Chapter 9: You Mustn’t Do That [3]
Chapter 9: You Mustn’t Do That [3]
“Excuse me, Senior.”
“What is it? And what’s with your face? Are you sick?”
I’m not sick.
The world simply contains not only white people, but yellow people too.
“India… no, you don’t look Indian.”
Somehow, he had managed to recognize that I was not from India.
In truth, the reason I felt so unsafe in London was because I worried these people might think I was Indian.
Of course, many members of India’s upper class had long since pledged loyalty to Britain and often came to study in Britain.
Among them, naturally, there were plenty of people with more influence than most ordinary Britons.
But I…
didn’t look like that, no matter how you sliced it, did I?
So I had been worried, but the senior with the injured hand unexpectedly recognized the difference in my face.
“Yes, I’m from Joseon. How did you know?”
“Ah, my family’s in trade. More precisely, not my immediate family, but my uncle’s. Anyway, I don’t know, I just had a feeling all of a sudden.”
Ah, so his family was in trade.
Maybe that was why his prejudice seemed lighter.
He treated me the way he would treat someone unfamiliar, not like some strange thing that was not even human.
Right.
In that case, I had to save him.
Though whether he could be saved was another matter.
“Ah, yes. But weren’t you hurt during anatomy practice just now?”
“Yeah. But, well… looking at it, it doesn’t seem that serious. I’m fine.”
Don’t say that so confidently.
Don’t confidently say you’ll be fine…
You’ll die, idiot.
But what should I say?
What could I say to make this man actually get treatment?
“In Joseon, where I come from…”
“Hm?”
Before coming here—well, after witnessing that shocking amputation—I had asked the man and various other adults a lot about the state of medicine at this point in time.
It had been astonishing.
Because of how little common sense there was.
No, in some ways it even felt as though it had regressed compared to the Middle Ages or antiquity.
These self-proclaimed men of science, these doctors, were so unbelievably narrow-minded.
Rather than clumsily talking about medicine, it seemed better to play up Joseon instead.
“In my country, there are people whose profession involves handling corpses. Don’t you have that here too?”
“There are, sure. But why? We have a different purpose from people like that.”
When people knew nothing, they tended to view jobs involving corpses rather badly.
Perhaps that was what he thought too, because he frowned.
It felt as though things would only get worse if he got offended, so I hurriedly continued.
“People in that line of work… don’t work if they have injuries on their hands.”
“Hm?”
“There’s a saying that if a corpse touches a wound directly, you die.”
“Ah, I thought you were going to say something serious. Isn’t that just superstition? Were you about to tell me I’d be cursed or something?”
“No, no.”
You bastard.
You turned me into some superstition-obsessed fool in a single instant.
I’m someone who has been baptized by twenty-first-century science, damn it.
The very structure of my brain is different from yours.
“Through the wound, the corpse’s… um…”
But because the other person knew so little, it was hard to figure out how to explain it.
Bacteria?
If I started talking about microorganisms in an era that did not even have the concept—
“Burn the spawn of Satan!”
“Satan from the East!”
—wouldn’t I become the guest of honor at some sudden London festival?
“Um… its bad energy.”
“Hmmm.”
The word I finally came up with was energy, and even as I said it, I realized I had messed up.
But unexpectedly, the senior’s face turned slightly serious when he heard the word energy.
Maybe because this was an era when hospitals seriously talked about bad air or bad water veins causing illness.
Anyway, it worked.
Good grief…
That actually worked?
At this rate, if I got hit by a truck one more time, maybe I really could go back.
I seriously considered it for a moment, but since I had already survived once through impossible odds, I concluded that I should at least live this life properly.
I had gone through that cycle of thought several times already, so it did not take long.
“Corpses give off bad energy. If you think about it, that’s only natural, isn’t it?”
“Hm. Now that you put it that way, it sounds reasonable.”
Reasonable, my ass…
The very fact that I’m using the word energy like this isn’t reasonable at all.
Contrary to what I was thinking, I kept the most solemn face in the world, lightly brushed back my black hair, preserved all the mystery of the East, and continued.
“So wash it quickly first. I once saw someone die after handling a corpse with an injured hand…”
I had never seen that.
In twenty-first-century South Korea, even ordinary people who were not medical workers were well educated, so they naturally acted carefully.
And besides, mighty Korea had antibiotics.
There were so many powerful ones around that you could look at Penicillin and call it pathetic.
So much so that no one could die from a corpse even if they wanted to.
Come on, brain, work!
How do I explain this?
“First, the area around the wound turns red and starts to swell.”
“Hm.”
“Then you get a fever… your body swells up, and you lose consciousness. In the end, you die.”
“Ah… I see. Then what… what should I do?”
I let my imagination run wild about what would happen if the wound were left untreated and things progressed to Sepsis.
Fortunately, the eternal truth that a detailed lie is the most believable one also held true in nineteenth-century Britain.
“First, wash your hand.”
“Wash it?”
“Ah… I mean, rub it under running water.”
Is it for real that you don’t even know what washing your hand means?
You bastard… you look like you’ve already been in medical school for one or two years at least.
Anyway, perhaps because the black-haired Oriental man was talking about mysterious energies, the senior suddenly looked frightened, sprang to his feet, and headed outside.
Wait, you’re not going to the washroom?
Where are you going?
Then again, getting water was not exactly easy here.
There was running water, but it did not come out all that well.
