Fight Poison with Poison
Before the clinic's proprietor could make it back, I hurried someone in — the man who would carry the climax of this little business. Until his moment came, I meant to keep him stowed quietly in the back yard.
A short while later the door banged open, and the proprietor returned.
"Nothing happened while I was out, I trust...... Why is the Postman still here?"
The canteen swinging from his hand caught my eye.
"Don't tell me you're still squatting here because you want to buy that Core."
"Blessed are those who wait."
He shook his head with a sour little smile, as if the whole thing were absurd. Time to lay out the findings of my forensic inquiry.
Let's see just how impressive this power of yours really is.
If you truly were a god — no, even if you'd only come into an angel's gift — then you ought to be able to drink poison and live.
"Treatment wrapped up nicely, I take it."
"Of course. The food poisoning on the patient who was lying here earlier cleared right up in the meantime."
Brimming with confidence, he raised his right hand and showed me the palm.
"You treated him with that hand?"
"The left works just as well."
"I'm sure it does. At this point your feet would probably manage."
"My feet are perfectly ordinary. The power is in my hands alone."
He looked away and started tidying the canteens.
"If you stayed just to sneer, you've wasted your time. A jab that small doesn't sour my mood in the least. Oh, and if you stayed to buy the Core, that was a waste too. I will never sell it to you. Not ever, no matter what happens."
Talking around a thing only breeds misunderstanding. The Old Man had said it himself: with a fool, the only answer is to speak plainly.
"I'm not sneering. Wouldn't your feet be plenty? All you have to do is mash the medicine into the water. Your backside could manage it."
The hands straightening the canteens went still. A brief silence. Then he set about dusting the blameless medicine cabinet, as if I had never spoken.
"Why so quiet?"
"Ah. Were you talking to me?"
He went on without so much as a glance in my direction.
"It didn't mean anything I could follow, so I didn't realize it was meant for me."
"Strange. I was told that if you speak plainly, even a fool understands."
"......A fool?"
Only then did he look at me.
"There we go. You're catching on. Well then."
I set the marked canteen on the table, and the cup in question beside it.
"This is the cup the patient drank from earlier."
He stared back with dead eyes and said nothing. How long could he keep that face in place?
"You'd already mixed medicine into this canteen, hadn't you. The cure, I mean. You poured water from it into the wooden cup."
He answered with a snort.
"Good thing you stayed. Something's clearly wrong up here — shall we operate right now? Pop the lid off your skull and it'll be over in a minute."
Right up until he returned, I had kept communing with the water in that canteen, trying to learn what, exactly, was dissolved in it. Unfortunately I couldn't pin the substance down. It seemed to be something I had never communed with before. Its nature, though, I could tell.
Medicine.
Without a doubt, a drug meant to treat a person. The method was the same one I'd used to verify the pharmaceuticals Kkamagwi had tried to sell on the black market.
The probability that whatever is dissolved in this water was made on Production Line 19, Wing G of the government complex...
Cross-checking every production line, one by one. If drinking the water had cured the illness, then of course the odds were high that medicine had been mixed in. The result confirmed it. Something from a pharmaceutical line was dissolved in that water. What had cured the sickness wasn't a healing hand. It was medicine.
If some god were looking down on this settlement alone, even he would not forgive a show like this.
"Proprietor. You made the people of this settlement sick, didn't you. I don't know how you managed it. Afterward you had them drink this water — the water you'd dosed with the cure — and the sickness went away."
"......What are you saying? Why would I make people sick? No — I don't even have the ability, to begin with."
His face said he hadn't the faintest idea. He turned straight to Madangbal, as if calling for backup.
"Do you understand a word this Postman is saying?"
"Not a bit. Heat got to him?"
Madangbal only blinked. I'd left the window open, so the man hidden in the back yard would be hearing every word of this.
"And I mixed a cure into the water to heal them? What kind of idiot goes to the trouble of making people sick and then handing out medicine? If I had a cure like that, I'd prescribe it. Why sneak it into their water? From first to last, none of this makes a lick of sense."
