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escher4096 t1_ixfq2d3 wrote

Sacrifice is power. The most powerful sacrifice is life. This is a universal constant of magic. The greater the magic to be performed the greater the sacrifice to be made.

  • Understanding Basic Magic, vol 1

“Master, there are too many injured and just not enough life to heal them all. The wizards are passing out…. Some of them are even dying. What are we going to do?”, my young apprentice Howard begged of me. He was 25 years old but looked to be in his sixties. We sacrifice part of our life when we do magic. A week here. A month there. A year over here. We wizards may burn brightly but we do not burn for long.

I inspected the wound of my patient. A sword slice through 2 lobes of his lung, broken ribs, liver damage, massive blood loss. I tally up the injuries…. It would cost me 10 years of my life to heal him completely. It would cost me 2 years to heal him enough that he would survive. I prepare myself and sacrifice 2 years and let the magic course through me, shaping it, directing it, moulding it to my will….. and then I release it into the patient. I collapse to my knees panting for breath….. I have given up 20 years of life today. Almost 60 years worth since this damn war started. But today, today has seen the fiercest fighting yet. Our king is trying to push through the enemy lines even if it means burning out all of his wizards.

“Give me a moment Howard.”, I say as he helps me to seat. I take a few deep breaths. “How many more have come in?”, I ask shakily.

“About a hundred more.”, he says quietly. “The offensive is not going well.”

“Are there any new prisoners that can be sacrificed?”, I ask hopefully.

“The enemy fights until death and if they can’t fight any more they take a poison capsule and kill themselves. They won’t let themselves be taken.”

I raise an eyebrow at that. “That is a new tactic.”, I say simply.

Howard shrugs. “They die on the field or we capture them and put them to death to heal our injured. Either way they die.”, he says, “at least this way they aren’t helping the enemy. It is smart.”

“Wizard! I need a wizard!”, a courtier yells as he hauls in a member of the Royal court. Howard and I go over to him. “It is the Prince. His wound is infected.”

We quickly lay him down on a cot. “When did he get wounded. We haven’t seen him through here in weeks.”, I say to the courtier.

“The Prince is aware of the cost of a healing and would not ask it for such a minor wound. He would sacrifice is own life force to heal it but it isn’t allowed to sacrifice noble life for magic, so he decided to let it heal on its own.”, the courtier said.

“That is noble of him, but a clean would of this size would take a day of sacrifice. Now that it is infected it is going to take a great deal more.”, Howard said sadly as he looked at the grotesque wound. It was was oozing puss and the skin next to the opening was necrotic.

I probed the wound gently, causing the unconscious Prince to moan, the wound was deep. I tallied up the work that would need to be done…. At least a year worth of life. “Damn…. There is so much infection”, I said to myself.

“It is too bad infection wasn’t alive”, the courtier said.

“Oh, infection is alive. Thousands and thousands of tiny organisms that are feeding off of our Prince and making him sick.”, I said absently as I cleaned up the wound.

“Can you sacrifice the tiny organisms?”, the courtier asked

I looked at Howard. He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t remember any text ever saying it had to be human life that must be sacrificed. It was always just…. Implied….”

“Well if nothing else, sacrificing the infection would clean up the wound, even if there isn’t enough life there to heal it.”, I said, trying to convince myself of the merits. “Why not?”

“We should at least try it”, Howard said excitedly.

I pulled up a chair to the prince’s cot. I took a couple of deep breaths and then reached out with my senses to find all of the infection and the microbes that shouldn’t be there. It felt like it took an eternity. I had to identify each and everyone one separately. I took a steadying breath and sacrificed those lives entirely…. Not minutes or hours or days but extinguished those lives entirely. I expected a little bit of power but I was overwhelmed.

The power burned through me, setting every nerve ending on fire and making me ache to the very core of my being. I shaped the power to heal the prince, but there was so much more and there was no where for it to go! I started to panic. There was no more hurt on the Prince and I wasn’t in contact with anyone else that needed healing. The power burned and struggled, it wanted to be free. I clamped down on that power and forced my will on it and then swallowed it whole. My very soul felt like it was on fire. Then the world went black.

