By now me administering Healer’s Resistance to townsfolk and refugees was just reflex. Just press Yes, Yes, Yes over and over again. The day was creeping on, and the entire area outside the town was abuzz with activity. We had some folks helping to tend and harvest plants from my magical garden, some folks tending to those who had just received their treatment, another few teams of people giving them interviews with little clipboards Alan had gotten from gods knew where. Those ones were acting as little Sorting Hats.

    And the vast majority they sent along to the Bucket Line. Some remained inside the town, because they had a decent Durability, while others needed to remain outside. The Bucket Line continually passed comatose subjects out of town and right to the administration zone where they could be roused out of sleep, comforted, quizzed, sorted, and join the workforce.

    so much

    “Um… what?” Unconsciously, I pressed Yes each time someone came to see me regarding Healer’s Resistance. I then cursed each and everyone who had ever thought or uttered the words ‘it’s more fun to find out’ when it came to this kind of thing.

    Instead I opened up the first option, Reclusive Herbalist.

    That sounded… terrible. There was no way I was going to forego being part of an awesome team, which I was. I clicked on the next one, Apothecary of Nightshade & Toadstool.

    “Great googly moogily,” I muttered. Just what in the hecky Becky had I stumbled onto here? I clicked Yes a handful more times for Healer’s Resistance, and ignored the bright flash of orange light surrounding more and more people as the ability took hold. Shaking my head once more at the thought of a poisoner class, I proceeded to click on Battle Medic. If this was just as terrible as the first two, maybe I would just stay Healer and be level 25 forever.

    Now this… this didn’t look terrible. Luckily all three of these new classes listed something called an advanced skill progression. They also seemed to be listing more and more impressive prerequisites that I’d accomplished since beginning my tenure as a Healer. Battle Medic didn’t seem as bad as the first two, given that there were instantaneous remedies like an enhanced Healer’s Breath I could look forward to. That said, I hadn’t raised my hand to anyone in this world and wasn’t about to start. Combat abilities would be wasted on me.

    Cleric of the Divine was next on the list.

    This seemed, on its face, like a step down. Sure holy smiting abilities sounded nice, but so many gods were on the fritz in this world… what if that happened with my ‘chosen’ god? It seemed from the write up that my regular herb-based healing abilities would be lost and replaced with holy stuff.

    On top of that, no advanced skill progression here, making this an automatic no.

    No, no thank you.

    While clicking Yes to grant people my ability (which existed for now and who knew how long thereafter), I looked at the last two options: Godsbane and Arcane Mender. S~ea??h the N?velFire.nёt website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

    Yikes to the first.

    “Nope!” I said, causing several townsfolk to flinch. “Not you. You’re okay. I’ll give you Healer’s Resistance.”

    I sighed. So far, the only one that seemed remotely good was Battle Medic… the rest had awful restrictions, and the last one was a hundred percent the opposite what I wanted to do with my life here.

    I mean sure, I could understand why someone might want to seize the godslayer blade and run around killing gods until Thor showed up to stop them in a situation that was way too dark to be funny but also far too light in tone. The gods were indeed on the fritz, and they had indeed killed people. Other Healers if you believed what the admin superiors told me. But I didn’t think that killing them was the answer, when I’d already had success healing them.

    After taking a deep breath, I clicked on Arcane Mender.

    I breathed out a hefty sigh of relief.

    With just the sun on my face and a near limitless progression of people ready to spend Ingenuity Tokens so they could have some time in the town they called home, I basked in the feeling of finally having progressed to my new class evolution.

    Arcane Mender Christopher Fletcher. It just rolled off the tongue, if for instance you first vomited all the words into your mouth. And now, without further ado…

    I pressed Yes another fifty times to let people join the bucket line. Then I watched as the bucket line passed more and more and more Nakamamon from the town of Glumpdumpkin out of the town limits. It was lovely to see the unconscious lumps lovingly passed from one person to another, having been placed on stretchers Larelle had cobbled together. They floated into our cure distribution area, where the weak ones without much Durability and Ingenuity learned how to distribute the cures to the sleeping, and worked in pairs to make sure the comatose patients didn’t choke on the micro dose of potion… that we were running out of. Some helped the patients to stir, helped get them processed, some of them even helped in my herb garden under Vellenia’s direction.

    I couldn’t think about that now. I needed instead to see Cinzy, our Bard comforting the newly awakened and telling them all was well, that we were awakening the whole town for purposes of ending this whole situation once and for all. All they had to do was see Alan over there, the stuttering one with the clipboard and the stylus. Several other Alans now existed, each with their own clipboards and styluses, marking down on soft clay where they were sending people.

    From there, they’d list out their Ingenuity and Durability, and either head off to join the line to see me for Healer’s Resistance, or the team leads around us for various and sundry other tasks. Pulling and drying herbs from my garden, joining the out-of-town-limits bucket line, joining the potion distribution teams, and more.

