To be honest, when Seraphia carried Shu and that other man out from deep inside the fire, there was a moment when she thought neither of them could be saved.
But perhaps it really was the hardiness of fate peculiar to a protagonist, or perhaps it was the karmic reward brought on by his saving people so decisively. Just as she brought them out, she immediately ran into a Church disaster-relief team that had come out.
The influence of the Church of the Holy Name showed in the fact that almost every major city held a church of theirs, and they would absolutely never pass up an opportunity like this to expand that influence further.
And so Seraphia could now sit in the local church's recovery room, looking at Shu lying on the bed.
【And here I thought he'd be wrapped up like a mummy.】
The boy's brows were drawn tight. Not yet returned to consciousness, he seemed to be having some kind of nightmare.
"Lady Holy Wing..."
A soft knock came from outside the recovery room.
"Come in."
The door opened gently, and a gentle woman wearing glasses walked slowly in.
The providence of the harem game was exerting itself again.
A glasses girl, with grey-green eyes, dark chestnut hair, and an air of intellect coming off her every gesture.
The person who, on the cover of that game in her previous life, had stood beside the protagonist Shu together with Seraphia.
But unlike Miss Angel, whose function was to lure people in and kill them, this character called Miriam was one of the genuine, bona fide harem heroines.
Equally, what Seraphia knew of her was likewise limited mostly to the name and a few associated memes.
As for this glasses girl in front of her, the meme the forums had used most about her was, as she recalled...
'Legendary Investigator'?
Miss Angel recalled the somewhat peculiar nickname, narrowed her eyes slightly, and looked her over out of the corner of her eye with a hint of scrutiny.
As someone who had spent years surfing the internet, she knew the memes of a great many different works very well, and even without having actually played anything connected to them, as long as a meme was one a lot of people played with, she would want to know its origin.
Which meant she knew exactly what the source text of a so-called 【Legendary Investigator】 was supposed to mean.
To put it in terms an ordinary person could follow—
It meant the sort of person who goes all out to court death, plunges into danger beyond ordinary imagining, and still walks away intact.
【This woman is very dangerous.】
Investigators, so called, were every one of them a pack of the abundantly curious, and their curiosity about things beyond common sense and about forbidden knowledge drags the people around them into danger.
"Um... is there something on my face...?"
Perhaps because Miss Angel's gaze really was rather too sharp, she spoke up weakly to ask.
"Have you come to perform the treatment?"
"Yes. The cost required for this treatment will be provided by the Church. May I begin, please?"
"Go ahead."
The sister who had earlier given Shu basic care and settled him here had said a specialist healer would come along shortly. Seraphia had not expected the one to pop out to be one of the original work's heroines.
Looking closely, although this glasses girl also wore church-style robes in black and white, there was a special badge on her clothing unlike that of ordinary church personnel, which looked like a design of a snake coiled around a staff of some kind. That was presumably some sort of professional insignia.
She had said she was here to perform treatment, though, and yet Seraphia could see that she had brought no tools at all.
【Are you serious... Shu's spine has been smashed to pieces, hasn't it? And there's organ damage too... even healing magic in a game can't ignore the basic laws entirely, surely?】
Seraphia had assumed they would at least take him to an operating theatre.
But once the glasses girl had taken out an emerald-green gemstone and brought it close to Shu, she began chanting an incantation.
【Don't you need to clear out the shattered bone and the internal bleeding first, or something?!】
As the emerald light rose, and after a wave of mana fluctuation, the green gemstone in her hand instantly turned to pale powder.
"There. From here on, all that's needed is for the Lord Hero to rest properly for a few days and there'll be no problem."
"?!"
Seraphia looked at Shu on the bed, and then at the glasses girl, whose face had gone somewhat pale.
【No, hold on, you didn't even touch him!】
The unadulterated otherworld healing process struck a savage blow to the worldview of an Earth soul.
"Haha, everyone is very surprised the first time they see healing magic. Yes, the process is very fast, almost only an instant."
"That really is convenient... this, can I learn it?"
"Mm... it does look very simple if you only watch from the side. You want to learn? Your mana leans towards the sacred in nature, so of course you can learn it, but I would recommend you learn 【Miracles】 instead. Those don't require supplying the patient with additional life energy, and both the casting and the healing are much faster."
Knowledge of every self-evident sort poured out of the other woman's mouth, and Seraphia did not understand a word of it.
So Seraphia had no choice but to ask humbly for instruction.
"I see... you were arranged as a Hero Candidate's companion the moment you were welcomed back into the Church... no wonder you don't understand some of the more basic matters. Mm, that's quite all right, I can teach you. Let me first answer your greatest question: why healing magic requires only this simple little step."
The glasses girl adjusted her round-framed spectacles, her deep green eyes looking at her gently.
The feel of an older-sister type. The sort who would very gently teach her younger brother and sister how to do their homework.
"First: the gemstone-like thing I took out just now is a crystal of 【life energy】. The essence of healing magic is to inject a large amount of life energy into the patient's injured area, so that the patient's own capacity for self-healing becomes several hundred or several thousand times what it normally is, over a short period."
【Now that I understand.】
You put a buff on someone that boosts their base health regeneration.
But in a game, the state of a life's health is expressed numerically, and both damage and recovery are changes to damage figures, whereas in reality being injured and recovering are nothing of the sort.
"But with a shattered skeleton plus damage to the internal organs, something of that degree can heal itself too?"
Seraphia pointed at Shu on the bed. She had seen exactly how he was injured earlier, in perfect clarity.
"...One moment, I'll find you some introductory books to read."
The glasses girl put on a rather headache-stricken expression.
Miss Angel's face was covered in black lines.
【I've been looked down on for being too ignorant!】
Her fair face grew a little hot. In her previous life she had not known this game well enough, and the person Seraphia was even more straightforward on the point: in human terms of age, she was still only eight years old.
"Let me give a simple answer to your question first. When each of us is born, mm... let us restrict this to humans and to other races that reproduce normally by live birth. At the moment the parents unite, each obtains a portion of the outflow of the parents' souls. Then, within the mother's womb, the soul outflows mix together... and then the mother divides off her own life energy to let the newborn obtain a physical body."
Miss Angel was working hard to understand all this using knowledge from Earth.
【Feels like more or less the same thing... so the so-called soul is something along the lines of DNA? The level of civilization of otherworlders really is still very low, explaining ordinary biological reproduction with all this mystical stuff.】
"By the time the newborn has grown to the point of delivery, that is when body and soul are fully mature, and because the outflow of the parents' souls has been mixed in, newborns all closely resemble their parents."
"Mm-hm."
Miss Angel made her responses. Sure enough, exactly as she had expected, it was a complete set of the same things. This entire worldview had been made by people from Earth, after all, and it is in the nature of things that a person cannot create what they cannot imagine.
"So, this means that a person's flesh is bound by the shape of the soul."
"Mm-hm."
"So no matter how severe the injury sustained, as long as life energy is replenished in time, the body will slowly grow back along the shape of the soul."
"Mm... mm?!"