*
Morning at the clinic begins early.
“Huh? Doctor, why are you here so early?”
Erica, still not fully awake, came walking out of the duty room to greet me.
Tsk, tsk.
What use is an employee lazier than her boss?
“Clinics are supposed to open at this hour. And they say the early bird catches the worm.”
“If you sleep longer, you get less hungry, so wouldn’t you need to catch fewer worms?”
Oh.
That logic was actually pretty good.
But I was the protagonist, so I couldn’t agree with it.
Of course, I’d made a decent amount of money by now, and I wanted to be decently lazy too.
But if I did that, who knew what kind of snowball might start rolling later?
So, regrettably, I had no choice but to be an early bird.
“I can save one more person in that time, so I can’t do that. Sorry, but you’ll have to follow my lead.”
“Hing.”
Erica staggered with her swollen eyes.
From what I’d heard, she’d only been active at night until now to avoid people’s gazes.
Maybe because of that, she didn’t seem used to mornings.
But she couldn’t keep doing that now.
I’d even gone so far as to give her a blood transfusion, after all.
Shouldn’t she now live in the morning as an ordinary little girl, not the bastard child of a vampire?
Afterward, Erica returned after washing her face in cold water.
I held out a slip of paper to her.
“Today’s errands. Pick up medicine, contact patients, and clean now and then. Can you do it?”
“That’s all? You said it was in place of my treatment fees.”
Eri’s eyes widened.
Judging by her reaction, since I’d said it was in place of her treatment fees, she must have braced herself for some grueling errands.
But what was written on the paper was work that children her age could handle well enough.
“This is way too little.”
“That’s right. That’s your daily quota, so if you finish early, rest.”
But there was one thing she was seriously mistaken about.
I didn’t need an errand runner named Erica right now.
I wanted to find out what talents she had.
If I bought low now, while no one knew anything, then thanks to that connection, wouldn’t I be able to coast through life later?
But Erica, who had no way of knowing my inner circumstances, instead sent me a suspicious look.
“Liar. There’s no way that’s all.”
Erica shook her head and glared at me.
“The alchemist mister over in Block D-4 said my arms and legs are so skinny that even if he skinned me, they wouldn’t fetch ten mars. I know your treatment costs more than that.”
“What would I use your skin for?”
“If you’re scheming something, just say it already. I’d rather let you have me once—”
Thwack!
It sounded like words that should never come out of a child’s mouth were about to, so I cut her off with a chop.
“Ow!”
I had prepared myself for the darkness of Limbus Pit to always lightly surpass my imagination.
Even so.
That was not something that should come out of a teenage girl’s mouth, was it?
‘Am I supposed to call Podori and the FBI to another world?’
The bottom of this city was a far worse gutter than I’d expected.
“Erica.”
When I called her name, Eri flinched.
I rose from my chair and lowered myself to Eri’s eye level.
“Listen carefully. The mouth is an organ meant for savoring delicious food, or for giving voice to a person’s worth.”
“No— mmph!”
I blocked Eri’s mouth, which was about to argue, with a piece of star candy.
“Keep in mind that the sentence that was about to come out of your mouth just now could make you into filth worth less than the cheapest scrap in this city.”
Eri’s mouth, which had been rolling the star candy around, stopped.
She stared blankly at my mask.
Then, with a short ptoo, she spat the star candy into her hand.
“But then the deal doesn’t work.”
“Yes, yes. You and I are making a deal right now. In exchange for you running errands for me, I provide food, clothing, shelter, and treatment.”
Conscious of keeping my voice stern, I admonished Eri.
“But a deal, you see, means each side offers what they can offer. It does not mean offering what must not be offered. If you propose something like that, what happens to my dignity?”
“…Sorry.”
I wasn’t asking her to apologize.
Somehow, it had turned into me scolding her.
I snapped my fingers to change the mood.
“So? Your answer?”
“I’ll… run errands.”
“Good.”
I tore a clean white sheet of paper from the desk and made a memo slip.
