Chapter 45
Chapter 45
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 45
Chapter Title: Putting Witches in Boiling Cauldrons
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Third-rate painter Balzac was extremely satisfied with the recent changes in his life.
It was thanks to the patronage of House Riddle, the richest among the 'great merchant houses.'
To be precise, it wasn't just simple patronage; they had hired him as a teacher. But since they were buying him paints, it didn't make much difference either way.
The truly important thing was...
that he could now use paint to his heart's content.
"When I first heard I was supposed to teach painting to slaves, I thought it was absurd... Well, nobles have all sorts of hobbies."
A student who was a slave?
It was absurd, but not enough to make him feel repulsed.
Balzac himself would sometimes dip a cat's paw in paint and stamp it on paper when he was bored.
If cats could paint,
then slaves could certainly paint too.
In fact, sometimes the cat's paintings seemed more artistic than his own.
"All I had to teach was basic line drawing and color mixing... This is even easier than being a tutor for some rich young master."
There was the minor hassle of creating simple textbooks and written exam questions...
but he wasn't teaching art history or anything,
just color combinations and types of paintings, so it wasn't difficult.
A leisurely, stable life of giving casual lessons to slaves and painting in his spare time.
It felt like a dream.
To third-rate painter Balzac, all of this was nothing short of a dream.
But that didn't mean he had no complaints at all.
Balzac had one grievance.
His patron and employer had forbidden him from 'eating paint.'
"Why ban this delicious paint?"
If it were a sane person,
they'd reasonably ask, 'Why eat expensive paint that's pricier than meat stew when you're always complaining about being broke?'
But that was a question only someone ignorant of an artist's nature could make.
All artists... are insane.
Only an artist would see distorted, cloudy light from lead poisoning-induced retinal damage and think first, 'Wow, the night sky looks so beautiful. I want to paint it.'
Fear of bodily harm?
That fear existed, but unless you saw even that fear as nourishment for the soul, you couldn't call yourself a true artist.
"You can't paint good pictures without eating paint!"
Of course, a 21st-century art student properly educated in art history
could rant for 4,700 characters debunking the romantic prejudice that pain creates art,
but regrettably, no such 'properly educated art students' existed in this world.
So.
When a modern person claims, 'Lead is eating away at your soul,'
and a foolhardy artist bloated with prejudice and ego replies, 'Indeed, paint is the source of my inspiration! I must eat more!'
it's not all that strange.
Eat paint, and pictures come out!
Only those who fail to grasp this mystical principle of the soul—where paint goes in and paint comes out—lack the qualifications to be an artist.
"Especially mixing cheap booze with blue paint... Ah. There's no greater source of inspiration."
Cheap booze is a source of inspiration.
Paint is a source of inspiration.
Mixing paint into cheap booze and drinking it— that's an explosion of inspiration.
That was third-rate painter Balzac's theory of art.
And...
his employer's response to Balzac's passionate rant was this.
"You'll attend the lessons too, teacher."
"Pardon? I'm the teacher."
"No lessons, no paint."
"I'll prepare my notebook right away."
This world is barbaric.
The natives of this fantasy world are nothing but half-digested barbarians.
At least in the field of 'health and medicine,'
the majority of this world's inhabitants weren't much different from Stone Age shamans.
No.
At least shamans probably didn't gobble down lead, so the natives here were worse than shamans.
"Now, repeat after me. Do not eat lead."
"Eating lead... tastes good!"
"They're completely out of their minds..."
At this rate, all the slaves would end up poisoned by lead from their art teacher.
He hadn't stocked cheap paints blatantly ground with lead, but paints in this era were basically made by grinding minerals anyway.
It wasn't good to put any paint in your mouth, lead or not.
Yet artists, like kindergarten kids, had this instinct to shove anything they touched into their mouths.
Even after explaining lead's toxicity, they acted like this.
They didn't seem to feel it personally,
and they had preconceptions like, 'I've eaten it fine so far, why make a fuss now?'
"Farmers taste the soil to check the land's condition, and palace physicians taste excrement to check the emperor's health. Similarly, artists must taste paint to become one with art. The dizzying sensation as paint mixes with the soul—that's the state truly brimming with inspiration."
"That's heavy metal poisoning."
"What's heavy metal poisoning?"
"This is hopeless."
The problem was that this wasn't limited to this one artist named Balzac.
The general awareness in this world was all like this.
So I even brought in doctors as teachers to teach basic health knowledge,
but even the doctors believed all sorts of bizarre nonsense.
"Diseases spread through bad air, don't they?"
"...Well, ventilation is important."
"Isn't it from imbalances in bodily fluids?"
"For dehydration from diarrhea, drinking sugar-salted water is good."
"If you're low on blood and die, just replace it with goat blood—"
"Absolutely do not."
In the end, I decided to take drastic measures to fix this.
"Ah. This is health and hygiene."
I became the teacher myself, instructing the teachers and doctors on health.
What I called 'health and hygiene' was really
a subject to catalog deadly health habits and educate against them to prevent accidents.
"First, no eating paints containing lead or minerals."
"What about putting lead in wine?"
"...Just don't eat anything with lead in it."
From the common sense of a 21st-century South Korean, there was so much that was utterly ridiculous.
Health doesn't show up visibly like a status window,
and for nobles, divine power could heal most illnesses, so medicine hadn't developed much.
Military doctors from field hospitals had some know-how,
but much of it only applied in the extreme conditions of the battlefield.
In the end, I had to compile and teach the 'common sense' from my previous life myself.
"Ah. This is epidemiology. ...No. No one had thought of collecting patient data to trace infection sources?"
I had no idea where to start teaching.
Honestly, I wasn't professionally trained in health education either, so I lacked full confidence in my knowledge.
Health was mandatory education... but honestly, I never properly attended health classes either...
Instead, experiences and tidbits from the COVID era were a huge help.
"How do you know all this?"
"I learned it through a blessing."
"Ah, I see."
For reference, I brushed it off by saying the source of this health knowledge was roughly a 'blessing.'
No one else knew the detailed workings of blessings anyway.
A blessing that reads objects' memories?
Ah. From now on, it's a blessing that 'reads diseases' memories.'
"What's a germ?"
"...Tiny creatures you can only see with a microscope?"
"Yes."
"Among them, the microorganisms causing infectious diseases are called germs."
"Pardon?"
Of course, there were many concepts hard to explain.
For those, I resolved them by blending in this world's concepts.
"...Actually, germs are a type of demon. It's the demonic world's evil scheme to devour humanity a little at a time."
"Ah, so they're demonic creatures! Then infectious diseases are demonic energy contamination."
I successfully convinced the teachers with the miraculous logic of 'germs = demons.'
These were people who called coal 'highly volatile black magic stones,' after all.
It was a form of eye-level education.
For reference, in this world, all power sources are called magic stones. They've used them for thousands of years.
Anyway.
Thanks to my efforts,
the teachers' understanding of diseases made miraculous progress.
"Now. Washing hands with running water washes away the demons contaminating them, preventing illness. But water contaminated with demonic energy can itself spread disease. One way to prevent waterborne infections is to boil the water before use..."
"It's like putting witches in boiling cauldrons!"
"Damn, exactly! You really nailed it."
There was the minor issue that explaining this made me feel like my own head was getting contaminated with demonic energy...
but anyway, I miraculously succeeded in hammering the concept of 'health and hygiene' into the school.