Protection Mechanism

Thud!

As Ryan's expression shifted from confusion to alarm, Kraft's forehead slammed heavily into the windowsill. The thin layer of snow that had accumulated overnight provided no cushioning, and a vivid red mark immediately appeared on his head.

His uncooperative limbs and temporarily malfunctioning sense of position gave him no chance to react. He merely slid down the wall and collapsed onto the floor.

Still caught in a confused, panicked daze, Ryan hurried over, helped Kraft up, and carried him to the bed in the awkward pose of a bridal carry.

When he reached out to brush aside Kraft's blond hair, Ryan realized that more serious than the superficial red mark was the abnormal heat radiating from his forehead.

As the cousin several years older, Ryan had looked after Kraft when he ran fevers as a child. Even though those memories had grown hazy, he could still tell that this temperature was outrageous—far beyond an ordinary fever, hot enough to scald his hand.

What was more, Kraft had not said a word. From banging his head to being moved onto the bed, he had not even let out a weak cry of pain. He was completely delirious with fever.

"Kraft, Kraft!" Ryan employed Old Wood's secret battlefield first-aid technique, vigorously slapping Kraft's cheeks in an attempt to bring him back to his senses.

When two slaps failed to wake him, Ryan decisively grabbed a large handful of snow from the windowsill, packed it tight, and pressed it to Kraft's forehead for simple yet effective physical cooling. He straightened Kraft's head and found that he was still staring blankly ahead, showing no intention whatsoever of reacting to Ryan's brutality.

"I'm going next door to ask if there's a doctor here. Lie still and don't move around!" After giving the token instruction, Ryan jumped up and ran for the door. A few steps later, he rushed back, shut the window that had been open all night, pulled half the blanket out from beneath Kraft and covered him with it, then finally charged out the door.

Who knew how long later, when Kraft had gradually pulled himself free from the chaos and barely regained control over his face, his panting cousin burst through the door dragging a middle-aged man who looked no different from any other villager. The breathless village chief followed behind them.

After Ryan brought along the village chief, the two had found no one at the only household in the village that knew a few folk remedies. Their search of the whole village came up empty, and they had finally found the man they were looking for near the stone pillar. Only then did Ryan learn that one of the people they had hired to dig the pit was the village's "doctor."

This part-time "doctor," along with the others, had accepted a fairly generous payment but failed to dig the thing out completely. Feeling somewhat guilty about it, and figuring that winter idleness was still idleness, they had seen that the sun was unusually nice today and arranged to take a few more swings at the pit while chatting to pass the time.

The three of them ran back to the doctor's house for his tools and herbs. By then, most of the morning had already passed.

Thus, when Ryan returned with the man, Kraft was already able to squeeze out an indistinct expression in his direction and mutter incoherent sounds. Combined with the stripe on his forehead and his red, swollen cheeks, he looked rather ridiculous. Lying in bed, he listened as his relieved cousin described his symptoms to the half-doctor.

Without a personal history, past medical history, family history, marriage and fertility history, or even a proper specialist examination, this fellow—who looked far more amateurish to Kraft than the doctor who had amputated Fire Hand's limb—made a diagnosis based solely on the family's account of the chief complaint and half a history of the present illness: "This illness of yours, I reckon it's our village's Local Specialty Disease!"

Through his somewhat difficult-to-understand dialect, Kraft and Ryan learned that this doctor did in fact have an inherited tradition behind him.

From ancestors too far back to verify down to the present generation, three generations of his family had farmed in this village while working as part-time doctors, supporting its basic medical care with techniques roughly in line with the average medical standard of the age.

Their main services were usually bloodletting and folk herbal treatments. Compared to city clinics, they won in orderly inheritance and lost in the lack of advanced techniques such as amputation and enemas.

This medical model, which existed only in historical records and rumors for an Otherworld Soul, could not exactly be called plain and unadorned. It could only be called highly efficient slaughter.

Objectively speaking, however, after the doctor predictably suggested bloodletting and local medicinal brew treatment, it did indeed help Kraft regain his ability to speak sooner.

With lips that were still somewhat numb, he forced out a few words under the doctor's astonished gaze. "No need. I'm much better."

