Chapter 10
*
Cough—
On the way to the clinic, I cleared my throat inside the mask.
As someone born Julian, I’d never really felt that I was frail.
But the air and smell of Limbus Pit were a bit much for the delicate lungs of the Sanctum Hill young master.
‘When will I be able to take this mask off, I wonder.’
On the way to the clinic, I kept coughing from the stench I hadn’t smelled in so long.
I met the man smoking across the street.
Those half-lidded golden eyes lazily swept over me.
“Hm?”
As those eyes narrowed and searched me, they grew as wide as a full moon.
“Oh! You’ve come, Dr. Schnabel!”
A hyena beastman who tossed away his cigarette and approached with a bow-legged gait.
As he came closer, I could see the scar across his brow and the half-cut ear.
A man in a burgundy Mandarin-collar shirt and a black silk vest embroidered with arabesque patterns in gold thread.
Like the buildings of the red-light district, his clothes told me exactly where he came from.
“So it’s Mr. Wangcho.”
Wangcho.
He was the boss of the criminal organization <Scard Hyena>, which ruled this red-light district.
For the record, Wangcho was a nickname; his real name was Tao Chen.
But I just call him Wangcho.
He asked me to.
“It’s been a while, Wangcho. Have you been well?”
“Ho ho. I’m always well. And you, Doctor? Did anything happen during the heavy snow?”
“I went somewhere warm and got plenty of rest.”
“That’s a relief. Whenever you come here, you never got to do anything warm anyway, only wear yourself down. Couldn’t you at least rest for a month out of the year?”
He rubbed his hands together with a kindly smile.
He had that friendly, eager-to-help air, like he was about to ask, ‘How much did you come in knowing?’
But you couldn’t let the appearance fool you.
This man, of all people, had conquered this gutter and was the undisputed king of the brothel district.
...Come to think of it, even his nickname lacked a certain punch.
“But to be honest, I was surprised when your letter said you wouldn’t be able to come for six weeks.”
“If I remember right, I wrote that I couldn’t come because of the heavy snow. Did I perhaps forget to write it down?”
“Ah, I saw that, of course. But that wasn’t what I meant.”
Wangcho glanced around, then brought his mouth close to my ear.
And then he whispered,
“I thought you had been taken by the ducal house, or something...”
“...Out of nowhere?”
“No, no, there’s no need to pretend you don’t know in front of me. I know too. You were... um... at Sanctum Hill...”
Wangcho gave me a look.
As if to say I should’ve understood by now.
Only then did I understand what Wangcho was trying to say.
“I understand what you’re trying to say, but all of that is just rumor.”
A rumor about the crow doctor Schnabel has been spreading through the red-light district.
That he had once been a slave healer for some ducal house, but after failing treatment his face was seared,
that he started wearing a mask to hide the scar,
and that he was an eccentric dwarf with over 150 years of experience, driven into the red-light district and living a life of service.
The reason such rumors spread was all because of this mask.
It was a mask I wore because the air of the slums was rough on a body used to Sanctum Hill, and to keep from catching secondary infections besides.
To people who knew nothing about infection, the fact that I never took off the crow mask made them assume there had to be some story behind it.
And with people’s imaginations layered over that assumption again and again, the rumor above was born.
People really were amazing, the way they could spin a whole novel out of nothing more than a mask.
“I have nothing to do with the ducal house.”
“Eh? But didn’t you just get out of a car? Aren’t you from Sanctum Hill?”
Cars are a luxury reserved for nobles.
From the mana-stone kerosene that powered them to the parking garage that stored them, and even their maintenance.
Just keeping machines running properly in this city was itself a form of power.
‘Because the smog, thick with mana, tends to break machines at the slightest provocation.’
The more delicate something was, the more outrageous the cost of running and maintaining it became.
Naturally, the ultimate end of that was transport like cars and airships.
So when Wangcho saw me coming to work in something like that, it wasn’t strange that he thought of rumors tying me to nobles.
I waved a hand to correct his misunderstanding.
“I had a patient over there who needed me.”
“So the ducal house called you back again!?”
“...Not every noble is a duke.”
“Then even if it wasn’t a duke, you’re connected to some other noble...?”
“...”
“Maybe... the car was given by that noble as a token of gratitude...?”
I couldn’t even say anything.
It wasn’t even wrong, so I had no idea where to start correcting the misunderstanding.
Then, all of a sudden, one fact flashed through my mind.
A familiar flow.
That’s right.
This is unmistakably the flow of a misunderstanding story.
