Yes. I Am, Uh... a Man! (4)

"Phew…"

The entity had completely vanished. We slumped down where we stood and finally let our breath out. When I turned my head, I saw a pale-faced soldier — a private first class, leaning against the wall as he staggered, two other privates supporting him on either side.

I offered the soldiers a bow. "Thank you, truly, for everything you've done."

"It's why we came here in the first place."

The private's color looked bad. The pain from the gunshot wound in his thigh was creeping back up on him. But whatever his complexion said, the smile on his face was genuine. Looking at that face, a question suddenly occurred to me.

"Why did you come rushing here, of all places?"

"I heard a monster had appeared in the exam room while I was lying in the ICU. I'm a soldier — I couldn't just stay in bed."

He smiled bashfully. "Do you think this makes up for it, a little?"

"It more than makes up for it."

"That's a relief, then."

The privates helped him into a wheelchair. So that's how he got down here. It must have been an exhausting ordeal.

"Then I'll head back to my room, Professor. When would rounds be convenient?"

"Would this afternoon work?"

"Understood. Get some rest."

The wheelchair carrying the soldier creaked its way back toward the intensive care unit. He needs to recover fast. He'd already been septic; wandering the halls was hardly ideal for him. But thanks to that man, we'd been able to deal with the entity — so this once, I decided to let it slide.

The basin…

I stared at the spot where the Beggar Royal had stood. There, where he had vanished, lay the rusty basin. So it's an item.

Subduing an entity in accordance ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠with its narrative produces an item. A weak entity like the Digital Portrait, for instance, could simply be shot dead with a gun — but doing it that way meant no item dropped, which is why the game recommended eliminating entities according to their stories whenever possible.

I wonder if the Management Bureau in the real world did the same? Curious, I asked Shiho, and she confirmed it.

"Yes. The Bureau's field agents were supposed to aim for suppression and containment first, but when they had no choice but to destroy an entity, they went after the item."

The Management Bureau had wanted, pathologically, to quarantine Echoes away from society. Kill an entity, and the Echo simply went hunting for a new host — so their policy centered on suppression and detention rather than extermination.

Another difference from the game. In the game, anything caught at a checkpoint was burned without mercy. The risk of the Bureau collapsing for letting an Echo through to resonate with a new victim simply outweighed the risk of the Echo itself.

"I'll take charge of the item for now."

I picked up the basin sitting abandoned in the corridor.

I couldn't quite remember its effect, so I pulled up the drop-item entry linked to the Beggar Royal's codex entry. The item description, of course, was maddeningly unhelpful. Just as the earlier research reports had voted a fake into the majority, every item description in the game read like this one. Not that item descriptions ever mattered much in the game.

There, carrying an item simply bumped certain stats — survival rate, evasion, attack power, recovery. But now that the game had become reality, we didn't have the luxury of playing with numbers. I should at least figure out what it does. I suspected it transformed you or strengthened your body, but I couldn't be sure. So, on the off chance, I asked Shiho.

"The game never explained how to actually use the items. What about the Bureau's app?"

"The Bureau banned item use outright on the surface. And otherwise, the culture was everyone for themselves — people hoarded their items, or sat on the information."

Shiho shook her head. Why did every story about the Management Bureau somehow get worse the deeper you dug? The fact that the fate of the world had once rested on people like that was now less infuriating than it was simply absurd.

"I see. Well, I can at least make a rough guess at this item's power."

"You can, Jungwook?"

"Yes. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠In the end, it all comes down to narrative. Narrative."

Echoes were tied to the bad endings of stories. Just as a person consumed by regret becomes a ghost, stories that met tragic ends resonate with reality carrying that regret within them. Items, on the other hand, were tied to happy endings — most item descriptions were written in exactly that spirit.

"If we frame this entity through the story of The Prince and the Pauper, the Echo is probably the worldline where the pauper dragged the prince down."

I raised the basin to eye level. "And this item is the worldline where the pauper forgave the prince."

"So what does it actually do?"

"Hard to say. But as it happens, I see a perfect place to test it."

I looked down at the woman sprawled on the floor, moaning as she crawled. The president of the mom cafe was feeling her way across the tiles, searching for me.