And it was not clean either.
They drew it straight from the filth of the Thames.
In Upton, you could more or less drink river water without too much trouble, but here…
We do boil it to drink, but is that really enough?
While worrying about that, I followed the senior outside and then witnessed that idiot—no, that senior—plunge his hand into the fountain in the middle of the university grounds.
“Senior…?”
“Hm?”
Do you really get no feeling from looking at fountain water?
It’s dirty.
No, you can tell even before looking.
You can smell it.
“Running water. Isn’t this it?”
Ah, my fault.
This is my fault.
Running water…
Yes, I shouldn’t have put it that way.
“Um… just wait a moment first.”
“Hm. Okay.”
Maybe my eyes had gone a little wild without me realizing it, because the senior suddenly became very obedient.
Or maybe he looked a little scared of me?
It was hard to say.
The power of a black-haired Oriental man shouldn’t go this far.
Still, I decided to take it as a good thing for now.
I could always ask about the details later.
Saving a life was more important than anything else at the moment.
Thinking that, I boiled some water and filtered out the impurities.
“You’re going to pour that on it?”
“No, I have to let it cool first. If I pour it on like this… you’ll get burned.”
“Ah, right. Right.”
“But…”
“Hm?”
“Why are you being so proactive about this? To be blunt, didn’t you just meet me for the first time today?”
“Ah.”
At my question, the senior hesitated for a moment, then whispered, “The thing is… the symptoms you described earlier… my friend died like that.”
“What? He died?”
“Not just my friend… every year, a few people die like that.”
“What… what are you talking about?”
“You didn’t know? Medical students sometimes die like that. I just thought the air here was bad. Quite a lot of medical students from our school have died.”
“Ah…”
I see.
So people had been dying, and they were still making them do practicals like that.
These lunatics…
Even if I gave them a hundred concessions and said this was an era too lacking in knowledge for forward-thinking reasoning, then if they claimed to be scientists, shouldn’t they at least be capable of backward reasoning?
If people kept dying here, shouldn’t they at least have tried to find out why?
“But to think it wasn’t the air, but the energy.”
“Ah.”
I had almost become the junior who slapped his senior across the face.
Then again, in this atmosphere, it did feel like I could probably get away with hitting him…
“But is washing it this much enough?”
“Hmm. No. Harder. It’ll hurt a bit. Will you be okay?”
“Are we drawing the energy out?”
“Um…”
I still had not found a better word than energy, so I nodded.
Then I stretched the flesh around the wound that the senior had scrubbed raw with the boiled water.
“Uh… uh. It’s bleeding.”
“That means the energy is coming out mixed with the blood.”
“Ah. Wow… I see. But it’s just red?”
“If energy were visible, do you think people would die so helplessly?”
“Ah, right. If it were visible energy…”
Without realizing it, I glanced around me.
I was worried someone I knew might be watching.
But this was nineteenth-century London, and the people I knew had not even been born yet.
No, sometimes I wondered if this was even the same Earth at all.
There were plenty of theories about parallel universes and such, weren’t there?
“And do you have alcohol?”
“Alcohol? Why? Does drinking it help more?”
“It’s better to clean the wound with distilled alcohol.”
“Alcohol…? You mean the stuff used to light fires?”
“Ah, if there’s that kind of alcohol, even better.”
Of course, directly scrubbing a wound with alcohol was not really a good idea.
Alcohol disinfected well, but it was also very good at destroying tissue.
If I rubbed it in directly, the surrounding tissue would probably suffer permanent damage.
But it was clearly the better option.
Otherwise, he would die.
Unfortunately, there was no alcohol available right now, so I kept pouring boiled water over it to disinfect it.
“U-uaaagh!”
“Does it hurt?”
“It-it hurts!”
“Think of it as the energy screaming.”
“Ugh… this really is vicious energy!”
“Right? But if we do this, you can live. Once may not be enough, though. We need to do it every day.”
“Do… this every day?”
“Yes. And be careful not to let anything touch this. Especially not water like that.”
“O-okay. Okay.”
Maybe his friend’s death had been that much of a shock, because the senior listened very well.
No, it was more than that.
Even after we returned to the lecture hall and I tried to study with Joseph, he would not leave us alone.
I was wondering what the hell was wrong with him when he suddenly spoke.
“Excuse me, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, I’d like to invite both of you.”
“Invite us?”
“Yeah. To my house.”
He seemed extremely uneasy.
Seeing how he wanted to keep an Oriental exorcist close by.
“Where’s your house?”
“Hm? Ah, Kensington.”
“Let’s go.”
If something goes out, something should come back in return.
So I asked where his house was, and he said Kensington.
By Seoul standards, was that Gangnam—no, more like Cheongdam or Apgujeong?
No, no, that was too middle-class a comparison.
Hannam-dong… more like UN Village.
So our senior was rich.
I wanted to sleep there too.
Our boarding house was hell.
“Hm? We’re going?”
Innocent Joseph blinked, but that was not particularly important.
“Let’s go. Let’s go to Kensington.”
“Yeah, well… all right.”
He was the kind of guy who went along when I said we should.
The kid was kind.
“Then do you want to go now?”
The senior looked kind too.
No, maybe he was just a pushover.
Or maybe my mysterious Oriental persona was working on him.
Maybe I should make myself a gat at this rate.
Or maybe a folding fan?
Yes, a fan.
That sounded good.