If I'd known that casually saving one dying worker would set off the whole chain reaction that came afterward, then back then…
Fine. Back then, I probably still would've saved him.
Because I really couldn't just watch someone rot into a lump of organic fertilizer right in front of me.
But after saving him, I absolutely would've sealed Little Spark's mouth with industrial-strength tape, tied her up, and tossed her into the attic storeroom. And while I was at it, I would've had Granny Marta stick her with a heavy sedative so she'd sleep for three days and three nights.
Because all this madness started with that girl's mouth, which simply did not come with a door.
The news of Harvey's recovery spread like a high-explosive grenade tossed into a cesspit, instantly setting off waves upon waves across Hold Seven—and even several nearby blocks around the lower levels. In a place with no internet and no phones, the dissemination efficiency of Little Spark's two legs and one mouth was somehow more outrageous than any social media platform.
Early the next day—if we're calling it "morning" just because the gigantic ventilation fan tens of meters above the clinic started roaring—when I groggily pulled open the clinic's sheet-metal door as usual to go dump the piss bucket (yes, even shit and urine had to be collected centrally here as valuable resources), I was so startled by what I saw that I almost dumped the bucket on my own head.
The narrow, muddy, foul-smelling alley outside was completely jammed. The drainage ditch by the clinic entrance was nearly trampled flat by rotten boots. A dense crowd—like sardines waiting to be fed—filled every inch of space. Some lay on stretchers. Some were carried on backs. Some just sat directly on the filthy ground. Acid water condensed on the steam pipes, dripping in steady plinks, and they still hunched their necks and didn't move.
Those faces—twisted and warped by life—those eyes shining in the dark… the moment they saw me appear, they all lit up at once.
"He's out! The healer is out!"
Someone yelled, and the crowd instantly boiled. Then dozens of voices screamed the same word together:
"Save me!"
I froze. My first instinct was to turn around, slam the door, and run—this looked like a live-action zombie siege.
But Granny Marta stepped out right behind me. She raised an oil lamp that threw out a harsh, glaring white light, illuminating the dim street. She came to my side and bellowed in that grating voice of hers—like a ladle scraping a pot:
"Stop shoving! Line up! Do you understand the rules?! Anyone tries to push one step forward, this old woman breaks his leg first!"
The crowd stirred—then, unbelievably, formed a long, winding queue on the spot.
I stared at Granny Marta, slack-jawed. I'd never imagined that this dried-up, tiny old woman could command that kind of… authority here.
Holding the lamp high, Granny Marta counted heads.
"…the crippled news hawker, the mute laundry girl, and that big idiot at the station who's always getting beaten…"
She suddenly went, "Huh?" and stepped forward. From the arms of the woman at the front of the line, she took a small bundle wrapped in burlap. A large patch of the burlap had been soaked through with black-green fluid, giving off a nasty, rotting stench.
"Isn't this Little Snowball Erin? She's got it too?"
The woman dropped to her knees with a thud, grabbed my pant leg, and sobbed hoarsely.
"Please, touch my baby! At first we thought it was just a fall, but these last few days her whole arm has started rotting! They said it's Rustbone Disease!"
And so another busy day began—oh, after living here this long I'd picked up a bit of local life experience, and judging time was one of them.
One day, in the slums, was marked by the biggest steam pipe overhead venting six times.
As for treatment, it was the same old routine: debride, cleanse, bandage—then send off the endlessly grateful woman and the little girl who fell into heavy sleep.
(Granny Marta even stuffed a mint-scented little ball into the child's mouth. No idea if it was candy—damn it, I never thought I'd live to see the day when I'd drool over something that might be candy.)
The days that followed felt like I'd been tossed into a full-power industrial washing drum, spinning into darkness until I couldn't tell what day it was.
At first, Granny Marta was skeptical—worried, even. She feared I was putting on a show and wouldn't be able to end it, that I'd be torn to pieces by an angry crowd.
But after she personally watched the second, the third, the tenth "certain-to-die" patient—bodies ulcerated and oozing—break away from the long-established track everyone had accepted (slowly turning into a rotting corpse) after my clumsy debridement, disinfection, and bandaging routine, and instead begin scabbing, closing, and recovering in a way that actually made biological sense…
That worldly old woman fell completely silent.
