Water Knows the Answer
“Mrs. Park is the one who found the Core?”
Mrs. Park, the woman who had died of food poisoning. She had been fairly muscular, yes, but muscular enough to beat down monsters and collect Cores?
“I didn’t know she was that skilled.”
“Huh? No, not like that. She picked it up where it was lying after the army swept through.”
So the army had been sloppy about searching the spoils.
“Feels like just the other day she was all excited, saying she could sell the Core and cure her sibling’s illness. Then out of nowhere she’s raising hell about a stomachache. And that’s how she died.”
“Tell me in a little more detail.”
“Her side, was it? No—the waist, right around here? Said it felt like something was wringing her—”
“Not the symptoms. Her movements.”
“Ah, right. They carried her straight to the clinic, but the treatment must not have taken. I heard that before she died she left the Core with the director and asked him to get medicine for her sibling.”
So that was how the Core had come to be left at the clinic.
“But once Mrs. Park went out of here as a corpse, this time the director took to his bed. Didn’t last long before he died. One funeral right after another.”
Mrs. Park and the former clinic director, a string of funerals. One had been the patient. The other had been the doctor treating her.
“Doesn’t that look like a case where you start by suspecting contagion?”
“The clinic director himself didn’t know what the illness was. Said if it were contagious he’d have known, so he didn’t think it was that—and in the end he died without ever finding a way to treat it.”
The healing hand had examined both Mrs. Park’s body and the previous director’s. His conclusion: the cause of death was food poisoning.
“Out of all the people in this settlement, why was it Moon-ssi’s Son who saw the bodies? Fine, he’s the clinic director now, so you can call him qualified. Until recently he wasn’t a doctor, or anything else.”
“Oh, that.”
There was a reason.
“Right after the clinic director died, a few more people came down with stomachaches too. I thought we were about to lose another batch, and that’s when Moon-ssi’s Son showed up and—swoosh!—cured them clean.”
“With what? The healing hand?”
“The healing hand!”
Round and round, and the story came back to the healing hand.
“So once he’d cured the sickness, what do you think happened next?”
“……?”
“Oh, come on. Guess.”
Why was he suddenly so excited?
“They asked the healing hand to take over the clinic. That sort of thing.”
“Exactly! Isn’t it a beautiful story?”
“Which part.”
“If you see it as heaven sending down the power to heal for our sake, right when we were in crisis, it all clicks into place, doesn’t it? Maybe an angel came down!”
“We put up a steel roof to stop air raids. How did he come down out of the sky? What part of that clicks?”
“He must have come down to the surface and walked in.”
An angel strolling through the settlement.
“Through where? The front gate?”
“Could’ve been the back gate. What does it matter which one?”
“Didn’t they plaster traps in front of every gate?”
“An angel’s eyes would see all of that.”
“Dig up one of the spots where they planted the traps. See if there isn’t a dead angel in it.”
“Anyway, I’ll admit it’s a little strange that the power went to Moon-ssi’s Son of all people. Still, it’s all heaven’s will. That’s what I’m saying. Idle one, be useful!”
This settlement believed in God. Maybe that was why an absurd healing-hand act was actually landing. Not that I believed in God. It wasn’t only God I refused to believe in.
I didn’t believe in anything except the Backscratcher.
In any case, there was no chance he had cured an illness with something like a healing hand. Had he gained a Core ability, perhaps? The odds were slim, but a Core hand was still more convincing than a healing hand. A Core hand was plainly not the healing hand they talked about. A healing hand might be a god’s blessing, but a Core was nothing more than a monster’s heart—just the pot you won by staking your life in a gamble against a devil.
“Still, after this, everyone’s looking at Moon-ssi’s Son differently, you know? When they asked him to take the clinic, he refused at first, flat out. The director’s seat, no less! Do you know what kind of seat that is, hm?”
“……?”
“What kind of seat!”
“You want me to guess again?”
He nodded.
So besides Bae Guk-jang, there was one more person who should never, under any circumstances, be allowed to get excited.
