Hua Tuo, Kim Suhyun

A healer holds an extraordinarily important position in a hunter's party. In a dungeon, you can't keep chugging recovery potions that cost several hundred dollars a bottle every time you take a hit, so the healer becomes a human potion — the one person who can still put life force back into you.

Important as the role is, actually finding a healer is anything but easy.

A healer is an aristocrat.

Why else would recovery potions trade at prices like that? If a healer sat in every party and handed out heals like clockwork in every dungeon, a recovery potion would be no different from an energy drink. Demand would drop, and the price would have no choice but to drop with it.

Hunters with any recovery ability at all are already scarce, and among them, those who possess a skill that can actually restore life force are scarcer still. As for why, once again, nobody knows. If a world is going to have all these different abilities, shouldn't their numbers be balanced too? No one has ever been able to answer that question.

What can you do? A small handful of people have to carve up the spoils. So healers came expensive.

Even a low-rank healer, the moment they stepped onto the job market, was snatched up by a top guild or a major hospital. Hunters of middling standing, unless they had connections, could barely catch a glimpse of a healer's retreating back.

It's no wonder healers rank as the number-one spouse on the marriage market. They don't die easily, and they make a fortune. Dungeon healers are one thing, but the healers at university hospitals and private clinics earn even more than the doctors.

Positions like those require more than a simple life-recovery skill. You need the kind that cures disease. A truly tiny number of such skills had been shown to treat certain illnesses that modern medicine still couldn't solve, and once it came out that their wielders were quite literally sweeping money in by the armful, awakening as a hunter in hopes of becoming a safe, wealthy healer grew rather popular.

Of course, wanting it doesn't make it so. Stories of lives actually turned upside down are rare.

Anyway. That was the kind of skill this was. The one called Purify.

"Heal is one thing, but what the hell is Purify supposed to be?"

All at once I felt a flash of pride at having chosen melee weapons — and shame toward the past version of myself who had been convinced melee weapons were the strongest thing alive.

Fine. It was a good ability. I still hadn't changed my mind about the early game: that path let you wring powerful, stable strength out to the absolute limit. I had simply tossed aside, cleanly, the notion that melee weapons were overwhelmingly better than every other ability, the moment I looked at these two SSS+ rank divine magic skills.

SSS+ rank was a grade you could brand however you liked — busted, fucking busted, obscenely fucking busted — and every label would still fit. It hadn't been that melee weapons were better merely because they were more efficient. The only difference was whether something was a little more convenient to use now, or more convenient later.

"Restoring twenty people to ninety percent with five Divine Power — what kind of efficiency even is that...?"

The longer I stared, the less my brain was willing ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠to accept it, and all that came out was a hollow laugh. Ask any healer and you'd get a startled huh? without fail. They'd fire straight back: the most basic recovery skill, and it costs five whole Divine Power?

My Divine Power was S+ rank. I was a character of the Rift Dimension, so I had a little more of the stuff — that was why I sat at twenty. Ordinary healers, as ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠far as I knew, had somewhere from five to ten at the very most. Even the healer they called the Saintess was widely guessed to fall between ten and twenty.

Spending five Divine Power in a single cast? Picture a healer who gets four heals off and then waits two and a half minutes for the skill to recharge, and try calling that SSS+ rank. The efficiency would feel downright poor. I'd thought the same thing at first. Isn't this a little expensive?

But the moment I read the description of that SSS+ rank recovery skill with the +100 percent divine-magic effect of Divine Imbument laid over it, five Divine Power was by no means expensive. It was exactly like the first time I saw Leap Slash and thought, Hmm... kind of pricey for a movement skill, isn't it? Nothing but a prejudice I'd cooked up from seeing the thing once.

The efficiency was ridiculous. If I used it right now I'd be casting it alone, so plenty of the healing would go to waste. Judged on raw performance alone, though, it was still goddamn broken. That much hadn't changed.

And then there was Purify, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the skill that made even a Heal like that feel ordinary.

It cured every disease.

On the strength of this one skill alone, the choice to spend an SSS+ rank ability pick on divine magic had become one hundred percent correct.

"Maybe I should retire and just open a hospital."

If I had to name a single skill truly worthy of the words SSS+ rank, wouldn't it be this?

Even in a world where ignoring the laws of nature and brushing aside the impossible under the name of mana had become a matter of course, there was exactly one thing hunters, skills, and abilities had failed to conquer. Disease.