“Master! Master! Are you alright‽”, I heard Howard’s voice through the darkness. I opened my eyes.

“I am still here young man.”, I said to Howard.

The healed prince looked down at me on the floor. Then to Howard then to me. “You look a lot younger than him.”, the prince said.

I touched my face. The wrinkles were gone. I moved my legs experientially…. No aches or pains. “How old do I look, Howard?”, I asked cautiously.

“If I had to guess, I would say…. about 16 or 17, master.”, Howard said with a big smile.

“Send a runner…. Everyone of them we can find. We need everything they can find that is rotting… food stuffs, horse manure, people with infections, yeast….. all of it, any of it. We are going to turn the tide of the war, my boy!”

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Dr_Euler t1_ixgrrxc wrote

probably just me seeing this but I instantly saw them in a ww1 Era medical tent near the front lines

I didn't even question why they knew about germ theory that just sounded right for the time period

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sin-and-love t1_ixhv7s0 wrote

Actually we have a record of a roman dude warning that swamps are full of tiny infectious creatures. We have no clue how he knew, though.

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Jrmundgandr t1_ixhyb2k wrote

Probably time travel

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thisismego t1_ixi7620 wrote

Probably the Doctor

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YourAverageNutcase t1_ixj9rn6 wrote

Clearly, this was Rory passing the time while he protects the Pandorica. He was a nurse, might as well share some medical knowledge

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flying-lizard05 t1_ixjfzf4 wrote

😭😭😭😭😭😭 I don’t have favorite companions, but he was my favorite companion 💜

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-FourOhFour- t1_ixih0h6 wrote

I recall the theory was that he was able to notice "small" amoeba like creatures in water (not sure the correct term is for these large enough you can see with your eye but obviously not a bug or small fish) and concluded that there are smaller ones that can't be seen. How he came about that those caused infections was probably the tried and true method of let me try this on a guy and see what happens.

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Sany_Wave t1_ixijgz7 wrote

There are some amoebae that are large. Enough to poke with a pensil with only good glasses.

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TheArmoredKitten t1_ixj3wyi wrote

Yeah it's honestly really weird how long germ theory took to develop. The microscope was invented in the 1600s but germ theory wasn't firmly established until 250 years later.

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SliceThePi t1_ixihm4q wrote

is it possible he was talking about macroscopic parasites?

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Accidental_Ouroboros t1_ixiljeh wrote

This makes the most sense to me, unless he is specifying something like "so small that they can't be seen." Microparasites like helminths and flukes are visible to the naked eye.

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sin-and-love t1_ixjr06g wrote

yes, actually, he did specify that they were too small to be seen.

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SantiJamesF t1_ixjf342 wrote

My theory is because of magic, scientists of then times could turn their eyes into microscopes and because of this, they discovered bacteria, mold spores, viruses, etc giving them germ theory centuries before it was discovered in our time.

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boomchacle t1_ixg8dne wrote

But how do they know of germ theory at this point?

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bradles0 t1_ixg98k1 wrote

>I took a couple of deep breaths and then reached out with my senses to find all of the infection and the microbes that shouldn’t be there

sounds like they can sense living organisms so they have a way to detect bacteria, greatly easing the process.

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boomchacle t1_ixga72g wrote

I wonder why they couldn’t just sacrifice individual cells if it works like that. How does the power scaling work here? Is it one second of bacteria equals one second of human life? Millions of bacteria seconds would absolutely blow everything else out of proportion. (Which to be fair does seem to happen a bit, but not as much as I would expect if it was a 1:1 ratio)

Plus, the human body contains millions of bacteria as required for our day to day survival. That’s basically a cheat code for immortality.

