The Bloodstained Ward: Fever, Infection, and the First Threads of Symbiosis
After the second binding—when the beast’s biological narcotic had thoroughly ravaged her through the frenzy of their union—the hospital room sank into a deathly, grotesque silence. Eunha’s slender body lay sprawled across the floor, bearing the brutal evidence of the massive male’s bone-hard frame having twice torn through her without mercy. Deep within her belly, between the displaced womb and the lacerated vaginal walls, the creature’s scalding seed still pooled thickly, driving an unnatural cellular regeneration. Torn blood vessels and muscle fibers knit themselves back together with the viscous fluid as their medium, forcing flesh to mend in grotesque miracle. Yet even this overwhelming healing mechanism had its blind spots.
“Haa… hngh… haaah……”
Scorching breaths trembled from between Eunha’s thin lips. Her once-pale, translucent skin had flushed a violent crimson, and cold sweat poured down her forehead and neck like a waterfall, soaking the marble floor. The lethal internal injuries were being repaired by the beast’s semen, but the external environment was nothing less than a vast petri dish teeming with bacteria and viruses. Brain matter leaking from her younger brother’s crushed skull, the ruptured corpses of hundreds pooled across the floor, and the remnants of her own uncontrolled excretions. Even though the beast had licked her clean with his rough tongue, he could not prevent the tetanus bacilli and countless other pathogens from invading the wounds around her torn vulva and damaged mucous membranes. In the end, Eunha’s fragile immune system collapsed, and a horrific secondary infection fever began.
—Kkiiing. Whine.
At that moment, a massive shadow approached her through the darkness. The same ferocious 90-kilogram monster that had moments ago shredded her insides to sate its extreme rut now padded closer with its tail lowered, emitting anxious breaths. It had detected something different from the heat of estrus on the body of its perfect female—something that smelled of death and abnormal deterioration.
The beast lowered its enormous head beside Eunha’s face.
—Lick. Slurp.
Its sandpaper-rough tongue dragged across her sweat-drenched forehead and cheeks. It was the instinctive, blind urge of a wild animal to cool the fever and tend the wounds with its own saliva. But each time the beast’s hot breath and saliva touched her skin, the inflamed flesh sent a searing, unbearable pain through her.
“A-ah, it hurts… hngh, stop……”
Eunha lifted a trembling, slender hand and pushed the beast’s massive muzzle away. Even through the fever that felt as though her brain were melting, the blind pharmacy student’s mind screamed its final warning. This was a bacterial infection. Physical suturing alone could not stop this fever. Without broad-spectrum antibiotics, disinfectants, and antipyretics entering her bloodstream, her heart would stop from sepsis before dawn.
“Haa… medicine… I need medicine……”
With unfocused silver eyes turned toward the ceiling, Eunha reached up with both hands and cupped the face of the enormous predator looming over her. Stiff, thick fur. Rough, hot breaths from the beast’s nose. She stroked the merciless creature’s muzzle gently, whispering in a frail voice as though soothing a giant hunting dog.
“Down… we have to go down. To the first floor. Take me to the pharmacy……”
Though it could not perfectly decode human language, the beast’s superior intelligence and keen sense of smell accurately read the desperate intent in her fingertips and the scent of crisis radiating from her body. To save this female, they had to leave this place and move to a specific location.
—Grrrn.
The beast rumbled low in its throat and flattened its massive shoulders against the floor beside her, lowering itself so she could climb onto its back—a perfect gesture of submission and protection.
Eunha pressed her shaking arms against the floor and struggled to push her upper body upright. She was completely naked. Sticky residue and dried bloodstains from the beast still clung grotesquely to the insides of her thighs and buttocks. Relying solely on touch and smell in the darkness, she wrapped both arms tightly around the beast’s thick neck and spread her thin legs on either side of its broad ribcage, pressing close.
—Slide. Sway.
The moment Eunha settled fully onto its back, the 90-kilogram beast flexed its heavy muscles and slowly rose onto all fours. Eunha’s vision was perfect darkness, yet through touch and scent alone she could feel with painful clarity just how enormous the monster was beneath her. Its shoulder height alone reached 90 centimeters. Every time her slender breasts and bare skin brushed against the beast’s stiff back fur, a sharp shiver ran through her. Her lower body—pelvic floor muscles torn to shreds—clung precariously to the beast’s wide back, balanced only by the direction of its moving muscles and the potent male pheromones pouring off its body. A blind woman’s complete dependence.
—Thud. Thud. Thud.
The beast’s massive paws crossed the threshold of the hospital room and stepped into the corridor that had become hell. Perfect silence. Not a single scream or sign of survivors remained in this apocalypse. Hundreds of ruptured corpses lay across the floor in a slick sea of blood.
—Crack. Crunch. Squish.
With every step of the beast’s razor claws and thick pads, the sickening sounds of shattering skulls and crushed ribs tore through the hospital’s stillness. Eunha squeezed her eyes shut and clutched the beast’s neck fur tighter each time the horrific vibrations traveled up its spine and into her thin thighs.
“Left… toward the stairs.”
Following Eunha’s faint directions, the beast turned without hesitation through the darkness. As it descended the stairs, its shoulder muscles rippled with fluid power, and Eunha entrusted her body to that perfect balance, enduring her terror with nothing but the heat of the beast’s body beneath her palms.
Finally, they reached the first floor. Eunha’s skin registered the change in the density of decay and the strangely cooler air. The familiar scent of countless disinfectants mixed with the distinctive smell of powdered medicine. They were in the outpatient pharmacy area.
—Crash! Crunch.