No matter how I looked at it, saying anything didn’t seem like it would clear up the misunderstanding.
Realizing that only after the fact, I chose silence.
“...”
Come to think of it, it wasn’t even a lie.
Even if it was only a baron’s house, I am still from a noble family, after all.
At that rate, I’m about 0.01 duke.
The amount of noble blood in me is even higher than the strawberry content in strawberry milk, so I’m certainly not scamming anyone.
“Sen... sor?”
“...”
“...I won’t dig any deeper.”
Wangcho interpreted my silence on his own.
As if he wanted no part of noble affairs, he blatantly changed the subject.
“Oh, right. As requested, I’ve been managing the clinic while you were away.”
Wangcho handed me the key.
The reason I left the clinic in Wangcho’s care.
In this red-light district, a lock on an ownerless building was synonymous with a prostitute’s virginity.
No matter how expensive the lock, it would eventually be picked.
It was much safer to ask someone to manage the building instead.
“Are you starting treatment right away?”
“Would a doctor have any reason to come to work for anything other than that?”
“Haha. Fair enough. That was a stupid question.”
Jingle.
I stood in front of the clinic, keys in hand.
A roof with slightly upturned eaves, faded red pillars, an old lantern hanging above the door.
Apparently, it had originally been a boarding house run by an old shaman woman who was the beastfolk’s only healer.
Eight years before I came to the red-light district, the old lady died of pneumonia, leaving the house empty, and I inherited it.
The panda-engraved lantern that had once guarded the entrance had now been replaced by a crow-mask sign.
Click.
I opened the door and went inside.
“It’s been a while.”
The first thing I saw was the narrow waiting room.
Inside the waiting room was a partition, and beyond it was the consultation room.
A treatment bed barely big enough for one person. A creaky wooden chair. A cabinet full of medicines.
And beyond the closed door at the back of the consultation room was a delivery room for mothers, while on the second floor there was a room for newborns.
This was my clinic.
Since it was a clinic converted from a boarding house, I couldn’t exactly expect 21st-century hospital interiors.
But even so, it was a pretty decent clinic.
“You even cleaned.”
It still smelled like the red-light district, but there wasn’t any musty dust smell, so Wangcho must’ve been cleaning it regularly.
First, I set out an herb jar near the entrance to mask the smell.
Then I checked the medicines on the shelf.
Wangcho came over and rubbed just under his nose.
“I inspect the medicine every day. They’re my underlings, but they’ve got sticky fingers, so I can’t afford not to keep an eye on them.”
“I wouldn’t have minded if a bottle or two went missing.”
“How could I? Even beasts know to repay the one who saved them. I may not be an upright man, but I’m not an animal.”
“Thank you, Wangcho.”
The medicines were all still there.
A few were past their expiration date, though.
Lastly, I picked up the mana lamp from the shelf beside the treatment bed.
When I wound the tiny spring set into the bottom of the palm-sized brass case, a warm orange glow filled the room.
For the record, this mana lamp was the third most expensive thing in the clinic.
Light sources that didn’t spit out oil or soot were incredibly rare in this world.
It was also indispensable in my treatment room, where hygiene was essential.
“Come to think of it, Dr. Schnabel, I’m about to run out of medicine soon, so...”
“Didn’t I give you plenty? Have you had ten gout attacks in six weeks or something?”
“Haha...”
“Come inside. I’ll take a look and prescribe something.”
It was the clinic’s opening day after a long absence.
The first patient was Wangcho.
*
*
The first patient to visit the clinic in six weeks was Wangcho.
Wangcho sat on the small bed and took off his socks.
“Ugh... please bear with me if it smells a bit.”
The area around the big toe joint was swollen red.
The skin was stretched tight and shiny, as if it might burst any second.
Gout.
The disease of nobles and kings, said to hurt even when the wind brushed against it.
In this world too, it was known as a disease caused by uric acid crystals building up in the joints after excessive consumption of protein-rich foods, especially meat and alcohol rich in purines.
It was something they knew from experience.
‘Though there were plenty of studies in the 21st century saying genes and the kidneys mattered more.’
By the 21st century, gout seemed to lean a little more toward a metabolic issue than a matter of diet.
Still, you couldn’t rule out the influence of diet on gout.
And the patient in front of me, true to his title as the master of the red-light district, was the sort who indulged heavily in meat and alcohol.
At the very least, this man’s diet was to blame.
At the rate he drank beer, even a perfectly healthy kidney wouldn’t hold out and he’d end up with gout.
“You haven’t cut back on the meat or the alcohol at all, have you?”
