Chapter 12: Mister, Listen to Me [1]
Chapter 12: Mister, Listen to Me [1]
A condom.
A Condom...
It was good.
It really was good, but there was one problem.
Would people in this era... actually use Condoms?
Would they even feel the need for them?
Thinking about the Lister Family in Upton, it did not seem like they would.
Even though they were Quakers who sold alcohol, were they not unbelievably strict about private life?
Of course, married couples used Condoms too, but...
using them before marriage...?
Ugh...
It felt like I would get burned at the stake.
Still, this is a jackpot item.
It was too valuable an item to back down over something as minor as being burned at the stake.
Right.
I would have to weave the story together carefully and at least try talking about it.
For now, I set the rubber neatly to one side and went to sleep.
The one who shook me awake the next morning was Alfred, my dimwitted senior.
“W-wake up.”
When I rubbed my sleepy eyes and sat up, I saw my senior’s pale face.
In fact, even from his trembling voice, it already seemed obvious that something serious had happened.
So instead of looking at his face first, I looked at his finger.
“Ah... it’s swollen.”
“This... this is exactly what you said it would be! I’m going to die now...”
“Just wait a second. Let me look at it first.”
“Uwaaaah.”
“No, hold still for a moment. I need to examine it.”
“Ugh.”
“Joseph.”
“Yeah.”
Leaving my hysterical senior to Joseph, the huge man over 175 centimeters tall, I examined the finger carefully.
It was swollen.
Without a doubt... this was an inflammatory reaction.
“Aaagh!”
When I pressed it, he cried out in blinding pain.
That meant there was tenderness to pressure.
Which in turn meant the inside was packed full of inflammation.
This is bad...
Of course it was bad.
In the twenty-first century—no, even in the twentieth century—this would usually have been the kind of wound that could be solved by buying an antibiotic ointment at a pharmacy and applying it.
No.
This came from a corpse... hmm. He might even need injected antibiotics.
Even if I conceded a hundred times and said antibiotics would solve it right away, there were no antibiotic substances here to eat and die from.
Should I start growing mold from now on?
Penicillin flashed through my mind for an instant.
But for now, it was a meaningless thought.
Most molds devoured people instead of producing beneficial effects.
“Give me a knife.”
“Hng...? So it really is amputation? No... no. If I lose my index finger, then surgery...”
“I’m not cutting it off, so stop freaking out. Where’s the knife?”
“Freaking out? Did you just say freaking out?”
“If you keep resisting, I’ll curse at you even worse, so tell me quickly where the knife is. Behave yourself while I’m still speaking politely.”
“Uh...”
I stopped wasting time on useless thoughts and started looking for a knife.
I did not know whether this was normal, but my senior did not even know where the knives were in his own house.
No, he did not even know exactly where the kitchen was.
He said he had never cooked in his life.
That did sound plausible.
If you lived in a mansion this large, a spoiled boy making his own fried eggs would probably only exist in some ideal world.
“Good.”
I said it was good, but it was not good.
That was because even the kitchen we finally found was not particularly clean.
The first thing that caught my eye was a huge cauldron, with something bizarre bubbling away inside it.
“Ah, this is stew.”
“Stew?”
Stew.
It was a familiar name, but at the same time a strange kind of food.
The sort of thing I had heard of, but did not know exactly what it was.
Still, I could say with certainty that the stew I had eaten in the twenty-first century was not like that.
If someone tried selling that for money in Korea, the customers would kill them before the police got there.
“Yes. Hmm. Let’s step back first.”
I pulled Alfred and Joseph away from the dish that looked like a river on the road to hell and retreated farther inside.
Then I told them to boil water.
Judging by the look of things, even the dishcloths and everything else seemed rotten, so I told them to boil whatever scraps of cloth looked the newest.
There was nothing here to wipe things with, let alone gauze, so this was a desperate measure.
“There’s a knife.”
“Ah... this... this needs to be cleaned.”
“Ah, yes, yes. Right. If it gets mixed with food, then the taste...”
“I’m not cooking my senior.”
“Then do we really need to clean it?”
“I... I’ll clean it.”
The knife brought over by someone who was either a servant or an employee was not clean.
No, it was filthy.
You bastards... at this rate, you’re all going to die...
Did they not even have the concept of food poisoning?
Ah, of course they did not.
I had heard that cholera had spread through London not long ago.
I heard a lot of people died.
When people kept passing stool, you had to keep refilling them with water, but they did not know that yet.
Damned idiots.
Scrub, scrub.
Thinking all that, I put the knife into the boiled water and scrubbed it hard.
Looking at the knife with steam rising from it made me feel oddly warm inside.
It felt as though the resentment that had built up inside me was finally being relieved.
When had that resentment started piling up?
Ever since I saw Robert Liston’s bizarre knife, one corner of my chest had felt blocked up.
“Good.”
This time, it really was good.
A clean knife, and my senior, held down by Joseph, looking at me with a frightened face.
No.
A frightened senior was not good.
It would have been nice if there had been an Anesthetic.
“Then... I’ll clean your hand a little with the alcohol we made yesterday.”
“Ugh...”
“Does it hurt?”
“Of course it hurts!”
“Yes. Well, you’ll just have to endure it.”
“Hey.”
Calling me “hey” did him no good.
It was not as though I enjoyed him being in pain either.
If it did not hurt, I could cut into it without hesitation.
“Hmm.”
Anyway, I wiped my senior’s finger with alcohol and examined the wound inside.
