SSS-Ranked Surgeon In Another World: The Healer Is Actually OP! - Chapter 394 394: Domain without horizon

The Akashic Codex pulsed faintly at the back of his mind, full recognition, the system had said, and he could feel it now as a kind of available reference, a library he hadn’t yet learned to read but knew was open to him.

He suspected the Domain would grow into that reference over time. He suspected the radius would expand. Suspected the precision would sharpen, the cost would drop, the verb would learn finer and finer grammatical moods until he could return things to specific points in their origin instead of all the way to the beginning.

He suspected, very quietly, that this was only the nascent form. That what he was holding now was the seed of something the cosmos had not yet seen a healer wield.

He let the Domain dissolve.

The golden light folded back into him, smooth and unhurried, and the labyrinth space returned to its neutral grey distance. Bruce stood alone in the quiet.

He took a breath.

He thought, with a small dry amusement that was as close to celebration as he ever got, ‘Sophie is going to have opinions about this.’

Bruce instantly ordered axiom to teleport them out, and Axiom, the labyrinth itself obliged. He could tear through space but they’re a lot of uncertaintues to that, that’s why he decided that it was better for axiom to teleport him out…

The grey distance folded sideways, the way a page folds when someone closes a book they’ve finished reading, and Bruce found himself standing on the path outside his own front gate.

His own gate. His own walls. His own quiet stretch of garden with the early Velmoran light still soft on the grass.

‘Home.’

He took a breath that was just a breath, not a healer’s breath, not a focused one, just the kind a person took when they had been gone for longer than they’d planned and had now arrived back at the place where the air smelled correct.

Then he grinned.

He couldn’t help it. The grin arrived before the thought did, and the thought, when it caught up, was simply: *’et me see what I can do now.’

He let his aura unspool.

Not in the controlled, measured way he’d practiced for years, the careful sphere of perception a healer used to track patients in a crowded room, or the slightly wider one he used to monitor Lily and Ash when they were playing somewhere out of sight. This was different.

He let it go, the way a person lets out a held breath after a long climb, and what unspooled was nothing like what he had been working with a week ago.

The aura unfolded smooth and patient and vast.

It crossed the boundary of his estate before he had finished extending it. Crossed the surrounding district before he registered that it had. Kept going. Bruce stood very still on his front path with his eyes half-closed and felt his perception pour outward across the geography of Velmora like water finding the shape of a basin it had always belonged in.

He felt the river that ran east of the estate.

He felt the edge of the forest beyond it.

He felt, and this was where the grin started widening, the next forest. The one past the mountain ridge. The one he had no business being able to feel from his own front path. He kept extending. The aura kept going. He felt the curve of the coast, fifty leagues south. Felt the cold edge of the northern range. Felt, faintly, the warm pulse of a city he had visited once, years ago, somewhere out toward the Reign holdings.

He kept going.

Bruce stopped extending, not because he had hit a ceiling, but because at some point continuing felt rude, like eavesdropping on a planet that hadn’t given him permission. He pulled the aura back to a polite radius and stood with it humming gently around him at a fraction of its capacity.

‘My aura and sense can already span the radius of two large continents around me,’ he thought. ‘And it’s not even at its limits’

He could feel the growth in it, too. Not just the size but the quality too…

His aura at SS had been a careful diagnostic instrument, a fine-grained net for picking up wounds and disturbances. His aura now was the same instrument scaled up and refined down at the same time, finer and broader simultaneously, the way an experienced surgeon’s hands grew both stronger and more precise with the same years of practice.

And it kept growing. He could feel that, too. Every time he extended it, the muscle, if aura could be called a muscle, which it couldn’t, but the analogy was close enough, adapted. Stretched. Settled into the new range as a baseline. At the rate it was growing, extending all of Velmora was a question of months. Maybe weeks.

He filed that, and noticed something else.

The aura wasn’t stopping at atmosphere…

He extended a thin filament of it upward, just to test, and felt it pass cleanly through the boundary where the air thinned and kept going. Through the upper sky. Through the place where the upper sky stopped being sky. Out into the cold patient dark above Velmora pocket space…

The aura didn’t even slow.

Bruce paused with his perception drifting somewhere above his own world and considered, quietly, what that meant.

‘Aura isn’t matter,’ he thought. That was the answer, and it was obvious once he’d said it. His aura wasn’t air moving through air, it wasn’t light needing a medium to propagate, it wasn’t anything that the void could refuse to carry. It was a projection of him, woven through the same patient mana threads that ran through everything regardless of whether there was atmosphere to thread them into.

Vacuum didn’t bother it. The void didn’t bother it. The space between worlds was as comfortable a substrate for his aura as the air over his garden was.

‘Useful,’ he thought, with the calm of a man cataloguing a new instrument.

All these happened within the span of a second. Sighing, he pulled the aura back the rest of the way, to the polite warm radius of his own home, and turned to walk inside.

He didn’t make it three steps.

The front door burst open from the inside, and a small body launched out of it at approximately the speed of an excited projectile.

“Big brother!”

Bruce caught Lily before she could quite collide with him, hands easy under her arms, and she came up against his chest with the breathless impact of a child who had been waiting and waiting and was now done waiting. Her hair was a little wild. Her cheeks were flushed. Her hands grabbed at his sleeves like she needed to confirm by touch that he was actually there.

“Big brother, big brother, Ash,”

“I know,” Bruce said gently, he had sensed ash’s presence vanishing from the area the moment he appeared…

“It just, vanished! It was right there, and it was looking at the wall like it was thinking really hard, and then it was, gone, and I tried to call it but it didn’t come back, and I didn’t know what to do, and,”

“Lily.”

She stopped. Looked up at him. Eyes wide with fear.

Bruce had already swept the area with the very edge of his aura the moment she’d said vanished, and what he found was exactly what he’d expected to find, Ash’s residual signature, warm and bright and intact, lingering in the precise shape of a small dragon that had been recently present and was no longer. No struggle in the imprint. No distress. Just the clean fade of a creature who had departed deliberately.

He sighed, but it was a fond sigh.

“It’s alright,” he said. “Ash is fine.”

“But it just,”

“It went into a trial,” Bruce said. “His own trial. He’ll probably hit the threshold for its next rank and was waiting for me to come back before it left, so we’d know it was going on purpose.”

Lily’s brow furrowed. “Like, like the kind you went on?”

“Mm.”

“Will Ash be okay?”

Bruce considered the question honestly, because Lily deserved honest answers, and because dismissing her worry would teach her not to trust him with the next one.

“Trials are dangerous,” he said. “But Ash is strong, and Ash’s bloodline is older than most things on Velmora. I think Ash will be alright. And when it comes back, it’ll be bigger and stranger and probably hungrier.”

Lily processed this. Her small face went through several expressions in quick succession, worry, consideration, reluctant acceptance, and finally, with a kind of fierce loyalty that made Bruce feel complicated.

“Okay,” she said. “Then I’ll wait too.”

“That’s the spirit.”

Then, very quietly, mostly to the air above Lily’s head, ‘Get stronger and come back home safely, Ash.’

The thought went out with a thread of his aura attached to it, not as a message, exactly, but as a marker. A signature Ash would recognize when it returned, no matter where in the world or out of it the trial sent the small creature.