The second day dawned with no sunrise.
Instead, the alien sky shifted from a deep violet to a bruised gray, the towering fungal stalks glowing faintly brighter as if they alone dictated the rhythm of time.
Harold stirred from his cot, every joint smooth and painless, every breath too easy.
It still unsettled him—this young body that wasn't his own, at least not the one he remembered having.
He sat up slowly.
The stone room was as he had left it: barren, silent, indifferent.
For a brief moment, Harold imagined he could simply stay here forever, safe behind the thick walls, living off whatever strange magic had restored him, after all the status did say he had a 300 year life expectancy.
But the thought soured quickly.
To hide now would mean breaking the promise he had made to himself.
Today was the day.
He rose, brushing the dust from his trousers, and moved to the door set into the stone wall.
It opened with surprising ease, a soft grind of stone on stone, revealing a narrow tunnel that breathed out stale, cool air.
Harold hesitated only once before stepping forward.
The passage led him out into a wide ledge overlooking the alien wilderness.
Harold froze, awestruck.
The fungal forest stretched endlessly, its stalks so tall they blotted the horizon.
Between them wound strange ridges of moss-covered stone, rivers of faintly luminous water cutting through the landscape like veins of silver.
And not far off—so close he could have reached it in half a day's walk—rose the unmistakable shape of a city.
Its walls shimmered faintly, carved from some material that looked like a cross between glass and bone.
Towers speared upward, strung with glowing bridges.
Movement flickered within—shapes, too far to make out clearly.
Civilization.
People.
Answers.
Harold's chest tightened.
That city could hold doctors, healers, or at least those who knew this world better than he did, and could possibly offer him guidance and training.
It could give him food, direction, perhaps even acceptance.
But then he remembered the rusty tweezers, the soiled bandages.
Remembered the bile that had risen at the thought of harming someone through ignorance.
He clenched his fists.
"No," he muttered. "Not yet. I promised. I need practice first."
Turning from the city, Harold began the slow climb down from the ledge.
The stone gave way to thick mats of moss that yielded under his boots with a damp squish.
The air was heavy with the smell of earth and fungus, not unpleasant, but cloying.
Somewhere in the distance, he heard chittering, high and shrill.
Life.
Harold crouched low, moving carefully through the undergrowth.
He had no real experience hunting, but he had emptied enough hospital traps to know the signs of vermin.
Scraps of gnawed fungus, tiny trails pressed into moss, droppings dark against the glowing soil.
He followed them, heart hammering, tools shimmering into his hands whenever his thoughts brushed against them.
A rusty needle.
Pitted tweezers.
Stained bandages.
A wooden clipboard with paper and pencil.
Wooden sticks that looked more like tongue depressors than splints.
His arsenal was laughable—but they were all he had.
Hours passed as Harold stalked through the fungal forest, every sound magnified in the silence of his nerves.
He saw things he couldn't have imagined back on Earth: insects the size of his hand with translucent wings that glowed like lanterns, sluglike creatures trailing shimmering slime that hardened into glass, even a birdlike thing with scales instead of feathers, darting between mushroom caps.
But none were right.
Too fragile, too alien, too dangerous.
He needed something familiar, something that would bleed and bruise like the creatures he imagined treating one day.
Finally, near a cluster of pale-blue fungus, he saw it: a rodent-like animal, hunched on its hind legs, gnawing at the glowing cap.
It was the size of a large rat, its fur mottled gray, eyes glimmering faintly in the dark.
Harold's breath caught.
This was it.
He crouched lower, creeping closer.
The creature's ears twitched, but it didn't flee.
He swallowed hard, reaching into his mind for something—anything—that might let him catch it.
The rusty tweezers appeared in his hand, useless as a weapon. He grimaced.
"No good. Need something else," he whispered.
The thought barely left his lips before he looked down and realized he didnt need to try and use his healing system for harm, there were rocks at his feet he could just toss a few of those.
Harold's lips curled into a shaky grin, it wasnt the most honorable form of combat, feeling more like a young child clutching an armful of rocks while preparing to throw the first one as a projectile.
He threw the rock clumsily, the movement awkward, but fortune was with him.
The rodent squealed, thrashing as the flying stone had clocked it in the head.
Harold rushed forward, heart hammering, and scooped it up.
It struggled, teeth flashing, but he held it firm.
For a moment, he simply stared at the trembling thing in his hands.
His first patient.
And then, as the adrenaline faded, the weight of what he was about to do pressed down on him.
He wanted to heal, not harm.
But to heal, he needed to learn—and learning meant mistakes, practice, trial.
Harold closed his eyes.
His whole life he had dreamed of being a doctor, of living by the oath he had heard whispered in the halls of St. Mary's.
Do no harm.
But in this world, with these tools, he needed something different.
Something truer to his path.
His mind turned inward, shaping words as the rodent writhed in his grip.
"I will harm if harm teaches me how to heal," he whispered. "But never more than I must. I will practice on beasts before I dare touch a thinking being. I will not ask for gold or favor, only trust. And when I learn enough to heal without fear—I will heal all who come, without weighing their worth."
The words steadied him.
A crude oath, perhaps, but his own.
Harold opened his eyes.
The rodent's head had bone visible from where the skin was torn away due to the rocks impact, a shallow wound but real enough as the blood dripped out dying its fur a dark blue.
Quickly running back to his hidden room, he placed the rodent down on the desk, took up a seat on the stool.
His tools shimmered into being at the thought—tweezers, bandages, needle.
All crude, all unclean.
But here was his chance.
He took a breath.
"Alright, little one. Let's both learn something today."
And with trembling hands, Harold Greene began his first real lesson in medicine, while his test subject learned a lesson in pain absent anesthesia.