It was the first time I'd heard him speak so logically, and the suspicion only deepened. That was a prepared line.
"You'll keep denying it, that's plain, so first I'll prove you dissolved a cure in that canteen. That alone will make it obvious you've been lying."
Of course I could never reveal that I had an ability to see probabilities. Tipping my hand over something this small wouldn't pay.
The proof has to be made without the ability.
I set two cups on the table with a tap, and filled each with a different water. One held ordinary drinking water. The other held water from the canteen in which the medicine had been dissolved.
"I never gave you leave to use the drinking water as you please. That is, strictly speaking, clinic property."
"This will only take a moment."
"Moment or not, pay properly for the two cups you poured without permission. I'll take back one of those homemade rounds I gave you earlier."
An attack I hadn't seen coming. A cheaper man than I'd imagined.
"Come on, hand it over."
I set a round on the table. He snatched it up at once. Stingy to the bone.
"You've paid, so drink your two cups to your heart's content. Drink them quietly and go, and I won't even call the guards."
No. I only meant to drink one.
"One of these is for you."
"Hm? By all means. Drink up, then leave at once."
He reached for a cup without a flicker of hesitation. Dosed or not, the water would do him no harm, so he had no reason to refuse. But what if I did it this way?
"I'm not telling you to drink it as it is. Let me show you something entertaining."
I took out my secret weapon, a medicine bottle.
"......What's that?"
"A clinic proprietor who can't even recognize a drug. Allow me to explain."
It was the antihistamine I'd given the commandos, taken back again. Recovered, more than received. Anyway.
"What's in here is a drug used to treat a rare disease."
Watch closely. If you're going to run a con, this is how you run it.
"The active ingredient, placebo hydrochloride, is a gentle little thing. Taken on its own, it causes no trouble at all."
I kept up the specialist's tone and dropped one antihistamine into each cup.
"You can dissolve it in water and take it that way, too."
"If you know so much, you should have been a pharmacist instead of a Postman."
"The problem starts now."
I pointed at the water he had dosed with the cure ahead of time, and went on.
"As I confirmed, there was already a drug dissolved in this one. The cure you mixed in, I'd say, and its active ingredient is panacea trihydrate."
Proprietor and Madangbal both looked lost at words they had never heard in their lives. I was hearing them for the first time myself.
"The result of a scientific analysis I ran while you were out."
I shot Madangbal, head tilted, a look that told him to keep his mouth shut.
"Right now, inside this cup, panacea trihydrate and placebo hydrochloride are meeting, and a special reaction is underway. Mm. That ought to be about done."
"......Drop the difficult words and say it so a person can understand."
"In plain terms, it becomes poison."
I lifted the cup and held it out to him. He only glared. I smiled lightly, gave the cup a little shake, and he took it, reluctant.
"If, as you say, what was in there was ordinary drinking water, then drinking it won't cause any problem. But if I'm right, that water is poison by now."
He went rigid. I gestured for him to knock it back. He didn't move.
"What's the matter?"
"......I'm not drinking it."
"Oh?"
"Isn't it more likely that what you just put in here is the poison? A cheap trick like that—"
"I thought you'd say that."
The other cup sat in front of me: ordinary drinking water, with an antihistamine in it. I drained it in two swallows.
"See? No problem at all. I put the exact same drug in this cup as the one you're holding."
In the cup in his hand, the surface began to tremble.
"If that water were ordinary drinking water, the way what I just drank was, then drinking it would do nothing to you. But if, as I expect, you dissolved panacea trihydrate in it beforehand?"
"......Then it's become poison. That's what you're saying."
"Now we're having a conversation."
He stared down at the water shivering in the cup. After a long silence, the way out he found was this.
"You expect me to believe that? Bluster like that isn't much of a threat."
Disappointing, but I'd expected as much.
"Then all you have to do is drink it. Simple."
"I'm not about to be played by a stunt like this. I'm calling the guards."
Any time now would be good for him to show himself.
"Drink it."
Right on cue. The man hidden in the back yard slowly rose, and a moment later everyone could see him through the window.
