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

Everything compressed into something smaller than anything? The universe exploding into existence? How does that any sense?

That skepticism died now. It didn’t argue. It didn’t resist. It simply evaporated under the weight of what he was watching.

’Holy shit,’ Bruce thought, with genuine reverence.

He couldn’t breathe here, so he did what he always did when his body needed to keep functioning through conditions it wasn’t designed for.

He directed Heal inward, set it to continuous, and let the silver threads maintain him. Then he turned his attention to his eyes, or the thing serving as his eyes. He could perceive. That was all that mattered. The resolution was a variable, and variables could be tuned.

He pushed Heal toward his perception itself, in a direction or level he had never pushed it before. He was directly enhancing it with his eyes… The threads responded reluctantly at first, then more willingly as he refined the instruction. Sharpness. Acuity. Temporal resolution. The dials were all turned up as he could now see things in a quantum level, this level was a level even tinier than molecular level

Something clicked, and the hidden part of the universe came into focus.

He could see the protons forming. Not metaphorically. Actually. Individual composite particles binding themselves out of the quark soup, three at a time, like atoms learning to be atoms for the first time in the history of there being atoms. Roughly a million times more detail than his enhanced eyes had ever delivered.

’…Okay,’ Bruce thought slowly. ’This is useful.’

He filed that away. He’d think about it later. At length. In a quiet room.

The first three minutes.

Hydrogen first formed.. the simplest thing, the survivor. A single proton, a single electron. Then helium, slightly more complicated, the second-born. And then a long stretching. The eruption still expanding but no longer inventing, now just cooling, heat bleeding outward into the ever-expanding volume of what was no longer a point.

Time accelerated. Three hundred and eighty thousand years passed in what felt like a single long breath. The universe was moving through its own durations; he was being shown a compressed highlight reel.

The cosmos cooled enough for light to travel freely. He saw the moment it went from opaque to transparent. The first photons breaking free of the dense electron soup, the exact radiation that back on Earth, humans had eventually detected with radio telescopes.

He laughed, once, silently. ’The scientists were right. Of course they were right.’

Then the stars. Great blue giants, the first generation, igniting across the new dark like match-heads struck in a cathedral. Burning so hot and so fast that their lives were cosmic eyeblinks. Bruce watched one go. Watched its core collapse. Watched the outer layers rebound in a supernova that, for a flicker, outshone its galaxy.

And in the ash, new elements. Carbon. Oxygen. Silicon. Iron. Gold. The heavier building blocks, forged in the death of the first stars, now seeding the cosmos with the raw materials that would eventually become everything complicated.

’The building blocks of life came from the deaths of stars.’

He had known this in the abstract. Every schoolchild had heard ’we are made of star stuff’ and filed it as poetry. He was watching the poetry be literal.

And then he felt it. A thread.

Not physical. Something underneath the visible. A faint, luminous filament running between, through, the stars. Connecting them. Threading one newborn galaxy to another. Weaving through the expanding web of matter like a nervous system forming in a body that didn’t yet know it was alive.

’Mana,’ Bruce realized.

The universe had mana in it. Threaded through its fabric from the very beginning. Not a late addition. Not a magical layer grafted on top of physics. Part of the architecture. A fifth force, or maybe a zeroth one, something that had been there the whole time, binding stars to stars, galaxies to galaxies, everything eventually to everything else.

He stared. Tried to follow the threads. The answer was everywhere. Every star. Every cloud of hydrogen. Every nascent planet. All of it laced through with the faint filaments of something he had spent months learning to wield, and was only now realizing he had not, in any meaningful sense, understood the source of.

He was still trying to trace the pattern when the force moved him again.

A pull. Still the same sovereign force. It carried him in., through cosmic distances that would have been unspeakable in normal terms, toward a single unremarkable solar system in a single unremarkable spiral arm of a single unremarkable galaxy.

He was made to watch a planet form.

Cosmic dust accreted. Gravity found its first victim. Particles stuck to particles. Small clumps became large clumps.

Cosmic dust accreted. Gravity found its first victim. Particles stuck to particles. Small clumps became large clumps. Large clumps began to pull in more material with the growing authority of their own mass. The process took millions of years and Bruce watched it in what felt like minutes, his enhanced perception catching each stage as it bloomed past.

