Firefly Prince (4)

*

Day 34 since I started vaccine research.

I had turned thirteen by Korean age, not international age.

Eri was spending her days learning magic from Chief Shen as usual, while I was at the clinic racking up case after case.

Hngh.

I stretched alone inside the clinic.

It had already been three years since I started treating patients in Limbus Pit.

At some point, my patient base had grown wider.

Beyond the prostitutes of Sector D, patients from other sectors had started coming all the way here.

Thanks to that, I’d been busy lately too.

'Ah, I could really go for a three-minute consultation.'

My mind naturally drifted back to my past life.

In 21st-century South Korea, there was that beautiful culture called the three-minute consultation.

It’s possible here too.

Sort out yesterday’s test results in advance and push through the follow-up patients quickly.

Meanwhile, if the first-time patients are told to answer questionnaires in the waiting room,

ta-da.

A factory-style three-minute consultation is complete.

'…No matter how I look at it, that’s not it.'

But no matter how I think about it, that still doesn’t seem right.

From the start, this clinic wasn’t something I opened to make money.

I started it to recover my past-life skills and to build my reputation.

Besides, I owe the residents of Limbus Pit.

I’ve been shamelessly using all sorts of experimental treatments here—things I’m not even used to yet, or that haven’t been properly proven in this world.

I’ve been throwing those risky treatments at the residents here without holding back.

For me to only see patients for three minutes just to make life easier on myself would be way too shameless, wouldn’t it?

'Doctor! I’m really, truly grateful! I thought I’d have to live my whole life as a one-armed cripple...!'

My thoughts were snapped apart by the deep sobbing of a grown man that rang through the examination room.

A gaunt young man was crying across from me.

He was the patient whose wrist had been severed by the paper mill cutter.

Come to think of it, today was the day to do the final dressing and remove the bandage.

The right wrist that was holding my hand was trembling violently.

'My fingers move now, just like you said, Doctor...!'

A ring of stitches circled his right wrist.

Every time I looked at that hideous scar, I felt a swell of pride.

As expected, a surgeon should be good with thread, not just the scalpel.

'Doctor. So I can work again now, right?'

'It’s not fully healed yet. For the time being, absolutely do not lift anything heavy, and please do rehab every day by clenching and unclenching your hand in warm water so the blood flows well to your fingers.'

In reattachment surgery, after hygiene, the next most important thing is blood flow.

In the end, prognosis is decided by how much life remains in the tiny blood vessels.

Of course, in this patient’s case, it would be harder to have a bad prognosis.

I doused it with that much potion—it would be ridiculous if it didn’t stick.

If it doesn’t, then that’s not my problem, it’s the alchemy guild’s.

'Yes! Yes! I’ll keep that in mind!'

'And if your fingertips turn black, you have to come back.'

'Yes! I’ll never forget your kindness for the rest of my life, healer!'

I keep telling you, I’m a doctor, not a healer.

After that, the man kept bowing so deeply it looked like he might smash his head into the floor, then left the examination room.

The moment the patient was gone, I picked up the bill lying next to the chart.

Normally, Eri handled the billing too.

But Eri was away from the clinic right now for magic training.

In the end, I had to sort out the ledger myself.

'Let’s see.'

The money that patient just paid was 30 silver coins.

And the potion used to reattach that wrist cost 3 gold coins.

Hmm.

I’m in the red again today.

But the deficit was only as much as I could make up by doing nothing but breathing for about ten minutes, so I didn’t care.

'I feel like my sense of money is getting more and more broken.'

Well, I’ll probably never be short on money for the rest of my life anyway, so maybe it doesn’t matter.

I shook off the thought and picked up the next chart.

The next patient was a first-time patient.

'Next patient, please.'

Creak.

The door opened, and an old man slowly came in.

He was a white-haired old man with a slightly hunched back.

An ordinary grandfather you’d often see in Limbus Pit, wearing a worn-out coat and a faded hat.

'Have a seat, sir. Isn’t it cold in the examination room?'

'Oh, no. The waiting room was sweltering from the start. The healer must be rolling in money, huh?'

'If it’s for the expectant mothers, what can I do?'

'Hoho. Fair enough. Ah, if what I just said sounded rude, I apologize.'

'Not at all, sir. What seems to be bothering you?'

'Hoho, lately I haven’t had much strength in my hands.'

The old man held out his hand.

'I make cigars, but my hands won’t listen to me, so I can’t work.'

'Ah, so you came from Sector E.'

Sector E is mainly the district where tobacco and herbs are processed.

And if drugs get added into the mix, that completes Sector E’s bread and butter.

The old man in front of me seemed to be a cigar artisan from that district.

'Sector E? Ah, yes. I came from Sector E.'

'Then since when have you been like this?'

'About a month ago?'

'Do you usually smoke cigars?'

'A little. I have to check for myself what the things I make taste like, don’t I?'

'Then have there been any recent times when you couldn’t smoke cigars?'

'No, not really.'

Then the tremor wasn’t from withdrawal.