Eri gasped even at that, looking as if it were a waste.
I scribbled a note on the torn paper.
“Now, your first errand.”
I wrote down the medicinal ingredients on the paper.
“Go get these medicines from the alchemist. They’re things I ordered in advance. I’ve paid already, so you don’t need to pay. If he asks whether I really sent you, show him this signature on the back. It should go without saying, but don’t throw this memo away halfway through.”
Eri folded the paper carefully and tucked it away.
As if that paper were her lifeline.
I wasn’t an emperor or anything, so there was no need for her to feel such a sense of mission over a single memo slip.
“I’ll be back.”
“Ah, and one more thing.”
Before she left, I remembered something I’d forgotten and called her to a stop.
“…What.”
“Let’s settle what you call me too. Would you prefer Dr. Schnabel, or mister physician?”
“…I’ll call you Doctor.”
Leaving those words behind, Eri crossed the threshold and disappeared into the street already filled with smog in the morning.
It might have been my imagination, but her back somehow looked strangely tense.
***
A week had passed since Eri became my errand runner.
To be honest, she did better than I expected.
“Doctor. I went to the apothecary in Block D-4. Here’s the change.”
Clink.
A few coins were placed precisely on the desk.
As expected of someone who knew the ways of the back alleys inside and out, she was quite fast at running errands.
It meant not only that she had the head to grasp geography properly, but that her stamina was considerable as well.
“Good job.”
But what satisfied me even more than her speed was her honesty.
The people sent by the Boss, or Erica’s predecessors, would sometimes pocket the change after running errands.
They probably thought that since I made good money and the clinic was always busy, I wouldn’t notice a few missing coins.
Without even knowing why ledgers existed.
I overlooked those things as if I were giving them a tip.
But unlike them, Eri didn’t pocket even a single coin.
‘Perhaps this, too, can be called a talent if you look at it that way.’
Because this was not an environment where one could easily keep one’s hands clean.
That was why maintaining honesty in such an environment meant Erica had a talent for preserving honesty.
I organized Erica’s talents in my mind and handed her a few coins.
“This is a tip. Use it to buy snacks or something.”
“Then I’ll clean now.”
“Just the bathroom today.”
Her cleaning ability and the way she handled other miscellaneous tasks were also satisfactory in many ways.
No one had taught her, yet she cleaned beyond the level I demanded.
Smart, and highly trustworthy too…
‘A bank, bodyguard work, or perhaps a recommendation as a knight would suit her.’
This one was quite decent.
In the sense that her talent didn’t bring to mind some bakery.
And so, a satisfying week passed.
“Next patient.”
The door opened, and a patient carried on a stretcher came in.
He was one of the Boss’s subordinates.
A patient whose arm had gotten caught in a gear while he was brawling at a factory.
The wound was a problem, but what was more urgent right now was blood.
The bleeding was no joke.
“Has this man had a blood genealogy made before?”
At my question, his companion answered.
“Last autumn, I think. We had it made here on the Boss’s orders.”
“Then this will go quickly.”
I opened a leather file that gave off a strong vintage feel.
[Propositum : Matrix Sanguinis]
Literally translated, it was [Project: Blood Genealogy].
In this era, there was no way to store blood safely.
Once drawn, it clotted within a few hours, and if you put clotted blood into a patient, the patient died.
There were magical tools like refrigerators, and I had enough capital, but I still didn’t know how to make a preservation solution, so there was nothing I could do about it.
If I’d known this would happen, I would’ve studied transfusion medicine harder.
Setting that digression aside.
In any case, that was why I’d prepared an alternative.
Whenever I had time, I tested people’s blood types and recorded them in a notebook.
So that in an emergency, I could immediately call someone and draw their blood.
For reference, the reason I wrote it in Latin was simply because it looked cool.
What? Latin is cool.
“What is the patient’s name?”
“Donovan.”
“Donovan… Type B.”
