Nothing doing.

"I hope you're not getting bored," he says, absently and slightly too fast, as he goes back to the Sympathy/Conquest approach and considers the problem with his spare attention.

He asked what this universe knew about and healing magic wasn't, actually, specifically on the list. So maybe you have to - construct an understanding out of local pieces. He doesn't have any local pieces, and also that's annoying. But okay, what are some alternative avenues? Experimentation is safe here! He can just try things and see where trying gets him!

People heal naturally on their own without magical intervention; can he request that her finger do that on a highly accelerated schedule?

"You're not boring me," she assures him. The wound closes up just fine.

"Hm," he says. "Then can I try it again a different way?"

"Sure," she says. A new wound opens.

"Thanks."

Okay, how else can you conceive of healing? As reversing an injury, restoring a healthy state? He'll try that.

This one doesn't even have time to bleed!

"Again, if you don't mind? I'm trying to figure out which ways of conceptualizing healing work and which don't," he says.

"Sure." All five fingertips acquire small cuts, to be more efficient.

Okay. So what he wants is similar to both of these alternate conceptualizations, but different. More fundamental, better-targeted. Healing, rather than erasing an injury or making a thing heal itself. It's not that hard. (This seems like a job for Sympathy for now.)

Any luck?

Not really, no.

Three-branch injury-erasure. Three-branch make-it-heal-itself. Those both still work.

"Why doesn't your local magic understand healing as a concept?" he wonders.

"Why would it?"

"Here I am, healing things. You acted like that was a common occurrence. But I can only seem to do it in weirdly indirect ways. No one's invented a better method and taught it to the universe? Or - is it not possible to do that?"

"Magic doesn't really learn. You could, hm, you could probably enchant something to do that, over a given area...I guess you could enchant the planet, come to think of it, that would be really hard but theoretically doable once we've been great mages long enough..."

"Enchant? Define 'enchant'."

"Enchanting something is doing a large amount of magic to something at one time so that continuous use of magic on it later gets a lot easier. The city is enchanted, making it fly would be a lot harder otherwise."

"...You might have to explain that in more detail."

"Um, so," she grabs one of the larger rocks from the garden. "There wouldn't be a lot of point to my enchanting this to make floating it easier, and anyway I can't enchant things yet, but in a while I could put a lot of magic into making this rock a thing that was easier to make float, and then it would take much less magic to do that."

"Hmm. But still not none? Things can't be magic in themselves?"

"No, that's not how magic works."

"You have no idea how deeply inconvenient that sounds. I think I'll fix it."

"My first instinct is intense skepticism and my second instinct is to be suspicious of my first instinct."

"Oh?"

"Well, it seems to be going, but of course that's not how it works, that's the way the universe works, and you apparently have instincts like that for science not working, so who knows, maybe your extreme brain or your from-another-universe or something would let you do it."