Elric Sane opened the records first thing the next morning.
With every blank space that increased, Elric’s brows sank a little lower. Ruan noticed the breathing on the stretcher before those brows.
As if to block Elric’s gaze, Sera pushed a medicine bottle forward. The smell of medicine spread across the table before any question could.
Medical officers who looked at paper before people were not uncommon.
But that man behaved as if he could scent clues even in stains on paper.
Ruan recognized that even from a distance.
Three ledgers lay open on the small record desk inside the Medical Bureau.
Roen Hasta.
Ramon.
Deren.
And two nameless infantrymen, one messenger, and one engineer.
Elric compared the rate of recovery, changes in body temperature, records of bleeding, and the point at which walking became possible, line by line.
His hand was neither fast nor slow.
It moved at a pace that did not pass over a single line carelessly.
Ruan found that sort of hand the most uncomfortable.
A danger that came straight at him like a blade could at least be blocked,
but hands like that built up sentences and later drove a person into a corner.
“Are these your records?”
Elric asked.
“Some were written by me, and some were taken down by Orte.”
“Have they ever been amended?”
“No.”
Even after hearing that answer, Elric’s expression did not change.
He simply turned to the next page.
“Roen Hasta.
Survival line recovered just before dawn.
Deren.
Early ambulation after abdominal spear wound.
Ramon.
Recovery rate maintained after wound reopened.”
He lightly tapped the ledger.
“Taken separately, each could be a coincidence.
But when they repeat, the story changes.”
Ruan forced his breathing to remain even.
“There are many variables in the field.”
“That’s right.”
Elric agreed readily.
“That is why it is even stranger.”
Usually, people like this knew how to refute first.
But Elric instead acknowledged even the variables and dug in narrower.
Ruan failed to keep his breathing even.
“Improved hygiene, speed of evacuation, organization of the waiting board.
Those are systemic effects.
They can be explained.”
He picked up another ledger.
“But several cases cannot be explained by system alone.”
Ruan could not answer.
Afraid that the silence itself would show, he tried instead to make an ordinary face,
but the hand pressing down on the corner of the ledger trembled faintly.
Sera saw it from afar and set the water pail down harder than necessary.
Karen, too, stood by the door and watched only Elric.
If until yesterday her eyes had been wary of those who approached,
today they were wary of someone who dug in without a word.
After a long while, Elric personally reexamined several recovering patients.
The edges of Deren’s wound.
The movement of Ramon’s arm.
Roen Hasta’s breathing record.
He pressed the scars and looked back and forth between the records and the actual bodies.
“Pain?”
Deren answered with a bewildered face.
“Yes.”
“Walking?”
“I can.”
“Since when?”
Deren looked at Ruan for a moment.
His eyes were asking for help.
Ruan deliberately avoided his gaze.
If he intervened now, it would only stand out more.
“Since two days ago.”
Elric nodded, then recorded it without another word.
That silence made people even more uneasy.
At midday, when the flow of patients briefly thinned,
Sera dragged Ruan behind the water tent.
“Those records.”
Her first words were sharp.
“Leave some of it out.”
Ruan immediately raised his head.
“What?”
“The recovery lines that are too fast.
The points when body temperature returns.
Phrases like survival line recovered just before dawn.”
Sera planted her hand on the record desk and spoke quickly.
“Field records have plenty of omissions anyway.
It’s not as if anyone will know right away just because you wrote a little less.”
As Ruan listened, he grew strangely cold.
Sera was not wrong.
Field records were rough by nature.
In a place where the dying and the living were tangled together, it was impossible to leave every time accurately.
If he wrote a little less, a little more vaguely, and let one ambiguous expression pass, perhaps even the eyes of someone like Elric could be blurred for a few lines.
And yet Ruan answered at once.
“I can’t.”
Sera frowned.
“Is this the time to be stubborn?”
“That isn’t stubbornness.”
“Then what is it?”
“The records must remain.”
Ruan’s voice was quiet, but firm.
“When and how someone endured, where someone’s body turned back from the brink—those things cannot be erased.”
“I’m not saying to erase them, just to blur the times.”
“If the times are blurred, the people become blurred.”
For a moment, Sera was at a loss for words.
She knew very well that when Ruan was stubborn in that way, no one could easily break him.
“Even when your secret is at stake?”
The question came at him head-on.
For an instant, Ruan could not breathe.
His secret.
The words were so precise that he did not want to say them aloud.
“Even so.”
That was all he said.
“The traces of those who lived and died must not be falsified.”
Sera irritably swept her hair back.
“I’m trying to keep you alive.”
“I know.”
“If you know, then why?”