The beast struck the pharmacy’s locked glass door with a heavy forepaw, and the thick reinforced glass shattered like paper, raining down. The beast stepped forward without pause over the sharp shards. For a moment its gait faltered slightly to one side—an almost imperceptible hitch transmitted through Eunha’s thighs—but the beast only snorted and kept moving.
Reaching the relatively clear, flat stainless-steel preparation counter inside the dispensary, the beast slowly tilted its back to help Eunha slide down safely.
“Th-thank you……”
Stepping onto the cold counter, Eunha barely managed to steady her fever-weakened body and reached forward with both hands. She had no sight. Yet the training she had repeated hundreds, thousands of times at the College of Pharmacy, combined with her heightened senses, began to grant her fingertips an almost supernatural vitality. Her slender fingers spidered rapidly across the collapsed medicine cabinets and shelves.
—Clink. Rustle.
The curves of plastic containers, the texture of foil blister packs, the subtle temperature difference of glass. Her nose dissected the coating agents on pill surfaces and the faint chemical scents of powdered medicine, sending the information to her brain like a microscope.
“Amoxicillin… no, this is first-generation cephalosporin… clindamycin.”
Eunha’s hands moved like a ghost, selecting the necessary medicines and gathering them on the counter. Because her vision was blocked, her sense of smell and touch had been honed to their absolute limits. In the darkness, her knowledge as a pharmacist bloomed in perfect fullness.
—Scrape. Grind.
Eunha found a mortar and pestle, dropped the selected broad-spectrum antibiotic tablets inside, and crushed them into fine powder with the heavy pestle. She added physiological saline by feel, mixed in an analgesic ointment, and stirred vigorously. The result was a powerful makeshift antibiotic-anesthetic ointment capable of fighting infection and protecting torn mucous membranes.
With trembling hands, Eunha scooped up a generous amount of the ointment she had made. Spreading her thighs, she applied it directly and liberally to her vulva and vaginal entrance—torn in third-degree lacerations by the beast’s violence and now inflamed.
“Hngh! Ah, aaah!”
The moment the sharp disinfectant and antibiotic agents sank into the open wounds, a pain so sharp it brought tears to her eyes lanced through her entire body. Yet behind that pain, the dull numbness left by the beast’s semen and the anesthetic components of the freshly applied ointment began a strange chemical reaction, rapidly cooling the burning fever.
Eunha swallowed more medicine and continued treating her wounds, gradually steadying her ragged breathing. The confirmation of survival through knowledge—that she was not a useless lump of meat, that she possessed skills that could keep her alive in this hellish world—planted a small support in her collapsing mind.
Just as she finished treatment and exhaled deeply, about to slump over the counter—
—Lick. Suck. Slurp.
A wet, dull sound of something being licked and sucked came at regular intervals near her feet. It was the beast. Eunha bent down and carefully reached toward the sound. Her slender fingertips touched the beast’s massive right forepaw.
—Grrrn.
The beast reflexively growled low and twitched its paw. But it had no intention of attacking or pushing her away—only the defensive instinct of a wounded wild animal. Eunha gently stroked the beast’s thick fur to calm it, then slid her fingers toward its enormous pad.
“Ah……”
What her fingertips found was a sharp foreign object deeply embedded between the thick, cushioned pads of its paw. When the beast had smashed through the pharmacy’s locked door earlier, it had stepped on a shard of reinforced glass. Though the creature’s body had mutated to the point of deflecting bullets, the large glass fragment driven straight into the center of its unprotected pad had pierced the hide and sliced a blood vessel. Sticky blood now soaked the beast’s paw. Even this overwhelming monster bled and felt pain. And its rough tongue alone could not extract the glass buried deep in its pad; it had only been licking the surface uselessly.
Eunha’s silver eyes trembled faintly.
“Stay still… I’ll… I’ll take it out. It’s okay.”
She fumbled for tweezers and disinfectant, then carefully drew the beast’s massive forepaw onto her slender lap. The moment was strange: the brutal creature’s paw—thicker than an adult man’s thigh—rested docilely in the blind female’s fragile hands without resistance. Eunha concentrated her sense of touch to the extreme, reading the exact angle of the glass shard lodged between fur and flesh. She inserted the tweezers, gripped the fragment in one motion, and pulled upward with a clean, strong yank.
—Ssshhk. Plop. Gush.
The moment the glass came free, dark red blood that had been pooling burst out. The beast exhaled a pained, rough breath and bared its teeth, but did not sink them into Eunha. Calmly, she poured disinfectant, wiped away the blood, and packed the deep wound with the same powerful makeshift ointment she had prepared earlier. Finally, using a medical compression bandage she found on the counter, she wrapped the beast’s enormous paw in several tight layers, completing perfect hemostasis.
“Now… it won’t hurt when you walk.”
Eunha wiped the sweat-drenched hair from her forehead and gently stroked the bandaged pad. The beast stared at her hand that had treated its wound, then pushed its massive head heavily into her lap.
—Grrrrrr.
It was not the destructive vibration it had made while suppressing and ravaging her earlier. This was the deep, tranquil sound of a beast directed at a capable companion who had healed its wounds—or at a mate absolutely essential to its survival.
In the middle of an apocalyptic pharmacy turned into a sea of blood, the blind pharmacy student who had been thoroughly violated used her knowledge as a weapon to prove her perfect value by supplementing the overwhelming predator’s weakness. The beast protected and bred the female with physical strength and supernatural bodily fluids. The female mended the beast’s wounds and balanced their survival with delicate knowledge and pharmaceutical skill. What had begun as simple domination and submission, rape and surrender, had evolved—now entangled in a horrifyingly perfect, codependent symbiosis far more enduring than any violence, locking them together with an eternal key.