She stopped asking about my "treatment principles." She quietly withdrew to the second line, becoming my compounder and anesthetist (and still handling everything that wasn't Rustbone Disease), her gaze always carrying the reverence and… fear of someone looking at an alien.
Truth be told, I doubted the meaning of what I was doing just as much as anyone. But once I'd treated enough people, I started to figure out a pattern.
This so-called "Rustbone Disease," in my view, was very likely psychosomatic.
Yes. I grew up in a traditional medicine hospital compound. I knew this stuff.
A brutal living environment, a rotten mindset, and certain superstitions—those were what made ordinary wounds and skin infections gradually develop into this… fatal condition, like the old saying of "carbuncles on the back leading to death."
There were also all kinds of mystical rumors. For example, the disease was always tied to "seven." The lesion on the chest always started rotting at the seventh rib. On the back, the pus supposedly started at the seventh vertebra. I thought that was pure superstition—forced pattern-matching.
What, if the foot starts rotting at the seventh toe from the left, then I'll say it's the fourth toe from the right. Who's going to argue?
And the claim that "the dead will become walking corpses on the seventh day" was even more ridiculous. Whoever invented that was probably just trying to force people to burn bodies promptly to prevent plague spread. As for "walking corpses," it was more likely just late-stage patients who weren't fully dead yet.
I'd already discovered the key to treating this disease—exactly as Granny Marta said:
Let the patient see light.
The more confidence I gave them, the faster they recovered.
So talking wasn't enough. The manual work still had to be done—at least enough to make them believe they'd received proper treatment, and that they were going to get better.
I didn't care whether what I was doing counted as shamanism. At minimum, the cleansing and bandaging I did on ulcerated wounds seemed to make that irreversible decay stop instantly—like it had lost the blessing of some mysterious force.
Once the suppression was gone, the body's own immune system and repair mechanisms naturally began a furious counterattack.
"Next!"
Wearing those rubber gloves that had been washed so many times they'd gone pale, I rasped the words out.
The one who came in was a one-eyed old man—Old Crowbar Jack—who worked down in the boiler room. His right lower leg had turned completely corpse-white, mottled with pus-green blotches. Like a rotten radish, it gave off a suffocating stench.
By local standards, even if you sawed the leg off, he'd still die within three days.
"Those black-robed bastards from the Ecclesiarchy," he spat a chunk-filled wad of phlegm, "took half a month of my pay and all they did was splash some cold water on my wound, calling it holy water!"
Trembling, he tried to bring that rotten leg closer, then seemed afraid of dirtying my table and left it hanging awkwardly in midair.
"Put it up. Stop wasting time." I did my best to sound like a professional doctor, even though inside I was panicking like hell.
I picked up the scissors with practiced familiarity, cut open the trouser leg that had already stuck to flesh, and tossed it into the trash. Rotten meat peeled away, pus and blood flowed out. Fighting nausea, I used forceps to hold a cotton ball soaked in that bottle of high-proof industrial alcohol—now regarded by the locals as "the real holy water"—and began scrubbing the wound.
"Hold it in. It's going to hurt."
"AH—!"
The instant the alcohol touched the wound, Jack let out a pig-slaughter scream. The man's back teeth clenched until they crackled.
"Treat it hard, sir. If you can't fix it, toss me in the furnace. Saves me from cursing my kids."
"Done. Wrapped." I finished binding him up and waved him off without even looking up. "Go home, rest two days, drink water, don't touch filthy things. Next!"
I sent Jack away, too tired to lift my head. Now I truly understood why those senior physicians in big hospitals were always so foul-tempered when they worked nonstop.
—Though about three days later, he still came back with a whole nest of chattering kids to thank me, because he really did recover.
The smallest girl clutched a shiny, brand-new piece of aluminum foil and insisted on giving it to me.
Little Spark was squatting on the roof gnawing a biscuit at the time, laughing so hard she kept hiccuping.
"Crowbar Uncle goes around bragging to everyone now. Says you used sack-stitching needle and thread to sew his rotten meat into new skin!"
(End of Chapter)
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