Chapter 28
*
“Uu… my head feels all warm….”
And so, a hectic day came to an end.
Erika, who had spent the whole day sensing people's bone marrow(?), melted into her desk.
“Teacher. I hear weird noises coming from my body. Could I have caught a cold too?”
“That’s your stomach growling, Eri.”
Over the course of today, Eri filtered out about four infected patients.
Most of them were patients with latent syphilis or latent tuberculosis.
“Eri. Still, you should be proud. Thanks to you, we were able to save eight people.”
Latent syphilis is a disease I have no way of diagnosing at present.
Given the limitations of the equipment and technology in this era, even I can't diagnose it if there are no symptoms.
But since Eri became my assistant, I can now diagnose latent diseases even without symptoms.
The ability to detect marrow abnormalities through mana was this useful.
“Eight?”
“I mean eight, counting the children too.”
“Aha.”
“And your magical proficiency should have gone up a lot today too.”
On top of that, Eri's magical ability should have improved too.
After peering into nearly dozens of people, her senses had already grown a little sharper.
They say your sense of smell gets more acute the more you train it, don't they?
It seemed to work on roughly the same principle.
“Huh? This was training?”
“Yeah.”
“Aha. If it was that kind of thing, you should’ve said so sooner.”
The moment she realized that what she had been doing wasn't mere repetitive work but training, Eri straightened up from her desk.
She was the type of child with a strong drive to improve, so whenever I motivated her like this, she quickly perked up.
“Aw. If I'd known it was training, I would've looked even harder. Oh, or how about night consultations too, Teacher?”
“We still have tomorrow and the day after, so don't wear yourself out already.”
After calming down Eri, who was belatedly burning with enthusiasm.
I prepared to clock out and packed my things.
Creak- creak-
Just then, Wangcho came down from the second floor where the mothers were.
“Teacher. I’ll look after the mothers, so please head home now.”
“Ah, thank you, Wangcho.”
“But, Teacher. May I ask you one thing?”
“What is that white powder you gave the mothers?”
“Ah, that?”
I said, pointing at the drawer with the white powder Wangcho had mentioned.
“It’s a medicine made from seaweed and wood ash.”
Its proper name is potassium iodide.
It’s a drug that suppresses syphilis to some extent.
Syphilis is supposed to be treated with penicillin, but since I still haven't been able to make that, it's also a substitute I’m using.
‘I get that blue mold is the ingredient, but I don't know what comes after that.’
Still, that wasn't what mattered right now.
The moment Wangcho heard the ingredients, he looked thoroughly unconvinced.
“Does that even work? Wouldn’t it be better to just expose them to mercury instead?”
“What are you talking about when there’s a child in the womb?”
“Well, I mean. Still, becoming a cripple is better than dying, isn’t it?”
“If we have the white powder, there’s no need to die, and no need for the child to be born disabled, so please don’t say things like that.”
“Tsk… understood. You’ve never been wrong, Teacher.”
Good grief.
Maybe because this was a tough dark fantasy, the people here sometimes tossed out heart-stopping remarks without a second thought.
“By the way, Wangcho.”
That was when Eri, who had been listening quietly, joined the conversation.
“Wangcho, you’re the boss, so why are you being so attentive to the prostitutes?”
At Eri's dead-on question, Wangcho's thick eyebrows twitched.
With a somewhat uncomfortable expression, he blurted out.
“Why are you asking such useless questions, kid. The mothers are people from my nest, and in the end they’re assets that bring in money at my brothel, so of course I have to look after them.”
“Huh? Didn’t Wangcho’s old boss not do that? Just used them up and threw them away…”
“That man and I are different, idiot.”
Wangcho continued his answer awkwardly, clearing his throat in the middle.
I knew why Wangcho was reacting like that.
‘He said there were several mothers.’
Wangcho doesn't have a birth mother. She died giving birth to him.
The ones who raised Wangcho were the many prostitutes in this district.
That's because beastfolk have a culture of communal child-rearing.
So Wangcho treats the prostitutes with great care.
Because one of them may have nursed him at her own breast.
For the record, the reason I know this is because Wangcho is my patient.
I found out naturally while asking about his family history.
‘I probably shouldn't tell anyone about this.’
Thinking of a doctor's duty of confidentiality, I closed my itchy mouth.
Wangcho himself didn't seem eager to reveal why he protected the prostitutes either.
Pretending not to know, I smiled faintly and fastened the buckle on my briefcase.
“Either way, thank you for your hard work. Please keep giving them that powdered medicine for the time being.”
“Understood, Teacher. Ah, right.”
Just as he was about to turn away, Wangcho suddenly remembered something and pulled a small glass bottle from inside his thick coat.
Then, with no attempt to hide the nauseated expression of someone lifting a plastic bag full of food waste, he held the bottle out to me.
“Was this something you asked for, Teacher?”
“What is that?”
Eri's eyes gleamed with curiosity at the sight of the bottle.