“If I go so far as to touch that, I’ll start to doubt whether the people I held on to were really there.”
At those words, Sera could no longer answer immediately.
Ruan added with a tired face.
“Even if I don’t know exactly what I did,
who survived must remain.”
It was a statement closer to obsession than to the ethics of a medical officer.
That was why Sera could not get angrier.
Because she vaguely understood that those words were also a line that kept Ruan alive.
From afar, Karen was watching the two of them.
She did not come closer, but from her expression alone, it was clear she had realized the conversation had not ended well.
That afternoon, Elric asked Ruan again.
“Has anyone advised you to omit from the records?”
The question flew at him suddenly.
Ruan felt as if his heart dropped.
Sera stiffened at once as well.
“No.”
The answer came too quickly, and that startled even him a little.
It was not a lie.
She had not pressed authority upon him.
But what Sera had said just now had, in truth, been close to a suggestion that if they did not erase it now, it would be too late later.
The inside of his wrist went cold at the thought that Elric might read even that fine difference.
Elric looked at Ruan for a long while.
“You seem to be the type to trust records.”
“Yes.”
“Interesting.”
“What is?”
“That the person who saw unexplained recoveries from the closest distance refuses to erase the records.”
Ruan knew those words were not praise but vigilance.
That man was looking at his contradiction now.
A person who wanted to hide, yet rejected the method of hiding.
“If I erase them, even who lived becomes blurred.”
“So that is why you cannot?”
“Yes.”
Elric nodded.
“Good.
Then we will have to leave even more behind. The more ambiguous a line is, the better it would be to compare it more and record more of it.”
Those words sounded like a sentence.
Ruan clenched his teeth without realizing it.
They had to leave more.
They had to compare more.
They had to explain more.
Before a person who trusted records, it felt as if his secret had less and less ground to stand on.
Around sunset, Sera asked once more.
“You really won’t leave out a single thing? Even though, if this keeps going, later it may not be the records but your life on the line?”
“Yes.”
“Even if you regret it later?”
“I will regret it.”
Ruan answered calmly.
“But that is something I have to bear.
I can’t go in the direction of emptying out the traces of patients.”
Sera only exhaled, looking as if she were swallowing a curse.
“You really won’t bend at the most frustratingly righteous places.”
Ruan could not smile.
He knew those words were neither praise nor blame.
As night deepened, the Medical Bureau once again filled with patients.
Ruan changed Deren’s bandages, bound Ramon’s arm again, and brought down the fever of the nameless engineer.
His hands moved no differently than usual.
Only now, after every treatment, someone’s record was attached.
Elric checked the records as he looked at the patients,
and checked Ruan as he looked at the records.
Ruan laid his palm on top of the ledger.
Even with it covered, the names at the edges of the paper kept jutting out from beneath the back of his hand.
A blade could be avoided by bending the body, and an arrow could be made to pass by throwing oneself flat.
But once ink dried, it did not easily disappear even if rubbed by hand.
From behind the Medical Bureau came the sound of a late evacuation line.
Ruan rose reflexively.
Even at that moment, one side of the ledger entered his sight.
Names attached to unexplained recoveries.
Records he did not want to explain.
Even so, the names of people he could not erase were especially clear that day.
Ruan closed the ledger.
And stood before the next stretcher.
When the flow of patients briefly thinned, Ruan opened the record desk again alone.
He scanned it to see whether there were exaggerated expressions, or lines wrongly written because of confusion in the field.
He wondered if at least one line might be corrected naturally.
But there was no exaggeration.
There were no wrong lines either.
The lines that were not wrong were the most dangerous.
Seeing that, Sera said in a low voice,
“That’s why I said to write less.”
Ruan tied the ledger cord again.
Sera looked at that tied cord for a while.
Because to her, it looked like a rope around Ruan’s neck.
“If I empty this out, later even what I held on to will become blurred.”
Sera could not get angry anymore.
Just because he could not hide it did not mean he intended to reveal it outright.
It only meant that, at the very least, he would not create blanks with his own hands.
From afar, Elric could be seen taking out several ledgers separately again.
Roen Hasta.
Deren.
Ramon.
The names were woven together on thin paper.
Ruan saw it and stopped for a moment.
He did not take the ledgers back.
He could not, and he did not want to.
Late that night, Ruan opened the ledger again and stared for a long while at a few blank spaces.
Blank spaces for people not yet entered.
Places that by tomorrow would be filled again with blood, fever, and names.
Leaving a blank space was also a record.
A sign that he did not yet know today.
A promise that he would confirm it tomorrow.
Even knowing that even that promise could become someone’s suspicion, Ruan did not lift his pen.
He left those blank spaces as they were.