Wu Zhou, deputy director of the emergency department, woke from unconsciousness to the sound of someone pounding on him.
"Little Grete, Little Grete..."
The person kept calling as he pounded. Wu Zhou managed to crack his eyes open, but everything before him was pitch-black. The guy calling him still wouldn't stop. When pounding didn't work, he grabbed Wu Zhou by the shoulders and shook him back and forth.
"Little Grete, wake up! How are you feeling?"
Wu Zhou's head rocked with the shaking, and he realized he was lying face-down, his face apparently buried in the dirt. He drew a breath, and the smell of blood, earth, and heaven knew what else came rushing into his nose and mouth.
"Cough, cough, cough..."
He instinctively arched his back and coughed desperately. As he coughed, he roared inwardly:
Who had left him like this? Why had they let him lie face-down? Didn't they know unconscious people shouldn't be put in that position? If he aspirated vomit, he could suffocate to death!
He'd make them practice emergency first aid ten times as punishment!
No, twenty times!
His occupational instincts kicked in, and Wu Zhou silently gave the unreliable nurses, interns, and residents a thorough dressing-down. Once he'd finished, he raised his tear-filled eyes and looked around—and froze in shock.
Where was the operating light?
Where was the operating table?
Where was the gurney?
Where were the doctors and nurses in white coats, rushing around without stopping?
Where was the hospital?!
The surgical building was gone, and so was the laminar-flow operating room. In their place stood a low, dilapidated shack with stone walls and a thatched roof. Dirt had been haphazardly stuffed into the gaps between the stones. Beside the wall was a knee-high circular stone enclosure, empty except for a few tufts of dead grass poking out of the bare dirt...
What the hell was this place?
Wasn't he in the emergency department, resuscitating a patient?!
Wu Zhou's head was ringing. His body went limp, and he nearly collapsed again. All he remembered was working nonstop from nine in the morning until four in the morning. He'd just finished a major emergency operation: removed the spleen, stitched the liver, repaired the bowel. There'd been no active bleeding when they were done, so he'd told his assistant to close. Then everything had gone black...
"Little Grete, are you feeling any better?"
Wu Zhou stiffly turned his head, and his pupils slowly focused. The person shaking him was a burly redhead with a prominent nose and deep-set eyes, his features typically Western. He wore a shabby hemp vest, his muscular arms bare, and held a bow in one hand.
Calling it a vest was generous. It was more like a rectangular piece of cloth folded in half and sewn together, with two holes left for the arms and another cut out for the head. The neckline and armholes were frayed, with loose threads everywhere and no finished seams. It was so filthy that its original color was impossible to make out.
...The only thing he could tell was that the hemp was incredibly thin. Even the medical gauze in an operating room was better quality.
Wu Zhou looked down at himself.
The same kind of hemp.
The same kind of vest.
And the same kind of... Uh, his shoes seemed to show one more toe than the other guy's.
For a moment, everything went black again. He really wanted to pass out on the spot.
Why had he been dumped here? He'd saved the injured patient he'd been treating! At least, up until he passed out, the patient's vitals had been stable, and the operation had gone well...
Send me back!
I want to join the emergency resuscitation!
Unfortunately, no deity heard his prayers. An emergency really did arrive, though—from a dozen or so paces away, a string of shrill cries rang out:
"Help!"
"Captain! Captain!"
"Oh no—the guts are spilling out!"
Wu Zhou instantly forgot all his complaints. Just as he did every time he heard someone call for help, he ran toward the cries without a second thought.
"Coming!"
But someone else got there faster—or rather, they were closer. Wu Zhou was panting and only halfway there when he saw someone kneeling beside the injured man, head bowed and muttering something he couldn't make out.
Then a beam of white light shot from the person's clasped hands and fell straight onto the injured man.
Under the white light, the bloody wound visibly began to heal.
Wu Zhou slammed on the brakes!
What had he just seen?
An instructional time-lapse showing how wounds heal?
An essay on the effects of high-energy particle beams on wound healing?
What the hell was this, a wound starting to heal as soon as a beam of white light hit it...
Right, this was...
Healing magic!
Two sets of memories surfaced at once. One belonged to Wu Zhou, drawn from the countless novels, games, and animated shows he'd encountered. The other belonged to the original owner of this body. Somehow, both sets of memories reached the same conclusion:
Healing magic called upon the power of a god to heal. Even the lowest-level healing spell could instantly close minor wounds, while the highest level could even bring the dead back to life...
So the person casting the healing spell was a priest?
Wu Zhou took a quick glance. This kneeling, praying priest was dressed better than anyone else there:
A light-brown linen robe, its front hanging down to the ground and its back covering his calves. The collar and cuffs were neatly hemmed, and a fine dark-brown line traced the shape of a shield in the center of the chest.
Hmm...
Spellcasters really did seem to belong to a higher class...
Wu Zhou silently snarked to himself, then turned his attention to the injured man. He was a burly fellow in his thirties or forties, with brown hair, brown eyes, and a wild, tangled beard. His gear was better than the others', at least—he had a leather cuirass—but even that hadn't protected him. A huge gash had torn through the cuirass over his abdomen, and a mass of bloody intestines had spilled out.
Compared to that, the many bleeding wounds on his arms and legs were hardly serious.
The injured man was leaning against a tree stump, his eyes half-closed and his consciousness nearly gone. A young man who looked somewhat like him knelt at his side, trembling as he gazed hopefully at the wound—
The gaping wound, with its ragged, torn edges, twitched, contracted, and closed. Its length shortened, and the bleeding gradually slowed...
Wu Zhou's eyes lit up. Healing magic in this world was pretty amazing—it worked instantly! If only he'd had healing magic to help during surgery...
Before he could finish the thought, the white light... vanished.
Only a small part of the abdominal wound had healed. The intestines were still hanging out, and the wound showed no further sign of healing.
Wu Zhou: "..."
The priest: "..."
The young man kneeling beside the injured man went pale. He held the fallen intestines in both hands and stared at the priest pleadingly for a moment. The priest tried and tried, chanting again and again, but not a speck of white light appeared in his hands. At last, the young man couldn't hold back his shout.
"Keep going! Please, cast one more spell! The captain's badly hurt!"
"I... I can't!" The priest was young too, only fifteen or sixteen. His face was flushed, and he was so anxious he was on the verge of tears. When the young man shouted at him, even his freckles seemed to swell.
"I'm only an apprentice! I can't save him..."
The young man's eyes quickly dimmed. Despairingly, he lowered his head and, hands trembling, began to push the injured man's intestines back inside—
"Don't move!"
Wu Zhou shouted. Only after the words left his mouth did he realize something was wrong. He hadn't spoken Chinese, English, or any other language he'd ever learned, yet he somehow knew how to speak it. The people who'd been shouting earlier had used a language he'd never heard before, too, and he'd understood them!
What was happening?
Wu Zhou was bewildered. But one look at the injured man pushed all his questions to the back of his mind. Someone was hurt; that was the emergency doctor's call to arms. Even if the sky fell, the earth split open, the sun exploded, or everyone was transported to another world, he'd deal with it after he'd finished the resuscitation and gotten the patient out of danger!
He shouted again. "Don't put them back in! Do you have a clean bowl?—No? Then hold them in your hands! Don't move!"
Before you continue