The entire story so far HAS taken place in a bubble of sorts, a "sanctuary" where the weather never changes. However, the fact that we still know so little about what the sanctuary is and why anyone would want to live there is a point of frustration for me. It occurs to me that only desert plants like cacti are likely to thrive in such an environment, but I can't recall anything in the story about vegetation (this could be the writing group problem).
Okay. I liked this chapter. I liked the structure and flow of it. You tricked me into expecting a Medora chapter, and I was pleasantly surprised when it wasn't. >
Your explanation of the healing process was clear enough, but it didn't make any sense. Let me see if I've got this straight. Invigoration is the process of ripping divine energy from one's soul and channeling it into the body to make it resistant to change. Focusing that energy on a specific region of the body preserves that region as-is; it can get neither better nor worse. So far so good. Then, when the invigoration is suddenly released, the pent-up healing is released, and the body works overtime to do it all in one go, overshoots its mark, and winds up healing the injury nearly completely. Um...wut?
First, I'd expect the rapid healing to be only that which was denied by the invigoration for however long it was held - not much at all. Second, since the process appears to rely on the body's natural healing, why is there no scar tissue? It just doesn't make any sense.
I'm with the others on Tav's proficiency. It came out of nowhere, and was too strong. If learning cerebrance is so effortless for him, why has it taken him so long to get this far? But more than that, a superman character is boring. He'll quickly learn everything there is to know and then be invincible.
Along those same lines, how is Tav able to walk around? Generating so much new tissue so quickly would have drained his body's reserve of nutrients, leaving him weak and lethargic. I'd imagine it would feel quite a bit like going days without food. He still has a nasty gash in his belly, and most of his skin is tender and new, and if he has any sense at all he'll get taken to the infirmary on a stretcher and go straight to bed.
Then there's the mystery of the magical Kurick soul. Either:
1) An especially potent soul can inhabit more than one body at once. In this case I'd expect some (or even most) of the soul's potency to remain on the "other side", so to speak, wherever souls go when they die.
2) An especially potent soul can possess one already living, subsuming it and combining with it. This would explain a lot; if the Kurick-soul possesses many people at once and absorbs their potency when they die (or even while they live), it would build up a large reserve of potency and memories and so on upon which any of the hosts might draw. This jives with Haiden's description, in the prologue, of Kurick's soul being "chaotic".
3) The explanation is something that makes no logical sense. Don't pick option 3, grasshopper.
Last non-sequiter in the batch, Haiden's horribly conspicuous submission of a fake to the confirmation is out of character for a bright, shrewd schemer like Haiden. The circumstances are such that any observer with half a brain would surely know that this Legate ain't legit. Unless his plan somehow depends on everyone knowing his candidate is a fraud, he needs a better cover story. Like, maybe the dude was the vice-candidate, the runner-up, held in reserve in the event of the first choice failing the confirmation. Actually, now that I think of it, that seems like something everyone should be doing as a matter of course.
Last comment. The Lord Cerebrant was a bit off. It's hard to describe how, but with his first few lines of dialog you created an outline of a character in my head, and then he didn't quite fit that mold that you'd set for him. If this doesn't make any sense to you feel free to ignore it. It's just an impression, hard to put into words.
