The Crown Prince Who Raises Alt Characters

#Chapter 352 Delinquent Priest Rufus (10) - Medical Reform. The Patient's Side. Hasht. Randel, a young porter in the city of Boots, had recently been feeling a bit under the weather. The soles of his feet kept itching, and strange blister-like things had started forming. If you asked whether it was uncomfortable or not, of course it was uncomfortable. But that didn't mean he had any intention of going out of his way to get it treated. That might be different for someone from a wealthy, well-off family, or someone with a priest among their acquaintances or kin, but for an ordinary commoner like Randel, illness or injury was simply an everyday matter one had to endure. If it were the kind of problem that immediately interfered with making a living, he would have tried somehow to fix it, but itchy soles hardly counted as that serious an ailment, did they? He'd once heard rumors of a clinic that treated anything at a cheap price and gone to check it out, but it was always packed with a sea of people standing in line, so he had never actually managed to step in and get examined himself. And even that clinic had closed its doors after some sort of uproar broke out involving the temple. According to an acquaintance who'd witnessed the scene at the time, several hundred Wardens had been beaten down by a single priest, and the city's high-ranking figures along with other priests had also been beaten and strung up, but Randel hadn't taken it particularly seriously. Well, even a tall tale needs some reasonable degree of exaggeration for people to even pretend to listen—wasn't this taking it a bit too far? In any case, it did seem to be true that there had been some kind of uproar with the temple, and that was probably why the place had shut down. For Randel, who had been planning to get examined once all the urgent cases had cleared out, it was quite a disappointment. Then, one day. "Hey, did you hear? They say the clinic finished renovating and is opening its doors again! And this time, they say they've added a lot more people doing the treating, so there won't be any of that business of standing in line all day and still not getting seen like before." "...Wasn't that place supposed to have gone under?" "Gone under, what are you talking about? I told you before—they're planning to team up with the priests and make it even bigger, and it was only closed for a while because of the preparations for that." "Ah, um. Right. So you did." He didn't bother mentioning that he'd only half-listened from the middle onward. After all, there were truths in this world better left kept secret. "I hear you've been having a rough time with your feet. You should go take a look." "Nah, it's fine. It's not like it's such a big deal. I don't want to stand in a long line." "Weren't you listening to a word I said? With the reopening, they've massively increased the medical staff, so it won't take nearly as long as before—go on, quick!" In the end, unable to withstand his acquaintance's badgering, Randel went to check out the clinic, half out of curiosity and half out of disbelief. "It really has gotten bigger." Even the last time he'd seen it, it had felt about the level of a decent estate, but now that the expansion work was finished, judging by the sheer scale of the building alone, it seemed almost comparable to the temple. Just how much money did they have, to be able to throw up a building like this without a second thought? 'Is the treatment fee really cheap? Am I not about to get ripped off for nothing?' As Randel, feeling uneasy, was looking around near the entrance, he spotted Thomas, the youngest of the fellow porters, coming out of the clinic with a look of relief on his face. Knowing that Thomas's finances were even worse off than his own, Randel went straight over to him. "Huh? Brother Randel? Did you come to get examined too?" "Mm, yeah, something like that. But what about you? You just came from getting examined?" "Yes. That splinter that got stuck in me wrong last time kept hurting and the flesh around it kept swelling up, so it was bothering me, but this time I got it treated completely." Thomas showed him his palm, and the swelling had indeed noticeably gone down compared to before. Which made it all the more suspicious. "You just came out of your examination, and it's already working that fast?" "Right? I thought it was amazing too. They pulled out the splinter with something like thin metal tweezers, then did something like disinfecting it, and at the end the priest gathered a little cluster of light at his fingertip and gave it a light tap, and that's how it turned out like this. They also told me that since some kind of bad toxin might have gotten into my body, I should take this medicine here once a day, after meals." Even to Randel, who had never properly received treatment at a place like this before, it was clear that Thomas had received quite a systematic course of treatment. "So how much did the treatment cost?" "The price of two bowls of rabbit stew." Rabbit stew was, among the meat stews, the cheapest one after rat-meat stew. It was a price that even a porter like Randel could afford without too much strain. If treatment could really be had for the price of about two bowls of that, it was, without a doubt, an unbelievably low price. Only then convinced, Randel began standing in the long line leading to the clinic. Because there were simply so many people physically present, he couldn't get seen in an instant the way his acquaintance had claimed, but even so, the speed at which the line shrank was quite fast. The inside of the clinic was white and clean to a degree that made him wonder if it really needed to be this way, and he could sense a certain refreshing scent whose identity he couldn't quite place. "The patient who just came in, what brings you here today?" "Uh, are you speaking to me?" "Yes." At the call of the young female clerk at the reception desk, Randel stammered out where it hurt, and the clerk wrote his name and ailment down in some kind of register before telling him to sit in a chair and wait. 