Tim's POV
Winter released its grip on E-Rantel, in stages, the cold retreating inch by inch while the city tested the warming air, The sick room thinned as the season changed. Fewer of the crowding-related fevers that peaked when families huddled together in unventilated rooms for warmth. The elderly woman who had worried me most in the early weeks had graduated from steam treatments to morning walks in the courtyard, which she conducted with the deliberate pleasure of someone who had been told they wouldn't see another spring come.
One more level in Doctor, in the two months following the initial push. As Expected, But Still, level 20 was level 20, and I recorded it in my private notebook with the same satisfaction I gave to all progress.
I learned the *Clean* spell on a grey morning in late winter, a quiet click of something slotting into place in the architecture of my magical capacity. I cast it immediately on the cloth wrappings I used in the sick room, watching the grime and biological residue simply cease to exist, the fabric returning to a state of cleanliness that no amount of boiling water with soap and physical scrubbing had been able to fully achieve.
I sat with the clean cloth in my hands and felt something that in a previous life I would have called spiritual.
Clean* was, objectively, a domestic utility spell. It had no combat application. It would not help me in a fight, would not impress the Theocracy agents I had concluded were monitoring my development *not very sneaky, when you watch me form my window at winter, would contribute almost nothing to the metrics by which this world evaluated dangerous people. In the church's informal hierarchy of magical achievement it ranked approximately alongside the salt-and-sugar spell, useful, unglamorous, not given the glory it rightfully earn.
I had wanted this spell more specifically and more urgently than I had wanted almost anything since my rebirth.
Because I had spent months working in a room full of sick people without it, doing wound care with boiled instruments and hoping, every single day, that my methods were sufficient and my immune system, bolstered by whatever statistical contributions my levels of development had made to my constitution was holding. The *Clean* spell made that entire category of concern obsolete. Instruments, cloth, surfaces, my own hands, sterile on demand, at will, for the cost of a moment's concentration.
It was the best spell ever made. I held this opinion firmly and did not expect to revise it regardless of whatever tier ten catastrophe-magic I will eventually learn, if i can, with what little time i have left.
The druid class arrived quietly enough that I almost missed it, right after i learned the clean spell.
I had been walking through the church's rear courtyard in the early morning, a habit maintained through winter and resumed properly now that the cold was receding, when I became aware of something that I initially mistook for a peculiarity of the morning air. A kind of texture to the ambient information around me that hadn't been there before. Not sound exactly. Not in any way that translated cleanly to the sensory vocabulary I had developed over eight years of this life and forty years of the previous one.
I stopped walking.
The old rosemary bush near the south wall was, and I had no better word for it, *communicating.* Not in language. Not in anything that assembled into meaning the way words did. More like the way a person's posture communicated something, or the way a room's temperature communicated something, information present in the environment, available to interpretation, not transmitted deliberately but simply *there* for anyone with the right capacity to receive it.
The rosemary was dry. It wanted water. Not urgently, it was a resilient plant, winter-hardened, built for dry conditions. But there was a quality to its state that I could now perceive directly rather than inferring from the colour of its needles and the dryness of the surrounding soil.
I stood very still and extended this new perception outward.
The courtyard resolved into a completely different kind of information. The young apple tree in the corner had something going on with its root system, a wrongness, that suggested either a drainage problem or something competing for nutrients below the surface. The herbs along the east wall were largely content, the mild winter having suited them. One section of grass near the gate had been walked on too consistently, compacted, and was struggling in a way that felt almost like discomfort.
The *Bind* spell I had acquired alongside the druid class was more immediately legible as useful. Tier one, nature-aligned, vines and roots responding to direction, small-scale entanglement, I practiced it in my room at night, running roots from the pot of soil on my windowsill through their paces, learning the spell's texture and limits.
The wheat seedlings in that pot were also, I noted, considerably more communicative than I had expected. They wanted more light than the window provided. I rotated the pot daily after that.
The classroom confrontation arrived on a Tuesday.