Hundreds of them. Thousands. The countless cancers that had advanced right alongside the whole history of human life. Healers with purification-type skills could, among those, resolve a handful of illnesses that modern medicine genuinely struggled to cure — by the power of mana, or rather, by divine power — but that was the whole of it.

Plenty of people had benefited. Plenty more still walked into hospitals because they were sick. The world is full of people who would burn every last coin they owned if it only meant they could be healthy.

Even hunters fall ill. You can have a superhuman body and beat monsters to death with your bare hands, and still, once disease starts rotting you from the inside, you either borrow a doctor's hands or — if it has already progressed — you die.

This could solve that.

"Assuming it actually works, mind you..."

I could talk like that all I wanted. I obviously had no intention of throwing everything away and retiring over this one skill. It was just the thought I had every time.

If I were going to retire, I would have done it ages ago growing Sunro Mushrooms, or cracked a baldness cure out of the hair-growth fruit I'd just obtained and walked off after that.

Besides, every disease was yet another — another, and another — subjective, unbounded, ambiguous turn of phrase, and it needed testing. You can argue that the word every has no limit, and the thing will still turn around and screw you. That happens all the time. Until I finished the experiments myself, it was going to sit in my skill window as an ordinary purification skill.

Set that grand effect aside, and Heal was, for the moment, far more useful to me than Purify. To use Purify at all, I would first have to get my ass kicked by something — poisoned, or slapped with a status ailment. An enemy who could do that was an enemy I couldn't handle. If my luck held, Purify might buy me one chance to run. That was about the size of it.

"So, Oppa. Are you a healer now? Or a damage dealer?"

With two main abilities, my position had turned ambiguous. From the seat of someone who soloed, you might wonder why it even mattered — but out in the real world I'd be entering dungeons and matching tempo with other hunters now and then, and when that happened, settling on a single main ability would make a party much easier to build.

"I'll just pull the weight of two."

"Hmm... fair. What does an SSS+ rank need a party for? Watch you work and everyone else is luggage."

"The monkeys ought to be here soon, right?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"When they show up, get the whole lot assembled."

I had finished confirming the SSS+ rank abilities, but they were still SSS+ rank abilities. Glancing at a few lines of text and moving on felt like a waste. So I decided to run a test.

"Kiki... what's going on... kiki."

"Chief. You called us."

The Black Monkeys who had come were the bottom thirty of the pecking order. Formed up in ten ranks, they waited while I told just twenty of them to step forward.

"Hmm. Why do you think you lot are the bottom twenty?"

"Kiki... because we're weak."

"We are weak."

"Right. Because you're weak. I'm going to make you strong."

"Kiki?"

I put the Sewer Sword away and drew a wooden sword instead. Not the D+ rank basic sword I'd picked up in here — the wooden sword I'd used in the real world when I fought Team Leader Kim Jinhyeop. Attack +1.

I told the Black Monkeys to stand still, then cracked each of them once across the skull.

"Kieeeek!"

"Kyaaaak!"

Thock-thock-thock-thock-thock! Twenty Black Monkey heads, one blow apiece, and it didn't take three seconds. They clutched their skulls and thrashed in pain. Things that hadn't died in a single hit even from the Sewer Sword — why the drama? Then it came back to me. Because of the Corrupted Ring, my Strength was S+ rank now, and my Agility was SS− rank.

Well. As long as they weren't dead.

The remaining ten Black Monkeys stared at me in shock, while the twenty I'd hit appealed the injustice with wounded eyes. I stretched out a hand at once.

"Heal."

Five Divine Power drained out of me, and white light sank into the twenty Black Monkeys I had fixed in my mind. It felt like white rain falling over their heads. The monkeys who had been howling in pain whipped those aching heads around, bewildered in a flash.

"Ki? It doesn't hurt."

"Kiki! We're healthy!"

"The Chief made us strong!"

"Yeah. That effect is killer."

"Whoa... what the hell... that's insane."

"That's incredible, Master!"

As expected. The gap between reading a description and using the thing for real was this wide.

"From now on, call me Hua Tuo."

"Kiki! ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Hua Tuo!"

"What's a Hua Tuo? Kik!"

"Heh heh heh!"

Was this how healers felt? Watching the monkeys swell with morale off my heal, I felt as if I'd become somebody.

"Now get back to work."

I sent the monkeys off to their jobs, and called Kim Sujeong next.