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

Chapter 403: No Exception!

"You’ve made that clear across every exchange we’ve had. You speak in patterns that have intent behind them."

"You choose what to say and what not to say. You went silent when I asked if you were the Akashic Codex instead of denying it, it’s not something, some ai can do." He kept his eyes on the core.

"And you’re monotonous, yes, but monotone isn’t the same as emotionless. There’s something behind what you say. The way you told me to guess that wasn’t neutral. That was something. You’re a being with an interior. You’re just very careful about how much of it shows."

The core pulsed.

And then, from the thing that governed the laws of worlds, that had shattered his aura without effort more times than he’d bothered to count, that existed at a scale that made the word powerful feel like a category error, came a sound...

An exasperated sigh. Not what one would expect from a being of its level...

Bruce stared at it.

Bruce’s face remained expressionless despite the compliment...

The voice had not changed in any technical sense, still that same flat, boundless monotone, but the shift in register was unmistakable, the way a shift in atmospheric pressure was unmistakable...

Bruce’s eyes narrowed very slightly.

"It was helpful."

The answer was honest, as far as it went. The trial had been genuinely useful, the kind of useful that leaves marks, that changes the shape of what you understand yourself to be capable of. He wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.

What he wasn’t going to do was pretend that the question hadn’t landed strangely.

The Akashic Codex, the governing intelligence of this world’s fundamental mechanics, the being that had punished a god for interfering with the laws it kept, the entity that had spent the last however-long systematically dismantling his every attempt at resistance from inside a void pocket, was asking him, with what felt uncomfortably like casual warmth, what he’d thought of the experience.

As though they were two people catching up after a shared event.

As though this were normal.

The Codex seemed to consider the word, turning it over in whatever passed for its mind.

Bruce’s jaw shifted.

He looked at the core, at the soft, total illumination it cast, at the crystalline geometry that implied structure beyond anything he could fully parse, and he ran that sentence back through his mind once.

The trial were he witnessed the big bang happen time and time again was nothing but preparation for this meeting.

"You designed it," he said. Slowly.

"The entire thing. Everything from the first shatter."

He breathed in through his nose. Out through his mouth. The fury was back, specific and hot, and he put it somewhere it couldn’t reach his face. He was becoming quite practiced at that today.

"You could have simply spoken to me," he said. "You were already in my mind. You could have explained yourself from the beginning."

The confirmation sat between them in the void. No apology attached to it. No justification offered. Just the plain, unhurried acknowledgment of a being that had made a decision and had no particular interest in defending it.

Bruce looked at the core.

The core glowed.

He thought about what it had taken, the sheer accumulated cost of the last hour, mana spent on a scale that still made his sense of proportion rebel, his aura broken apart and rebuilt so many times that he’d lost the thread of what normal had felt like. He thought about Lily’s hand on his arm.

About the way her voice had cracked at the edges when she’d said ’that’s three times.’ About the blood he’d swallowed and the stumbles he’d converted into strides and the smile he’d held on his face through all of it because she was right there and she couldn’t know.

Preparation, the Codex had called it.

’For this meeting.’

"Then we’re meeting," Bruce said finally. His voice was quiet. Controlled. The kind of controlled that had learned to wear itself lightly. "So tell me what it is you actually want."

The core pulsed again, that slow, sourceless rhythm, and the void held its silence for exactly as long as the Akashic Codex decided it should.

Bruce waited.

He was, at this point, entirely certain that patience was the only currency he had that this being couldn’t simply take from him.

He spent it carefully.

"What are you getting at," Bruce said, then suddenly, his eyes went wide. "Don’t tell me... Is the Big Bang real?"

Bruce could almost feel the core smiling at him.

Bruce’s gaze narrowed. Akashic’s tone sounded almost amused, like it wasn’t talking about its own fast-approaching end.

"What happens to every being in this universe when you die?"

"No exceptions? Then why contact me in the first place..."

"You’re clearly trying to use me. After everything you’ve pulled so far, what makes you think I’ll help?"

Bruce gritted his teeth. Akashic knew exactly how to use his words.

’How long until the next Big Bang...’

"I’ll help. But I have one request, give me the void coordinates of Earth. I need to see how much things have changed since I left."

Bruce received the coordinates. He tore the void open with his aura and stepped toward them, calling back to the Akashic Codex as he went.

"We can keep talking while I check on things back on Earth before I return to Velmora."

Inside Earth, a tear split open in the air, and a figure stepped out through it.

Bruce hovered in silence, his aura spreading outward in a quiet, invisible tide that swallowed the whole planet.

For a moment, just a fraction of one, everything went still.

Then the information came.

Not as sight. Not as sound.

As understanding.

Bruce exhaled slowly.

"A lot has changed..."

It wasn’t just the landscape. It was the logic of the world itself.

Earth no longer worked like a closed system.

The atmosphere had thinned unevenly, not in a clean layer, but in fractures. Regions where mana density bent pressure and gravity. Some skies shimmered with aurora-like distortions even in daylight. Others hung dark and heavy, thick with unstable energy that sparked like silent lightning.

Entire ecosystems had either collapsed, or evolved violently.

Some forests had grown massive and dark, trees stretching kilometers high, their bark threaded with mana veins that pulsed faintly like living circuits. Other areas had become barren wastelands, the ground hardened into jagged glass-like formations from condensed mana overload.

The oceans weren’t stable anymore.

Sections of them floated.

Huge volumes of water hovered above the surface, suspended by gravitational distortions, drifting sky seas where aquatic creatures had adapted to swim through open air. The oceans that remained had grown unnaturally deep. Trenches expanding into abyssal zones that even Bruce’s perception struggled to fully reach.

He narrowed his eyes.

"Planets are missing."

Pluto, gone. Venus, gone.

Not destroyed. There were no debris fields, no asteroid belts where they should have been.

They had been erased. Or consumed.

The solar system’s gravitational balance had shifted, subtly, but enough. Earth’s orbit had destabilized, just enough to cause erratic seasonal swings. Regions of extreme heat sat right beside zones locked in permanent frost.

Radiation levels had spiked across the planet, but not evenly. Mana acted as both a shield and a trigger, those who had adapted could handle it. Even thrive under it.

Those who hadn’t?

Bruce didn’t need to look to know.

His aura swept across cities.

Or what used to be cities.

Civilization hadn’t collapsed.

It had restructured.

Urban centers had become fortified zones, layered with barrier arrays, energy shields, and defensive structures powered by mana cores. Skyscrapers had either been reinforced into vertical strongholds or abandoned entirely, overtaken by mutated organisms and rogue entities born from unstable mana clusters.

Transportation had changed too.

Roads weren’t the main way people moved anymore.

Instead, there were aerial paths, controlled zones where flight-capable individuals and mana-driven vessels moved between cities. Teleportation arrays existed, but were heavily restricted, likely due to instability or strategic control.

Bruce’s gaze shifted.

His hospital.

Now a fortress.

The structure had been expanded and reinforced with layered defenses, surrounded by multiple perimeter zones. What was once a place of healing had become a command center, part research institute, part military stronghold.

And inside...

He felt them.

His fellow surgeon with who he researched with. The ones he had trusted. The ones he had left behind with knowledge that should never have existed on Earth.

"They adapted faster than I expected..."