She naturally reached a hand toward it.
Wangcho recoiled and pulled the bottle away from her hand.
“Don’t touch it, kid. What’s inside isn’t exactly clean.”
“Now you’re making me curious. Will I get hurt if I know?”
Wangcho glanced at me.
It was a signal asking whether he could tell Eri.
I nodded—no, bobbed my beak. It wasn't really a secret.
With my permission, Wangcho revealed what was in the bottle.
“It’s pus from a cow’s udder.”
“…Huh?”
“Since the first time you came down here, you asked me to get some, Teacher. Whenever a sick cow gets discarded at the slaughterhouse, I bring it to you from time to time.”
At those words, Eri stared at me in shock.
“What do you need pus for?”
“Because I need it.”
“No way…”
Eri trailed off for a moment, then continued.
“…Teacher, are you a black mage?”
Bonk!
This time, it wasn't me.
“Hey! What nonsense are you spouting about the angel of our brothel district, brat!”
“Ow! Teacher said if you keep hitting my head it'll get stupid! What are you doing to this precious head that's supposed to become a magician’s?!”
“If your head gets bad just from a little hit like that, it was bad from the start.”
“Geez….”
Rubbing the spot she’d been hit, Eri turned her head toward me.
Wangcho’s hand was pretty rough; tears had welled up in her eyes.
“But what do you actually use that for, Teacher?”
I answered while carefully putting the glass bottle into my bag.
“I have a use for it.”
“So where exactly is that ‘somewhere’?”
“Do you think I’d have any use for something like this other than medicine?”
At those words, Eri narrowed her eyes.
After thinking hard about something, she lowered her gaze to her own arm.
At the end of her gaze was an injection mark.
“…Teacher.”
“Hm?”
“You’re not putting something like that in the medicine I get, right?”
“….”
“…Right?”
I snorted a laugh and nodded.
“You watched the process of making heparin right beside me.”
“Ah, right.”
Eri let out a sigh of relief.
I quietly averted my eyes from her.
‘I didn’t do it through injection. Not through injection….’
Though I did once secretly apply it for vaccination purposes back in the day.
Anyway, I hadn't lied.
***
I’d packed up all my things.
At last, we set out on the way home.
“Good work today too, Eri.”
“You too, Teacher.”
Eri, Otto, and I stepped out of the clinic side by side.
“Ah, and you too, Mr. Otto.”
Bow.
Otto, his coat draped like a cape, silently bowed his head.
“Aren’t you going to greet me?”
Wangcho joined us as well.
The reason Wangcho was accompanying us home wasn’t because his house was in the upper district, but because of the previous incident.
After I left Otto alone on escort duty last time and it got cleanly breached.
From that day on, Wangcho started volunteering to see me off on my way home.
— “If even a scratch ends up on your body, Teacher, I could lose my head.”
Judging by the look of it, he’d also been given an extra request by Butler Wilhelm.
It seemed Otto's reliability had dropped in Butler Wilhelm's mind because of the last incident.
But it wasn’t like you could just find a first-rank superhuman anywhere, so Butler Wilhelm seemed to have chosen Wangcho.
Tsk tsk.
How had Otto ended up being treated like this?
In any case, that was why Wangcho was with us on the way home.
“Ah, I’m hungry. I want to eat already.”
“Is there anything you want to eat?”
“If it’s something you make, Teacher, everything tastes good.”
“Thank you for liking it.”
And so, chatting merrily, we headed toward the upper district where the car would be parked.
That was because the roads had frozen a little right after the heavy snowfall melted, making it difficult for Otto to drive the car all the way up to the clinic.
The Limbus Pit that night felt especially desolate.
This district, one step removed from welfare and administration, had no mana gas lamps to be found.
And normally, those gas lamps were replaced by red lanterns hanging from every eaves.
“By the way, Teacher. Don’t you think the gas lamps are out a lot more than usual today?”
“….”
“Is it because the fire doesn’t catch well after the heavy snow?”
Eri tilted her head.
Her gaze was fixed on the end of the dim alley.
Then it happened.
Kssht.
One of the red lanterns ahead lit up.
Flicker.
Soon, the lantern’s flame went out and came back on once.
“…?”
Something emerged from the end of the alley.
“What is that?”
It was hard to see because of the distance and the dim light, but it was a human shape.
Flicker.
With one flicker of the light, the figure was ten steps closer.
Only then did its clothing come into view.
‘A clown?’
A worn, tattered robe. A scepter with bells on it. A belly bulging out beneath the robe.
A huge clown, easily at least two meters tall, was striking a ballet pose.
‘What the hell.’
Flicker.
The fat clown twisted its body at an angle and approached ten steps, crossing its front legs.
Flicker.
It extended one leg straight and tapped the ground with its toe, advancing ten steps.
Flicker.
This time it balanced on one leg, lifted the other high behind it, and bent its upper body far forward.
