The clinic had been getting louder and livelier by the day. Women hugged all sorts of bundles and crammed into the narrow street in front of the door, chattering louder than a steam engine:
"…My man's fingers are starting to flake apart, please take a look…"
"…The holy unguent the church hands out just makes it rot faster. Those monks are lying…"
"…Please look at my kid! I can't pay, so how about I sleep with you instead?"
I was debriding the thirteenth patient of the day. When I heard that, I nearly jabbed the forceps straight into the wound.
I was seeing the most bizarre, and also the most real, faces of life in this dark lower-level tableau.
The people coming to me weren't just laborers who scraped by at the bottom. There were gang enforcers who killed without blinking, street girls selling their bodies in shadowed corners, and orphans living off scrap.
In front of Rustbone Disease, everyone was equal. Whether you were a brute who could crush a steel pipe in one hand, or a seductive beauty, once you caught this thing you would still, step by step, turn into a stinking heap of rotten flesh.
And I had become their only lifeline.
That night, deep into "late hours," after the last patient left and the sixth steam detonation of the day was still echoing through the murky fog, a woman wrapped in a tattered shawl timidly walked in. Her name was Black Lilian, a well-known street girl in this area. She was only in her early twenties, but the weight of life and cheap cosmetics had already carved thirty years of weariness into her face.
She wasn't sick, but she brought in a younger girl who had Rustbone Disease.
After I stabilized the dying girl, Black Lilian stood stiffly at the counter, hands twisting the edge of her shawl until her knuckles went white.
"My lord… we… we can't afford to pay…" She kept her head down, voice barely louder than a mosquito. "We don't have anything you'd want either… If… if you don't mind…"
As she spoke, trembling fingers undid the clasp of her shawl, exposing the body beneath. Thin, but still young and pale.
There was no shame in her eyes. No deliberate seduction. Only a numb, heartbreaking calm, as if it wasn't her body at all, but a commodity laid on the table.
I almost threw my tea mug across the room.
"Put it back on. Now. Put it back on!" I turned my back to her, face burning all the way to my ears, flailing my hands in a panic. "What are you doing?! I'm… I mean, I'm a doctor! Not… not that!"
"But… it's all we have…" She stared at me blankly, like she couldn't understand why I was refusing the "deal." In this place, an intact, pretty body was one of the most popular forms of currency. "Before, when we asked gang bosses for help, they all…"
"That's them. I'm different." I spun around and roughly wrapped the shawl back around her shoulders, even using too much force as I fastened the clasp for her. "Listen. The fee's on credit. Pay it when you strike it rich. Or… or come help Granny Marta wash clothes later. Now take your friend and get out of here."
People say warm food and a full belly stir lust.
But me? I wasn't full, I wasn't warm, everything was filthy, I was exhausted every day, and I was still worrying about my future and my life. I couldn't summon that kind of mood even if I tried.
Black Lilian froze. She stared at me, and in those dead-water eyes that had long since learned how cold the world was, a ripple suddenly appeared. Her lips trembled as if she wanted to say something, but in the end she only bowed deeply and left with the girl.
The next "morning," a basket appeared at the clinic door: clothes washed so clean they even carried some kind of faint scent.
Granny Marta said nothing.
But Little Spark was clearly unhappy about it.
Of course, not every patient was so simple.
One day, they carried in a giant of a man—well over two meters tall, muscles knotted like iron cables. On his arm, thick as my thigh, was a tattoo of a massive scorpion. He wasn't walking. He was lying on his side atop a huge sheet of steel, hauled in by several men.
"It's Iron Tail! The Red Scorpion Gang's top enforcer!"
A gasp ran through the crowd. Patients who'd been moaning a moment ago fell silent instantly, fear filling their eyes.
This man, Iron Tail, was rumored to have torn open a mutated radiation lizard with his bare hands.
But now this beast was curled on the steel sheet, sobbing like a helpless infant. His back had rotted right through. You could even see the thick spinal column inside, speckled with rust-colored stains.