    We had already begun ramping up the speed of production, meaning Cinzy was no longer the bottleneck… I was.

    I needed to get through the class evolution stuff fast, and start spending my Tokens on the remaining gigantic punch bowls filled with potions we needed to keep this train a-running.

    I’d been almost all the way through these, salivating at all the wonders they were going to give me, and how I planned on spending my skill points. No more individual skill points going into salves or tinctures or unguents! No more individual skill points needed for magical diagnostics or physical! I was practically rubbing my hands together, in my mind at least.

    But then Hard At Work had disappeared.

    “Oh no,” I breathed.

    My first and most consistent ally, the sole reason I’d been able to handle such high level challenges, diagnose and then heal up gods when I was just an Apprentice Healer. Doubling my Tokens was insanely powerful, I had realized. I counted on it to be my bedrock in the days to come, when I’d need to handle this God of Productivity. Had taken it for granted, apparently. Now it was gone.

    I rushed mentally to where the new ability was written down.

    I smacked myself mentally for doing this now. I had grown to love the doubling of Tokens from Hard at Work, and the free retry. This was… probably great, when I sat down to think about it. Turning one Token into two was really good…

    …and I could do that for 2 Tokens at a time. Meaning I could take 2 Durability Tokens and turn them into 4 Ingenuity Tokens. It said from one attribute to another, so that most likely meant Free Tokens were right out.

    That was pretty great, three times a day. I’d need to be careful about how I did this.

    I gave my consent another dozen times while spending skill points. Twenty was a lot, making me grin. While I had a metric ton of skills and it didn’t typically feel like enough, a huge grin spread across my face. I had to be careful; I could raise each skill once per level. With that in mind, I would soon need…

    “Diagnosis…” I put one into each of those. Another one into Develop Cure (Large), and then I paused. I needed to know more about the new skills, the spellcasting stuff.

    First, some of the spellcasting I knew from my days playing assorted roleplaying games and video games. Abjuration was protection magic, principally for resistances, but there were a handful of circles of protection that stopped someone or something from entering that circle. It might be useful to make a divine protection circle when working near the body of our God of Productivity. Not incredibly useful unless there were poison Nakamamon or fire Nakamamon that needed saving. So… possibly useful.

    Conjuration was creating something out of nothing. I already had it on good authority that conjuring materials wasn’t as good as having the real thing. Although I needed glycerine and oils as bases for my treatments and cures, they wouldn’t work if they were magically conjured, so Conjuration was going to take a backseat, if I bought it at all.

    Evocation harnessed the forces of the planet, so that would allow me to create fireballs and lightning bolts and such. Not initially, but once my level got high enough, the classic explosive fireball was possible. That put Evocation into the not necessary pile, as I could just as easily get some fire going with firewood or a Magmamander.

    The last one was Transmutation, or changing one material into another. I knew this could eventually work on living things, but I thought it might work very well for my purposes. Unlike Conjuration, which made a material strictly out of magic, Transmutation took a real thing and made it into a different real thing. I put a point into that one.

    Mana Shaping I wasn’t entirely sure on, but once I focused on it, the pop up explained (in two different bickering voices) that it was about pulling mana together and threading it into the necessary shape to cast into spells. Like with my treatments and cures, I’d be staking the Spellcasting skill with Mana Shaping in order to cast. That one got a skill point too.

    And last was the new skill Instinctual Casting. The write up on this one was long, and explained essentially that casting spells was incredibly complicated, difficult, and wonky for people who had never done it before or didn’t have training. But, like Trent’s instinctual mastery of stone and his ability to shape it, make it float, soften it up, and so forth, this skill could blunt the limitations of not knowing what I was doing. Each point of Instinctual Casting would be used  on spellcasting checks.

    “Hm.” If I had spellcasting, I wouldn’t need to generate treatments and cures in order to use Arcane Alchemy to redistribute my Tokens.

    When I put a point into Instinctual Casting, a pop up appeared and I didn’t swat it away this time, like I had with Transmutation and Mana Shaping. I was glad I did, too.

    I pressed Yes a whole bunch of times to grant people Healer’s Resistance, which thankfully had remained my class ability.

    Okay, with level 7 being the cap for new skills, I immediately put Instinctual Casting at 7, a single level into each of the Spellcasting skills, and then a single level into Mana Shaping and Mana Affinity. Meditation I’d already spent a ridiculous amount of time leveling all on its own. Okay, that was 13 points from new skills, 4 from Diagnosis, and 1 for Large Cure Development. Already only 2 left.

    “Hmm,” I mused. Although the first few weeks I’d kept skill points in reserve until I could see where they needed to go, that was clearly not going to work.

    Instead, after furiously pressing Yes for what felt like another fifty times, I put one into Administer Cure, and another into Mana Shaping.

    This is Christopher getting a huge boost.