By the time night fell upon the land, the rain had let up, reduced to a light shower. As most of everyone had gone to sleep while accompanied by the sound of soft pitter-pattering from the falling rain, a small figure had snuck out from one of the rooms.

With threads of Aether wrapped around his feet, absorbing the sound emitted, the figure moved in dead silence, arriving before the room of the late Eliza, a kindly old clergywoman who had passed away three years prior.

Gently, the figure twisted the knob and pushed open the door, disappearing inside with a smooth motion.

(Now let's heal you up and have you go on your way.)

The figure was Theodore, now standing before the wounded demonkin resting in Eliza's bed. He appeared to be unconscious, a condition that Theodore preferred him to be in.

Threads of Aether poured out of Theodore's fingertips, each reaching towards the sleeping demonkin, probing him.

(He has scratches and bruises all over, but the major injury is in the upper thigh of his right leg. There's some loss of blood, but fortunately, no major artery was damaged. I can patch him up in a jiffy.)

Even while being probed, the demonkin remained sound asleep, as if not feeling a thing. From this, Theodore concluded that either the demonkin was completely out cold due to exhaustion or that he was simply not Aether sensitive. Regardless of which, it was convenient for him.

Gathering his focus, Theodore sent his threads of Aether into the demonkin, slipping through the skin via the gaps in-between cells. The skin, however, was not the only obstacle as the Aether within the demonkin's body was actively preventing entry. Treating Theodore's Aether as the invader that it was, the Aether within the demonkin's body began to break down the threads of the foreign Aether. It was something akin to the immunity response within a person's body, a reaction dubbed 'magic resistance' by the haughty mages.

Fighting hard against the magic resistance, Theodore managed to have fifty-odd threads of Aether penetrate deep within the demonkin's body, nearly the maximum amount he could deploy at the time.

As he kept his threads from being broken down, Theodore began to redistribute the proteins within demonkin's body and funneled the amount needed to reconstruct the damaged tissues towards the wound. Once the materials had been gathered, the threads then focused on the wound itself and began the repair process, molecule by molecule.

The wound took around ten minutes to heal to a satisfactory degree. Though it was but a mere ten minutes, Theodore was left completely exhausted. For him, it was the longest ten minutes he had to endure. To repair the wound while fighting against the magic resistance was a task that took up a great amount of processing power, more than he had ever used at one time.

With his head throbbing in pain, he checked once more that the demonkin was indeed still asleep and snuck back to his room without a sound. With this, once the next day arrives, the demonkin would be able to leave and trouble them no more.

Lying on his bed, Theodore was tired but ecstatic. Ever since he became fully aware of himself and his surroundings, Theodore had been practicing with his Aether per the Demon Lord's memories, refining his control and strengthening his mind. He was quite proud to have been able to perform healing magic at his current age. Requiring knowledge of the body and precise control over Aether, healing magic was by far the most difficult to perform out of all the rudimentary magic techniques. It was still considered the basics of the basics, but thinking about how he had progressed over the years, he can't help but form a grin on his face. Demon Lord or no, to have something to show for after hard work was a joyous thing.

As his fatigue took over him, Theodore slowly fell into slumber. His work was done and it was well done indeed. Wearing a smile on his face, Theodore went to sleep.

***

The Demon Lord was a being that had existed since time immemorial. It existed before this world was formed and arrived here as a foreign body thousands of years ago. Passing down its Aether, its 'soul', from one being to the next, the being now called the Demon Lord had taken many forms. With each form, another layer of memories was added and passed down to the next incarnation. Reincarnation was the method in which the Demon Lord reproduce.

As such, with the memories going so many thousands of years back, a human's natural lifespan meant nothing to the Demon Lord. So ephemeral was the world that, in the eyes of a Demon Lord, it might as well have come and gone in a blink of an eye.

Truly, it was but a blink of an eye before everything was over. No matter how hard they tried to hold on, everything they hold dear will crumble to dust and slip past their fingers. All in a blink of an eye...

Theodore had not yet realized it, but his childhood was about to come to an end.

***

End of Chapter 8

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