After the successive shocks, Kraft's brain had returned to normal, even though he still found it difficult to move his torso and limbs. When Ryan applied ointment to the injury on his forehead, he could clearly feel that the fever had receded. At the very least, that ruled out the possibility of an infectious disease.

As for everything that had happened last night, Kraft remembered only scattered, unsystematic fragments such as snakes and scales. It could be summed up as having a nightmare by the window, in which a large snake crawled past him.

That was nothing unusual to anyone present. In an era when neurology had yet to ascend to the top of the medical hierarchy, many diseases with complex mechanisms were still explained through supernatural factors.

Whether it was language impairment and hemiplegia caused by a stroke, weakness caused by low potassium, or convulsions and delirious ramblings brought on by high fever, all of it could be explained as the interference of some evil thing.

A nightmare about snakes causing illness was most reasonably explained as an Evil Spirit's trick. Since Kraft was already recovering rapidly, in the view of the somewhat devout village chief, it must have been the Lord of Heaven's protection that allowed him to recover without medicine.

Ryan stood to one side, hesitating to speak. Leaving aside whether The Church's god would bless the relative of a collector of heretical trinkets, he also had no idea whether his slap on Kraft's shoulder that morning, which had led to the accidental collision, might have made things worse and turned a minor illness into a serious one.

Meanwhile, lying in bed, Kraft's professional sensitivity as an Otherworld Soul quickly caught a word from their conversation. He barely moved his hand, trying to push himself up. Ryan noticed and helped him sit up, piling the blanket into a small cushion behind him and feeding him a sip of water from the kettle so he could speak more easily.

"What was that 'Local Specialty Disease' you mentioned?" Kraft asked in a slightly hoarse voice. Ryan held the kettle over, hoping to get him to drink another sip, but Kraft tilted his head aside to avoid it. "What do you mean, your village's Local Specialty Disease? Are sudden high fevers like mine common here?"

He faintly sensed something, but only shattered fragments of last night's memories remained. More had been lost in depths he could not reach, and he needed clues now.

Perhaps because the symptoms were so distinctive, the amateur doctor displayed an excellent memory in this regard. "According to my father—though he heard it from my grandfather, and anything earlier than that I don't know—this strange illness has been around here for a long time. It's usually young people. Every eight or nine years, there's one case. They all suddenly get fevers in their heads, hot like they've been roasted in a fire, and ramble about snakes or something. In the end, they all..." He suddenly stopped, studying Ryan and Kraft's expressions. Deciding they would not take it out on him in their current state, he continued, "In the end, none of them lived more than two days. The ones my father encountered were the same."

Seeing that Ryan and Kraft did not quite believe him, the doctor pulled out his bloodletting set. "Before my grandfather came here, he was a proper doctor elsewhere. He left this set behind. He said he'd never seen an illness like this anywhere else. Even people who babble during high fevers wouldn't all be talking about snakes, would they?" His voice lowered again. "Of course, that's what my father said too. He guessed there was a snake Evil Spirit here. After it ate a fresh, strong soul, it would go away, then come out again when it got hungry."

Kraft habitually filtered the man's words himself: acute onset, common among young adults, fever and delirium as the main symptoms, and obvious geographic clustering. The mortality rate was extremely high, though it could not be ruled out that local medical measures had backfired.

And then there were the "snakes." That inexplicable element still lingered in his mind, impossible to shake. His current state felt like waking from a dream, dragged back into reality from a distant dream. Other than the most deeply impressed images, he knew nothing else. The only difference was a hazy feeling that would not disperse, making him feel that something had been utterly changed somewhere beyond his awareness.

The hazy feeling was like a rafting trip he had once taken. From his kayak, he had looked down at murky water overrun with algae when a dark shadow flashed past the corner of his eye beneath the surface. Looking closely, there had been nothing. Amid self-doubt, perhaps it had been an illusion caused by rippling water, or mottled shadows cast by jagged rocks and ancient trees overhead. He could not imagine, and dared not imagine, what living thing might be moving in that bottomless abyss.

If he had discovered some horrifying truth in the darkness, then it now lay beneath the calm surface of his reason, temporarily hidden by the human body's self-protection mechanism. Instinct told him not to reach down and test the depths.