The noteworthy thing about this file was that the blood types of all the members of the Boss’s organization were recorded in it.
Because knife fights were an everyday occurrence for these people.
That was why this blood genealogy served as a kind of health insurance for them.
“Type B… If anyone whose name I call is likely to be nearby, answer me.”
Locke, Heinz, Lewen…
“Heinz! At this hour, he’ll be at that tavern over there!”
“No drinkers.”
Emil, Rody…
“I’m Rody!”
One of the companions who had come with him raised his hand high.
I briefly examined the man’s body.
Before a transfusion, I had to check whether he had syphilis, whether he showed symptoms of a cold…
The conclusion was that he was healthy.
Then Rody it was.
Eri prepared the tools for the transfusion.
Meanwhile, I began stopping the patient’s bleeding.
There was nothing special about stopping bleeding.
It was just a repetition of finding and tying off blood vessels, and stuffing cotton into large holes.
In the meantime, preparations for the transfusion were completed.
“We’re ready, Doctor.”
I immediately prepared to connect arm to arm.
The name of the procedure I was preparing was direct transfusion.
As the name suggested, it was a method of transfusing fresh blood directly and raw.
Originally, it was a dangerous method, so in my previous life, it was avoided whenever possible.
But—
‘Please, just let there be no side effects.’
Praying to the power of the misunderstanding-story genre, I prepared the transfusion.
Trickle, trickle—
Blood flowed from the donor’s arm and ran down into the bucket.
That was when it happened.
“Doctor.”
Eri, who had been cleaning up the trash beside me, suddenly spoke.
“What is it, Eri? Is the tube twisted?”
“No. It’s hard to explain, but this man’s arm feels strange.”
“?”
At those words, I turned toward Eri.
Eri frowned and tapped Rody’s forearm with her finger.
“It’s kind of… creepy? Noisy? Looking at this person makes me feel strange somehow.”
“Noisy?”
“Yeah. The inside is writhing. It feels like tens of thousands of bugs are crawling around.”
At those words, I turned toward Eri.
“Can you explain in more detail?”
“Something’s boiling inside? It’s the feeling I got from sick pigs at the slaughterhouse.”
“…?”
At those words, I stopped the transfusion for a moment.
Because one hypothesis suddenly flashed through my mind.
The bastard child of a bloodfiend.
Her nickname.
I had thought it was simply an expression of anachronistic hatred.
But in this fantasy world, I began to think that perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that she had been given that nickname.
Especially the fact that she compared it to “sick pigs” rang an even louder alarm in my instincts.
I looked at Rody again.
And because the situation had been so urgent, I discovered something I had missed.
“…Your eyes are a little yellow. Since when have they been like this?”
“Ah, they weren’t like that yesterday?”
Then had they yellowed just now?
Of course, considering that jaundice wasn’t a symptom that progressed that rapidly, it might have been my imagination.
It might have been because of the lighting, or just my mood.
Before that, they were so vaguely yellow that it was embarrassing to even call it jaundice.
Even so, what Eri had said bothered me.
So I checked one more thing.
“Mr. Rody. Have you gone anywhere recently?”
“Uh…”
Rody folded his fingers as he retraced the past.
“I went outside the wall a few weeks ago.”
“Why?”
“To receive goods the Boss was trading for. It was near the swamp.”
“And you were bitten by mosquitoes there?”
“Yes.”
Damn it.
All the circumstantial evidence pointed to one thing.
Malaria.
The incubation period, when the symptoms weren’t severe yet.
This blood could not be transfused.
“The transfusion is canceled. We’ll find someone else.”
“Why?”
“You have malaria. If we put your blood into him, there’ll be serious trouble.”
After that, we hurriedly found another donor.
Fortunately, the transfusion ended successfully.
The patient had overcome the crisis, and the person whose malaria had been discovered by chance was also prescribed quinine.
*
An hour later.
I called Eri, who was wringing out a rag in the corner.
“Eri.”
“Huh? What?”
“Can you come over here for a second?”
