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

Chapter 406: Earth’s Consciousness Awakens!

One of Bruce’s acquittance, a female surgeon who had once worked in reconstructive trauma, looked up to the air and didn’t speak for a long time.

She didn’t move for a few seconds straight, she didn’t know why but she was feeling a sense of familiarity from the silhouette hovering on the air...

The familiarity she felt wasn’t rational, it made no sense. It was the kind of recognition that lives below thought, in the part of a person that responds before the mind has caught up.

Her and the rest of Bruce’s acquittance could feel his heal now, specifically, distinct from the general warmth the rest of Earth’s population was experiencing.

At their level they could identify the type of energy, categorise it the way a musician identifies a chord. It was curative. It was evolutionary. It was the most advanced instance of a healing skill any of them had ever encountered by a margin that made the comparison almost meaningless.

Letting out a long sigh, the woman said in a soft voice, "Am I the only one that feels this way...’

Bruce floated above it all and watched it happen.

He could see all of it. The domain had dissolved every physical obstruction between his perception and the surface, and at his level of existence seeing across an entire planet was trivial. He saw the man with the cigarette on the highway divider.

He saw the dungeon team standing in the aftermath of the fight they hadn’t expected to win that easily.

He saw the child who had stopped crying, and the old man at the distribution point with his hands over his face, and the scouts at Osaka pointing their equipment at the sky.

He saw his acquittance all over the world...

He saw the moment a few of them recognised him, or started to. The moment the certainty crept in past all the logical reasons it couldn’t be true.

He shook his head slightly.

’Don’t resist.’

He said it inwardly, meant it for everyone, knowing none of them could hear him. Not yet. He understood the resistance.

The apocalypse had made everyone cautious. Every instinct had been sharpened toward suspicion. That was correct. That was survival. He understood it completely.

It didn’t make watching it any less frustrating.

But it was already working. Even the ones who had tried to resist, who had clenched against the warmth the way you brace for impact, found it moved through them regardless, quietly and without force.

His existence outclassed theirs by a distance so vast it wasn’t really a comparison. There was no mechanism available to them that could stop it. And because it was his heal, because what it did was improve and not damage, they would feel within moments that there was nothing to brace against.

He planned to leave his domain active for two or three days.

Long enough for the heal to cycle through completely, for the benefits to compound and stabilise, for even those who are in dungeons to come out , he didn’t want anyone to miss this

Below him, Earth turned slowly, wrapped in gold and silver light, and its people moved through their days with something new growing quietly in their bodies, whether they understood it or not.

The domain was still running, warm and steady across the whole planet, when Bruce looked up at nothing in particular and spoke inward.

’Is there anything you can give me to help speed up my progression?

There was a pause. Then Akashic’s reply came, and Bruce could have sworn there was something tired in it.

Bruce opened his mouth.

Bruce closed his mouth.

He couldn’t argue with that. Infinite mana was exactly what it sounded like. No ceiling. No depletion. The kind of thing that made everything else negotiable. He let the thought go and turned his attention downward.

He already knew Earth had a core. Iron. Solid. Spinning slowly at the centre of the planet surrounded by liquid metal and heat. He’d learned it the same way everyone did, in a classroom, from diagrams with the layers labelled in different colours.

But he was thinking about something different now.

The sun’s core had felt alive. Dormant, but alive. A slow, deep aura radiating outward through every layer above it, expressing itself as heat and light and plasma without the core itself being aware it was doing any of it. Not yet. That was just what a core did before it woke up.

So Earth had a core too.

Whether that was the same thing the geography textbooks described, the physical lump of iron at the centre of the planet, or something else entirely sitting underneath that, Bruce wasn’t certain. The physical and the spiritual didn’t always map onto each other cleanly. He’d learned that much.

He already had a feeling he knew the answer. But he asked anyway.

’The iron core at the centre of Earth. That’s what would awaken, isn’t it. That’s the real core.’

Akashic confirmed it simply.

Bruce was already moving.

He dropped out of the sky without ceremony, passing through clouds, through atmosphere, through the surface of the earth like it was water. Rock closed over him and he kept going, pushing his aura ahead of him as he descended, feeling the layers change.

Compressed rock giving way to denser rock. The temperature climbing. The pressure building from every direction. Mantle material, thick and slow-moving, nothing like the rapid churning of the sun’s interior. Earth moved at its own pace. Old and unhurried.

Then the outer core, liquid iron swirling in vast slow currents, the source of the planet’s magnetic field. Bruce passed through it without slowing.

And then the inner core.

Solid. Dense in a way that even the surrounding liquid iron wasn’t. Bruce stopped just at its surface and pressed his perception against it the same way he’d pressed his palm against the sun’s core.

There it was.

Faint. Much fainter than the sun’s had been. Like a candle against the sun’s slow furnace. But real.

A consciousness at the very earliest edge of existence, not yet aware of itself, not yet aware of anything, just present in the way a seed is present before it becomes anything. A pulse so slow and quiet that anything below Bruce’s level of perception would have missed it entirely.

He looked at it for a moment.

Then he raised his hand, and healed it.

It wasn’t like healing a person. A person had defined biology, a system he could target and improve along known pathways. This was different.

The core wasn’t injured. It wasn’t deficient in any conventional sense. What it lacked was simply time. Thirty billion years was what Akashic had needed. Earth’s core had been working with a fraction of that.

Bruce didn’t have millions of years.

But he had infinite mana.

He poured it in. Steady, consistent, unhurried. His heal working not to repair but to accelerate, feeding the core’s growth the way sunlight feeds a plant, compressing decades of natural development into something much shorter.

He felt it responding. Slowly at first. The pulse that had been barely detectable began to strengthen, gradually finding a rhythm, the consciousness underneath it stirring without waking.

He kept going.

An hour passed. Then several. The core’s aura grew denser, warmer, more defined at its edges. The faint thing he’d first felt was becoming something with shape. Something with weight.

Bruce didn’t stop.

He was still there at the six hour mark. The twelve hour mark. His mana didn’t thin. His focus didn’t break. He simply stayed and fed it and let his heal do what it was designed to do, accelerating what was already there, not creating anything new.

At the twenty hour mark something shifted.

The pulse changed. It had been the rhythm of something sleeping. Now it was the rhythm of something about to wake up.

Bruce kept going.

Four more hours.

And then, at the twenty fourth hour, the core opened its eyes.

The wave of aura that followed was immediate and enormous.

It didn’t travel like Bruce’s domain had, steady and controlled. It burst outward from the centre of the planet in every direction at once, passing through every layer of the earth the way sound passes through water, carrying nothing hostile in it but carrying everything else.

Every person on the surface felt it hit them from below rather than above, a deep resonant pressure rising through the ground, through the soles of their feet, through the floors of their shelters and the foundations of whatever buildings still stood.

Those who had already been experiencing the warmth of Bruce’s domain now felt something layered underneath it. Different in quality. The domain was warm the way sunlight was warm.

But this aura was different...

One of the 5 S-Ranks of earth looked underground upon being hit by an aura that was completely unfamiliar but felt strangely familiar, he felt as if he was linked to the being with that aura...

"That came from inside the planet," he said.

Nobody contradicted him.