Felicity: The Sixteenth Life

CHAPTER TEN: Mana Breakthrough

Night was deepening and the Acker household had been in hysteria for the past hour. Everyone waited anxiously outside the closed door of the guest room in the ground floor of the Sapphire mansion. Maids and butlers carried buckets of hot water and armfuls of towels, standing by apprehensively so that they may spring into action the moment that they would be called.

Liam, Hazel, Ryder, Chase and Carter wouldn't listen to their nannies to go back to their rooms, and they were stubbornly standing guard with the servants outside the room. They desperately wanted someone to tell them what's going on, but no one exactly knows what was happening. All that everyone know was that a bloodied Lady Felicity was carried off to the guest room by the Count, and that Dr. Silas, the Acker's family physician and Sir Sebastian, a newbie healer, had been inside the room with them for the past excruciating hour.

A few minutes later, knights of the Obsidian Order who were ordered to investigate in Felicity's cabin returned empty-handed but with a useful information. Treatment was ongoing thus the knights couldn't make their report. As the eldest, Liam demanded that they relay the report to him in place of their father.

"There seemed to be no foul play. There were no signs that somebody entered the cabin and hurt Lady Felicity. The floor was covered with her blood which we suspected she threw up. Upon closer inspection, the blood had vomit mixed in. We searched the cabin to find whether she had eaten something poisonous, but we didn't find anything spoiled or suspicious in the pantry or the garden. A sample of the water from her tank was taken and sent to an alchemist to test for dangerous elements," Sir Dimitri said.

All of a sudden, the door opened and several maids went out with basins of bloodied cloths, blankets and used red-tinged water. They had been cleaning Felicity's body to change her into more comfortable cloths suitable for the treatment but the vomiting of blood was not stopping. It came in differing intervals and just as the maids were done dressing her, she would cough up blood again and they would start all over again.

Dr. Douglas Silas and Sir Sebastian Atticus were both living close to the Count's residence so that there would be someone to cast simple healing magic and perform first aid for the Acker household in cases of emergency however, they were at a loss of what to do with Felicity's case.

The children listened raptly to the muffled conversation as the door was left open partially.

"I suspect this is not from poisoning or from internal trauma. I can't use simple healing magic on the lady's body, and I don't know why... I'm sorry Your Grace... I'm not a full-pledged healer yet thus I don't have enough knowledge nor experience to figure out what is going on with the lady's body... but for sure, this condition is related to mana. We need a more experienced healer to look at her," Sir Sebastian said, his tone full of disappointment at himself.

The next batch of servants with the hot water and fresh towels were ordered to go inside and the children anxiously craned their necks to sneak a peek inside the room before it closed. Aside from their father's stiff back and Dr. Silas bending over the edge of the bed, they were unable to see anything else.

At last, a more experienced healer arrived. He was a familiar face to the knights for the healer mage Sir Elias Prentice Irkwell was someone who had accompanied the Count and his entourage to the battlefield and provided his services and support. Fortunately, he still had not left the Count's territory to go back to his home in the capital city.

He was ushered to the room as soon as he stepped inside the mansion. With him, there were two people; the oldest, most trusted physician in the fief, Doctor Salvadore, and Mr. Andersen from the bookstore in Burke's town.

Mr. Andersen was outside his house in the middle of closing his store when he saw knights of the Acker Countdom run in the street towards the home of Doctor Salvadore whose residence was on the block opposite his. He stopped a knight that he recognized; it was Sir Dean. Sir Dean was among the few who knew about Mr. Andersen's real identity. His full name was Baron Callum Benjamin Andersen. The honorable elderly had been invited to the Acker Countdom yearly on the month that the Count goes back home from war. He was a friend of Count Herald's grandfather, a respected confidant of the late former Count and someone whom Count Herald considers and reveres as his own uncle.