“Second-in-command of the settlement.”
“Yes! That kind of seat! And he turned it down, can you believe it? No medical knowledge, he said. You should have seen how humble he was.”
“That’s not humility. That’s just the truth.”
“Being able to say what’s true—that’s what makes it humble.”
Hm. I couldn’t argue with that.
“Anyway, he didn’t refuse all the way to the end, which is how he became the director, isn’t it?”
“Tsk, tsk. Still got that talent for saying something true in the most crooked way. And Moon-ssi’s father is still grinning from ear to ear because his son made it big, so don’t go jinxing it.”
Moon-ssi. Unlike that good-for-nothing son of his, the man was decent. You could tell just from the courteous way he accepted his mail. He and I got along, too. Whenever the brat started giving me shit for no reason, the old man would appear from somewhere, twist the kid’s ear, and drag him off. Bad heredity, or did the man have two wives? The idle son had still looked like he wanted his father’s approval, and somehow the wish had come true.
“So Moon-ssi’s Son became director of the clinic, and only after that did he officially examine Mrs. Park and the previous director and announce the cause of death. That the order of it?”
“They couldn’t very well bury them without knowing the cause, so they’d left the bodies as they were. A few more days and the stench of rot would have forced a burial anyway.”
“Setting the healing hand aside, I’m amazed everyone just believes an examination by Moon-ssi’s Son, who doesn’t even have medical knowledge.”
“Look around. This place is packed with medical books. Whose do you think they all are now?”
“So we’re trusting an examination he crammed for overnight.”
“What’s wrong with that? It’s the best way to study.”
“You’re saying a surprising number of true things today.”
But this sort of thing should have happened only once or twice. This was a settlement where hard-to-understand incidents had always been common. That was why outsiders called the place the Tomb. Suspicious deaths broke out whenever things got dull.
People dying was nothing worth a fuss. Getting mauled by a monster or a zombie out on a search was routine, and even more died at the hands of other humans. The problem was how unnaturally often people dropped dead inside this settlement.
Even so, the settlers made no effort to find the cause. They called the place the Cradle and lived content. The Cradle—a name meaning the place where God was first born. They believed everyone who died suddenly had been taken because God needed them.
In the end, whoever died or didn’t, no one here felt it was a problem. Enough to make you wonder whether someone was covering it up on purpose. That was the secret of the settlement’s peace.
This time, I have a feeling this Core is where the whole thing started.
A green Core patterned with ripples sat in a corner of the clinic. Did the Core know that the people who had passed through its hands had died? There was no physical proof yet that the Core had caused any of it. Only a smell. A truly foul one.
“So this Core ended up with Moon-ssi’s Son? Because he became the owner of the clinic?”
“Strictly speaking, it would belong to Mrs. Park’s sibling, wouldn’t it? She left the Core with the clinic in the first place, asking them to sell it and spend the money on her sibling’s treatment. Moon-ssi’s Son is only trying to honor her last wishes.”
As if that would ever happen. The money from selling the Core would all go into his own pocket.
This sits wrong with me.
Of course, whatever was happening in this settlement was someone else’s business. But I had to stay here and wait for two hours anyway. And I couldn’t simply give up on that Core.
Maybe I’ll follow the smell. Just a little.
I kept staring at the Core, and Madangbal made a show of being bored.
“Don’t get close to that. You’ll get food poisoning too.”
“If I do, that precious healing hand of his will treat me.”
“Oho. You’ve decided to believe now?”
Belief.
“Do you know what’s required if you want to believe in something?”
“In the sacred Cradle, you dare to talk about faith?”
“I seem to recall you saying faith doesn’t need anything like evidence.”
“Well, well. You remembered. I thought my words went in one ear and out the other.”
He knew me well. Most of the time, I wasn’t listening.
The evidence-free faith Madangbal meant was the religious kind—questions like whether God exists. That sort of belief was no problem at all. It belonged entirely to one’s private values. The problem was that the people here believed in the healing hand in exactly the same way. That was a problem. Moon-ssi’s Son, after all, was not a god.