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jerbear0987 t1_ixgl3hm wrote

I think that is the point. They can sense the difference between a "good" bacteria and stuff like viruses, maybe because of their life force/soul. The story also said that he searched for the ones that weren't meant to be there, so maybe they have advanced sciences. The wizard had just discovered immortality at the end, which is how they would turn the tide of the war.

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Duiker6v t1_ixgtrgc wrote

By the sounds of they are actually sacrificing the time they have left in this world

And after doing some researching a single bacteria cell lives approximately 12 hours

Now if there are millions if not billions of individual cells then yes in this world you could become immortal

Once immortality is achieved you could essentially become a GOD being able to take and give life

Heck with that much lifespan power whos to say you can't effectively resurrect the dead(to their previous living conditions) if their brain is still intact.

Sorry for bad punctuation im not quite a writer

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succubusbanana t1_ixhq94a wrote

12 hours per bacterium and 1,000,000 bacteria is 12,000,000 hours.12,000,000 hours is 1,369 years, give or take a few months. I'd call that a win for living forever. The real question is how much magic can the wizards bank before they turn back into zygotes.

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techno156 t1_ixgt7w5 wrote

>I wonder why they couldn’t just sacrifice individual cells if it works like that. How does the power scaling work here? Is it one second of bacteria equals one second of human life? Millions of bacteria seconds would absolutely blow everything else out of proportion. (Which to be fair does seem to happen a bit, but not as much as I would expect if it was a 1:1 ratio)

Maybe they didn't think of it before, or thought that there was something special about an animal/human that powered the sacrifice?

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Ihav2bluecats t1_ixh9q9c wrote

As with everything sometimes people just don't question the logic, if it's seen like equivalent exchange or similar you would probably be biased to think a human is worth way more than an animal and especially bacteria.

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colonelhalfling t1_ixha4j4 wrote

Just a thought, but human lifespan, at least non-cancer ridden human life span, is believed to be governed by the telomeres in our DNA. They act as 'protective caps,' if you will, that help ensure good copies, but they get 'worn down' by the process. If that 'life sacrifice' was basically inhibiting the function of telomeres in the body, then sacrificing individual cells is what they are already doing. As they use magic, more of their own cells will be killed in order to avoid negative mutations (ie, cancer) until the ability of the body to stop it from happening is overwhelmed.

Not an expert, just fascinated by DNA and, well, the effects of small changes in the code that can causes big issues.

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849 t1_ixjairm wrote

Some lifeforms can regenerate their telomeres.

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the_turt t1_ixgwj2m wrote

1 million seconds is 11 days, and I dont think each one is worth 1 second. Also, unless you plan on actually shitting bricks, I wouldn't suggest killing your gut bacteria.

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Different_Spot_9603 t1_ixhiivl wrote

I think that’s because the bacteria are individuals and the cells of our body work as a whole to form an individual and that the sacrifice magic targets the individual.

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gandalf171 t1_ixh31y0 wrote

Maybe it works by trading lifetime for lifetime on a cell by cell basis, so if a human sacrifices a day they take a day off every cell in their body to give to new cells in the injured. The power scaling wouldn't quit work out for the rejuvenation at the end, but bacterial cells are a lot smaller than human cells, so it would give you something in the same order of magnitude at least and would have some internal logic

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The-Alternate t1_ixj00du wrote

Maybe they're able to do that too and they just haven't tried. If the spells were based on intent then sacrificing a person is not the same as sacrificing all of their cells. This doesn't fit well with real-world physically-based processes, but magic is often not physically-based and instead based on intent, emotion, etc.

There are good real-world analogies though. For example, is it cheaper to ship a few things together in one big package, or as separate packages? The individual cost of separate packages adds up to more than the cost of shipping everything together at once. In the end, the result is the same because everything ends up at the destination, but in one case it costs more.

Similarly, the life force gained from sacrificing individual cells adds up to more than sacrificing the conglomerate being made up of those cells. And similarly, the result is the same: it's dead either way, but one method gives you more life force.

