Reaching for the Stars

Chapter Thirty-Five

Now that I had started solely focusing on pulse reading, I was actually learning it more easily, things that had stumped me before because it had felt like so much time had passed since I learned it, were now easily remembered by me. What took me days to process before now let me understand it in only a few hours, I hadn't truly realized how distracted I was before.

But seeing the difference in my learning speed, now vs then, the difference was rather large. It was no wonder Professor Rayax got so frustrated with me, though his attitude towards me had been better than ever, I think the tea really helped to put me back in his good graces. Of which he was still rather curious about how I managed to produce something like it from normal tea leaves, but he refrained from mentioning it during lessons, preferring I focus on the task at hand.

As I progressed in the art of pulse reading, so to did the difficulty of the illnesses presented before me, now instead of just common illnesses, there were patients that I believed had been paid to ingest a poison for the sake of my learning, paid and also told they would receive the antidote within a reasonable amount of time. Because many of my patients were now suffering from various poisons both common and rare, quite a few times I had to go back to my spatial world to compare what could possibly be the poison causing these symptoms.

That was the only thing I did in my spatial world, after realizing how lacking my knowledge was of the potions and poisons I hadn't yet made, I began reading about them, memorizing their symptoms and antidotes. I limited myself to only a few hours in the spatial world, resulting in only ten minutes of my day spent in the spatial world, that gave me five hours to study. I had read through almost half the books that Nero and Marcellus had left me, I was reasonably certain that after a few more days I would read through the rest, and be able to mostly retain all that information.

Now that I was progressing in pulse reading I enjoyed it more, it didn't frustrate me as much as I could tell I was making progress, for a few common illnesses and poisons I could even tell what they suffered from at a glance now, without even needing to feel their pulse, but I usually felt their pulse anyways to make sure, a bad diagnose resulting in an antidote that wouldn't cure them, could actually make them much worse. Many antidotes had severe side effects if they weren't used up in the process of neutralizing a poison, it was a double edged sword, on one side they could save a person from a deadly poison, on another they could kill someone if given to someone who didn't suffer from the poison the antidote was meant to cure.

I always thought it was strange how revered herbalists were here, but after experiencing the lessons on herbalism at Ashara Academy I knew why, they were not trained in the same way herbalists were elsewhere, their training was much more intense, and so much more dangerous. Herbalists around the world were sheltered and prized for their ability to cure various illnesses and poisons, but herbalists in the Valena Empire were not seen as weak, instead they were seen as the bravest among them, they dealt with poisons most would never touch, most of the time herbalists here did not deal with minor ailments, unlike the rest of the world, they had people they called Herb Doctors that specialized in treating ailments and wounds.

While the herbalists here certainly had the training for anything and everything a Herb Doctor could do, they also had the skills to prepare poisons that could kill entire cities, they were used for much stronger purposes then to treat the ailments of the common people. Which is why I realized that this competition was truly such a big deal here, to learn all of this, and have the ability to use it, it was a dangerous thing, something that needed to be watched. Which is why I had no doubt that the Queen held this competition for two reasons, to see whether an herbalist had the skills to stop a major attack, whether through poison or other means, as well as if they had the personality to eventually cause one themselves.