Frodo had just finished reading the charcoal warnings on the birch bark brought by Orok’s fastest sled-runner.
Just as he was calculating the incubation period of the disease, Silas stormed into the central cavern.
"Frodo, the column of refugees from the Eastern Gorge just arrived at the lower valley!"
"So fast?" Frodo thought, briefly pleased.
It seemed that Jax’s operational efficiency in the underworld was incredibly high; his time surviving as a scavenger had not been wasted.
However, when Frodo looked up and saw his Head Scout’s sweating face and furrowed brow, he knew a catastrophe had marched right up to their doorstep.
"What happened?" Frodo demanded, dropping the bark.
"The refugees have brought a rotting sickness with them," Silas reported. "At first, it was only a few coughing children. But by the time they reached the valley, the black blisters had spread to dozens of people. Even one of Tor’s heavy spearmen has fallen sick!"
An illness that causes black blisters, rots the gums, and spreads through shared furs?
In the closed environment of a mountain cave, an infectious pathogen would result in a one-hundred-percent mortality rate.
It sounded similar to a hemorrhagic fever mixed with advanced scurvy.
However, viruses usually didn’t turn the blood into a tar-like black substance...
Frodo wrinkled his brow, his mind racing through thousands of years of medical history.
His first thought was to use extreme heat to burn the sickness out, but he had not fully grasped the biological scope of this pathogen yet.
Making his healers handle an infectious disease they had never encountered before would be a suicidal gamble.
If they failed to cure it, Vash and Elara would be the first to catch it.
According to Silas’s description, the infected refugees couldn’t hold out for another night in the snow.
Thinking up to here, Frodo ordered Silas, "Take the uninfected hunters and establish a hard blockade at the base of the mountain. Forbid anyone from taking a single step toward the cave entrance. Additionally, tell Bael to gather every spare mammoth hide we have. I am on my way down."
"Yes!" Silas shouted, turning on his heel.
"Is this going to kill us all?" Orin asked, stepping out of the shadows, his eyes filled with fear.
"That is still unclear. Everything depends on our ability to isolate the rot," Frodo said grimly. "Gather the Logistics team. There will be no rest today."
...
As soon as he reached the lower valley, Frodo directed Bael and the hunters to construct three sealed tents out of mammoth hides.
Next to the tents, they built roaring fires to heat river stones until they glowed red-hot.
Inside the tents, Frodo ordered his healers, Vash and Elara, to wear leather masks packed with crushed, aromatic sage and pine needles, which would act as primitive particulate filters.
During this setup, the one hundred and fifty refugees huddled in the snow.
That they didn’t panic and scatter wasn’t due to their strong willpower, but because they believed the rumors that the boy-leader of the mountain possessed the magic to save them.
As soon as the ’Sweat Lodges’ were prepared, the spearman who had shown the black blisters but could still walk was selected to enter first.
Following Frodo’s instructions, the soldier entered the tent.
Vash used wooden tongs to drop the glowing, red-hot stones into a basin of water, filling the enclosed space with steam.
At the same time, Vash forced the soldier to drink a clay bowl of boiling pine-needle tea mixed with crushed wormwood... a lethal combination of Vitamin C and anti-parasitic herbs.
Frodo stood by the tent flap, observing the soldier’s reaction through a small slit in the hide.
The heat forced the soldier’s body into a fever, accelerating his immune system, while the bitter herbs attacked his stomach.
After nearly an hour of sweating, the soldier leaned against the tent pole, gasping for air.
Frodo pulled his mask up and asked, "How do you feel now?"
"Frodo?" When the spearman heard the boy-leader’s voice, he weakly raised his hand to thump his chest, then froze, his eyes widening. "By the ice... I feel the fire leaving my blood. Oh, spirits! Frodo, I can breathe again!"
Frodo observed that the black blisters on the soldier’s neck had stopped expanding; they were already drying out in the intense heat...
This definitively wasn’t a viral plague. If it were a complex viral hemorrhagic fever, the blisters would have taken weeks to fade, and a simple sweat lodge wouldn’t have cured him.
The treatment was effective against this unknown infection, which made Frodo feel a wave of relief.
