The short average life expectancy of people here isn’t simply due to climate or parasites. And that’s also why people of the Northern Sea Ice Palace should be excluded from the average.
Jin Cheon-hee realized what his master hadn’t said.
Anyway, he was a physician. Not a politician or a thinker. He had no intention whatsoever of interfering in the internal affairs of another sect after coming all the way to the Outer Realm. Saving the patient in front of him and returning was already burdensome enough.
Phew. Let’s solve the problem in front of me first.
A soldier of the Healing Center stopped Jin Cheon-hee. No matter how you looked at him, he had the features and hair color of a Central Plains person. And the clothes he was wearing, though plain and undecorated, still looked unmistakably expensive.
Instead of kicking him away like he would a commoner, the soldier addressed Jin Cheon-hee politely.
“We’re restricting entry. There are patients with an epidemic inside.”
Jin Cheon-hee presented the letter of introduction from the Northern Sea Ice Palace.
The soldier replied in a businesslike tone. “Please enter.”
It was the kind of voice that made it clear he wanted no responsibility.
Guided inside, Jin Cheon-hee found the inner part of the Healing Center crammed with sickbeds. The patients’ excrement, sweat, and countless other odors churned together into a stench so foul it seemed to cling to the back of his throat. Groans filled the air. Some patients were bound tightly, mouths gagged, yet delirium still drove them to foam and tremble, eyes rolling as if they were trying to escape their own skulls.
“There’s an emergency patient here…!”
No physicians stepped forward to help. Each simply watched with empty eyes.
Only then did Jin Cheon-hee understand.
They’re waiting for them to die.
If it was an incurable epidemic, people gathered the afflicted, isolated them in one place like this, waited, then burned the corpses. Since it “couldn’t be cured anyway,” they treated medicine and even water as wasted resources, and neglect followed as naturally as breathing.
Jin Cheon-hee hurried over. He pressed the patient’s acupoints to prevent seizures and checked the rash creeping up from the neck. Strangely, there was no rash on the soles of the feet, yet the body burned with a vicious fever.
The patient on the next bed spoke, voice flat. “You should’ve let him die.”
Thud, thud!
The seizing man’s limbs jerked again under Jin Cheon-hee’s hands.
“I can’t do that.”
“Everyone here is just waiting for the day they die. Maybe you’re still naive because you’re a rookie physician.”
Jin Cheon-hee pressed the mute acupoint to calm the convulsions for the moment, but he didn’t know how long it would hold. Fortunately, it seemed like a neurological seizure caused by illness rather than an issue with blood points. Still, this was nothing more than a stopgap, a crude order given to the body: don’t die yet.
He turned his head slightly toward the speaker. “Sir, do you also have no rashes on your soles? And your palms?”
The patient’s eyes flicked over him. “Fascinating. You can tell that just by looking at one?”
“Not always.”
Jin Cheon-hee asked question after question. Where the rash began. Whether it itched. Whether there were chills, fever, muscle pain. How many people recovered fully.
“Those who endure about two weeks leave alive,” the patient said. “Those who can’t endure die within that time. That fellow you knocked out won’t last. He’s old.”
“Many elderly people die.”
“Yeah. Kids die easily too.”
After checking pulses again, Jin Cheon-hee’s thoughts sharpened into a single possibility.
Typhus…?
If this were modern times, a blood test would settle it quickly, cleanly, with an answer he could hold in his palm. But that was impossible here.
The nightmare of the Five Poisons Sect surfaced in his mind like something rotten rising in water.
Putting it all together, typhus fit. It was also an epidemic known to erupt in cold regions.
Typhus. It was also broadly called Rickettsia. Just from the name, it sounded like a cousin of typhoid fever, but it was a completely different disease.
It occurred mainly in cold regions, caused by a small insect: a louse. Lice infected with typhus transmitted the illness while biting human bodies, and the feces produced by those lice entered the skin and blood to trigger infection.
Historically, records claimed that as many as three million Russians died due to typhus during World War I, with even more deaths in Poland and Romania across Eastern Europe. That wasn’t all. Infection exploded among soldiers, too, and in Serbia, one hundred fifty thousand soldiers were forced to die in massive waves.
Later, the number of patients rose into the tens of millions, and the fatality rate fluctuated between 1–20%, making it maddeningly unpredictable. The reason was simple and cruel: severity varied dramatically with age. It was fatal to the elderly and to young children, while the fatality rate dropped sharply for young, healthy adults.
That was why the seizing patient had been an old man.
After an incubation period of about one to two weeks, chills, headache, rash, and fever began. The rash spread from the trunk to the limbs, with the distinctive characteristic of not appearing on the face, palms, and especially the soles.
Thanks to that, he’d recognized it quickly.
The problem was what came next.
In patients with weakened immunity, records described symptoms of mental disorder: auditory hallucinations, visual hallucinations, confusion, delirium. The central nervous system was being damaged. When those symptoms overlapped with the rash, people here tended to mark them as the ones who would die in this place.
And this region was cold, but not completely frozen. Because the lake was warm, it maintained a temperature that stayed just barely tolerable. Combined with extreme wealth disparity, it created an environment almost perfect for lice to thrive.
Those lice bred everywhere, clinging and multiplying, and they spread the disease as they went.
This is… completely different from the epidemic Master treated in the past.
Treatment was possible with antibiotics. Not with the kind used in modern times, but fortunately, literature recorded anecdotes of treatment with penicillin. According to a paper he’d read for fun long ago, seven people were given penicillin. One died. Six improved.