The young planet was hell. Molten. Violent. Its surface a ceaseless churn of magma, impacted every few seconds by incoming debris from the still-clearing solar neighborhood. Meteors the size of small moons punched craters into it, sent plumes of liquid rock spraying up into what didn’t yet qualify as an atmosphere.

Volcanoes erupted continuously, not one at a time, not dozens, but thousands, the entire crust a lacework of fissures bleeding the planet’s inner heat outward.

Slowly, slowly, slowly, in the way of geologic time made perceptible, it cooled.

A crust hardened. Then broke. Then hardened again, more stably. The bombardment from space thinned as the solar system cleared itself of loose debris. The atmosphere, such as it was, began to thicken with outgassed water vapor, carbon dioxide, sulfur.

It rained.

For millions of years, it rained. Water vapor condensed and fell and struck the still-cooling surface and flash-boiled and rose again and fell again, the entire planet locked in a scalding loop of precipitation that went on, and on, and on, and slowly, as the surface finally cooled below the boiling point of water, the rain began to stay.

Oceans formed.

Lightning cracked across skies that were still choked with volcanic smoke. The seas were warm and acidic and dark, full of dissolved minerals, churned by tectonic violence.

And deep down, in the absolute dark, at the bottom of those first oceans, where the planet’s inner heat still vented through fissures in the seafloor, Chemistry.

Bruce’s perception followed the hidden force as it pulled his awareness downward, through miles of primordial water, to a single hydrothermal vent on the floor of an ocean that didn’t yet have a name. The water here was different. Mineral-rich. Energy-saturated. A slow-cooking soup of possibility, stirred endlessly by the heat rising from below.

He watched amino acids form. Spontaneously. Out of the chemistry of the vent. Simple molecules at first, then more complicated ones, then structures that began to fold in repeatable ways.

He watched the first strands of RNA assemble.

He watched them replicate. And in that moment, that specific, unremarkable, utterly ordinary moment at the bottom of a dark sea on a young planet, Bruce witnessed, with his own enhanced senses, the instant life began.

A single molecule, making a copy of itself. That was all. That was everything.

The molecule was so simple it barely qualified as anything. It had no intention. It had no awareness. It had no idea it was alive, because the concept of alive did not yet exist and would not exist for another several billion years, when the descendants of this molecule had finally accumulated enough complexity to invent the word for what they were.

But it persisted. It divided.

It made mistakes in its divisions, and those mistakes made new molecules, and some of those mistakes were better at dividing than their parents, and those ones multiplied faster, and

Natural selection, Bruce thought softly. Starting on its first day.

He watched.

Single cells. Walled, organized, complex. Then eukaryotes, the revolutionary mutants who’d absorbed other cells whole and kept them as organelles. Then colonies, single-celled creatures learning to cooperate. Then multi-cellular organisms, the first true bodies, crude sacs of specialized tissue drifting through the Precambrian seas.

Time accelerated again.

The Cambrian Explosion hit like a starting gun. In what felt to Bruce like seconds, life exploded into form, trilobites, anomalocaris, bizarre creatures with five eyes and trunk-like proboscises, segmented things and shelled things and jawed things and jawless things, the seas suddenly and dizzyingly full of variety where moments before there had been almost none.

Fish. The first true fish, cutting through the water with the new invention of a backbone.

The first amphibians, hauling themselves awkwardly onto land with fins that had just barely started thinking about being legs.

Reptiles. Scaly, patient, successful.

The dinosaurs rose. Bruce watched the great ages of them, the Triassic, the Jurassic, the Cretaceous, unfold and stack on top of one another, forms growing larger, stranger, more elaborate. Long-necked sauropods taller than buildings. Horned ceratopsians. Feathered raptors that were half-bird before the word bird meant anything.

The land and sky filled with them for hundreds of millions of years, and Bruce, whose own Earth had treasured these creatures as myths carved from stone, got to see them alive, moving, breathing, fighting, mating, dying.

He couldn’t help but frown, ’Is This Earth? What the fuck is going on?!’