Dess Town

It was already deep winter, and Dess Town's weather had been exceptionally cold this year. Heavy snow like goose feathers had fallen nonstop for three days and three nights.

Ace ate breakfast while warming the chill from his body beside the warm fireplace at Hicks Clinic. More than two months ago, Ace had explained the estate's development plan for the next two years in detail to his mother, Marina. Kelson was responsible for carrying it out, while Romon and Marina supervised.

He had left a letter for his mother, telling her to give it to his father Romon when spring came. In the letter, he asked Romon to move the printing workshop to the estate after selling all the wine and flour produced there in spring, and to trouble Romon and Marina with looking after the estate's development over the next two years.

Afterward, he traveled south by carriage and arrived at Dess Town, southeast of the city-state. Dess Town bordered the sea to the east and lay in the central region of the city-state. Low-level Demonic Beasts could occasionally be seen here, and with its large population, it was the most populous region aside from Medimoth City.

Hicks was a famous doctor here, and Ace still remembered the scene of their first meeting.

"You're a City-State Scholar? This badge looks real enough, but that isn't important. You can't be an assistant at my clinic. You can't!" Hicks had refused with a stern expression.

"Doctor Hicks..." Ace had wanted to say something, only to be interrupted at once.

"You don't have a recommendation from any renowned doctor. Traveling around and practicing medicine is out of the question. Even if you're a scholar, you can only start as an apprentice."

Ace had looked at Hicks with a broad smile and said no more. He activated the Spellbook hidden beneath his black hooded robe: a lesser spell card, Lesser Charm Beast.

The magic power in the air pulsed, condensing into an invisible force that pounced on Hicks and formed a flickering rune structure around his neck.

"But you're an old friend of mine, so of course there's no problem. Welcome to my clinic, and welcome as my assistant."

And just like that, relying on Lesser Charm Beast, Ace easily gained Hicks's trust and became his assistant. So long as he cast Beguile Creatures on Hicks once every three days, he could freely do whatever he wanted.

Through Hicks, he had collected nearly two hundred potion formulas and three hundred common medicinal materials. After testing them, he found that 121 were effective remedies for their intended conditions, and recorded them in the Medicinal Materials and Prescriptions he was writing.

He had also recorded and summarized common and unusual illnesses, compiling them all in Comprehensive Explanation of Internal and Surgical Diseases. These two books would become his primary guides for practicing medicine in the future.

Hicks's treatment methods still followed Doctor Tailos's approach from the city-state. Many patients could not be cured and died in despair. By dissecting the corpses of dead patients, Ace had quickly figured out the structure of the human body in this world. It was basically similar to his previous life, and he wrote it into a book called Human Body Structure.

Ace's arrival gradually changed this place. Over two months, the treatment methods at Hicks Clinic underwent a qualitative transformation. They no longer relied on amputation, bloodletting, or enemas, but instead on observation, listening, questioning, palpation, and prescribing medicine according to the symptoms. Patients with complicated conditions were kept under observation.

For patients who truly needed part of their body tissue removed, Ace tried making a simple set of surgical instruments: copper scalpels, forceps, surgical scissors, and surgical thread in different sizes. All instruments had to be sterilized at high temperature, then fumigated with Fumigating Insect Grass, an otherworldly insect-repelling herb, before surgery was performed in a sealed room disinfected with alcohol.

Ace established the basic surgical procedure: disinfection, anesthesia, surgery, suturing, and hemostasis.

After dozens of failures, he was already able to perform simple operations. Removing an appendix or stitching an Achilles tendon was no longer a problem. He divided surgery into specific branches, and all his experience was recorded in Comprehensive Explanation of Internal and Surgical Diseases.

Although there was no longer any need for bloodletting, Ace continued the practice in order to collect information on the blood of this world and summarize its blood-type patterns. Without a microscope, however, progress was slow.

"Doctor, Doctor! My son went out to play in the snow, fell down, and now he can't walk. Please, come take a look!" A father knocked anxiously on the clinic door.

Ace shoveled down two bites of food and opened the door. Snow rushed in his face. A man around thirty hurried into the clinic with a seven- or eight-year-old boy on his back, and Ace shut the door behind them.

"Don't worry. Put the child on the bench, and I'll examine him."

"Sir, my child's condition is serious. Could you have Doctor Hicks take a look?" The man pulled out a handful of Silver Talers from his pocket and secretly tried to press them into Ace's hand.

"I'll examine him first. When Doctor Hicks comes later, he'll be able to understand the condition faster." Ace gently accepted the Silver Talers and weighed them in his hand. There were around five or six—quite a fair amount.

"I'm Hicks. This is my assistant, Ace. Don't let his youth fool you. Over the past month or so, most patients with broken legs have been treated by him. I'll take a look with him in a moment, so don't worry." Hicks came out from the back room, grabbed the man, and pulled him away. It looked like he was taking him to pay the consultation fee.

Ace examined the injury and asked the boy about the details of how he had fallen. He basically determined that it was an Achilles tendon tear.

"Prepare for surgery!" The apprentices immediately sprang up, placed the boy on a stretcher, and carried him into the inner room.

By then, Hicks had also calmed the boy's father. "I'll operate on your child right away. Wait quietly here."

The man had heard from others that Hicks had recently invented a treatment method called surgery. Many people with broken legs or cut hands had basically regained movement in their limbs after treatment. Though they were far from what they had once been, it was still better than being crippled for life.

Several people entered the operating room, where the fragrance of Fumigating Insect Grass was thick. The boy was somewhat uneasy. He only heard someone say, "Give him the medicine," before his nose was pinched and he was forced to swallow several mouthfuls of bitter, numbing potion. Before long, he lost consciousness.

Ace looked at the anesthetized boy, washed his hands with wood ash, then wiped them with a towel soaked in strong liquor. Conditions were limited here. Once he returned to the estate, he could use alcohol distilled again from high-proof liquor for disinfection.

The others had all been charmed by Ace and were basically obedient to his every word. The surgery was soon completed. Ace somewhat clumsily finished stitching the boy's left leg, washed his hands, and left the operating room with Hicks.

"Pay the hospitalization fee first. Your child has just undergone surgery, so he needs to stay here for monitoring, stitch removal, and prevention of postoperative infection. You don't need to understand all that. Come pick him up in three days."

Hicks rather roughly drove the man away. The man wanted to say something, but he did not dare offend the doctor. He could only pay the money and turn to leave.

Ace stretched lazily. Seeing all this, he had no intention of changing anything. Though he had charmed Hicks, Hicks still decided for himself how to charge patients. Ace merely needed a stable place to collect medicinal materials and prescriptions, study types of diseases, and practice surgery.

Now, the local medicinal samples and formulas had basically all been collected, the types of diseases had been recorded, and his surgical skill had taken shape. It was time to leave. Ace planned to travel throughout the Salia Peninsula over the next two years, practicing medicine while hunting Demonic Beasts and collecting more runes. Now that his medical skills had begun to take form, he had no time to keep delaying.

Ace took a bag of Gold Taler from Hicks as payment for his months of medical practice.

Once Hicks broke free of the charmed state, he might wonder why he had allowed Ace to become his assistant and even given him a bag of Gold Taler as a parting gift. But the New Medicine ideas and methods Ace had left him were enough to serve him for a lifetime, so Ace felt he had more than earned that bag of Gold Taler.

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