'My throat's dry.' Randel smacked his parched, scratchy-dry lips together. Between standing in the long line outside and being thoroughly tense, he felt an oddly severe thirst. But now that he'd already made it inside the building, he had no intention of stepping back out just to get a drink of water. If doing so ended up voiding his place in line, that would be a horrifying thing indeed. As he held out, telling himself to just endure it until the examination was over, the man sitting in the next seat reached out and touched a piece of furniture in the corner of the waiting room that resembled a fish tank with no fish living in it. It looked like an expensive item at a glance—what did he think he was doing, touching it so carelessly? What if he broke it? Randel was clicking his tongue at the man's carelessness when the man pulled a thin, white something out of a small box-like attachment beside the tank, then unfolded it into something resembling a concave pouch. And then he pulled on one of the two handles attached to the lower part of the tank, caught the water that came out in that concave pouch, and brought it to his mouth to drink—of all things. Randel watched this with a dumbfounded expression, then cautiously asked the receptionist a question. "Um, excuse me, how much would it cost to buy some of that water in the tank there?" "The tank? Oh, you mean the Brown water purifier? You can just drink it for free." Free, of all things. Randel approached the upside-down tank called a water purifier. He tried to recall the man's movements and do the same, but soon realized there was no need to. At the bottom of the upside-down tank was a square box section made of some strange material. On that box section, exactly how to use this thing called a water purifier was depicted using nothing but pictures, without a single word of text. Randel studied the pictures, which had a crest here and there that he took to be the logo of the trading company that had made this product, some "Brown" something-or-other, and soon reached his hand toward the "cup." 'They use paper this white as a cup?' Feeling as though he were indulging in some terrifying extravagance, Randel held the cup up under the spout with his right hand and pulled the handle with the other to fill it with water. And when he drank the water, the taste was truly excellent. Calling plain water "excellent-tasting" was an odd sort of expression, but water without the strange, faint unpleasantness he always sensed could only be described that way. He was gulping down water a second time, then a third, moved by some inexplicable emotion, when the receptionist called his name and told him to go on into the examination room. Unable to bring himself to throw away the paper cup he'd used, Randel carefully tucked it into his pocket before stepping into what was called the examination room. Inside was a middle-aged man with a rather fastidious, fine-featured impression, and upon seeing the priest's crest engraved on his chest, Randel hastily bowed his head. "Ah, that's fine, that's fine. You don't need to do that here. More importantly, your feet are itchy, is that right?" "P-priest, sir. P-please speak to me plainly. How could you use polite speech with someone like me?" "That's what I'm telling you—none of that's needed here. Every bastard who got some fool notion in his head and kept a stiff neck toward patients ended up strung up on a pole or poisoned with drugs, so unless you want to end up like that too, just tell me where it hurts. No, just show me." "Y-yes, sir." Randel hurriedly took off his cheap leather shoes and showed his feet, and the priest, giving them a cursory once-over, pointed to a basin filled with water that seemed to have been prepared in advance and said, "Wash your feet in that first. Use the soap next to it too." Randel washed his feet as the priest instructed and dried them with a towel, and only then did the priest check the state of his feet, take a small porcelain bowl down from a shelf, and carefully spread the viscous liquid inside it over his entire foot. As Randel marveled at the faint clusters of light that seemed to flicker briefly, here and there, from the priest's palm while he applied it, the priest continued speaking in a tone that could have been either a complaint or an explanation. "Treating someone with raw Divine Power is easy. You skip all these tedious procedures and processes and just pour Divine Power straight onto the afflicted area, and that's the end of it. But that way, you can only cure a handful of people. At most four or five a day. Whereas if you follow all the basic treatment procedures like this and use Divine Power only as a supplement, it turns out you can manage dozens a day. Though to get that kind of efficiency, I've been studying and studying, getting worked half to death over it every single day. Hah." It really did seem to be a complaint after all. As Randel merely opened and closed his mouth, unsure how to respond to such a delicate bit of self-pity, the priest, seeming not to care either way, began explaining in a weary tone. "This gel I just applied for you—I'll prescribe you a ten-day supply, so keep applying it to your feet steadily every day. Naturally, you need to wash your feet clean before applying it, and once you've applied it, it's best to keep your shoes off until it dries again, so apply it right before bed. And if you have a habit of wearing shoes indoors too, change that habit and make sure to go barefoot indoors from now on, without exception. Understood?" "Yes, sir." "Then you may go. You can pick up the medicine at the reception desk." After finishing an examination that was long if you called it long, and short if you called it short, Randel left the examination room and approached the reception desk in the waiting room. He received his medicine, contained not in a porcelain bowl like the one the priest had used, but in a vessel made from a section of bamboo, and paid the treatment fee. The price was three bowls of rabbit stew. It was pricier than what young Thomas had paid for his treatment, but it was still an amount well within his means. Randel went home somewhat dazed, and though he felt a little uncomfortable about it, he began following the "priest's" instructions and adopted the habit of going barefoot indoors. And on the tenth day. "It's really healed." Though a bit of a rash-like mark still remained, Randel couldn't help but marvel at his feet, where the itching had nearly vanished and the blisters had nearly disappeared compared to before. When he went back to the clinic after a good while, the line was still long. The odd thing was that quite a few of the faces in line were ones he'd never seen before. He came to understand the reason before long. 'They're people from other cities.' For residents living in a Faith-Based Territory, the procedure for crossing over into another god's Faith-Based Territory was extraordinarily complicated. But between Faith-Based Territories that served the same god, movement from city to city was comparatively lenient. That said, cities serving the same god tended, whether one liked it or not, to resemble one another closely, so there were hardly ever people who went out of their way to visit a different city. After all, if the neighboring city had it, their own city already had it too. That is, except for something like this clinic, which had abruptly sprung up out of nowhere, utterly ignoring the city's basic policies and procedures. "This is something incredible." As nothing more than an ordinary porter, Randel had no way of calculating the ripple effects of it all. But he could at least sense that something big was going to happen before long. Perhaps it was already happening, even now.