Center Independence (Part 2)
“Huuuugh…”
Come to think of it, a lack of physical exercise wasn't just Lord Jamie's affliction, was it?
Liston was blessed with an iron constitution from birth and genuinely enjoyed throwing his weight around, so he had no real need for a regimented workout. Granted, raw muscular strength and metabolic disorders weren't strictly correlated, but the sight of me putting Robert Liston through physical training would look rather absurd. Besides, with so many easy targets at hand, there was no reason to push my luck with him.
“Is this… not outright torture…?”
Alfred spoke up, balancing a makeshift barbell across his shoulders—a straight iron bar I had rigged with bells dangling from either end. Just moments ago, he had been deep in squats, sitting down and standing back up under that contraption's weight. Now, when I say bells, one might picture the massive brass instruments tolling from church belfries, but I was a man of reason. They were small bells. Quite small.
“Oof, rather heavy, isn't it?”
Still, heavier than one might expect.
I turned to Liston, who was hoisting one of the bells overhead like a kettlebell.
“It has to be heavy to do any good.”
“Exercise, you say… Hmmm… But tell me, Taepyeong.”
“Yes?”
“Could it not be that the more one uses the body, the weaker it becomes?”
Liston had stripped off his shirt, leaving his upper torso entirely bare. Watching the thick slabs of muscle ripple and coil with every rise and fall of the iron bell, a stray thought crossed my mind.
Did this bastard shoot up anabolic steroids or something?
How did that make any sense? Achieving a physique like that naturally?
Then again… in this era, you couldn't find gear even if you begged on your knees.
The concept of hormones had not even been conceived yet. Dig deep enough and one might find the earliest embryonic musings of endocrinology, but humanity possessed nothing resembling a modern understanding of hormonal science. And it wasn't as if Liston were the sort of lunatic to inject himself with extracts squeezed from crushed ram testicles. I never dreamed I would hear myself say it, but Robert Liston was far more sensible than people gave him credit for.
Which only made it more startling to hear such utter nonsense tumble from his lips.
“What on earth are you talking about? The more you use a muscle, the stronger it grows, obviously.”
“Is it so obvious? I grant you it may appear so in the short term. Look at seafaring men—every one of them possesses forearms like tree trunks. Yet in the end, do they not die far younger than the rest of us?”
“That's…”
Wait, what kind of logic was this man spinning?
Subjecting muscle tissue to mechanical stress beyond a certain threshold causes microscopic tears, and as those tears repair, hypertrophy occurs…
Damn it all…
That was twenty-first-century common knowledge! Come to think of it, the biological mechanism behind muscular growth was monstrously complex. How in heaven's name had modern scientists ever unraveled all those pathways? Twenty-first-century researchers were terrifyingly brilliant.
“At a loss for words, are you?”
“No, absolutely not!”
“What if someone falls ill from pushing themselves so unnecessarily? Especially Lord Jamie… Ah, look, he is resting already.”
“He hasn't even completed ten repetitions!”
“Have you not considered that those very ten repetitions might shave days off Lord Jamie's life? It stands to reason. What goes unused remains preserved. Have you never heard the word 'aging'?”
Fuck me…
Aging was the single greatest frontier of modern medicine—how could I possibly not know it? To be fair, there were cases where leaving things idle seemed intuitive. Take joints, for instance. Subject them to relentless, grinding wear, and the cartilage breaks down and erodes. Osteoarthritis existed for a reason. Yet keeping a joint utterly still was hardly better; it simply seized up and stiffened into immobility.
Besides, our topic of discussion was muscle. Muscle was the textbook definition of the more you use it, the stronger it gets. It carried the caveat that one must avoid acute injury, of course, but the routine I had assigned was virtually incapable of causing physical trauma.
Well, if someone did manage to injure themselves doing this, they were probably a lost cause anyway.
If a man was so frail that a few gentle squats crippled him, then he was simply beyond saving.
“Brother. How do you explain this, then?”
“Explain what?”
Persuasion was sorely needed. The second Liston voiced his skepticism, every single one of them had stopped moving. All I had demanded was for the young lads to squat with a weighted bar and for Lord Jamie to perform bodyweight squats, yet they were already slacking off. Human nature was predictable that way. Strenuous physical exertion… who would ever volunteer for it? Without an unshakeable justification, no one would budge an inch.
Fortunately—if one could call it good fortune—the nineteenth century was plagued with conditions like infantile paralysis; far from being eradicated, cases were so ubiquitous you tripped over them in the street.
“Those who lose the use of a leg… what happens to the thickness of that limb?”
“How should I know?”
“Come now… is that any way to answer a medical question?”
“Go on, enlighten me. You know I hold your powers of observation in high regard.”
“Right. The limb they cannot use withers until it is as thin as a reed. Think about it!”
Think, Taepyeong! Aren't you Pyung-shin, the living god, just as they revere you? Spin, brain, spin!
Oh.
Whether a desperate prayer had reached heaven or my bullshit-spinning instincts had kicked into overdrive once more, I couldn't say. But a brilliant ray of dawn broke through the clouds.
“When the Lord fashioned our mortal frames, how did He design them?”
“You ask as if it were a mystery. He shaped us from dust, of course.”
“No, not that part!”
“Are you about to propose another doctrine? Tread carefully; anything beyond Scripture is heresy.”
Storm clouds threatened my ray of dawn for a brief second, but no matter. My silver tongue was second to none.
“That is not what I mean. Consider: with what immense wisdom must He have crafted us?”
“Eh?”
“Would He not have engineered our bodies with supreme efficiency?”
“Well… I suppose He would have.”
