The old woman's eyebrows—bleached by acid fog and soot—were almost entirely gone. In their place, glued to her brow ridge with some kind of adhesive, was a small tuft of luminous moss.
Right now, in this clinic lit only by a single dim oil lamp, those two tufts of moss were giving off a faint green glow. That glow not only provided extra light for the fine work she did up close—treating wounds and the like—it also painted the deep shadows of her sunken eye sockets with an eerie sheen, like the dark green bottom of a beer bottle.
The worms on my chest were still working tirelessly, sending a prickling, numb-itch sensation through my skin, but I wasn't as frightened as I'd been at first. Curled up in a heap of relatively clean rags, I watched her hunch her back and, with slow effort that never seemed to stop, grind piles of dried mushrooms in a stone mortar, producing a dull, rhythmic thud.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
In that moment, I suddenly realized that this battered, weathered, scar-laced face might be a portrait of Spirepeak City itself—no, perhaps even of this vast, decaying Imperium.
All suffering and scars, in the end, settled into the ornamentation of years; and within every crease that looked like nothing but decline, a single spark of life lay coiled—refusing to go out.
I lay half-awake in this tiny clinic for two days, drifting in and out of sleep for most of it. The old woman didn't mind. If anything, she seemed pleased.
"Small aches and pains—sleep enough and you'll be fine," she said.
And honestly, I wasn't in terrible shape.
At least it was nothing compared to the time I took bullets at Valmonda Fortress. This time it was mainly shock, overexertion, too long without food or water, plus a collection of scrapes, bruises, and burns—all surface injuries. The infection and poisoning were the only truly troublesome part…
Thanks to the Lady Inquisitor's desperate protection.
…And I still didn't know how she was now. Had she survived the Ecclesiarchy's assault? Would she come looking for me?
Over those two days, I lay like a fish on a chopping board and endured Marta's full "witch-doctor" course of treatment.
She cut away rotten tissue with a sharp iron blade, then packed the wound with an ointment made from crushed beetles mixed with alcohol. She used a hollow bone—lined with barbs—to "draw out" what she called poisonous pus from my flesh. And she forced me to eat all sorts of bizarre roasted insects, fungus soups, and strangely colored liquids.
Every session was torture.
This place was nothing like the med-bay at Valmonda Fortress. In fact, it was the opposite extreme: there it had been advanced, cold, and efficient. Here it was improvisation and crude necessity—back-alley methods and rough hands.
But I had to admit: for all that it looked savage, primitive, even disgusting, the results were unexpectedly good.
My wounds healed at a visible pace. The fever from infection dropped away. The murderous cough and raw throat eased. My body seemed to be forced—violently and primitively—to adapt to this new environment, saturated with biological and chemical hazards.
And in the meantime, Marta's ceaseless, rambling mouth gave me a first working understanding of "Cargo Stack Seven."
This was one of the lowest slums at the base of Spirepeak City, boxed in by industrial zones, dump fields, and sewage districts—an end station for all the refuse discarded by the upper world, and… for all the people discarded with it.
There was no law here. No order. Only the most primitive rule of survival.
Clean water, food, and medicine were the true hard currency. Violence was the only universal language, the only accepted code of conduct. Spirepeak City's officials and enforcers neither wanted to enter this place, nor would they. They let everything here rot and sort itself out, so long as it didn't threaten key infrastructure or the upper city.
She told me the half-grown kids who robbed me were "mushrooms that sprouted out of the sewers." Their parents were dead—killed in street fights, factory accidents, or simply unknown in the first place. The kids banded together and lived by theft, robbery, and scavenging. Alive today, dead tomorrow—beaten to death in some shadowed corner over a bite of food.
"That one they call 'Little Spark'—he's a good kid." Marta said this while cleaning the grime from my scabbing wounds with a thin strand of glowing fungus. "His mum died early. I watched him grow up. Timid. Not bad-hearted. This time he was probably pushed into it by the others. When he ran back to warn me, his face went white—thought he'd gotten himself into a beheading sort of mess."
I stayed silent.
I didn't know what expression I was supposed to wear when thinking about kids who knocked me out and stripped me… and then turned around and saved my life.
Anger?
Gratitude?
Or… pity?
Maybe in this forgotten abyss, good and evil had long since lost their original boundaries. Survival was the only morality left.
When I was finally able to stand and walk properly, Marta threw a set of clothes at me—Emperor-knows where she'd gotten them.
It was a gray, military-coat-like garment stitched together from several different kinds of coarse cloth, complete with a hood. The faded trousers were covered in patches but thick and sturdy, carrying a faint scent of machine oil. There was also a pair of foul-smelling thick leather boots with no left or right, held in place on my feet by layers of binding straps.
"Put it on." She didn't even look up. "Your old outfit isn't coming back. But you still need something on your back. Soft-skinned types like you—if you don't have a reliable hide, you won't last a day out there."
I changed, and under her strict stare, I put on a crude respirator mask she'd cobbled together from unknown animal hide and metal mesh. Inside the mask was a rag soaked in sour vinegar.
"Remember this, outsider." As I reached for the creaking sheet-metal door, she called me back and shoved something into my hand—light as air, a bracelet strung from all sorts of teeth, bones, and tufts of hair. "If you're going out, wear this. In this patch, people see it and they'll give an old woman like me a bit of face. But outside Cargo Stack Seven, it's useless."
I held that strange bracelet and looked at her face—made even more gaunt by the dim light. A thousand words clogged my throat, but in the end only the plainest line came out:
"Thank you, ma'am."
She waved a hand. Something complicated flickered in her cloudy eyes—worry, pity, but more than anything, the fatigue of someone who has watched too many partings between the living and the dead.
"Be careful out there… Down here, if you live one day, you count one day."
She turned away and went back to her herbs.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
That monotonous, steady rhythm was like a weak heartbeat—stubbornly refusing to stop in this rotting mire.
(End of Chapter)
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