In the end the rules are obviously lopsided, which we don't see a lot in real life physical processes. Maybe there's a rigid explanation. For example, maybe most of the magic comes from the intent to drain anything's life force, so by sacrificing millions of cells you gain most of your magic from the "overhead" of so much intent on individual lives — similar to the additional cost incurred from shipping overhead when shipping multiple package. You can imagine how shipping millions of individual packages for knick knacks would cost significantly more than just stuffing them in a big box!

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boomchacle t1_ixj1xsu wrote

Right but literally every cubic meter of air can contain millions of bacterial cells. You could just use that. You don’t even need anything around you. If sensing life force was a thing and it was sensitive enough to differentiate between different cells of a human, the air itself would act like a giant wall of cells that you’d need to filter through in order to see anything.

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The-Alternate t1_ixj4tc8 wrote

I get what you're saying. Can you conceive of a way that the story makes sense? Not everything is always clearly stated.

I can think of ways that make it make sense. For example, I don't think it's literally seeing cells — for that matter, individually seeing, isolating, and targeting millions of cells is entirely impossible in the real world. I think it would be closer to "sensing" or "searching", and maybe that takes intent and awareness into account, unlike many of our normal senses which often work without strict direction.

Maybe sensing cells in the air isn't easy without having a rough idea what to search for. A good analogy is those optical illusions that require focus to change the direction of rotation, or confusing perspectives that require focus to see what others see. If you can't see it because you don't know what to look for, then you can't be aware and focused on it, right? Maybe germ theory is new to their society. Maybe they aren't yet aware that humans are made up of cells, but are aware that infections are made up of many microscopic beings. Similarly, bacteria being in the air may be a blind spot to them, making them unable to focus effectively on them.

I imagine after this point in the story their society probably undergoes a drastic change. We saw a critical turning point in their world, and we didn't get to see the results. If they're able to draw life force from anything counted as "living" that they can focus on with their magical senses, then they've effectively become an immortal society with limitless magic.

There were some blockers along the way, such their senses requiring preexisting knowledge, their understanding of sacrifice being wrong, and the newness of germ theory, but they're on the path to immortality and infinite magic.

I guess I prefer to look at a story and say "how can this happen" rather than assume the least. Filling in the blanks is like a fun puzzle! I do think this is a super lopsided world and I think it would be hard for the author to continue stories in this world while keeping the same setting and atmosphere. They'd have to invent some really wacky rules to prevent insane power creep and massive societal shifts.

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boomchacle t1_ixj5txx wrote

yeah I would be interested in seeing the after effects of this story since it has a lot of random stuff that kind of gets implied by the ending. Maybe only some people have the ability to sense such small things and will become super powerful wizards due to it.

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p0pfunk t1_ixg9kn4 wrote

We know of microbes because we can see them with tools. They can do the same thing with magic, it seems. It's fairly easy to assume that they know since they can sense them.

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TomMado t1_ixgn6fk wrote

RIP gut microbes

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JustTiredAllTheTime t1_ixgpj8b wrote

Every time we go to the toilet there are thousands of them sent to die and they regrow permanently in the gut. Imagine the power.

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DistractedEmilia t1_ixh4j6o wrote

Holy Moly🤯 Your writing is so good it gave me goosebumps. I would 1000% read anything you write 🤩

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escher4096 t1_ixhbd9t wrote

Thanks! If you check my comment history there are lots of stories but I am very hit and miss. But I am working on it….

These two are my favourites right now:

This one is really short: https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/yhfw9r/wp_you_are_a_barista_in_a_24_hour_coffee_shop/iudq6rb/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3

This one has 6 parts I think: https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/yr1zuf/wp_for_50_dollars_ill_help_you_do_anything_one/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

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Yayman123 t1_ixi7lmt wrote

That second one has 5a parts actually ;)

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escher4096 t1_ixi8376 wrote

Yeah, it was written as one post but hit the character limit of a comment and had to split it into 2 parts.

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kris533d t1_ixgo2zb wrote

More please! Can't stop a good story now!?!