Then the next most likely candidate was carpal tunnel syndrome.

A condition common among artisans who spend all day pulling and rolling tobacco leaves.

'Then would it be all right if I took a look at your hand?'

I asked the old man for permission and examined his fingertips.

His skin was dry, but there weren’t many calluses.

I examined each finger one by one.

I was checking to see whether they’d been stained by nicotine.

If too much nicotine is absorbed through the skin, the hand can tremble like this.

But there were no traces of nicotine on his fingers.

Instead, several faint horizontal lines ran across his nails.

'What is this doing here?'

Mees’ lines.

A finding that appears when there is chronic exposure to heavy metals.

A symptom you don’t usually see in an ordinary tobacco artisan.

'Would you mind raising your wrist for me?'

The old man tilted his head, but raised his wrist.

But he couldn’t hold it up for long before the wrist sagged.

Classic wrist drop.

A symptom caused by nerve paralysis, where you can’t lift the wrist upward.

The classic heavy metal behind it was...

Lead.

A material a cigar artisan would never come into contact with.

Much less a poor old man in Limbus Pit.

I stared at the old man’s hand for a while.

After thinking it over, I asked the old man:

'Sir, is “cigar” some kind of slang used by magicians that I don’t know about?'

Silence fell over the clinic.

I lifted my head and met the old man’s eyes.

Those blurred, tired-looking eyes had regained their sharpness and were looking at me.

Then the old man broke the silence.

'Hohoho.'

His bent back straightened.

'How did you know?'

'Only alchemists or magicians would handle lead that way.'

'Well now. I should have introduced myself as an alchemist instead of a cigar artisan.'

As expected.

The old man in front of me was a magician.

Lead is by no means a cheap material.

Because of its symbolism as a vessel that traps the soul, it’s often used as a catalyst in all sorts of magic.

Not only black mages, but other sorcerers use it a lot too.

Especially when summoning familiars or making contracts with fairies or spirits, lead is an essential catalyst.

That makes lead a material a poor old man in Sector E who only rolls cigars would have a hard time getting his hands on.

So I could infer that this old man was hiding his occupation.

The old man stroked his beard and said:

'Did I say I worked with lead?'

'There were traces of it on your hands.'

'Hands?'

The old man tilted his head and looked down at his own hands.

'I never knew traces of lead could remain on the hands. How did you figure that out?'

'Down in the gutter, magicians who fell from grace after handling lead naturally tend to gather. Thanks to them, I learned it naturally.'

The Limbus Pit excuse is really convenient.

If I say I learned it while seeing patients, everyone just accepts it.

The old man in front of me did the same.

Thanks to the power of a misunderstanding story, he accepted it right away without any boring, pedantic explanation.

'Indeed. From below, one can sometimes see things that aren’t visible from above.'

The old man nodded.

'We’ve only met twice, and yet your ideas are already giving me a lot of inspiration, junior.'

'Is that so?'

'Hm? You’re not surprised?'

'The only magicians who’d come looking for me are either black mages or you, sir.'

Besides, I also know that this man is the old sorcerer I met last time.

Originally, sorcerers are a busy bunch.

It’s unthinkable that they, who divide their time into seconds for research, would suddenly come looking for me for no reason.

So the only magicians who might come looking for me are either Beljian or that old sorcerer.

Of course, Beljian isn’t the sort of person who’d come find me in such a bothersome way, so by elimination the old man was the only one left.

And even putting the deduction aside, by the conventions of the genre, it was about time for the old man to show up.

'So what brings you here?'

I took out some tea and snacks and set them in front of the old man.

I’d prepared them a month ago, because I didn’t know when he’d show up.

At the combination of tea and sweets, something rarely seen in Limbus Pit, the old sorcerer’s eyes widened slightly.

'You prepared this in advance too?'

'Yes. Opportunity only comes to those who are prepared, right?'

A line that makes me look competent is just a bonus.

The sorcerer stared straight at my mask.

His gaze was odd.

I’d never seen those eyes before, but if I had to go by feeling alone, it was the look of a hunter who’d found prey.

'Preparation...'

The old man, still muttering to himself, blurred.

The blurred face scattered like mist, revealing the face of the old sorcerer I’d met before.

'If my junior has prepared himself, then as a senior it would only be proper to give him a chance.'

The left eye not covered by the eyepatch looked at me.

'Before that, let me ask one more thing. For what reason are you studying black magic right now?'

'I don’t quite understand what you mean.'

'Yulian Schnabel. It’s said that lying is a virtue when dealing with magicians, but don’t make the mistake of applying ordinary magicians’ standards to me.'

Tsk.

Looks like pretending to be clueless won’t do any good.

Come to think of it, pretending not to know someone who already knows your name is a pretty ridiculous move.

He didn’t even ask how I knew what research I was doing.

Maybe he used clairvoyance or some other spell.

That was only a vague guess, though.

Instead, I corrected part of the old man’s misunderstanding.

'I’m not researching black magic.'

'Hm? You didn’t use black magic?'

