Harvest Season (2)
Amid the screams, the grapevines slithered across the ground at a terrifying speed. Snakes and insects hiding among the vines scattered in panic, and the people were no different.
“Oh my god!” The woman who had been the first to shout upon realizing the village chief had collapsed let out a shriek at the sight of the vines moving as if they had a will of their own and fell flat on her backside.
Slither, tighten.
“W-what is this?! G-get it off! Get it off!”
“Leave it! I did that!” Ben’s father, who had been supporting the fallen village chief, tried to tear away the grapevine coiled around the patient’s calf, but stopped at Patrick’s breathless words as he came running.
“You did, sir?”
“It’s to keep the poison from spreading further.”
“Ugh… urgh…!”
Patrick, still panting, quickly checked the village chief’s condition. He seems conscious, and while he’s breathing heavily, his breathing itself is stable. Fortunately, the venom didn’t seem lethal enough to kill instantly.
“Village Chief! Village Chief! Can you hear me? Do you know the antidote for this snake?”
“Ugh… by the bed… in the drawer…”
The village chief had always been earnest about stocking emergency medicines, insisting that the villagers couldn’t afford to travel to the mainland every time someone fell ill. Patrick had been regularly supplying various common remedies since he first started making them, and each time the village chief would say:
— We can’t stock every medicine in every household, can we? So we keep them all at my place. If anything happens, people can just come straight to my house. That’s what a village chief is for, after all.
True to his words as the village’s respected elder, he had even prepared the antidote for the island’s only venomous snake.
“I-I’ll go get it right away, sir!”
“No! The medicines are all mixed together!”
“What?”
A quick-footed young villager had volunteered to fetch it, but Ben’s father, who was close to the village chief and often visited his house, wore a troubled expression.
“All the medicines are jumbled together! From the oldest ones to the most recent ones the teacher made—they’re all mixed up! And many of them don’t even have proper labels!”
“Oh no!”
“Village Chief, Village Chief! What does the antidote look like? Is there a label? Please, open your eyes!”
“Ughhh…”
Ben’s father desperately asked, but the village chief’s consciousness was already fading and he gave no reply.
“I’ll go!”
There was no time to waste. Patrick began running toward the village. If the medicines were mixed up, it would be best for the person who knew them best to go himself.
“Huff, huff! Haaah!”
His heart felt like it was about to burst. I should’ve done my morning exercises more diligently! Patrick forced his body to keep moving, even biting the inside of his cheek. Never before had his frail physique felt like such a burden.
Crash—!
Suppressing the urge to vomit, he flung open the door to the village chief’s house and headed straight for the bedroom. No one was home, but this wasn’t the time to worry about that.
“Is it here? Yeah, it is.”
When he opened the cabinet beside the bed, it was packed full of medicines.
“……Damn it.”
There were far more medicines than he had expected. Some looked like they had been collected for years; there were even bottles whose manufacturing dates were impossible to determine.
The most accessible shelf held the headache medicine, antidiarrheal, and fever reducers he had made. He kept the frequently used ones in easy reach.
Which meant…
“Of course!”
He pulled over a chair and checked the top shelf, where dust-covered, old bottles were crammed together. These were clearly medicines that were rarely touched. Many of the labels had faded so much they were nearly illegible.
Even though the Shadow Viper is the only venomous snake on this island, it rarely appears. So the antidote was probably just stocked and never used.
Judging by how the people around him had reacted when the village chief collapsed, that was likely the case.
“……Found it!”
Trusting his hunch, he rummaged through the bottles and found one labeled in elegant handwriting: “Venomous Snake—Shadow Viper.” The word “Viper” was half-worn away. Worried it might have gone bad from age, he shook the glass bottle, but aside from a bit of sediment, it looked fine.
The seal is still intact. Alright, let’s go!
Just as Patrick was about to close the cabinet and run back to the vineyard—
“……What’s this?”
Something among the dusty bottles caught his eye. But there was no time to satisfy his curiosity when the village chief’s life was at stake.
“Later.”
Without realizing it, he slipped one medicine bottle into his pocket and dashed back toward the vineyard.
“Huff, haah!”
Patrick’s breathing grew even rougher. It couldn’t be helped. The village was located near the coast, while the vineyard—where good drainage was essential—sat on higher ground. That meant he had to climb uphill on the way back.
“XX!”
A curse slipped out before he could stop it. Someone’s dying and I have to deal with the worst possible situation just because of my stamina? Is there even a villain this pathetic?
— Give me the medicine. Quickly!
Just then, Ben’s spirit flew over like a drone.
“H-here……!”
— I’ll deliver it properly.
“I’m saved……!”
