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Translator: penny
Chapter: 6
Chapter Title: I Will Definitely Save You
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The moment I escaped the mansion where they saw me as a thorn in their side, I clutched the beastkin slave on my back and bolted toward the annex without even catching my breath.
The breath I felt on my back was too faint.
So faint that even now, I could sense it flickering out.
More accurately, she wasn't alive—she was merely not yet dead.
And the words I'd just uttered in front of the mansion.
Birthday?
What a joke.
In the original story, the character Lucas Argent was written to die after brutal torture right from chapter 1, imprinting on readers that 'this novel is a tale of revenge.'
Who would remember the birthday of a man like that?
He was just a handful of dust, dissolving into the air.
So I'd simply made it up.
If it's a day no one in the family cares about, even a lie rolls forward as truth.
'What a cursed life... both you and me.'
I let out a hollow laugh as I crossed the threshold of the annex.
"Young Master! Where on earth— Huh? What's that you're carrying on your back?"
Karen approached with a thorny scowl.
As always, a maid showing no trace of deference in her service to me.
"Warm water, clean cloths, herbal medicine box. Bring them all. Right now."
"No, why should I—"
"By the way, this child is a slave given to me by Brother Wolfram Argent. If her condition worsens... as my formal servant, you'll be held responsible too, won't you?"
But at those words, Karen's eyes shook instantly.
"W-Wolfram!? Ah, got it! I'll fetch them right away!"
She rubbed her palms together and scurried off in a panic.
The look she'd given me moments ago—like a fluffy rag—vanished in an instant.
Indeed, in this mansion, it wasn't words that moved people, but fear.
"From afar, I thought it was serious, but up close, the reality is even more horrific."
While Karen fetched the herbal box and clean water, I carefully laid the slave I'd carried myself,
Piel, on my bed.
The heat radiating from her tiny body scorched my palms.
The moment I stripped off the sackcloth, I swallowed hard.
"...Ha."
It was a gruesomeness words couldn't capture.
So severe that Karen nearly dropped the basin she carried.
"Eek?! Ugh... so dirty—"
"If you're going to puke, do it outside. If even a speck of your vomit gets into her wounds, it'll truly be over."
All over the child's body were linear lacerations from whips, burst wounds scraped by saw teeth or rough tools, and infected areas where flesh had rotted and pus had burst.
Ragged cloths unworthy of being called bandages were wrapped around her; when I unwound them, rotten blood and pus met the air, spewing a foul stench.
The worst was her head.
The stump of her severed ear wasn't clean.
Flesh was jaggedly torn away, and white maggots writhed in the crevices, feeding on her body heat.
"...This isn't just simple lacerations. Dirt, rust, fibers are embedded deep in the dermis... and toxic tissue necrosis is underway."
My words were calm, but my stomach churned.
Piel's breaths came shallow and ragged, her fingertips gradually paling to a purplish hue.
Early shock symptoms.
If she were a human child... she'd have died three days ago.
"Karen, once you've brought everything, get out."
Karen blinked.
"Huh? You're... doing it yourself?"
"Or do you want to? Washing the wounds, squeezing out pus, holding flesh for suturing. If you're up for it, go ahead."
At that, Karen flapped her lips and waved her hands frantically.
"Th-that... my stomach's weak. That tras— no, if you want the child, you handle it yourself... hehe."
She belatedly corrected the word that had slipped out and bowed at the waist.
Contempt still lingered in her eyes, but Wolfram's name seemed to force her silence.
And for what lay ahead, it was better to station her outside the door anyway.
In this room, all she'd manage was heavy breathing and retching.
"Fine. Lock the door and let no one in. Or... if you fancy gore, peek away."
"...Got it! Treat her—without any slip-ups!"
Karen bolted from the room, her face lit with irrepressible relief.
As if grateful to flee this horrific sight, her toes bounced with each step.
Once the door shut, only one stifled breath remained in the room.
Piel.
The small body on the bed still burned hot, and the unrelenting fever only heightened my unease.
"Alright... let's get started."
First things first: sever the contamination.
I began wiping her body with a cloth soaked in warm water.
Using my fingertips rather than my wrist, so as not to tear scabs forcibly.
