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

He let the tear take him

The vision collapsed. The foreign world vanished. The accelerated millennia, the cycles, the points and the breaths and the patient mana web all *

folded away like a curtain pulled aside, and Bruce was back, back at axiom Labyrinth’s Space.

Bruce blinked.

The space was exactly as he had left it. The same neutral grey distance. The same absence of geography. The same patient stillness that had greeted him at the start of the trial and had clearly been waiting, unhurried, for him to find his way home.

He was breathing. He registered that as interesting. He had not, as far as he could remember, been breathing during the vision.

His body felt, different. Not changed, exactly. Settled. As if every cell in him had been carrying a question for longer than he had realized, and the vision had answered it, and the answer had quietly redistributed itself through his tissues while he wasn’t paying attention.

And he felt stronger, multiple times stronger than he was before

Then the notifications started.

[Congratulations. You have completed the trial: Escape the Universe Loop.]

Bruce read it twice.

‘Escape,’ he thought. ‘Not understand. Not *master but escape. How can Akashic send me to such a trial without telling me the goal…’

This time around, its his scientific spirit as a scientist that made him willing to test theory out that helped him escape…

The Akashic had named the trial after the only correct response to it, recognize the cycle, recognize that watching was not the answer, and leave. He felt a small dry amusement at having been told the name only after he’d passed. While he found it amusing it was still annoying though

[You have transcended the Trial Evolution method.]

He didn’t know what the Trial Evolution method was. He understood, from the phrasing, that he had just stopped needing it. Most Awakened progressed by passing trials in sequence, each one calibrated to push them slightly past their current ceiling.

He had apparently just done something the system did not have a sequence for, and the system had responded by removing him from the queue.

‘That’s, interesting.’ He filed it. But then he thought of something, ‘Maybe this is how it have been for all awakened in the universe…

The next notification dropped.

[You have achieved: Teleportation through Healing.]

That one made him exhale, almost a laugh. The technique didn’t have a name yet, teleportation through healing was a description, not a title, but Bruce already knew what he’d call it when he had time.

The mechanic was clean. Saturate a region. Detonate. Ride the seam. He could refine the precision later. He could probably reduce the energy cost by an order of magnitude with practice. He could almost certainly learn to choose his destination instead of just somewhere else.

That was a project for next month. He filed it too.

[You have gained full recognition of the Akashic Codex.]

Bruce’s breath caught.

Full recognition. Not partial. Not provisional. The Akashic, the hidden force that had been showing him things since the trial began, the same force that recorded everything that had ever happened in every cycle of every universe, had registered him. Acknowledged him. Granted him, presumably, some kind of standing relationship with the record itself. He didn’t know what benefits comes with this, but he didn’t see Akashic in a good light so he knows they’re definitely dangers as well..

Then came the message he had been waiting for

[Congratulations on becoming a full SSS-Rank.]

He had been knocking on the door of full SSS for a while. The trial had apparently kicked the door in.

Bruce checked himself, internally, the way he checked patients. Mana reserves: deeper than he remembered.

His mental clarity was sharper before.

He moved one finger experimentally and the finger moved before he had finished deciding to move it.

Full SSS. Officially.

He noted it without celebration. The rank was a measurement, not an achievement. The achievements were what he had done to earn it.

And then the last one.

[Congratulations on awakening your nascent Domain: SSS-Ranked Domain Genesis.]

Bruce went still.

‘Genesis,’he thought.

The information arrived before the thought finished forming, the way Domain information always arrived, the system pouring the relevant data straight into the part of him that already knew how to use it. He felt his mind reorganize, briefly, around the new shape.

Every Domain offered three things. Boosts, inside the radius. Restrictions, on enemies inside the radius. And a core ability, the thing that made the Domain what it was, the one verb the Domain knew how to perform on the world.

Genesis’s core ability was: [Return to Origin.]

Also called, the system informed him with what felt like a faint dry pride: [Absolute Beginning] [Origin Override]

Bruce understood it the moment he read it.

Inside his Domain, anything he chose to address could be returned to its original state. A wound, to the unwounded flesh. A poison, to the inert compounds it had been before it became toxic. A weapon, to the ore it had been forged from. A spell, to the unshaped mana it had been before it was cast. A body, to whatever configuration its earliest viable self had held.

Anything inside the radius. Anything he had the focus to target. Returned. To origin.

The restrictions were the natural inverse, anyone of lower class than Bruce, inside his Domain, found their own techniques unwilling to hold. Their spells wanted to revert. Their formed mana wanted to dissolve.

Their will to maintain a constructed effect found itself competing with his will to send everything back to where it had begun, and his will, inside his Domain, was the gravity the local reality bent toward. His will is extremely strong

Only those of higher class than him could resist outright.

Those of equal class could resist with their own Domains, if they had one, by asserting a counter-law inside the contested space. Everyone else was at the mercy of the verb.

Bruce read all of this in the half-second the system gave him to read it, and the cold clinical part of him said, very quietly:

‘Origin Override huh?’ Bruce sihhed

He thought about the cycles he had just watched. About the threads dimming under the appetite of the hungry path. About what it would mean to reach into one of those frayed sections of the cosmic web and send it back to whatever it had been before something hollowed it.

He thought about Sophie. About a hypothetical future in which Sophie was wounded badly enough that conventional healing wouldn’t reach her. About being able to address not the wound, but the deviation from her origin, and watching her body remember what it had been before whatever had happened to it.

He thought about the Invaders. About what Origin Override would do to a being whose entire ascension had been built on hollowing other beings out. About whether the verb could reach back through the chain of their consumption and unmake the appetites themselves.

He set those thoughts aside, very carefully, in the place that did not forget.

Then he activated the Domain.

It came up smoother than he had expected. No resistance. No fumbling for the activation grammar. The Domain knew him, the way a well-trained instrument knows a musician’s hand, and it unfolded around him with the easy confidence of something that had been waiting for him to ask.

Five hundred meters.

A dome of pure golden light bloomed outward in every direction, soft and bright and somehow like the gold of late afternoon sun. Streaks of silver lightning flickered through it at irregular intervals, brief and beautiful, like neural firings in a vast brain that was just beginning to remember how to think.

Bruce stood inside it and felt the local geometry settle into his law.

Inside his Domain, the air was his. The mana was his. The patient underlying threads of the labyrinth space, and he could see them now, more clearly than he had ever seen mana threads outside a vision, pulsed in time with whatever rhythm his body was setting. Not enslaved. Not commanded. Aligned.

The way a well-run operating room aligns around the surgeon at the table, every instrument placed before the surgeon has finished deciding to reach for it.

He let the Domain hold for a long moment.

Then he tested it.

He picked up a small fragment of debris from the labyrinth floor, an inert chip of something stone-like, no clear origin, and set it on his palm. Focused. Asked the Domain to return it to origin.

The fragment dissolved. Not violently. Not even quickly. It simply, softened, the way a memory softens when you stop holding onto it, and then it was a small handful of finer particles, and then a faint cloud of unbound mana, and then nothing. Returned to the unshaped state it had presumably begun in, before some long-ago process had pressed it into stone.

Bruce closed his hand on the empty space where it had been.

‘Yes,’ he thought. ‘That’ll do.’