in this realm, more capable of acting in it, more himself.

His soul talent was awakening.

And it was, he understood without needing to be told, not a small one.

Hopefully what he’ll get will be helpful on his journey to the top...

It’s not going to be easy, But Bruce wasn’t about to give up, he’ll give it his all...

***

A/N:

What do you guys think of the story so far?