I had been expecting something like it for months, had watched the trajectory of the other students, the ones who had learned *Light Healing* in the first year and been quietly transferred to the room I had concluded was the advanced track. The room where the church put the students it considered genuinely talented, the ones worth investing serious instruction time in. I had watched them go, choosing to remain invisible.
The instructor, Brother Aldous, a careful and genuinely knowledgeable man who had been patient with the remaining students in ways that probably exceeded what the institution expected of him, announced the deadline is in one week, those who can't learn *Light Healing* will leave this class.
The remaining class was four students including me. Two had been struggling with the fundamental magical attunement required, the tier one threshold simply beyond where they currently were. One had the attunement but seemed to lack something in the direction of faith, or karma, or whatever the holy magic system used as its internal qualifier. I had watched this third student with private sympathy for months, genuinely devout, genuinely trying, unable to understand why the magic wasn't responding to effort that was obviously real *poor young lad*.
And then there was me, who had been able to cast *Light Healing* since November of the first year, and had spent years, pretending otherwise.
Revealing early meant the advanced room, meant more scrutiny, and more attention, I just want to be free, so I was sitting in a class being assessed as a slow learner, an unremarkable student who had squeaked through at the last moment.
I preferred unremarkable. Unremarkable was safe.
Unremarkable meant the Theocracy's observers in this institution were sending back reports that read *developing normally, no exceptional indicators beyond initial assessment* which was exactly the kind of report I wanted them to be sending, just leave me be.
Three days. I waited the three days, which felt appropriate, not the first day, which would have been too clearly strategic, but not the last day either, which would have felt theatrical.
On the third day I raised my hand in class and said I thought I was ready to try.
Brother Aldous watched me cast *Light Healing* with a bored expression. The spell came out cleanly, I made sure it looked like the spell of someone who had recently learned it, slightly effortful, slightly imprecise.
He passed me through.
I was three months behind those other students, but allowed to remain in the current class, which now shifted its focus to the second tier one holy spell.
*Holy Water.*
The Water God's specific contribution to the tier one repertoire, distinct from the fire church's *Holy Flame* or the earth church's *Sacred Ground, each denomination having developed their elemental variation on the same fundamental magical principle.
I already knew *Holy Water.* Had known it for years. I listened to the introductory instruction with genuine interest anyway, because Brother Aldous explained the underlying theory better than anything I had read in the library, and good theory was always worth having regardless of whether you already had the practice.
After class I went to the garden.
Hosef was finishing for the afternoon, collecting his tools with the unhurried routine. I took over the section he'd been working on, a bed of medicinal herbs that needed thinning, and let the new perception spread outward as I worked.
It was, I had decided over the past weeks, the most remarkable thing I had developed so far. Not the most powerful, the level gains from cooking and medicine had been more immediately impactful on my raw capability. Not the most useful in life, *Clean* would save more lives in practical terms. But the most *different*. The most genuinely new. Forty years of human experience and eight years of this life had not prepared me for the specific quality of understanding that came from being able to perceive what a living plant needed.
They didn't think. They didn't have opinions or personalities or inner lives in any sense I would recognise as such. But they had states, and those states were legible to me now.
The herbs in this bed were content. The thinning was correct, giving the remaining plants the space they needed. I worked through it with the clean efficiency of someone operating on accurate information.
The wheat on my windowsill appeared in my perception even from here, a faint thread of connection, extending through the church walls, the seedlings small and determined and wanting slightly more water than I'd given them this morning.
I filed the information and planned to address it before sleep.
The farmer job class required consistent engagement with growing food crops, genuine agricultural work, not ornamental gardening.
I finished the herb bed, thanked Hosef briefly, and went inside.
The wheat was waiting, as I gave it a little water.
Tim's stats (he can't see his true stats)
level: [22]
Vermin killer: [2/10]
Assassin: [2/10]
Priest: [1/10]
Gardener: [1/15]
Chef: [9/15]
Doctor: [4/10]
Wizard: [1/10]
Durid: [1/5] [Rare job class, unlocked form having both Wizard and gardener]