“I know that one! It’s an arabesque!”
You don’t need to narrate it for us, Eri.
I was already wondering if someone as pampered as I was should even be seeing something like that.
After that, the fat clown kept flaunting its absurdly flexible body, drawing closer every time the lights went out.
Soon, by the time its face—like a patchwork of rags stitched together—came into view.
I felt like I had a vague idea of what that thing was.
‘The Clown King?’
The day the Ironclad special task force returned after completing their mission.
I remembered the photo in the report they had submitted.
His face had been beaten into a rag, making him hard to recognize, but his clothes and the scepter in his hand were the clues.
‘I heard his head was blown to pieces?’
Or had they dismantled the bomb successfully?
But that wasn't possible.
I wasn’t the kind of third-rate villain who throws someone off a cliff and then relaxes, so I had ordered them to make sure the corpse was confirmed.
The clown let out a laugh mixed with foam.
“Oho—ho—ho—.”
Black liquid dripped between its torn lips as the clown’s mouth gaped open.
Only then did I realize.
“Teacher. That…”
“It’s a ghoul.”
The ghoulified Clown King kept dancing forward like a ballerina.
However, the Clown King’s gaze was fixed on one person.
“Damn it. It saw me.”
Wangcho spat.
The Clown King’s eyes were locked onto Wangcho’s face.
“Teacher. Just in case I’m asking, but that bastard came to see me, right?”
I nodded to indicate yes.
A bit of trivia here.
Undead that arise naturally are strongly influenced in how they behave by the cause of death.
The undead who drowned try to drag the living into the water,
the undead who starved try to devour the living,
and the undead who froze to death covet warm blood.
And vengeful spirits usually seek out the target of their grudge first.
“Tao chee—”
The Clown King transformed his scepter into a mace and came forward.
But before that ghoul could finish its rambling, Wangcho vanished into the darkness.
Flicker.
As the red lantern flickered once, Wangcho appeared above the Clown King's head.
“Uh?”
Wangcho’s hand axe buried itself in the clown’s neck.
The axe, shimmering with blue energy, sank halfway into the Clown King’s neck.
“Grrk—?!”
Wangcho twisted the hand axe he had lodged there.
CRACK!
With a horrific sound, the Clown King's neck snapped.
Wangcho, having separated the clown’s head from its huge body, landed on the ground and said,
“Hey, do you think you’re even at the level to share a table with me, you punk?”
It was only natural.
The opponent was the boss of numerous tiny gangs in H Sector.
By contrast, Wangcho was a superhuman who had unified D Sector.
If you consider that H Sector was scary not because it was strong but because it was full of lunatics, such a gap was only natural.
“Still, this bastard’s persistent. It walked all the way from there to here?”
Wangcho poked at the headless corpse.
But the massive corpse that should have died was writhing about, having bizarre convulsions, trying to grab Wangcho’s ankles with its stiff, heavy arms.
The head buried in the muddy ground was no different.
The two eyes visible beneath the clown’s heavy makeup had rolled white, completely devoid of reason.
Those unfocused eyes were fixed solely on Wangcho.
“Kaaaah! Heeheehee… meaaat…!”
With its jaw dislocated, spewing black blood, the head clacked its teeth like a wild beast.
“What the hell. So what's different about a first-rank ghoul?”
“Kyaaaak!”
“It’s ugly to look at in front of Teacher. Let’s end this bad blood here.”
Wangcho clicked his tongue and raised his hand axe to smash the noisy head to pieces once and for all.
Then, from behind the alley, a calm voice cut off the Clown King's shrieks and chimed in.
“I had intended to send a knight worthy of the occasion to greet our guest, but as expected, the lowborn cannot understand nobility even in death.”
“Hm? What is that?”
Our gazes turned toward the darkness.
The voice came from the alley where even the red lantern light did not reach.
Click-clack. Tap.
The sound of shoes tapping on the wet stone pavement approached us.
Interspersed between the shoe sounds was the sound of a cane tapping against the stone floor.
Soon, that figure slowly emerged beneath the red lantern.
“First-rank materials are hard to come by, so I tried using them, but it seems they still weren’t a suitable choice for entertaining guests.”
What walked out through the darkness was a man wearing a worn frock coat and a dented top hat.
You could call it the stereotypical appearance of a fallen noble.
The man lightly lifted his top hat and said to me,
“My apologies, Doctor Schnabel. This wasn’t how I had originally intended this to go.”
The man in the top hat placed the hat before his chest and greeted us with proper courtesy.
“I am called Belgian. I’ve come to you, one who deals with death as I do, because I wish to make a truly interesting proposal.”
Looking at the man, I thought.
Misunderstanding stories are all well and good, but the downside is when things like this start getting tangled up.
notes":"Aligned the chapter title to the established 'A Flower Blooming in the Plague (N)' pattern. Kept named/role-based phrasing where the Korean was context-dependent; no significant repetition issues required fixes."}