“Heh heh heh... can you tell just by looking?”
“The tophi got bigger, so I couldn’t help but notice.”
I sighed and pressed lightly on the affected area.
“Gah! Ahh...!”
Wangcho cried out and recoiled his foot.
To think the man who ruled the red-light district would break into a cold sweat just because I pressed one toe.
Even a Tier 1 superhuman was helpless before gout.
“Look at this. Both the tophi and the pain have gotten worse. At this rate, your kidneys will be ruined too.”
“Come on, life is hard enough. If I can’t even have a drink, what joy is left? Heh heh...”
“Keep looking for joy like that and you’ll find the road to the afterlife first.”
Even as I chided him, I turned to the shelf.
Clatter-clink.
I unlocked it and took out a medicine bottle by habit.
A brown bottle labeled [Colchicum autumnale] in Latin.
It was colchicine, extracted from the bulb of the autumn crocus.
“Oh, come to think of it, Doctor, it’s gotten really hard to get crocus from outside the walls lately. The potion dealers have swept them all up, you know.”
“That’ll be because it’s hibernation season. Demand for potions is at its peak.”
The period right after the heavy snow ends is called hibernation season.
Another name for it is extermination season.
It’s the season when newly awoken magical beasts are relatively easy to exterminate.
If you don’t thin them out now, things get difficult in the fall, so it’s also the time to push a little and cut down their numbers as much as possible.
“But why do those potion merchants put this stuff in potions? Because of it, whenever I drink a potion, the next day it just runs right out the back end. I even hesitate to drink one to save my life because it’s so embarrassing.”
“It can’t be helped. Otherwise you’d suffer even more from something else.”
Potions didn’t just have healing effects.
They contained trace toxins, and if they stayed in the intestines too long, there was a risk of buildup.
That’s when autumn crocus was used—to induce diarrhea and flush the toxin out quickly.
In other words, that wasn’t a side effect of the potion, but an intended effect.
When I explained that, Wangcho clapped his hands.
“I knew it. So the time my sphincter loosened up after taking this medicine was intentional too.”
“That was because you didn’t follow the dosage.”
His words made me recall our first meeting.
My connection with Wangcho began when I diagnosed his limping condition and treated his gout.
The problem was that back then, I had underestimated the common sense of the people in this world.
People in this world thought the more medicine you took, the better.
So on the day I first prescribed medicine, this man took four pills at once and had such violent diarrhea it looked like his guts were about to spill out.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime incident where the master of the red-light district, a Tier-1 superhuman, nearly crossed the River Jordan from dehydration.
We gave him water, gave him potions, gave him porridge...
It was a complete mess, in any case.
Anyway.
Wangcho took the medicine packet with a grin.
“Heh heh. What’s a little diarrhea, really? This medicine is something else. Back then I used to wonder if I should just cut the toe off, but if I take this, I’m fine the next day, as if nothing happened.”
“What good is taking medicine if you don’t change your habits? Don’t you ever think about cutting back on meat and alcohol?”
“Hahaha...”
Wangcho let out a dry laugh as he took the packet with five pills in it.
For the record, the reason I gave him so few pills at a time was that I didn’t trust him.
The more medicine he had left, the more secure he felt, and the more he drank—a miraculous sort of arithmetic he lived by.
Wangcho fussed and tucked the medicine packet I had given him into his inner pocket.
I said to him as he got up from the bed,
“I’ll see you again next month. If the attacks get bad, come before then.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
Wangcho put on his socks and stood up.
Then, as if he’d remembered something, he snapped his fingers and stopped for a moment at the door.
“Oh, right, Doctor.”
“Yes?”
“There are a few patients who piled up over the past six weeks. There are midwives you trained, but they can’t replace you, can they? I’ve sorted them by urgency—should I send them over?”
That was the secret behind how he became the boss.
Limbus Pit was nothing more than a meat shield the state didn’t even deem worth protecting.
Wangcho was the one who looked after the poor who couldn’t receive that kind of administrative protection, in place of the state.
That was why most of the clinic’s patients and mothers in labor were people Wangcho sent me.
“Please.”
“Got it. Then I’ll be off.”
After Wangcho left, I looked around the empty clinic for a moment.
It’s quiet now, but who knows.
I could already see it filling up with midwives’ screams and babies’ cries in just half a day.
Considering six weeks’ worth of backlogged patients, I’d say the place would be a madhouse for a while.
They don’t call it the calm before the storm for nothing.
‘Sigh... maybe I should rest while I can.’
I leaned back in the hard chair and enjoyed a brief moment of peace.