Screams rang out and blood spilled across the floor, only for the clinic employees assisting nearby to wipe it up at once and keep the operating room clean. Jodio's surgery was hardly gentle or refined. Gold Experience was among the best support techniques, yet its healing hurt the most, because it didn't repair anything. It replaced it.
He cut away damaged or diseased flesh, then attached a complete, brand-new body part. That was how Gold Experience healed: a blunt, straightforward solution. Unlike Cream Starter or Crazy Diamond, Gold Experience worked from outside the body, which made its approach a little more realistic. Naturally, the price was pain.
The people who came for treatment seemed more or less used to the screams, though. Besides, they never lasted long before turning into muffled whimpers. About fifteen minutes later, the operation was over. The old farmer emerged exhausted but excited, pressing his left hand against his new right one and feeling a rush of joy.
"Your new hand doesn't have any calluses. Take it easy with the farmwork for the next few days and let them build up gradually. Don't worry about the money. Pay what you can at the end of the year, and if you can't scrape anything together, we'll talk then." Jodio tossed his bloodstained white coat to an assistant to wash and explained everything to the grateful old farmer.
"Thank you, boss. I can't begin to express how grateful I am," the old farmer said respectfully.
"Head home and live well." Jodio waved him off.
"Next patient. What seems to be the trouble?" Jodio sat down and asked with a smile.
The Great Soul Arena was, in some ways, not all that different from WWE. Most matches there weren't brutal fights so much as performances. As the Soul Masters saw it, putting on a show for the crowd was enough. Ordinary people without Soul Power couldn't tell the difference anyway. All they needed was a flashy fight to satisfy their taste for blood.
Of course, some fighters went all out: Soul Masters hoping to make a name for themselves, newcomers earning a living in the ring, and rookies who hadn't signed contracts with the Great Soul Arena. They fought with everything they had and wouldn't stop until they truly couldn't continue. The ones chasing fame were especially fierce. They hit harder than anyone.
"Oh, man, there's blood everywhere. The cleaning girls are going to have a rough time with that."
"That's nasty. If someone smashes his teeth like that, I can't put them back."
"Look at that one. Damn, he lost a hand. If they call me in for him, I'm charging extra."
Jodio stood in a private box high above the arena with several other healing-type Soul Masters. They watched the fights below with relish, constantly cracking jokes and offering commentary. The healers had a good sense of humor, and it had taken them only a few days to warm to Jodio, who was even more of a joker.
Come to think of it, Jodio hadn't expected Teacher Shao Xin to work the occasional shift here too. But it made sense. Five high-level Soul Masters had to earn a little extra money somehow, right? When they ran into each other that day, both had looked guilty and pretended they'd never met.
Jodio worked at the Great Soul Arena for about an hour each night. He earned three silver coins an hour, plus one for every person he treated. That might not sound like much, but it added up to at least one gold coin a night—365 times what an ordinary person in Douluo earned. Going by the original story's economics, a typical family spent about one Gold Soul Coin in an entire year. Jodio could make that much in a night. He had practically stumbled into the middle class and was already losing touch with the masses.
Jodio's asking price was actually on the low side. The resident healers earned roughly a hundred Gold Soul Coins a month, with extra pay for overtime and holidays. He didn't care much, though. Money only mattered if he had enough to spend, and many of the things he needed couldn't be bought. For one thing, could money buy what he'd been searching for lately?
"Brother Jo, I'll leave the guy with the severed hand to you," a healing-type Soul Master said, rising to pat Jodio on the shoulder with a grin.
"Sure. Nothing difficult about that."
Jodio leaned against the glass window, watching the arena with a calm expression. Most healing-type Soul Masters couldn't reattach a severed hand, and even those who could would burn through enormous amounts of Soul Power. Otherwise, when Tang Hao later ended up like Retsu Kaioh—the Baki character who died missing a foot and later donated one of his hands to a friend—he wouldn't have been left without proper treatment. Tang San had to nurse him back to health little by little instead.
That was what made Jodio so valuable. Severed hands and feet didn't faze him; he handled them with almost freakish ease. It was precisely why the Great Soul Arena had signed a contract with him. They hadn't skimped on the perks, either. They had genuinely wanted him to stay, even trying to tempt him with a beautiful woman.
Unlike many people, Jodio had nothing against the Great Soul Arena. It was an arena, an entertainment venue. Whatever anger you felt about the world, you couldn't take it out on the place.
What, was the arena proof that society's morals had gone bad? Then why did Shrek Academy have one? Why were there so many spectators when Huo Yuhao went to the Beast Arena? Had they all come to watch critically? To critique the beasts fighting and the Soul Masters tearing into each other? Shrek Academy sounded less like Shrek Academy and more like an academy on the Sun-Moon Continent. The difference was that theirs had both the sun and moon, while Shrek only had the sun.
Who knew why Tang San had caused the Great Soul Arena to vanish entirely ten thousand years later? Society's productive capacity hadn't changed much, and neither had its structure, yet plenty of good things from ten thousand years earlier had failed to survive.
Jodio didn't know whether the Soul Masters of the great sects had thanked Lord Tang San, Douluo's little sun, after the Spirit War. But he figured unaffiliated Soul Masters below rank forty—especially those around ranks ten and twenty—must have been fed up. Damn it, where are my ten or hundred Gold Soul Coins every month? Spirit Hall was wrong to found an empire, sure, but couldn't you build a similar organization and keep handing out subsidies? One saying summed up Tang San perfectly: the moment he made it to the top, the first people he cut down were his own—the Soul Masters.
And even they weren't the worst off. That honor went to the children who no longer received subsidies at all. Never mind whether they could go to school or find work-study positions; they certainly weren't getting that one gold coin anymore. Brother Tang couldn't have forgotten how important that coin was, could he? It was what had let him live comfortably back then.
What Jodio really couldn't stomach was how quickly Tang San had distanced himself from the Soul Masters after becoming a god. So you spent the next hundred years getting divine positions for your buddies and did nothing to change society? Unbelievable. Typical crime-boss thinking. Jodio would have to take it as a warning and never follow his example.
"Oh?" Jodio spotted Ma Hongjun and Oscar standing in the ring, and his interest perked up. Come to think of it, he had hardly ever watched those two fight at the Great Soul Arena. Today might be interesting.
← To Be Continued
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