First things first: sever the contamination.
I began wiping her body with a cloth soaked in warm water.
Using my fingertips rather than my wrist, so as not to tear scabs forcibly.
Not stroking, but gently lifting the stains like peeling away grime.
I soaked gauze in disinfectant and laid it over the wounds without rubbing.
As the solution seeped in, Piel’s lips quivered, and even in her hazy state, tiny tears beaded at her eyes.
‘You’re still hanging on.’ The point where you can’t even feel pain—that’s true death.
Knowing that, I took her faint groan not as an end, but a beginning.
After slowly clearing the bloody residue, it was time for pus and necrotic tissue.
Snip…
snip…
The narrow, thin blade tossed in as a bonus for cutting herbs.
This morning, the herbal shop owner had handed it over as a ‘service’ when I bought a bundle of toxic plants.
I’d never dreamed it’d slice through blood and pus like this.
Yet a tool’s purpose is forged where its edge meets.
As the blade glided along dead flesh, the layered membrane unraveled quietly like thread from a seam.
The line between living and dead tissue shows in color and smell.
Healthy flesh is red and springy; rotten pus twists murky between gray and yellow.
I peeled away the dead bits along that line, like plucking loose threads.
“Uh…
ugh…!” Piel swallowed a feeble scream deep in her throat.
“Sorry.
If anesthesia were an option, I’d use it…
but no such luxuries here.” The Argent Family spares no coin acquiring slaves, but healing them?
Not a dime.
Sure, deep in the mansion there might be fine silver salves, refined spirits, or healing powders—but for a bastard like me, only leftovers trickle down.
What I could count on now was singular.
The beastkin’s innate regenerative prowess, and the fact that this child had reason to live again.
Piel.
As expected, she was one of the protagonists in [Vengeful Goddesses].
In the original tale, she survived without even this treatment, emerging a decade later as a ‘hero.’ …But that was ink on paper.
Before me now lay only a bleeding creature.
And before I was a reader, I was a surgeon.
In Korea, I’d once commanded real respect.
So I know.
In this world, there’s no such thing as a ‘complete cure.’ Diseases merely slumber, and slumbering ills awaken anew.
In a lapse of vigilance, people die more quietly, more pointlessly, than you’d imagine.
I’ve witnessed countless such ends.
So in this moment—plucking maggots wriggling from Piel’s severed fox-ear stump with tweezers— I put no faith in the original plot or the future.
Only in the deeds of my fingertips.
Sticky pus dangled from the tweezers, dripping slowly.
“Hang in there.
Live…
and cry.” I muttered low.
“The dead claim neither revenge nor freedom.” ◇◇◇◆◇◇◇ Surgery complete.
Precisely 11 hours, 24 minutes, and 41 seconds.
This world’s clocks mark only minutes, but these fingers—carving rot sans anesthesia—tally seconds.
“…Phew.
Done.” A room bereft of assistants, sterilizing lamps, or sterile instruments.
Compared to a Korean OR, this bordered on a workshop.
Yet I’d concentrated longer than in any operation, for a patient with fiercer reason to pull through than any other.
On the bed, fox beastkin Piel breathed quietly.
“Mmmnya…
mmmnya…” “Sleeping soundly, innocent of the world’s cruelties.” The dying beast-stench from her arrival had faded; now only faint sweat and vital warmth remained.
Fever lingered.
But this was reactive pyrexia.
The body’s signal, self-heating blood to incinerate lingering germs.
The bandages encircling her weren’t the original rags.
Layered pressure wraps secured drainage ports, herbal regenerative powders evenly adsorbed to the stump.
“Well, couldn’t make it perfect, but…” I reached to stroke Piel’s head, then paused.
Partially ruptured abdominal viscera, lightless right eye, ear ripped clean away without trace.
Wounds so profound and tenacious lay beyond even my 21st-century Earth medicine.
From reading the original, I knew.
Piel survives, no question.
A decade on, she awakens as the world-altering hero.
But behind that glory, phantom ear-rings haunted her life; meals triggered vomiting; nightly, torture-pains revived, screams swallowed in sleep.
…No such future would I abide.
I was the reader who’d traced Piel’s path from afar—and a doctor too.
And as a doctor, I knew.
Somewhere in this world existed arts to restore vanished senses, ravaged organs.
That instant—a tap at the window.
Tap, tap.
“Chirp chirp!” “Right on cue.” Luck sometimes strides to the table unwashed blade in hand.