The nineteenth century. Science was idolized, yet religion retained an iron grip on society. The moment you brought the Almighty into an argument, most people found themselves checkmated. I knew by now that being branded a heretic wouldn't haul me before an Inquisition tribunal, but it would put me at an extraordinary disadvantage. A mob might burn my lodgings to the ground by nightfall. The weight of religious conviction and the social power it commanded were colossal. Which meant there was zero reason for me not to exploit it.
“Now then, what must become of the parts that lie idle? Let us imagine our body is a hospital. Suppose there is a ward that generates no income whatsoever. What does the administration do?”
“They downsize it or shut it down… Ah. You mean the human body operates under the same principle?”
“Precisely. That is how the Lord in His wisdom must have designed us.”
“Does that not sound a touch cold-hearted…?”
“You agreed He would design us for efficiency. The British Empire may enjoy an abundance of provisions, but other lands across the globe certainly do not, do they?”
Not that Britain truly overflowed with food either. Surplus agricultural production only became an everyday reality after the invention of chemical fertilizers… I wasn't an economic historian, so my dates might be slightly hazy, but Britain certainly hadn't reached that point yet. If it had, the rampant starvation in the London slums would make no sense. Though, human greed being boundless, perhaps the wealthy simply hoarded every scrap for themselves.
“If a starving soul cannot use one of his legs, why on earth would the body squander precious sustenance keeping that useless limb fed?”
“That would indeed be absurd. But what bearing does that have on exercise? Though whether this peculiar flailing qualifies as exercise remains open to debate.”
“We are tricking the muscle! We send it a signal that it must repeatedly hoist heavy burdens—and that therefore, it must grow thicker and sturdier to survive!”
“Hmm… Is that so? That does sound remarkably plausible.”
As Liston nodded in concession, Alfred, Joseph, and Colin—who had been nervously reading the room—hurriedly resumed their squats. Lord Jamie let out a weary sigh and began lowering himself into a squat once more. Whatever could be said of the apprentices, Lord Jamie looked dead serious despite his quiet grumbling, which was a relief.
“I was quite nimble in my youth… To think I can barely manage even this.”
For all that he was a Duke of the British Empire, it clearly wounded his pride to find himself physically weaker than a collection of medical apprentices. It couldn't be helped, really. The moment he severed his own testicles, his physical vigor had been forfeited. Even so, if he maintained a steady regimen from this day forth—especially resistance training—I could guarantee he would live far longer and healthier than if he remained sedentary.
“Which is precisely why regular exercise is vital.”
“Mmm… Well, the theory seems riddled with holes, but seeing as no one stands to lose anything by trying, let us study it further.”
“Yes, brother.”
Riddled with holes? The only hole here is the one between your ears, I wanted to snap back. But my desire for a long, comfortable life easily kept my tongue in check.
Even had I wished to pursue the conversation, real dialogue would have been impossible anyway. Lord Jamie was exhaling ragged, breathless gasps, every puff carrying a rancid, sour stench from deep within his gut. Even without a formal examination, I could tell his liver was probably in terrible shape; breath that smelled of ancient decay couldn't be explained by poor teeth alone. Wait, the man who drank urine was the fellow standing right next to him—why did Lord Jamie smell like stale piss?
“Pyung-shin. What are you pondering so deeply?”
“Ah, nothing at all, Your Grace.”
As I have stated repeatedly, I wished to live a long, prosperous life, so I never let my true thoughts show. I merely nodded with an earnest, solemn expression. Thanks to that practiced poker face, the conversation proceeded smoothly.
“I am not searching for an excuse to shirk your exercises, but someone came to mind just now.”
“Go on, please speak. And you are not stepping foot out of this room until you complete fifty repetitions today.”
“Y-Yes… but I have an urgent cabinet meeting…”
A meeting… The Opium War… It probably didn't concern me directly. But if he hoped to weather those political storms, he needed to get into shape right now.
“Very well, I understand.”
Reading the unyielding resolve in my eyes, Lord Jamie let out a heavy sigh. I thought I caught him muttering damn it under his breath, but since he had yielded, it was time to hear him out. Seeing him constantly ailing made me forget his standing, but the man was a Duke. One of the rare figures who wielded true, terrifying power across the British Empire.
“At any rate… a colleague of mine has been suffering from persistent, debilitating headaches of late.”
“Headaches?”
“Yes. Apparently, he has even been frequenting your hospital for treatment.”
“Our hospital…”
When it came to headache treatments at University College Hospital, a few vivid horrors sprang to mind. The excessive bloodletting Semmel loved to prescribe, and whatever that bastard Thomas—or was it Tomato?—did with his human centrifuge. To think they strapped a peer of the realm onto that spinning torture rack to treat a migraine…
Well, given there's a fellow who cut off a Duke's nuts, I suppose nothing should shock me.
I was momentarily taken aback, but considering nineteenth-century physicians were all barbarians in frock coats, it made complete sense.
“It seems to have had little effect, however.”
“Naturally.”
It would be far more alarming if it had worked.
“He mentioned that drawing blood brings slight relief, but what good is that? The poor man looks like a walking corpse, utterly drained of color. He is suffering terribly.”
“Ah…”
So bloodletting did offer some measure of relief after all. Then again, if it hadn't provided even a transient drop in intracranial pressure or temporary placebo effect, would the practice have survived for thousands of years? Still, that was no excuse to keep subjecting a living human being to such butchery.
“Tell him to pay us a visit. I will examine him personally. While I cannot guarantee a miraculous cure… I will certainly manage better than the others.”
“V-Very well. In that case, I shall take my leave for the meeting—”
“No. You have forty repetitions remaining.”
“Right… But tell me, is this truly necessary for my wellbeing?”
“Of course. Would I ever torment someone without good cause?”
“I-Indeed.”
For some reason, Lord Jamie's nervous gaze drifted back toward his private sommelier.
I couldn't fathom why.