"This room..."
Mayuna was stunned by what she saw. Though it was underground and there was no light magic, it was still brightly lit. Long white objects on the ceiling emitted light, but it was completely different from the glow of magic crystals.
"You're sick. If I'm not mistaken, it's severe tetanus. You're about to die."
The young man placed Mayuna on a sofa he had made himself, opened a cabinet in the wall, and took out a transparent bottle full of liquid. Then he found a sealed syringe.
Of course, Mayuna did not know that the cylindrical object was called a syringe. She was merely puzzled that she did not recognize anything in his hands, so she began examining the underground room. Though it was an artificially excavated space, it was nothing like the messy caves she had seen before. The floor was covered in spotless white tiles, polished enough to reflect Mayuna's face. The walls had been painted white and covered in warm-colored wallpaper. In short, it was so tidy that it did not seem like a basement at all.
"How do you know? Are you a healer?"
She did not understand what tetanus meant, but he had correctly said she was about to die. Mayuna turned toward the strange person again and asked.
"Don't lump me together with those people who can't even cure such a minor illness."
The young man's voice was full of disdain, as if he looked down on the sacred healers. His arrogant attitude made Mayuna frown, but she quickly caught something else in his words and asked, "They can't cure me, but can you?"
"Of course. That's why I say this world's system has serious problems. It developed magic too much and completely abandoned science."
"You're trying to deceive me. This is a curse that even ninth-tier healing magic can't cure."
Though she was close to dying, Mayuna did not blindly seek treatment in desperation. She still deeply suspected that this person intended to do something to her.
"What curse? Think carefully. Has your body ever been pierced or cut by something sharp?"
"Hm? About a month ago, when I went to the Grand Library, I saw a very strange dagger. I cut myself on the blade while examining it, but I healed myself immediately."
Mayuna thought about it and remembered that she had indeed been injured. No one had cared; such a minor wound did not even require a healer.
"That was it. You mages, your magic is powerful, yet you're exceptionally fragile. That's why something like this nearly killed you. This is a matter of science. Can magic cure it? It takes healing magic several days just to cure a cold."
The young man knew that dagger had most likely been rusty. People in this world simply had no awareness of the danger of rust, and he could not be bothered explaining the principles to these unscientific mages.
"You seem to hate magic?"
"That's right. Take off your clothes."
After frankly admitting that he disliked unscientific things, the young man raised the syringe already filled with medicine and brought it closer to Mayuna. The silver needle tip looked especially terrifying beneath the lights.
"Y-You... what are you trying to do?"
Though she had never seen such a strange tool, a woman's sixth sense told Mayuna that it was dangerous. Extremely dangerous. More dangerous than his demand for her to take off her clothes.
"An injection. I'll inject the liquid in here into your body."
"Taking off my clothes is for... which part?"
Mayuna shrank farther back into the sofa. She did not see any twisted feelings such as lust in the young man's eyes, but she would rather have seen that! If she had, she could kill him with perfect justification!
"Your butt. Your hips."
"N-No, normally, there's no way I'd expose my butt to you, right?"
"Hmm... I was mistaken. This isn't my world."
After thinking it over, the young man gave up. Given how conservative she was, he did not want Mayuna to recover only to cry and demand that he take responsibility, or perhaps silence him by killing him.
"Let's hold off on the intramuscular injection. We'll use an intravenous injection instead. Hold out your hand."
The young man set down the syringe and picked up another needle connected to a tube. The tube extended all the way to the bottom of the transparent bottle. The only difference was that it looked somewhat less aggressive.
"So in the end, you're still going to stab me! What makes you so confident that I'll hand my body over to a stranger to do whatever he wants?"
Mayuna felt that she should reason with him properly rather than resort to force. It definitely was not because she no longer had enough magic power to kill this guy.
"The most basic trust between people. I believe I can cure you, so you need to believe that you can be cured. If you give up, you can only wait for death."
Hearing the young man's serious words, Mayuna felt a long-forgotten sense of frustration. She had only felt this way once before, when her teacher sealed her magic power and threw her into the Forest of Magical Beasts. Today was the first time since then. After hesitating again and again, she made the biggest decision of her life: she trusted this person and courageously held out her left hand to him.
"Y-You... don't touch me like that."
The young man held Mayuna's hand, feeling and squeezing it. Poor Mayuna had never been touched like this by a member of the opposite sex. Even the emperor had always treated her with great respect, let alone grabbing her hand and touching it so freely.
"I found the vein."
"Eek!!!"
What was a vein? Before Mayuna could figure out what he meant, a sharp pain shot through the back of her hand. Caught off guard, two tears fell from her eyes as she cried out.
"Sound magic? This is my first time seeing it."
The young man covered his ears in pain, but he still hung the medicine bottle high up so the drip could flow smoothly into the tube. Then he pressed cotton against the needle to keep it from slipping out before finally securing it with tape.
"Is it just my imagination? I really do feel a little better."
Mayuna quickly recovered from the pain. It had only hurt when the needle first went in; when the cool medicine entered her body, it felt quite comfortable, and the intense nausea had eased considerably.
"Of course it's your imagination. The illness was discovered too late. Don't expect to recover in less than half a month."
"Half a month? Will I have to get stabbed by this every day?"
"Yes."
"Maybe dying would be better after all... By the way, did you really save me that easily?"
Mayuna looked at the medicine bottle hanging from the ceiling and sighed. Then she looked at the expressionless young man. She had only wanted to find a place to rest in peace, yet she had never expected someone like him to exist in this remote little town, on an ordinary little mountain. Perhaps this was a miracle.
"Definitely."
"What's your name? I'm Mayuna."
"I'm Ruben. My profession is scientist."
Before you continue