SSS-Ranked Surgeon In Another World: The Healer Is Actually OP!

Chapter 420: The Soul Within The Swirl

’I am Bruce Ackerman. My wife is Sophie. I came here on purpose.’

He reminded himself as he kept moving.

He almost walked past it because he was looking at the ground in front of his feet, watching the give of the grey. But something at the edge of his vision pulled his attention up and to the right, and when he looked properly, he stopped walking entirely.

Ahead of him, perhaps a hundred paces away, the mist was moving.

Not drifting the way the rest of it drifted. Not the slow, almost-still flow he had been walking through for hours. The mist in this one spot was spinning, pulling inward toward a center he could not yet see, a slow, deliberate spiral that thickened and brightened the closer it got to its core. From where Bruce stood, the swirl looked like a small storm in the middle of a still grey sea.

His first instinct was to turn around.

More mist meant more eating. A concentration of the stuff this dense, this active, would consume a soul faster than the open expanse. Standing in it would be like standing in a current that pulled at him from every direction at once. He had spent the last several hours trying to breathe as little of this as possible, and walking into a swirl of it was the exact opposite of survival.

He almost turned.

He did not turn.

Because he had seen mana behave like this, once. In the physical realm. When an awakened was breaking through to a new rank, the mana around them would gather and spiral inward, drawn by the sudden hunger of an advancing existence. Bruce had stood in rooms where this was happening. He knew the shape of it.

This mist was doing the same thing.

Which meant, Which might mean that there was someone in the middle of that swirl. A soul. And not just any soul. A soul that was somehow pulling the energy of this place toward itself instead of leaking into it. Which meant a soul that had figured out how to use this energy. Which meant a soul that had likely already awakened its talent.

Which was exactly what he was looking for.

Bruce stood very still and considered.

The risk was real. If he was wrong, if the swirl was something else, a natural phenomenon, a hazard he did not recognize, a trap of some kind, then walking into it would dissolve him faster than the open mist ever would. He would lose hours of remaining consciousness in minutes. He might not even reach the center before he stopped being able to think.

But if he was right,

If he was right, then whoever was inside that swirl was the only being he had encountered in this realm who knew how to survive. They might tell him. They might not. They might be hostile. They might be too busy with their own breakthrough to even notice him. But the chance, however thin, was the only chance he had.

He weighed it.

He weighed it the way he had weighed bad surgeries, back when he was still mortal. The kind where the patient died if you did nothing and might die if you did something. He had learned a long time ago that a clear path forward was always better than giving up to uncertainty.

He might choose not to risk it and keep searching, if he does that then what if he’s not able to get help, what if his consciousness gets devoured, it’s better to follow this clear path instead of wasting time...

Sighing, he looked back, briefly, the way he had come.

Behind him, somewhere far behind him through the mist, was the older woman’s cluster, slowly being eaten.

Behind that, somewhere even further, was the place he had arrived. Behind all of it, in a different realm entirely, was a labyrinth where his wife was sitting next to his still body, waiting for him to come back.

He couldn’t see all that of course, but the weight of the moment still hit real..

He turned forward.

He started walking toward the swirl.

The mist thickened almost at once.

By the time he was fifty paces out, the air around him had gone from breathable-but-cold to heavy, pressing on him from every side. Each step took more effort than the last. He could feel the swirl pulling at him, not strongly enough to move him against his will, but strongly enough that he had to lean slightly forward as he walked, the way a man leans into a wind.

By thirty paces, he could see the center.

There was a figure there. A person, cross-legged, head bowed, body faintly glowing, not the soft uniform glow Bruce had noticed on his own soul-body, but a brighter, more focused light, concentrated in the chest. The mist spiraled around the figure in a tight, controlled column, feeding inward, vanishing into them.

Bruce’s intuition had been right, of course it was right, his intuition was great since they’re affected by his titles, while mana wasn’t active, Bruce could still feel life glance meaning his titles where still active...

Sighing, he kept walking.

By twenty paces, the pull was strong enough that he could feel his own edges starting to draw thinner, the mist around him stripping off him faster than it had in the open expanse. He could feel his consciousness narrowing, not all at once, but the small steady draw was no longer small or steady. It was accelerating. The closer he got, the faster the mist would eat him.

He had perhaps a few minutes inside the swirl before the eating outpaced his ability to think.

That was enough time, he hoped, to ask a question.

He set his jaw.

He kept walking, into the swirl, toward the only soul in this realm who might know how to keep him alive.

The pull got stronger with every step. The mist around him moved against his skin in slow currents, drawing thin and pale wherever it touched, and he could feel the drain on his consciousness the way a man feels blood loss, distant, dulling, getting worse.

His thoughts were starting to slow at the edges. The drumbeat in his head as he reminded himself ’I am Bruce Ackerman, my wife is Sophie, I came here on purpose’

It was harder to hold now. He held it anyway.

He kept pushing through.

The figure at the center grew clearer with each step.

A young man. Or what looked like a young man. He was sitting cross-legged the way Bruce had been sitting when he first arrived, but the resemblance ended there. He was big, broad shoulders, thick arms, the kind of build that came from years of physical work or fighting.

His soul-body was bare from the waist up. The soul glow coming off him was brighter than any soul glow Bruce had seen since arriving in this realm. Brighter than his own. Brighter than the older woman’s. The light pulsed gently from a point in his chest, steady, full, the way a heart beats in a healthy body.

Then Bruce saw the head.

Two horns. Short, dark, curved slightly back. They came out of the young man’s temples and rose perhaps a hand’s length above his hair.

Bruce frowned.

’What race is that. Demon?’

He had torn through space and crossed galaxy-wide distances in the physical realm, and he had met more than a few peoples in his time, but not plenty. Yet he hadn’t met many races apart from humans, the only races he had met were the chuthulhu, Elves and the Demons, there’s the dragons and devourer dragons which he had heard of but that’s all there is to it, and even those he had met he knew nothing of them...

Anyways, The soul in front of him opened his eyes.

The swirl around them eased almost at once, the inward spiral slowing, then loosening, then unwinding entirely until the mist returned to the slow, drifting state it kept in the open expanse.

Whether the young man had finished whatever he was doing, or whether he had stopped it on purpose because he noticed Bruce, was not clear. Bruce had no way to tell from the outside.

The young man flexed his hand.

He looked at his own fist as he closed it, opened it, closed it again. There was a small, hungry pleasure on his face, the look of a man feeling something new in his body and liking it. He clenched once more, harder, and the glow in his chest brightened briefly with the motion.

Bruce knew that look.

He had worn it himself. Many times. After every breakthrough in the physical realm, after every rank he had cleared, after every advancement that brought a new flood of power into a body that had not held that much before, he had stood there clenching and unclenching his own hand, just to feel it, just to know it was real.

This soul had just awakened. He had no idea how the soul would react to his presence