"Once your skin stops weeping, go and call the next group of refugees," Frodo commanded. "Let the next ten people enter. Whether they are coughing or not, they all have to drink the bitter root and sweat in the tents."
"Yes, Frodo!" the soldier shouted, pausing for a moment before bowing his head toward the elderly healer. "Thank you, mountain spirits. Thank you."
"It wasn’t the spirits. This time, the one who saved your life was Vash, and the herbs she gathered," Frodo corrected him with a slight smile. "Only if the sickness had rotted your limbs off would you need the spirits to save you."
"Yes... of course," the spearman touched his forehead in reverence. "Thank you, Elder Vash."
By the time the soldier left the tent, Vash glanced at Frodo, her wrinkled face flushed from the steam. "I didn’t mind that he thought it was the spirits. I do not need the praise of a spearman."
*Well, if that is true, why did you suddenly puff out your chest so proudly?* Frodo mused, watching the elderly woman adjust her furs. He couldn’t stop himself from offering an approving nod.
Since this wasn’t a viral plague, what exactly was the cause of this disease?
The moment Frodo stepped away from the tent, Orin appeared at his side, looking incredibly disturbed. "Frodo, I noticed something strange when they coughed onto the snow... the black blood... it moves."
"What?" Frodo stopped, shocked.
"In the snow, it is not just blood," Orin explained, shivering. "It looks like tiny, black hairs twitching in the red."
This came as a terrifying surprise... Frodo was now certain of one thing: this disease was not a curse, nor was it a virus. It was a macro-parasite.
"No, you might touch the rot!" Orin interrupted nervously.
"Rest assured," Frodo smiled confidently. "The boiling water and the lye-ash destroy the contagion on contact."
Frodo took a drop of black blood from a comatose patient and smeared it thinly across a flat sliver of quartz.
Then, he took a piece of bone and bored a round hole through the center.
Using a twig, he carefully placed a single drop of clear water into the hole.
Due to surface tension, the water remained suspended in the bone, forming a convex liquid lens.
Holding the water-lens close to his eye and bringing the quartz slide up to the firelight, Frodo adjusted the distance until the focal point cleared.
He thought that if the pathogen was the size of a bacteria, his primitive water-lens wouldn’t be strong enough to see it.
But when the image came into focus, Frodo could hardly believe his eyes...
Within the magnified line of sight, he saw hundreds of worm-like parasites wriggling through the blood.
From time to time, they sprayed out a tar-like mucus that thickened the blood around them.
They were massive compared to single-celled organisms... likely a terrifying species of nematode bred in the rotting filth of Kael’s slave pits.
Fortunately, the wormwood tea and the extreme heat of the sweat lodges acted as a lethal poison against the parasites, boiling them alive inside the patients’ bodies.
When all of Tor’s spearmen had been cleared, Frodo ordered the rest of the starving refugees to be processed through the three sweat lodges.
The treatment continued from noon until deep into the night.
When the nearly three hundred people from the eastern gorge had finally stopped coughing and their fevers broke, the crowd burst into tears of joy.
Hundreds of refugees dropped to their knees in the snow, pressing their foreheads to the ice, shouting praises to the "Mountain Lord".
"You don’t seem to be smiling?" Silas noted, walking up beside Frodo as they watched the chanting crowd.
"The ones who cured the disease were Vash and Elara, who boiled the water and risked the rot," Frodo shook his head. "They should be the ones the refugees are cheering for, not me."
Having said that, Frodo knew it wouldn’t be wise to try and explain the principles of parasitology and microbiology to a crowd of traumatized survivors.
So he just sighed, hoping that one day, science and logic would stand on the stage instead of primitive worship.
It seemed Silas could understand the burden in Frodo’s heart.
He generously clapped his hand on the boy’s shoulder and said, "It is unlikely they care about how it works right now. You gave them their lives back." Silas paused for a moment, a grin breaking through his beard. "Well, there is a piece of good news that I forgot to tell you in the chaos."
"What is it?"
"There is someone incredibly useful hidden among these sick refugees," Silas revealed with a gleam in his eye.