"The spells are not horrible death spells unless you have an affinity for horrible death. The spells are all the spells that people have written. I would get a spell to make mitochondria work better, I think. Breathe more effectively with less oxygen. That is what my affinity likes to do, make bodies work the way they should."

"- Whoa! That's really cool, actually. And yeah, a spell to make mitochondria work better would - actually help a lot if someone were injured, and starting to go into shock? Because usually the thing that actually kills you after losing a lot of blood is not getting enough oxygen to cells, and if you needed less... Worth a try! Though you'd, uh, probably want to try it on an animal first, not a person, just to be sure. Are there animals in here?" 

"You have to feed them from your food so most people don't have them. I do experiments on human volunteers and pay them in free healing. Wei Wuxian who's a freshman in the Shanghai enclave has brought in cockroaches because his affinity is dead things, so I may be able to experiment on his. He can use the corpses."

"What....does having an affinity for 'dead things' actually...mean? Like, what spells can he do?" 

"He can bring dead plants back to life and make vegetables and fruits very fresh, he's very useful in the garden and the kitchen. He can make bugs and spiders and things into zombies. He can make other things that are more useful as long as they're made out of dead things."

"Whooooa your magic system has zombies, I somehow did not see that one coming! Anyway, cool. That's probably enough on mitochondria for now - we can maybe go deeper on cellular metabolism later, if mitochondria spells do work, there are lots of more specific bits that can mess up. ...Oooh you know what'd be neat, though, I wonder if you can get a spell to oxygenate someone's blood. If they're not breathing well." 

"That seems possible. The blood carries the oxygen around the body?"

“Yeah, exactly! Uh, you probably know this already - so there's two sides of the heart, right? The left side pumps to the body, the right side pumps blood through your lungs so you can get it re-oxygenated. Blood loss means your blood can't move as much oxygen around, but you can also have injuries that directly damage the lungs - like a punctured lung from being stabbed, or, uh, some toxic gases? I don't know how much that's happen here but it might with alchemy accidents, lots of chemical accidents release corrosive fumes. So you might have someone whose heart and circulation are fine but their lungs are too messed up to absorb oxygen, and a spell to replace that would be amazing. In mundane medicine we can put people on a lung bypass machine - it's called ECMO, extra-corporeal membrane oxygenation - but it's a huge deal and pretty risky, and takes a ton of training to set up, I don't know how." 

"The accidents and also the mals release corrosive gases sometimes. The mals do any bad thing you can imagine, pretty much."

"Ugh." Shiver. "Well, in order to save someone longer-term you'd need a spell to fix up their lungs, but - having a magical equivalent of ECMO could buy you time to get mana for it or whatever. Seems worth trying. ...Uh, anyway, want to move on to the other parts of the cell now?" 

"Yes, I would."

Jin Zixun finishes up and leaves, grumbling in Mandarin.

"Right." Marian frowns at her cell diagram. "So, uh... Ribosomes? Have you heard of those?" 

"I have not."

"They're pretty neat too! They're little tiny cell-organs that make proteins. Hmm - do you know anything about how DNA, well, RNA, basically has the code for making proteins out of amino acids, and then proteins are what all your body's enzymes and - functional structures in general, are made of?" 

"I look at it carefully once and get a spell for altering RNA. I don't know what to do with it."

"Whoa! Yeah that sounds - pretty scary to use, if I'm following how spells work then I think you'd need to know exactly how you wanted to change the RNA? At which point you could get someone's body to start manufacturing different proteins, which would be pretty damned powerful, assuming you're doing it to all their cells? But I don't even slightly know how you'd want to control it. I'm not sure literally anyone knows, actually - protein folding isn't a solved problem, even with really good computers we can't predict what changes to RNA will do to the resulting proteins. I...guess you could cure things like sickle cell anemia or hemophilia or cystic fibrosis, where there's a pretty well-understood genetic mutation that causes someone's body to make a protein that doesn't work properly. But I doubt kids with those would usually, uh, survive to be in this school at all, if being magic is that dangerous." 

"Children with disabilities usually don't get spots, at least in China. But Jiang Yanli got a spot because of nepotism even though she has fibromyalgia. --Do you know how to treat fibromyalgia?"

"....Ummmm. I - don't actually know if anyone knows how to treat fibromyalgia? I, uh, I think a lot of doctors think it's fake or psychosomatic or something. Do you know what her symptoms are?" 

"She hurts all over, she is very tired, she can't sleep. What is psychosomatic? I know it is not fake because if it was fake she would have stopped."

".....Uh, honestly I think it's a stupid category because actually we don't understand bodies that well? In theory it means it's - psychological in origin, like, someone who has depression but instead of feeling sad they have stomachaches? In practice it's, uh, kind of a catch-all for anything where a patient has symptoms but all of their lab tests and imaging and stuff look normal. ....I might be able to get sleeping pills? The void wall gives me drugs when I ask. And, uh, hmmm - I think gabapentin is a treatment for fibromyalgia pain and also helps with sleeping?" 

"So Yanli might be sick because her parents are very bad and then die in the Scholomance? That isn't a fair way for bodies to work."

“I know, it’s really not! …Um. Was she - abused, or something? I, uh, I’m not - super qualified as a psychiatrist - but I could read up on things and try talking to her? If she’s depressed, there are meds for that, it might help.”

"I don't know what is 'abuse'? Her parents are not good. Her mother is angry about the fibromyalgia and about her kindness because she'll die. But she doesn't hit Yanli because Yanli is too worthless to be hit."

"I mean, uh, that - doesn't sound great? I...don't really have better ideas for treating it than just dealing with the symptoms, but I can see if the void will give me drugs to help her sleep and help with pain, and - maybe stimulants so she can be less tired for anything really important? ...Oh, and there's a girl here, Wendy I think? - who didn't know about magic until recently, and she's got some drugs that she wanted to trade. You could maybe get Adderall from her and see if that helps, uh, Yanli, with her fatigue?"

This sounds like medically speaking a TERRIBLE IDEA PROBABLY, but then again this is a horrible death school, Marian is not going to worry too much about the overprescription of stimulants.