I placed three glasses on the desk.
Each one contained small, cut-up pieces of blood-stained bandage.
“What is this?”
Eri approached, wiping her wet hands on her apron with a few quick swipes.
“A quiz.”
“…A quiz?”
“If you get it right, I’ll raise your weekly pay and switch your meals to something better.”
At those words, Eri’s eyes lit up with motivation.
“What is it? What is it?”
“Grab these bottles with your hands. And choose the calmest one.”
I pointed to the three glass bottles.
A was from the mother who had arrived this morning with puerperal fever.
B was from Donovan, who had gotten caught in the gears earlier.
C was from Rodi, who had been about to receive a transfusion.
Respectively, they were the bone marrow of a sepsis patient, a normal person, and a malaria patient.
However, I didn’t tell her what they were.
“The calmest one?”
“Yeah. Try picking the ‘bone’ that feels the most still to you.”
“…What does that mean?”
Damn. It was my best pun, but she didn’t bite.
Though puzzled by my quiz, Eri reached toward the bottles.
A.
“Ugh! Gross.”
She pulled her hand away from the sepsis patient’s bone marrow in disgust.
B.
“Hmm… Just sort of so-so?”
She didn’t find anything particularly strange in the normal patient’s bone marrow.
C.
“Ugh! This is gross too.”
She ended up choosing B as the most decent bottle.
I silently put B away and pushed A and C toward her.
They were respectively the bone marrow of the sepsis and malaria patients.
“What’s the difference between these two?”
“Hmmmm… Aren’t they both the same?”
“…”
I was slightly disappointed.
“Why? Why?! Is it wrong?!”
Eri stomped her feet in frustration.
I shook my head.
“No. It’s perfectly correct.”
She had already gotten the answer right the moment she chose B.
It would have been the icing on the cake if she had distinguished between A and C, but.
I reached a conclusion.
‘Eri can distinguish the degree of bone marrow activation through her senses.’
A binary classification of sorts: ‘repulsive’ or ‘not repulsive.’
She couldn’t tell whether it was malaria or a bacterial infection, let alone which bacteria.
‘That’s a shame.’
Still, honestly, it would have been perfect if she could distinguish down to the bacterial species.
But of course, I knew that was asking too much.
It’s natural that you can’t determine such things from bone marrow, not even from a blood culture.
And rather, since it was a bone marrow-side talent instead of blood, there were advantages too.
‘I can just screen bone marrow routinely? And non-invasively at that? Man, if this were the 21st century, it would have caused an uproar.’
I can say this with certainty.
Even if I hadn’t graduated from medical school—infectious diseases, rheumatology, or even hematology.
They would have given me a professorship and assigned me to screen patients at the ER entrance.
And my annual salary would have easily exceeded 400 million.
Even viewed apart from a medical perspective, it was an outstanding talent.
Because this talent was one of a mage’s talents.
‘Jackpot.’
First year of the Rain Prayer Ceremony.
Finally, my efforts had borne fruit.
I moved Eri up from Tier 3 to Tier 1 in my mind.
“Eri.”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t have to run errands starting tomorrow.”
Eri’s shoulders flinched.
She seemed to think she had been fired.
Her eyes shook for a moment.
The fear of being kicked out after finally finding a place flashed through her.
Tears welled up in the corners of her eyes.
Seeing that, I quickly continued.
“I’ll have someone else run errands now, and you’ll work beside me. During consultations, together.”
“Bweh…?”
“Not as an errand girl. I’m making you my assistant.”
A beat late, Eri’s mouth fell open.
“Why? I can’t even read.”
“I’ll teach you to read.”
I wiped the tears gathered at the corners of her eyes with a handkerchief.
“From now on, your job is to use that sense of yours to find sick people. It’s a very important mission.”
“…Is that really such a big deal?”
“Yeah. It’s something only you can do.”
As I said that, I wrote down the monthly salary she would receive in my notebook.
The zeros kept increasing.