Year 1946.
He remembered sitting in his room, fascinated that he could view overseas papers published before he was even born, just by clicking through the internet. Who would’ve thought that grinning at how advanced the world had become would help at a time like this?
However, there was also speculation that penicillin didn’t treat typhus directly. Instead, it may have treated additional infections accompanying the disease, giving the immune system enough strength to fight Rickettsia. If so, he thought treatment might also be possible with streptomycin, which interfered with bacterial protein synthesis. But since there were no research results on that point, Jin Cheon-hee couldn’t be sure.
Penicillin had come up during idle browsing of overseas literature sites.
First of all, it was a disease eradicated on Earth except for a few African regions.
Antibiotics… how long would it take for them to arrive from the White Qilin Medical Pavilion?
What he had on hand now was laughably insufficient. And above all, since lice were the problem, cleanliness had to come first. Everything needed to be washed, disinfected, and bathed. Bedding had to be cleaned or burned. Bodies had to be scrubbed until the lice had nowhere left to hide.
Jin Cheon-hee went to find the Director.
When he arrived at the Director’s office, the Director happened to be using a strange tool on a patient. A soldier approached and whispered something into the Director’s ear. Only then did the Director turn and address Jin Cheon-hee in fluent Central Plains speech.
“Nice to meet you. I am Saint-Germain, an alchemist and physician.”
Jin Cheon-hee blinked, surprised.
His appearance doesn’t match the Saint-Germain described in the Supreme Heavenly Demon. Is it the same person with the same name, or someone else entirely?
He couldn’t know yet.
***
Inside the Director’s office, a skeleton model and a human body model had been prepared.
No, why would something like this be here?
The internal organs weren’t carved with the precision of modern times, but the workmanship still showed unmistakable intent, as if someone had tried to reproduce the human body in plaster with stubborn devotion.
When Jin Cheon-hee couldn’t hide his surprise, Saint-Germain answered calmly, almost proudly.
“I brought what I was researching from my hometown. Being a Westerner, I hoped you’d understand.”
“A Westerner?”
“Ah. I’m from the Western Continent. I came here after hearing there’s an elixir of immortality in the Eastern Continent.”
Is he talking about Qin Shi Huang’s elixir of immortality? It had been a long time since Qin Shi Huang died, and yet someone still remembered.
“I see.”
“This place became my second home before I knew it. Especially these days, I have many apprentices, so I’ve grown fond of it. By the way, I’ve heard much about the White-Robed Divine Dragon, too.”
“I’m flattered.”
Saint-Germain moved to the main point without ceremony. “What brings you here?”
Speaking plainly like that seemed characteristic of people here, like the Northern Sea Ice Palace Lord.
Jin Cheon-hee explained that he had come as an envoy of the Martial Righteous Alliance, then stated simply that an epidemic was circulating.
“I need to check pulses more to be sure, but… it seems to be a disease I recognize. If I’m right, there’s a way to treat it.”
Though he’d already diagnosed it with modern knowledge and repeated pulse checks, he deliberately avoided speaking with certainty. He wanted to see how Saint-Germain reacted.
Saint-Germain’s eyes widened. “You have a treatment method?”
“Yes, if my guess is correct. I also have a little medicine.”
Saint-Germain said he understood and guided Jin Cheon-hee to a patient.
Jin Cheon-hee handed some of the White Qilin Divine Elixirs he’d brought to a physician and instructed him on usage and dosage.
Saint-Germain observed him closely. “I thought you would use something called surgery, but this is unexpected.”
“I can’t use it carelessly here. And the patient just now can recover well with antibiotic treatment. More importantly, the patients must be washed. Bed sheets have to be washed or burned. Lice must be eliminated.”
“I’ll take that under advisement.”
“No. Ultimately, if hygiene isn’t prioritized, a hundred medicines won’t matter.”
“I’ll take it under advisement,” Saint-Germain repeated, tone even. “So please don’t worry.”
Ah… this is making me nervous.
No matter how many antibiotics you used, if hygiene didn’t improve, it became a meaningless fight. Worse, it could end up cultivating resistance for nothing.
But Saint-Germain’s interest slid somewhere else entirely.
“If this medicine is truly effective… could you teach me the manufacturing method of the White Qilin Divine Elixir?”
Jin Cheon-hee shook his head. “Even if I teach you, it’s impossible. You’d need special facilities and engineering methods. And even if you tried to recreate it here, it would take at least several months.”
“Ah… regrettable.” He looked genuinely disappointed.
Jin Cheon-hee asked, “I understand you give up on severe patients, but treat mild ones. How do you do it?”
This time, Saint-Germain answered with unmistakable pride.
“We treat with drugs as well. Mercury, the basis of our alchemy, and…”
Hiik. Mercury!
“Mixing opium…!”
Oh, hell. Opium?
“If we make a mercury ointment and apply it to the rashes, it is effective.”
Jin Cheon-hee felt shock slam through him.
Ugh. This man… he’s an alchemist. A real alchemist. The kind that kills you while calling it medicine.
Back on Earth, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, exposing syphilitic lesions to mercury vapor had once been considered a “treatment.” They made mercury ointments, too, rubbing them into the skin. Records claimed it felt like things improved immediately.
The problem was that patients died later from complications of mercury poisoning.
It was that infamous method where, if you killed the human, the disease died along with him.