"Pro… Professor… I can't see…"

The voice spilling from her throat was the gravelly voice of a fifty-pack-year smoker — a middle-aged man's rasp. It was not a pleasant scene. Half the skin of her face peeled away would have been bad enough on its own, but this was a woman whose eyes and nose were gone, groping the floor for me.

This is why I hate entities. What the Beggar Royal peeled away wasn't just skin. Voice, eyes, nose, mouth — and at the end, memory. The pain of having your face torn off was one thing, but the feeling of your very identity being stripped from you in real time was not something I cared to imagine.

Ugh. That could have been me. I didn't know if that was the right way to put it, but mercifully, the woman's ordeal had ended at her voice and her eyes, nose, and mouth. If her lips, ears, and the whole shape of her face had been taken too, her memories would have been next.

"Professor… what am I supposed to do now? I… I can see again someday, right?"

She looked only at me, pitiful and desperate. Seeing her in that state, a sigh escaped me before I could stop it. She didn't exactly do anything to earn my help. Honestly, I didn't want to help her. She'd stacked up an impressive mountain of unlikable points, after all. Strictly speaking, she wasn't even my patient — I was cardiology, and she was a plastic surgery case.

But… Ugh. Hippocrates, you insufferable nuisance.

I couldn't bring myself to abandon a patient reaching for me. In this beggar's world of a planet, this scrap of humanity was the only thing that separated me from the monsters.

I pressed the basin into her groping hands. "Ma'am. Listen carefully."

The prescription I was about to write wouldn't be all that different from the one for the Digital Portrait. "From this moment, what happens to you depends on what you do."

When I'd treated Gu Jihye, I had given her one command: face the wrongs of her past, and go out and do enough service work to build an image of a good person. For the photographs that embodied her ugly interior to grow young again, she herself had to change. The same went for this woman.

"If you have built up good connections, ma'am, then mercy will accumulate in the basin."

The power of the beggar's bowl had to be regeneration. Not the healing of ordinary wounds — like the entity itself, it would have to regenerate even injuries that should have been impossible to recover from. In the game it had been written up as Regeneration +5; that notation was the proof. The question was the condition for triggering that regeneration. And that condition would be mercy.

Having heard me out, the woman asked in a trembling voice, "Te… teacher? How long will the treatment take?"

"I don't know. Probably the rest of your life."

She flinched at my words and hunched her shoulders in fear — much the way Gu Jihye once had. So I coaxed her the way I had coaxed Jihye back then.

"Don't think of it as something daunting. You know how managing hypertension or high cholesterol works, right?"

Diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia… They say modern people have conquered countless diseases, but strictly speaking, most of them we simply manage and hold at bay. Narrative therapy was no different.

"I can't promise you what will fill your basin, ma'am."

Modern medicine or Echoes — in the end, it came down to what the patients themselves did.

A few days passed. I finished my rounds and sat down, later than I should have, to a solitary lunch.

"Thank you for the food."

This was my second week confined to the hospital. I'd stopped eating the cafeteria meals and taken to buying convenience-store lunch boxes instead. My apologies to the nutrition department, but I was thoroughly sick of them. Ahh, I want to eat out somewhere. Not that that fog out there would ever allow it.

So there I was in the research office, poking at a lunch box alone, when the door burst open and the Department Chair stormed in.

"Whoa, Jungwook! You will not believe this!"

"What?"

At his side stood Shiho, her belly so round it was just barely peeking out from under her top. "Jungwook. You can stop eating those lunch boxes now."

She too was rubbing her stomach beside him, wearing a deeply satisfied smile. Just how much do you have to eat for your belly to swell up like a mountain? I was still mulling that over when the Department Chair snatched my lunch box away.

"Hey, hey! Today's cafeteria menu is incredible. Get down there and eat."

"What?"

"Actual cooking. Real cooking, for the first time."

What on earth could be so amazing to warrant all this fuss? For the first time in ages, I checked the menu on my phone.

"…?"

What is this. Did the cafeteria resonate too? Before, it was nothing but stir-fried pork with the occasional grilled fish.

