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Chapter 24 - Chapter 24: Signs!

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First, he used his considerable healing magic to mend all the physical wounds on the witcher's body. 

Before he'd left Britain, all those decades ago, Harry had been widely, and correctly, considered a true magical genius, a prodigy, because of his multiple, officially recognized Masteries in the highly complex subjects of Potions, Defense Against the Dark Arts, Ancient Runes, Herbology, and, perhaps most impressively, Healing Magic. 

Most of those Masteries he had acquired simply because he was either incredibly bored at the time, or because they directly helped with his ongoing, often esoteric, research projects. 

Healing, surprisingly, was the only one of those demanding disciplines that he had actually pursued simply from a genuine, burning desire to know more on the subject, to understand the intricate workings of life and recovery.

Unsurprisingly, his initial motivation for delving so deeply into healing magic had stemmed from a vivid, haunting memory. 

He had remembered, with painful clarity, how incredibly lucky he had been all those years ago when Ciri had been so grievously injured by the Wild Hunt. 

He'd managed to cobble together a desperate, last-minute solution that, by some miracle, had just happened to work. 

He had vowed then and there that he wanted to make absolutely sure that he would be able to truly help, effectively and without relying on sheer luck, any time one of his friends, or anyone he cared about, needed it in the future. 

It was precisely that same drive, that same fierce protectiveness, that had led him to create the Dragon Pox Vaccine. 

Little Rose Weasley, his goddaughter, his niece in all but blood, had contracted the dreadful, usually fatal, magical disease. 

He had worked, almost non-stop, for nearly an entire, agonizing year straight to find a solution, to create a cure for that terrible little issue, and he had thankfully made it just in the nick of time, when the poor, brave little girl had been on her very deathbed.

Harry shook his head, trying to clear away the distracting, bittersweet reminiscing, as he focused his attention back on the now physically healed, but still very much dead, body of the witcher he had just killed. 

Now, obviously, he couldn't bring the man back to actual life that was far beyond even his considerable magical abilities, and frankly, he didn't particularly want to, in this case. But he could temporarily imitate some of the physical processes of life within the body. 

He'd come up with a clever, rather complex little spell some years ago that could restart the heart, keep it pumping blood throughout the circulatory system, but only for as long as he actively held and maintained the spell. 

So, physically, on a purely biological level, the man would appear to be alive, his systems functioning. But since he had not had any oxygen circulating to his brain for far too long now, he would still be, for all intents and purposes, brain dead. 

Still, even with that limitation, Harry could at least conduct some useful tests on the witcher's unique physiology now.

Harry started by seeing how the witcher's body handled different, common strains of bacteria and viruses being introduced directly into its system. 

The results, he had to admit, had been a little… disappointing, to be honest. 

The witcher's body did handle the various pathogens better than an average human body would, but not by a significant margin, not by as much as he had expected. 

In fact, he had been genuinely surprised that it handled them so relatively poorly. 

He had seen the clear evidence of the powerful mutagens that had been integrated into the man's bloodstream, into almost every cell and tissue of his body. 

Logically, those mutagens should have been giving the body a much stronger, much more robust immunity system than it currently possessed. 

Harry wasn't sure if the original mutagenic formula was somehow flawed, or if he was perhaps missing some crucial, unknown factor in his analysis.

The next thing he looked into was the muscle and tissue structure of a witcher. This was clearly where the various mutagens shone through the most, where their effects were most pronounced. 

Muscle density had definitely been significantly increased, and the muscle fibers themselves seemed to retain their integrity and strength much better, even post-mortem, than he had observed in human tissues in the past. 

This easily explained their documented, almost superhuman, increases in speed, agility, and raw physical strength. 

He wished, for a fleeting moment, that he could somehow magically reanimate the man, just temporarily, to run him through a series of rigorous physical tests, to quantify his limits. 

But sadly, that wasn't really in the cards, not with his current magical repertoire. Despite these obvious enhancements, though, he still got the distinct, nagging feeling that it all… could have been better. More efficient. 

More potent. He probably couldn't give them the kind of insane, off-the-charts strength and speed that a higher vampire possessed, or anything even close to it, but there was definitely, he felt, considerable room for improvement in the witcher mutagenic process.

The last interesting, and rather unfortunate, thing he had found during his examination was that the mutagenic cocktail, as a side effect, actually rendered the user completely sterile. 

That must have been quite bothersome, even heartbreaking, if any of them ever wanted to have children of their own. 

Although, he recalled Ciri mentioning that it apparently hadn't stopped good ole Geralt of Rivia from raising her as his own beloved daughter, his "child of surprise." Still, from a purely biological standpoint, that was quite an unfortunate, and rather limiting, side effect.

Last, but certainly not least, was the limited, almost rudimentary, magic that witchers were known to use their "Signs." 

This, in Harry's expert opinion, was actually one of the most impressive, almost miraculous, things that the mutagens seemed to achieve, mainly because, based on his extensive knowledge of magical theory and biology, it should have been completely impossible. 

He hadn't encountered a single magical plant, a single alchemical ingredient, a single naturally occurring magical phenomenon on this entire world that made him believe in even the remotest possibility of artificially grafting a functional magic reserve onto a non-magical human being. 

It was, frankly, astonishing that every single witcher who underwent the Trial of the Grasses didn't just… implode in on themselves from the sheer, overwhelming magical and biological stresses. 

If someone had asked Harry, before he'd seen it with his own eyes, if there was even a slight chance of anyone surviving the incredibly traumatic process of what these mutagens apparently did to the human body, he would have laughed dismissively in their face and called them completely insane. 

It was an absolute, unadulterated miracle, in his honest, professional opinion, that any of them survived at all.

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