One, two, three, four…
“Eek?! 40… 400,000 mar?!”
400,000 mar was roughly the monthly wage of a skilled craftsman in the better part of town.
It was only natural to be surprised, as a back-alley orphan had suddenly skyrocketed to the level of a master artisan.
“…C…Can I really take this?”
“It’s worth that much.”
I had to spend at least this much to recruit her.
If you think of it as installing one MRI machine, this was actually a bargain.
“One, two, three, four…”
Eri kept counting the zeros, unable to believe this reality.
What’s so surprising.
If you stick by my side and build up experience, it’ll increase tenfold.
I finished writing today’s medical log and tucked the records into storage as I spoke.
“And one more thing.”
Eri raised her head.
“What?”
“Since you’re my assistant now, you’ll commute with me.”
“Commute?”
“Don’t sleep here anymore. I’m saying you should commute from where I live.”
This wasn’t something I said simply because she was my fated connection.
A mage’s talent is rare.
To what extent—even nobles drenched in a sense of privilege would try to adopt her the moment they discovered her.
If she was reasonably smart on top of that, calling her an SSR as a mage prospect would be no exaggeration.
So whether as a misunderstanding-novel protagonist, or as the young master of a baron’s household.
I had a duty to bring her to my house.
Naturally, Erika, who had no way of knowing this background, seemed unable to believe the sudden exceptional treatment.
“…At the teacher’s house?”
“To be exact, the annex. I’ll give you a room.”
“A house with an annex??”
Eri stared at me with a blank expression.
“Let’s go. I’ll explain on the way.”
I opened the clinic door and stepped outside.
Eri followed me in a fluster.
In front of the clinic.
A black sedan was waiting.
A smooth luster.
Brass trim.
Even the smog reflecting in the windows looked luxurious—a limousine.
Eri froze.
“…What’s that?”
“A car.”
“You think I don’t know that? Why is a car here?”
“Is it not allowed to be here?”
“It’s not even a carriage, so why is an automobile….”
Ignoring Eri, who was muttering in a daze.
I opened the door and pushed her inside.
Eri tumbled onto the leather seat.
I sat down beside her and closed the door.
“Let’s go.”
Beyond the rearview mirror, the driver Oto looked at me with eyes asking what kind of stray I had picked up this time.
From that gaze, I recalled Oto’s position.
He is my driver and bodyguard.
And before being my man, he was the head butler’s man.
Thinking of that and looking again, he had an air of not stepping on the pedal unless I explained about Eri.
So I briefly persuaded him.
“Please contact the head butler. Tell him to prepare a room in the annex. Tell him I have discovered a child with mage talent, and to prepare it befitting her status.”
“Understood, young master.”
The driver’s eyes changed.
If it was recruiting a mage, it made sense.
Only then did the car begin to move.
Eri fiddled with the leather seat, her eyes wide.
“Is, is this real leather?”
“Yeah.”
“Sniff sniff. The smell is….”
“Could you please restrain yourself a bit in the car.”
Eri buried her nose in the seat and inhaled the scent.
In the red-light district, leather mostly meant scraps left over from tanning, sewn together and patched up, so it was understandable.
Having adapted to the smell like a cat, Eri cautiously leaned her back against the seat.
And looked out the window.
The black slate buildings of Limbus Pit flashed by.
“…Where are we going?”
I simply answered that she should just quietly watch.
The car kept climbing.
It left Limbus Pit and crossed Kivitas Square.
But the car kept climbing.
And around the time the car passed through Sanctum Hill without inspection.
“Huh? Huh?”
“This is where you’ll live from now on.”
“…Click.”
Eri’s head dropped with a light thud.
It seemed her brain had chosen to shut down from too much information flooding in at once.
I understand.
After all, it was like being promoted from a brothel orphan to the right hand of a Celestial Dragon.
“….”
I gazed at the fainted Eri with satisfaction.
‘This was the reaction I was hoping for.’
It seemed I had gained an assistant with excellent reactions.