"Just drink it and see. If the Postman is playing a trick, you'll be fine."
The proprietor's father. Moon-ssi.
"......Dad, what are you doing out there?"
"Quit yapping and drink. It'll be over in a second."
This way I wouldn't have to pressure him myself. He was weak where his father was concerned, if nowhere else.
"The Postman brought you? You're all falling for it, every last—"
"I wondered what the fuss was. Glad I came to see."
"Just call the guards."
"Drink it. Now."
"I'm telling you, he put poison in the water! Do you want me dead?"
"When the Postman drank it, nothing—"
"It's a trick! He only poisoned the one I'm supposed to drink!"
He hurled the cup. From the shattered wood, blameless drinking water ran out like blood.
"A trick? Then let's do it this way. More certain."
I dumped out the bottle of antihistamines and refilled the cup I'd emptied with ordinary drinking water. This time he didn't ask me to pay for it.
"I'll show you plainly there's no trick. Moon-ssi, pick a tablet yourself."
Moon-ssi, who had climbed in through the window, took one of the spilled tablets and dropped it into the cup.
"I'll drink again."
Two swallows.
"Nothing, as expected. Ordinary drinking water, and a drug with nothing wrong with it."
Into the emptied cup I now poured water from the marked canteen. Moon-ssi likewise picked up one of the antihistamines rolling across the table and dropped it in.
"There. If this is ordinary water too, drinking it won't do a thing. You watched with your own two eyes — there wasn't a gap where I could have pulled a trick."
He had to be doubtful. A Postman, of all people, with a useless surplus of knowledge about drugs — suspicious from the start. And poison, appearing out of nowhere. It had every right to look like bluster.
But he couldn't dismiss what I'd said as mere bluster.
Because it was true that he'd mixed medicine into the canteen ahead of time.
And the decisive point was that I had found it out. There was no other way to explain it except that I knew drugs inside and out. So he couldn't simply wave off the claim that mixing them had made a poison.
Of course, he might decide it wasn't knowledge at all — that I'd found it out with a Core ability I was hiding.
That changed nothing. For him, it would be worse. No need to think about which was the more troublesome opponent: a Postman rich in knowledge, or a Postman hiding a Core ability.
If anyone in this situation could stake his life on drinking that water, it wouldn't be nerve. It would be a man who didn't know his own life was worth keeping.
He ground his teeth, a harsh, grating scrape. Even if the bastard lost his head and drank, I would lose nothing. I'd only be a Postman who had talked a streak of nonsense. He, on the other hand, would be betting his life.
I've won.
The match was already over.
"Did you really dissolve a cure in it?"
"Why would you do a thing like that."
Why indeed. Flash a god-given power to heal, and he could take the clinic proprietor's seat, conveniently vacant. An end to life as an idle nobody, and a rare Core thrown in besides. He wouldn't have known about the ripple pattern, but green alone would have told him that Core was expensive.
"If you won't drink it, I will."
"Dad!"
Moon-ssi lifted the cup to his mouth. The old fellow was laying it on thicker than he needed to.
"It's your son who ought to drink."
I set a hand calmly on his arm.
"Put it down."
I gripped with everything I had. Moon-ssi's arm trembled as he lowered it, straining.
"Ha. Fine. I'm throwing all of you out of the clinic. You!"
He seemed to have decided Madangbal was the only one left who would listen.
"Y-yes?"
"Go fetch the guards."
"Ah."
I gave a small shake of the head, but—
"Be right back!"
Madangbal burst out of the clinic, leaving nothing behind but a pitiful retreat.
Moon-ssi had lowered his arm, but he still couldn't let go of the cup. If the old fellow actually drank it, the whole plan would come apart.
"Dad, go home. And you, Postman — you stay. I want to see the guards drag you out looking like a fool."
He had already lost. The moment he started bluffing, he had as good as admitted that his healing hands were a fraud.
So he means to hold out on nothing but nonsense.
But in the end he couldn't hold out for long — because a short while later, Moon-ssi's Son was a corpse.
The cause of death was food poisoning.