It would have been nice to have something like forceps, but there was nothing like that, so I lifted the flesh with the end of a sterilized fork.
It sounded like something a psychopath would say, but the sight was not as strange as it sounded.
At least, not to me.
I could see it quite clearly.
Ah, damn... the color of the muscle...
Muscle was supposed to be bright red by nature.
But the muscle in my senior’s finger, laid out before my eyes, was pale pink.
Not a pretty pink, but the pale pink flowers showed just before they wilted.
The kind of pink that made you think it was about to die.
“Hm?”
“It smells, doesn’t it? The inside has started rotting a little.”
“No... Lord...”
“There’s no reason it has to be hopeless, but go ahead and pray. Just in case.”
“You...”
There was no doubt it was full of pus.
The one small blessing was that the amount was not that great.
Come to think of it... yesterday, instead of just disinfecting the outside... I should have dug into the inside too.
I had never seen a wound like this in the hospital.
An injury caused by handling a corpse.
That belonged at the police station before it belonged at a hospital, did it not?
And if it was a rotten corpse, even the police station would probably be at a loss.
“It hurts.”
“I know that!”
“No, I mean it’s about to hurt more.”
“What? U-uaaaah!”
Anyway, I made a quick cut around the swollen area with the knife.
As soon as I did, yellow pus mixed with blood flowed out.
The smell was not pleasant.
It seemed anaerobic bacteria had already started growing.
There was no point speculating what strain it was.
All sorts of things were probably growing in there.
“Ugh... ngh!”
“What are you doing? Hold him down so he can’t move!”
The servants froze in shock as the place for cooking suddenly turned into a brutal scene, but at my shout they hurried over and pinned down their master.
“You, you!”
“You’ve seen surgery before, haven’t you? This is what it’s like. Don’t panic. Hold him down.”
Alfred shot the servants a betrayed look, but it did him no good.
Because thanks to the young master who insisted on becoming a surgeon, they had already seen what was basically a murder scene—no, a surgical scene—in the square several times.
Compared to what they had seen then, this was nothing.
It was only a finger, after all.
Of course, the pain he felt probably was not all that different.
Sliiice—
There was a limit to how much pain the human brain could tolerate.
But regardless of such concerns, my hands did not stop.
Even if I was holding a fork and a kitchen knife instead of forceps and a scalpel, surgical experience did not go anywhere, and I was already getting used to it.
“Aaaagh!”
“It hurts, doesn’t it?”
“You son of a bitch!”
“I know it hurts.”
Using my senior’s screams as background noise, I opened the wound further and drained all the pus from inside.
Then I scrubbed the opened wound thoroughly with alcohol.
Not a single part of the treatment came without pain.
At this point, was this not a more efficient form of torture than any torture that had ever existed in history?
“Aaah...”
Anyway, I finished the procedure in about ten minutes.
The wound, which had been dripping yellow pus just moments ago, was now dripping red blood.
“Ah...”
It must have looked horrifying.
But to a surgeon digging through a rotten wound, it was a pleasing sight.
Whatever it was, everything dead had now been removed.
Everything scraped away by the edge of the knife was rotten flesh.
There were probably quite a lot of bacteria in there too.
“Senior, look at this.”
“...Look at what? It hurts too much.”
“This is your flesh.”
“I know that too!”
“It’s rotten flesh.”
“Hm?”
My senior had been on the verge of getting angry at me, but when I said it was rotten flesh, he came to his senses and looked at the tip of the knife.
“You saw this during amputations, didn’t you? Normally, muscle is bright red. Larger muscles are a bit darker, but this is a small muscle, so this is what it should be.”
“Mm. But this...”
“When muscle dies, it turns this color. Smell it too.”
“It smells rotten.”
“That’s because it’s mixed with pus.”
“And why did pus form?”
Maybe it was because he dreamed of becoming a doctor, but he was astonishingly studious despite the pain.
It had been a while since I had felt like I was dealing with a student, so I answered without thinking.
“Pus is a collection of the corpses of white blood cells that died while fighting bacteria.”
“Hm?”
“Ah.”
At the same time, I found myself meeting several pairs of puzzled eyes.
So this is how I get burned at the stake.
Had there ever been a moment this embarrassing since I was reborn?
I did not think so.
Maybe that was why my mind started spinning furiously.
“That is... a term used in Joseon... haha. My mistake.”
“Joseon language sounds a lot like English.”
“Uh, well. Human language is all like that.”
I brushed off Joseph’s remark and continued.
“When this bad energy enters, shouldn’t our bodies protect themselves?”
“Is that so?”
“Of course. First, the skin blocks that energy. That’s why you do not die as long as you are not wounded.”
“Ah.”
“Then inside the skin, there is also something that blocks it. If it loses the fight, or something like that, then this yellow pus forms.”
“Ahh.”
It was not easy.
Education adjusted to the learner’s level was never easy.
Damn it.
“Well, we are not exactly certain either. It is just something like, this is how people in Joseon think.”
“People from Joseon think very deeply.”
“That’s right.”
It was probably not a lie.
There had to be plenty of masters of Neo-Confucianism.
Wouldn’t they think deeply?
Probably.
“Anyway, let’s leave it open like this for now.”
“Leave it open? Without wrapping a bandage?”
“Bandage...”
At some point, my senior had produced a bandage.
It looked as though it had been made some time ago.
It smelled sour.
The bandage smelled sour.
“No. It is not a large wound... for now, let’s leave it open.”
As I said that, I looked out the kitchen window.
Could it be that this place is not Earth after all...?