“But there is a kind of belief that absolutely requires evidence. A fact like someone having died of food poisoning, for instance.”
“You mean you don’t trust Moon-ssi’s Son? I’ll grant you the kid’s got a criminal’s face, but he did treat people. That’s a plain fact.”
“It’s already been set off. I can’t stop it.”
“Set off what?”
“Suspicion.”
Belief grows firm only once it has broken through doubt.
“If you truly mean to pursue the truth, then at least once in your life you have to doubt, as far as possible, everything. That’s what he said.”
“Uh…… Who?”
“Someone. A man who tried to prove that God exists. Anyway, watch closely from here. This is how you go looking for belief.”
Moon-ssi’s Son, the professional idler. How was he curing people’s illnesses?
The most realistic answer, and the easiest to reach for, was a Core ability. Back in my active-duty days I had seen plenty of healer-type hunters. It was entirely possible. The trouble was that once you used an ability like that, the cooldown ran long, so you couldn’t heal people without limit. If it really was a Core ability, there would be no way to expose it. A secret I could never uncover unless it came out of his own mouth. So I would set that possibility aside for now.
If not a Core ability, then what else?
There might be an answer even more down-to-earth than a Core ability.
“Get up for a second.”
“Huh?”
“Now.”
I cleared Madangbal off the examination bed. The patient from a little while ago had lain here to be treated, too. Start from here.
He did something in this spot. I’m sure of it.
There was nothing wrong with the bed. I looked around for any special equipment and found nothing of note there either.
Does he keep whatever cures them on him at all times?
Something small enough to hide in his clothes. If he’d had a way to slip them medicine in secret, for instance, then there would be nothing I could uncover here. He wasn’t in the clinic right now.
Something he could carry on him…… hm?
That was when a wooden cup caught my eye.
Moon-ssi’s Son had filled this cup with water and offered it to the patient. And at the news that the patient’s daughter was ill as well, he had taken a canteen and left the clinic. Worth checking.
“What are you doing? Drinking that? A patient used that cup. You’re going to use it without even washing it?”
“Wash this and we’re in trouble.”
“Huh?”
“The evidence might vanish.”
The way to check was simple. Settlers usually shared drinking water drawn from the same source, so the water kept in each house was bound to be similar in composition. I went around the houses near the clinic and took a little from each. When I said a few drops would do, no one asked for anything in return. This wasn’t a settlement so mean it would charge you for two drops of water.
When I came back to the clinic, Madangbal was lying on the bed.
“What are you wandering around for? At least explain yourself.”
“A forensic investigation.”
“Looks less like science and more like a targeted investigation to me.”
“You said it yourself. The guy’s got a criminal’s face.”
“That part’s true, but suspecting someone over their face is exactly what a targeted investigation is.”
“Didn’t you know? Physiognomy is a science.”
I set a finger to each of the drops I had collected and communed with them. Every sample came back over ninety-nine percent similar in composition. Now for the clinic’s water—the real question. Four canteens sat in a corner of the clinic. I would draw off a few drops and check.
99.41%
99.85%
99.16%
Similar composition, as expected. Up to here, the water stored at the clinic wasn’t much different either. Would the last one be the same?
96.28%
Just as I thought.
Water whose composition stood out all on its own. Exactly as I’d expected. Only this canteen had some kind of mark drawn on it. He must have labeled it so he could tell the contents apart. Almost there.
“Even if you’re not the one drinking it, sticking your hand into a water cup—where did you pick up a habit like that?”
“Forensics has no sacred ground.”
The moisture left in the cup. That alone was enough.
The result:
96.3%
Just as expected—its composition differed from the water circulating through the settlement. One last check. Compare the moisture left in the cup with the marked canteen from before.
99.79%
The water that had been in this cup had definitely come from the marked canteen.
“What on earth are you doing? Can’t you explain while you work?”
“I found evidence.”
“Evidence? Of what?”
Evidence that the healing hand was not God’s.