I turned to the Department Chair. "This isn't human meat, is it?"

"Hey, you little—! The nutrition staff worked their tails off to keep our spirits up, and that's what you have to say?"

"So you're telling me the thought never crossed your mind, sir?"

"…Honestly? I ate with the diagnostic lab professor, so I asked her to run a tissue test on the meat."

Figures. This man's thought process wasn't so different from mine after all.

"And what did she say?"

"Genuine pork, real fish, and some dry, flavorless excuse for chicken breast."

"Oh no — she didn't get annoyed that you were wasting a microscope and lab equipment on something like that?"

"She said, honestly, she was curious too."

"…"

Come to think of it, the Department Chair had a friend in diagnostic pathology, just as I did. If I remembered right, the two of them were a pair of troublemakers who'd once broken their noses skiing together.

"Anyway, Jungwook — go eat downstairs. You won't last without it."

"But I already bought a lunch box…"

"What kind of med-school professor is this stingy? I'll buy it for you, so come on."

Between the two of them, I was dragged down to the cafeteria. And while I stood at the A-B-C corners deliberating, one of the nutrition staff, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠transferring meat onto trays, came over to me.

"Professor!"

A raspy, fifty-pack-year voice. It was the mom cafe president. I hadn't expected to run into her here.

"Ma'am? What brings you here?"

At my question, she burst into a broad, easygoing laugh and explained. "We moms got to talking about what we could actually do inside the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠hospital, and it turns out this is the thing we're best at."

She gestured at the food. "Medicine matters, sure, but a person needs to eat to hold on, don't they? So we decided to pitch in with the nutrition department."

I looked at the dishes she was pointing to. They could really do all this just by volunteering?

"…Forgive me, but what did you do for a living, outside?"

"Oh, I just ran a restaurant. Nothing special."

She added, as an afterthought, that it was one of those hole-in-the-wall places that changed its menu every single day.

"…It seems the basin has filled up quite a bit, then."

"The hospital staff have been so kind about donating blood."

She pointed to the basin sitting at the entrance of the cafeteria — the one with the note explaining it was part of her treatment. It was filled to the brim with blood.

"I've begged for all sorts of things, but money never amounted to anything — blood and flesh, that's what came."

She couldn't exactly ask people to hand over their eyes or noses, so…

"I just asked for a few drops of blood, but people give like that every day. I'm so grateful."

So many people were donating that the blood was overflowing.

"That's right. Would you like to see, Professor?"

She pulled down the mask she'd been wearing. Her eyes had come back — but the skin of her face and her nose had not. Still, considering how quickly her eyes had returned…

The rest will come back soon too.

Just how much blood had she begged off people?

"That's a relief."

"It's all thanks to you, Professor."

She took both my hands in hers. "Professor. I'm sorry. For back then."

"It's all in the past. It's fine."

"Still, I owed you an apology."

She bowed her head deeply.

— Gyu-cheol's mom!

Just then, a voice called her from the kitchen. She hastily fixed her mask and turned toward it.

"Professor, it's still the lunch rush, so I'd better get going. If there's anything you'd like to eat later, just say the word."

She limped off toward the kitchen. I watched her go for a long moment, then shrugged to myself and headed for Corner B.

"Mmm. This is good."

The seerfish meunière was excellent.

"Right? It's good, isn't it?"

Shiho had settled into the seat across from me, a mountain range of chicken breast steaks piled on her tray. Hold on. Didn't you already eat lunch?

"Shiho? What's with all those steaks?"

"Want a pro tip, Jungwook? Near the end of the lunch service, they stop counting one per person — you can eat all the leftovers you want."

"That's not what I meant. Didn't you just have lunch?"

At that, she rubbed her newly flattened stomach and gave me an embarrassed grin. "My body's just got terrible fuel efficiency… hehe."

Watching her ravenously devour the meat, I found myself inevitably turning over the terms of our contract in my head. If we get out of this hospital, how am I supposed to keep this woman fed?

Would a buffet actually be more economical? I spent the rest of my lunch solemnly contemplating ways to protect my bank account — and savoring every last bite of the meal.