'In the end, what I’m trying to make is alchemy.'

Alchemy in this world isn’t magic.

At first, when I heard alchemy existed, I thought I’d be able to directly change the arrangement of elements with mana, like in some famous manga.

So I thought developing quinine would be easy.

But when I actually called in the alchemists, what they showed me was just grunt work in the end—throwing things into a cauldron and boiling them down.

The only difference was whether the fire was lit by magic or by a magical tool.

In essence, alchemists were no different from chemists.

Just with a bit of this world’s unique chemical laws and new materials mixed in.

'So that’s why there was no Alchemy Tower.'

Anyway.

Alchemy is a term that covers every kind of technique that alters the properties of matter.

The reason I called my research alchemy when talking to this old sorcerer was precisely this.

'For me, black magic is only a means. What I want to make isn’t a magical tool, and it isn’t a magical phenomenon either.'

'Then that means it was alchemy?'

'Yes.'

The way to distinguish magical research from alchemy is simple.

You just tell by whether the finished object or phenomenon requires mana.

If it doesn’t need mana after being made, it’s alchemy.

If it needs mana after being made, it’s a magical tool or magic.

That’s why I said I would pursue alchemy rather than become a sorcerer.

Alchemy doesn’t require even a shred of a sorcerer’s talent.

'Hoho... I thought you were a junior... but you’re an alchemist, then.'

The old sorcerer’s eyes sharpened.

Seeing that, I remembered that magicians despise alchemists.

A chill ran down my spine.

Because it felt like deja vu.

'Don’t tell me this is going to be like with Beljian again?'

Was he going to get angry because I’d deceived him again?

That’d be bad.

Beljian, after all, was only a rank-2 nobody, and because he was so riddled with inferiority, I’d managed to get by somehow.

But the old man in front of me was radiating a presence that seemed, at a glance, far beyond rank 2.

If I antagonized him, I might not even keep my bones.

'Isn’t this a bit too much of an unfair setup, even for a misunderstanding story?'

I sweated coldly and opened my mouth to correct the old man’s misunderstanding.

'Sir... I wasn’t trying to deceive you...'

The old man cut off my words and asked in a cold voice:

'Then what are you planning to use that curse for? Don’t tell me you’re trying to spread it?'

'No. Quite the opposite.'

'The opposite?'

'Recently, while fighting a black mage, I happened to learn that if you overcome a curse, you won’t easily fall to the same curse afterward.'

'Hmm. That’s true.'

That was already known to magicians to some extent.

Once you overcome a curse, you gain some resistance to that same curse.

Because of that property, curse-casters don’t use curses unless they’re sure they can kill their target.

If they do use them, they cast them with the intent to kill for certain.

The old sorcerer seemed to recall that fact too and nodded.

'But what does that have to do with anything?'

'Something I learned while treating patients here: the patients who survived a curse often got through plague outbreaks without any trouble too.'

'Hm? Is that really true?'

I nodded.

If I said that was what I felt, who could prove otherwise?

'Yes. So if we distribute weakened curses to people ahead of time, I thought maybe we could save them from the plagues that come around regularly.'

'...'

The old sorcerer fell silent.

He fiddled with the teacup on the desk and sank into deep thought.

His one eye swept over me again and again.

How long had passed?

Just as the steam rising from the teacup faded, the old man finally spoke.

'You’ve really stirred my curiosity over the past month.'

'…Yes?'

'After I handed you that grimoire, I did a little private digging on you.'

The old man propped his chin on his hand and continued at leisure.

'At first I thought you were just a young nobleman playing healer in the slums. But the more I looked, the more astonishing things turned up.'

One by one, the things I’d done began spilling from the old man’s mouth.

'You made medicine from the bark of trees that grow naturally in the demon lands and sold it to soldiers at half price.'

'...'

'You extracted elixirs from beast innards and saved people dying of diabetes.'

'...'

'It was all an alchemical miracle.'

The old man gave a wry smile and adjusted his eyepatch.

'I apologize, junior. When you stand high up, you have all sorts of things to verify. After living this long, I seem to have become suspicious of everything.'

The old sorcerer scratched his chin.

'For one thing, I salute your boldness in serving tea without even asking my name. As part of my apology, I think I can tell you my real name.'

The old man stood up from the chair.

'My name is Louis Edelhardt.'

At that moment, the contents of a history book I’d read before to get a grasp on the world’s setting flashed through my mind.

Louis Edelhardt.

The Father of Magic.

The grand master of the Empire’s Thirteen Magic Towers, and the only living 8th-rank sorcerer.

And the one who had walked with the Empire through its history.

As I hurriedly searched for the right line in response to this unexpected visitor, Louis smiled faintly and held out his hand to me.

'Yulian Schnabel. Would you care to become my disciple?'

As I looked at the Father of Magic holding out his hand to me, there was only one thought in my head.

'What is this. I’m scared....'

Where on earth had the snowball started rolling?

I felt like I could vaguely understand the feelings of protagonists in misunderstanding stories who want to run away.