Kraft avoided the parts he disliked and chose the questions he was most used to asking. He asked whether those people had been related by blood, whether they had suffered any other illnesses before falling sick, whether they had been bitten by snakes or insects, and whether they had experienced fever, coughing, or similar symptoms as children.

Taking this world's peculiarities into account, he focused on the village's dietary habits and the stream that served as its main water source. Was there any problem upstream? Ryan watched his cousin reveal an unknown meticulous side, then fed him several more sips of water and told him to speak more slowly.

The doctor and village chief answered this guest who had raised the village's GDP with great patience. The main components of their answers were "don't know," "not sure," and "no."

The elderly village chief did recall several names and sighed that they had all been fine young men, sharp ones too. That Evil Spirit really knew how to pick its victims.

"All right, I'm done asking. Thank you." Unsurprisingly, this information might not even have been answerable by the patients' families, much less by these two, who had never considered such things before. "By the way, since this strange illness only exists here, have you never considered moving somewhere else?"

The moment the words left his mouth, Kraft knew he had said something stupid. An illness that occurred only once every several years was probably not even a fraction as significant as some common causes of death here. Besides, the village's location was actually quite good. It sat just beyond the tax jurisdiction of any lord, while still not too far from Wenden Port, where people bought and sold goods. Traveling merchants even passed through here.

Of course, that also meant there was not enough protection. But for a fairly united village, driving off a few wild beasts was not too difficult, and avoiding taxes allowed them to support a larger population. Given time, it might well develop into a small town.

Compared to that, the Local Specialty Disease was probably nothing more than a minor annoyance, however frightening it looked.

Realizing he had said something foolish, Kraft ended the topic and sent off the village chief and doctor on the excuse that the two cousins had private matters to discuss. As they left, their faces clearly showed thoughts like, "He really is some rich young master—maybe even a noble."

As for the illness, considering that he himself was practically half a transmigrator, it was understandable that some other supernatural event might occur. Naturally, he could explain it that way. Oh, no. Here, it should be called an Anomalous Phenomenon.

But from a rigorous perspective, it was more reasonable to explain this as a special acute Central Hub nervous system disorder. Perhaps it had been caused by an opportunistic pathogen or parasitic infection. Since each person's immune system differed, it only manifested under certain conditions and had a relatively low incidence rate.

Everyone mentioning snakes while delirious might be due to generations of village rumors. They subconsciously believed there was a connection, so naturally they felt that a snake Evil Spirit had latched onto them.

As for himself, he had just happened to look at patterns resembling snakes crawling all over the ground. What one thought of by day, one dreamed of by night? As for the course of the disease... forgive my limited knowledge, but there were countless bizarre cases in the world. One more would hardly matter.

Kraft tried moving his arms again. This time, without his cousin's help, he shifted himself into a more comfortable position.

"All right, sorry for scaring you. It looked serious earlier, but I feel like I'm getting better. Could you put that bloodletting set away?" He looked at Ryan by the bed and stretched his legs forcefully to show that he was fine. Vigorous energy was returning to this young body, and control over his limbs had mostly recovered. Now he was beginning to feel hungry.

Kraft refused Ryan's support, climbed out of bed by himself, and walked with an uneven gait over to the luggage. He pulled out a strip of dried meat, snapped it in half, and handed one piece to Ryan.

For someone who had been half-dead moments ago, his condition was unbelievably good. Strong chewing muscles gave his teeth the force to tear through the richly seasoned dried meat. "See? I'm fine."

"I'm starting to wonder if you were faking it earlier." Ryan cautiously accepted the dried meat, still shaken. "How about we rest here for a few days before setting off?"

"No. I think we can leave tomorrow morning. And that damned pillar—have them fill the pit back in. Pack the dirt down tight. I don't want to come back to this cursed place." He had not gotten a souvenir, lost several silver coins, and nearly lost one of their own. It had been a spectacularly awful job.

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure. We leave tomorrow. You don't want to ride through muddy ground after the snow melts, either. And remind me to have them pack that pit down properly." Kraft was somewhat eager to put all of this behind him. He could feel both body and mind resisting any deeper examination of the matter from certain angles. Besides, he had wanted to leave for a long time already.