"I think perhaps his parents sent him here, and he lay in a hospital bed, watching Plague Doctors in beak masks receive all kinds of patients."
"Because he was too young, he couldn't understand what a plague actually was. And the methods Plague Doctors used in that era were indeed rather fantastical, so he imagined it all as magic."
"People afflicted with the Black Death suffered terribly. They might scream and wail, flail their limbs and bare their teeth. Unable to understand such behavior, he instinctively added his own fantasies, seeing every patient who came for treatment as some bizarre monster—octopus people, Raven People, and so on..."
"But there are still parts that can't be explained." Schiller lightly tapped the armrest with his fingertips. "Those bizarre patients and magical treatment methods may all have been imagined by this child."
"In modern medicine, virtually every disease is interconnected. But here, the contents of the manual are basically nonsense. It clearly isn't a scientific discipline that developed naturally, but something more like fantasy. That fits the theory of the Consciousness World."
"Some of the tools used for treatment here were also used by medieval Plague Doctors. For example, they used water boiled with sulfur for disinfection, tried to cut away ulcerated skin with scalpels, or used herbs to ease patients' pain. That part should be this child's memories from reality."
"But one thing alone doesn't quite add up: the clothes worn by the patients who come here."
"Clothes? You mean their outfits?"
"Exactly." Schiller nodded. "People can't imagine things they've never seen. Even these bizarre illnesses and treatment plans must have had prototypes. Quite a few resemble symptoms of the Black Death."
"But when it came to clothing, if this child had never seen what wealthy people wore, he would certainly think