Seeing the spirit shoot off toward the vineyard, Patrick finally allowed his sweat-soaked body to collapse onto the ground.
“Still… I have to go.”
After catching his breath while lying on the dirt path, Patrick forced himself upright again. He needed to check whether the antidote was working properly, and if additional measures were required, that was his responsibility too.
Gripping his uncooperative legs, he somehow made it back to the vineyard.
“S-sir!”
“How is it? The village chief?”
“Ugh… he seems… to be okay……”
When Patrick used the last of his strength to approach and check, color was slowly returning to the village chief’s previously pale face, likely because the antidote was taking effect. His consciousness also seemed to be gradually returning, albeit slowly. The vines that had been tightly bound to slow the spread of the poison were finally loosened.
— Do you need clean water?
With the spirit’s help tending to the patient, Patrick felt like a traveling healer.
“I brought some painkillers just in case. Here, take these. Let me see the wound too. We need to disinfect it at least. If it gets infected, it’ll be serious……”
He finished all the treatment he could manage with the emergency medicines he had brought along with the antidote.
“Now it would be best to find a proper healer.”
“Th-thank you…… urgh!”
“I’ll carry him!”
A sturdy young villager stepped forward to carry the village chief on his back. Just then, the village chief’s family members, who had only now heard the news, came running.
“Since he took the antidote in time, there’s no need to worry too much.”
“Oh, sir! Thank you, thank you so much!”
Patrick felt the praise was a bit excessive for simply fetching the antidote.
“Is the boat ready?”
“There’s a boat that didn’t go out fishing today, so we can use that. Please come with us, sir! There’s a skilled healer in Eltron. If you explain what treatment was given……”
The village chief’s wife spoke in a flustered rush, then stopped mid-sentence with an awkward expression when she saw Patrick scratching his head uncomfortably.
“I’d like to, but I can’t leave this island. Haha……”
“I-I’m sorry, sir! I didn’t mean it that way……”
“Sister-in-law! Come quickly, the boat’s ready!”
“Please go on ahead. Getting the village chief to a healer quickly is the urgent matter, isn’t it?”
Patrick casually urged everyone toward the boat as if nothing were wrong. The hesitant villagers seemed to decide that saving the village chief came first and headed back toward the village where the boat was docked.
“Sir……”
“You should all head home for today too.”
“Yes, I’ll come tomorrow!”
“Alright.”
In an instant, the surroundings grew quiet. Step, step. All that remained on the dirt path were Patrick and his shadow. Since arriving on the island, he had never once felt lonely or found his exile suffocating, but today his mood was strangely off.
***
After returning home, Patrick showered in cold water, applied the rose water he had been saving, changed into his favorite silk pajamas that always felt satisfying against his skin, used magic to slightly lower the room temperature, and burrowed into his bed—his number one treasure.
“Sniff.”
It was clearly a situation where satisfaction should be coursing through his entire body, yet for some reason his nose was running.
“……Tsk.”
It was a night where sleep wouldn’t come easily even if he tried. Patrick sat up again and finally remembered the old medicine bottle he had brought from the village chief’s house.
……Is it a coincidence?
The faded paper attached to the bottle listed its effect: “Effective for hemoptysis of unknown cause.” But what caught Patrick’s attention was the part below it. At first glance it looked like a decorative band, but it was actually ancient script written in an ornate hand, as if drawing a picture.
Ancient script was also called the language of wizards. Since many wizards studied relics from ancient dungeons, it was natural for any wizard to be able to read and write it. Patrick was also fluent in ancient script—more precisely, it was a memory from his previous body, but somehow reading and writing it had come naturally from the start. It was the same as using the imperial language like his mother tongue.
Anyway, that was why this medicine bottle inevitably drew his eye.
Luchen.
The word written in ancient script beneath the bottle’s listed effect.
It’s my surname.
Patrick Luchen. His name.
Back at the magic tower, his teacher’s name had essentially been his surname as well, so he had rarely needed to use it. What mattered at the tower was “what research one was doing, under whom, and what achievements one had made”—not family names. Family names only became important when determining how much financial support a teacher could provide, and for Patrick, who had no parents, having a surname was as good as not having one.
After coming to the island, it mattered even less. Most of the people he met were commoners without surnames, so he hadn’t bothered attaching one when introducing himself. Moreover, the empire had a custom of deliberately omitting surnames when addressing convicted criminals in the name of fairness, regardless of background. It was a kind of customary law.
Well, it’s not like I’m a noble anyway, so I never cared.
Yet that surname had suddenly appeared here. And written in the language of wizards, no less.
Could there be something……?
Just then, his eyes fell on the cover of Chronicles of Imperial Noble Families—the trashy drama, or rather trashy documentary series, that supplied his nightly dopamine.