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A_Cryptarch t1_ixgu93d wrote

Time for them to be hunted down for practicing Necromancy.

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ktripler t1_ixh3pk6 wrote

Nurgle from 40k wouldn't be happy about this... or would he?

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TOHSNBN t1_ixhvrhc wrote

Counter question, can nurgle even be "happy" in the conventional sense we can grasp?

I guess nurgle would hate this, it would put an end to all desease and make humans immortal.
It would be genocide to all his precious children.

Also, i do not think that shiny yellow throne corpse guy would like the competition of other immortals.

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ktripler t1_ixhzwkz wrote

Would it put an end to disease? I picture people farming diseases in bodies and animals in order to keep a never ending supply of bacteria/cells for use in medicine. He'd love that

Shiny throne corpse guy would love immortals because they could then be sacrificed. Using this authors logic, it would probably take 3 sacrifices of people imbued with this immortality to bring the emperor back to full health. Ultimately he hates being seen as a god though, and I'm excited for all the fallout if it ever comes.

I'm not even that into 40k, why have I done this 🙃

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TOHSNBN t1_ixi328e wrote

By that (valid) logic it would mean enslavement of his plague children though. Nugle wants his children to be free so they can cause suffering.

Good point on corpse guy!
No more need for a thousand psykers each day, just throw an Immortal at him every once in a while after he got into a fight with one of his kids. Again. So most likely, once a week. 😂

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ktripler t1_ixi8h6g wrote

That's a good point!

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TOHSNBN t1_ixi9uo8 wrote

I think 40K is at the top of my list of things i am utterly fascinated by, but not really interested in.

Like, i would never play it or spend a single cent on.

But man, 40K is wicked cool to read and learn about. Also, it looks so damn cool. The whole lore is just awesome.

In my next life i want to be an adeptus mechanicus and just replace my entire body with the cold, hard embrace of the machine. And i am not even joking ☺️😂

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mismanaged t1_ixim8ld wrote

Given the nature of the 40k universe it's far more likely you'll end up a servo-skull.

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TOHSNBN t1_ixinxkb wrote

Yea...

Admech > corpse starch > entomed in a war machine > human harp > servitor > servo skull.

That is the order im gonna go with.

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sling848 t1_ixjh95i wrote

Outstanding concept, love the word building here. Certainly something I’d think to bring into my next DnD game (it’s sadly as creative as I get).

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PhilinLe t1_ixjopxl wrote

So a strictly hierarchal society that demands the lesser people sacrifice life force for their masters by blood, a society that summarily executes enemy combatants and whose notoriety is so great that enemy combatants choose berserker-like suicides over capture, has just had their servant class discover not only unlimited power but also eternal youth? This is either heading towards full blown dystopia or fully automated luxury gay space communism.

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escher4096 t1_ixjoy78 wrote

“Luxury Gay space communism”…. That is a new one for me.

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YOMGuitar t1_ixk5rso wrote

A universal constant of magic is that the greater the magic to be performed, the greater the sacrifice that must be made. This is because wizards perform magic by sacrificing part of their life force. Over time, this takes its toll and wizards don't live long lives. Consequently, in times of war, when there are many injured people and not enough life force to heal them all, wizards have to make difficult decisions about who to heal and who to let die.

The Prince was wounded and chose not to use a wizard's healing powers because it would require too great a sacrifice on his part. However, his wound became infected and he was brought back for treatment. The wizard cleaning up the Prince's wound realized that the infection is alive (made up of tiny organisms) and decided it might be worth sacrificing them instead. By sacrificing the infection, rather than the Prince, the wizard was able to save the Prince's life without requiring too great a sacrifice.

Sacrificing something of value is always a difficult decision, but sometimes it is necessary in ordering to save something even more valuable. When faced with a decision like this, it is important to weigh all options and choose what you believe is best.

Brilliant piece 👏

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Snomitty t1_ixjqo4v wrote

I got excited with them when they said they're gonna turn the war my boy

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