"It calls the soul back from however far it's progressed to the afterlife, if it is willing to return, and restores the body to a condition suitable to hold it."

Uh huh. There's the sinking feeling.

"Is the resurrected person..." he searches for the words. "The same? After coming back?"

"They come back weaker, but that can be fixed with another spell. - these spells, both the raising and the restoration, require expensive diamonds, the raise dead yea big," pinch, "and the restoration diamond dust, yea much," pinch, "but it sounds like that may not be the limiting factor here, so perhaps they would be relatively inexpensive if I did manage to gain the necessary circles."

That's not what he was trying to ask, but still good to know.

He's not sure how to ask this.

"How does this fit into, whassitcalled, Pharasma's project?"

"It doesn't work on deaths of old age, which is Her primary means of obliging all souls to be judged. I believe Pharasmin clerics will perform raises the same as other churches when the situation calls for it."

Niggling confusion.

"So Pharasma takes your souls eventually, but lets you take your time getting there. Does the [Resurrection] spell come from her?" It's sort of making more sense. "And is this not considered necromancy?"

"The g- uh - all clerics can cast it if they are powerful enough even if they are not - associated with - Pharasma in particular. It is conjuration, not necromancy; the two schools have different auras when viewed."

Well, who's Jeiss to say otherwise. Not like the Necromancer couldn't cast a [Fireball] as good as any other [Mage], and the Terandrian stories don't read like they thought [Resurrection] was necromancy.

"Well, if you can level enough to deliver on that, you'll have [Wall Lords] and [Nobles] knocking down your door from all over Izril. The whole world, honestly." He snorts. "I don't know if it'll work here, though. We don't have a Pharasma or River of Souls."

"If that's the case I don't know if it will work, though being higher circle opens up other spells too, if you do have things I should be fighting that would level me up."

"Well, you can't join the Army, but if you level from combat, you can sign up with an adventuring team. The Adventurer's Guild here is small, it's more of a human thing to go off picking fights you don't know you can finish, but if you can heal without a potion there'll be plenty of guys fighting to snap you up."

"My experience is mostly in combat, though I'm not actually sure, if I'm the only cleric, whether it makes more sense to risk my life trying to get better spells versus setting up somewhere safe doing what I already can."

"If you were a Drake citizen I'd have better advice for you." Jeiss shrugs. "Five in ten adventurers die before they make it to Silver-rank. Three in ten quit. Serve in the army and you have better odds than not of passing Level 15 before you retire, and it's by far less hazardous to your health." It's delivered like a familiar spiel. "But you have better options than most. If your healing's as good as it sounds, a Gold-rank team would be stupid not to take you, whatever you're used to working with. And those guys are very good at not dying." Or they wouldn't have made Gold, obviously.

"How does 'level fifteen' correspond to spell-circles?"

"Third circle, maybe?" He thought Blai had Tier 3 spells himself? "But that's just where people start deciding to go home, you know, some [Soldiers] plateau in their tens but plenty make it past twenty if they stick with it." Oh, wait: "Are your circles the same as our circles? Uh, [Fireball] is a third-circle spell."

"I think it is third circle on Golarion, too, though we don't have anything nearly discretely measurable enough to divide each circle into five of anything... So even if I could join the army it is not obvious it would help given my present strength, if people there plateau there."

He didn't really understand that first thing Blai said but his policy today is not to dig too deep into confusing things Blai says.

"Some people plateau there," Jeiss corrects, "but people plateau in and out of the army, and practically all of our strongest people came out of the Army, so I personally think it's just that people don't die of being middling in the army so you see a lot more middling [Soldiers] than middling [Adventurers]. But they won't take a foreign human so it's a moot point—also, I'm not sure the numbers work out the same for [Mages]; I mostly worked with the martial types in my time."

"If you say so."

"Got a bit carried away there, didn't I," Jeiss concedes, scratching his ear. "Attaching to a Gold-rank team might be the fastest way to level, but I don't know where you'd find one around here. Maybe down in Pallass. But I'm not your boss. You'll make a perfectly good living hanging around casting healing."

"Do you have a guess how many people might want to be healed in a city this size in a day?"

"Depends on how much you're charging for it, no?" He thinks for a moment. "Low-grade healing potions, not for combat, cost a bit under a gold a pop? So that's what you're bidding against."

It occurs to him that Avistan might not be using the Drake standardizations.

"That's a flask half again as big as this." He shows the eight-ounce one he carries. "A gold is a good day's earnings for a lot of people*, though of course it varies."

*Jeiss' sample size is skewed.

"And how big is a gold coin minted around here?"

He shows him a gold coin.

"It's not pure gold," he mentions. "Same for the silver and copper. And a lot of cities mint their own coins, so you'll see variations even in Liscor, but it's all worth the same, mostly, though some shopkeepers will haggle on it."

"Okay. And how much is a loaf of bread?"

"Three to five coppers, about? It's two hundred coppers to the gold, ten copper to the silver."

Huh, gold must be... about twice as rare here? Or he's bad at judging coin sizes, it could also be that, he hasn't handled much gold since Cheliax did paper money. "Do you have an idea what it will cost to rent a large room with space for plenty of people to wait to all be healed at once?"