"Save… save me…" He stretched out a hand like a fan, reaching for my clothing, then hesitated as if afraid to dirty my table. "I have money… I have bullets… I have women… Just make it stop hurting…"
The once-unstoppable thug was now as humble as a worm.
"Shut up and save your strength." I'd been running on fumes for half a day, and my temper was about as pleasant as a pediatric chief at seven in the evening. I slapped his hand away.
The people around us sucked in a sharp breath, like I was already dead.
"Roll over. Don't move."
His back was too far gone, and the debridement was brutal. Sometimes being too strong—too able to endure—wasn't a blessing at all. Several times, the mountain of a man bucked and thrashed, ready to explode upright, only to be crushed back down by my impatient bark:
"If you want to live, stay down!"
The whole time, Granny Marta stood motionless by the door, watching. Her hands were hidden under the counter.
When the Red Scorpion Gang carried the bandaged giant out into the smog, Granny Marta gathered up the heavy sack they'd left behind—bullets and coins, still smeared with someone's blood—and spoke suddenly.
"You shouldn't have saved him. Some dead branches belong in the cremator."
I gave an awkward laugh. I didn't have the nerve to admit that, just now, I'd been scared stiff by these infamous gangsters and hadn't dared refuse. So I hid behind a line like, "A doctor shouldn't choose patients based on who they are."
None of us expected what happened the next day.
At dawn, the giant came back again—alone. He loitered in front of the clinic with a sack for a long time, until the neighbors and nearby alley folk were startled into rushing out with makeshift weapons to defend the clinic. Only then did he drop the sack and flee like a thief.
When we opened it, we found it packed full of medicines and injectables from the upper levels. Emperor knows where he'd gotten them.
Then, on the walls across from the clinic and throughout the nearby lanes, someone painted the same message again and again:
Whoever touches one hair on this healer's head is making an enemy of Iron Tail, and making an enemy of the Red Scorpion Gang!
From that day on, two Red Scorpion Gang sentries appeared at the mouth of the alley in front of the clinic, standing guard around the clock. They were more diligent than any "regular troops" I'd ever seen.
Little Spark was so frightened she didn't dare come back to the clinic for days.
And just like that, amid the endless grind, I gradually noticed something.
The way people looked at me had changed.
It wasn't just gratitude from patients to a doctor anymore, or reverence from the poor toward someone kind.
It was… fervor. Certainty. And even, threaded through it all, a hint of… worship.
They started bringing me gifts.
People had always occasionally brought supplies for Granny Marta, yes. But over the last week, the volume of offerings arriving at the clinic began to grow exponentially.
Someone brought an expired military ration can that actually contained real beef—at least some real beef component. (I think it was called "ambull," or something like that.) Someone brought a pistol painstakingly modified and polished from scrap pipe and springs.
Someone brought several high-capacity power cells that still worked. A mutant whose arm had grown three segments brought a shriveled fruit pit—an actual fruit pit—and claimed he'd hauled it back from the far side of the wasteland beyond Spirepeak City. Plant it, he said, and it would grow into a god-tree.
The storeroom filled to bursting. Even my sleeping space started to feel like a treasure vault inside a trash heap.
But the most ridiculous part was this:
They began imitating me.
They treated "washing hands" and "boiling water" as sacred religious rites. I even saw punk-haired gangsters outside, solemnly scalding their knives in boiling water before chopping someone up, muttering under their breath:
"By the Saint's deeds, cleanse your sins…"
What in the void was this?
I'm a materialist. This is science. Science, do you understand?
I tried to explain bacteria, viruses, infection. I explained why high-temperature sterilization mattered.
They just blinked at me with the expression of someone who clearly understood, Ah, yes, this is an invocation of rites, then did it even more devoutly.
Granny Marta's expression grew stranger and stranger as she watched all of it.
One day, while I was bandaging a patient, she sighed.
"Kid. Right now, you're more effective than the priests and sisters up in the grand cathedral. At least I've never heard of them saving even one Rustbone patient." She puffed on her pipe. In the haze of smoke, her voice sounded oddly distant. "Down here, people don't need reasons. They need miracles. And you're that miracle."
Then one day, Little Spark hit me with the final blow.
(End of Chapter)
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