Not stroking, but gently lifting the stains like peeling away grime. I soaked gauze in disinfectant and laid it over the wounds without rubbing.
As the solution seeped in, Piel's lips quivered, and even in her hazy state, tiny tears beaded at her eyes.
'You're still hanging on.'
The point where you can't even feel pain—that's true death.
Knowing that, I took her faint groan not as an end, but a beginning.
After slowly clearing the bloody residue, it was time for pus and necrotic tissue.
Snip... snip...
The narrow, thin blade tossed in as a bonus for cutting herbs.
This morning, the herbal shop owner had handed it over as a 'service' when I bought a bundle of toxic plants.
I'd never dreamed it'd slice through blood and pus like this.
Yet a tool's purpose is forged where its edge meets.
As the blade glided along dead flesh, the layered membrane unraveled quietly like thread from a seam.
The line between living and dead tissue shows in color and smell.
Healthy flesh is red and springy; rotten pus twists murky between gray and yellow.
I peeled away the dead bits along that line, like plucking loose threads.
"Uh... ugh...!"
Piel swallowed a feeble scream deep in her throat.
"Sorry. If anesthesia were an option, I'd use it... but no such luxuries here."
The Argent Family spares no coin acquiring slaves, but healing them? Not a dime.
Sure, deep in the mansion there might be fine silver salves, refined spirits, or healing powders—but for a bastard like me, only leftovers trickle down.
What I could count on now was singular.
The beastkin's innate regenerative prowess, and the fact that this child had reason to live again.
Piel.
As expected, she was one of the protagonists in [Vengeful Goddesses].
In the original tale, she survived without even this treatment, emerging a decade later as a 'hero.'
...But that was ink on paper.
Before me now lay only a bleeding creature.
And before I was a reader, I was a surgeon.
In Korea, I'd once commanded real respect.
So I know.
In this world, there's no such thing as a 'complete cure.'
Diseases merely slumber, and slumbering ills awaken anew.
In a lapse of vigilance, people die more quietly, more pointlessly, than you'd imagine.
I've witnessed countless such ends.
So in this moment—plucking maggots wriggling from Piel's severed fox-ear stump with tweezers—
I put no faith in the original plot or the future.
Only in the deeds of my fingertips.
Sticky pus dangled from the tweezers, dripping slowly.
"Hang in there. Live... and cry."
I muttered low.
"The dead claim neither revenge nor freedom."
Surgery complete.
Precisely 11 hours, 24 minutes, and 41 seconds.
This world's clocks mark only minutes, but these fingers—carving rot sans anesthesia—tally seconds.
"...Phew. Done."
A room bereft of assistants, sterilizing lamps, or sterile instruments.
Compared to a Korean OR, this bordered on a workshop.
Yet I'd concentrated longer than in any operation, for a patient with fiercer reason to pull through than any other.
On the bed, fox beastkin Piel breathed quietly.
"Mmmnya... mmmnya..."
"Sleeping soundly, innocent of the world's cruelties."
The dying beast-stench from her arrival had faded; now only faint sweat and vital warmth remained.
Fever lingered.
But this was reactive pyrexia.
The body's signal, self-heating blood to incinerate lingering germs.
The bandages encircling her weren't the original rags.
Layered pressure wraps secured drainage ports, herbal regenerative powders evenly adsorbed to the stump.
"Well, couldn't make it perfect, but..."
I reached to stroke Piel's head, then paused.
Partially ruptured abdominal viscera, lightless right eye, ear ripped clean away without trace.
Wounds so profound and tenacious lay beyond even my 21st-century Earth medicine.
From reading the original, I knew.
Piel survives, no question.
A decade on, she awakens as the world-altering hero.
But behind that glory, phantom ear-rings haunted her life; meals triggered vomiting; nightly, torture-pains revived, screams swallowed in sleep.
...No such future would I abide.
I was the reader who'd traced Piel's path from afar—and a doctor too.
And as a doctor, I knew.
Somewhere in this world existed arts to restore vanished senses, ravaged organs.
That instant—a tap at the window.
Tap, tap.
"Chirp chirp!"
"Right on cue."
Luck sometimes strides to the table unwashed blade in hand.
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