Simon quickly found a cot and moved it into the shade of a building far from the corpses. Then he picked up the stranger and carried him over, and then Simon started to evaluate him. Simon knew very little about medie. To be ho, physiology and anatomy were the st things he would have expected to o know about in a fantasy world, but he’d learhe hard way that just wasn’t so.

  Magieeded to be wielded with precision and focus, though a sloppy spell could still work, as he’d demonstrated plenty of times with fire magic. Healing was a little more finicky.

  Simon shuddered as an image of Freya’s trembling form came briefly as he remembered how badly healing could miss the mark, but he suppressed it. Instead, he forced himself to focus on the man in front of him. The parched, cracked lips spoke to thirst, and the raging fever implied that it was getting worse, but the fact that his blisters weren’t too bad and his skin had not yet gone gray implied his case was still earlier than the rest.

  “Maybe that dumb bird mask did you some good after all,” Simon said as he pulled out his water fsk and tried to get the man to drink.

  The dying man tried and failed to choke down some water, spraying Simon enough that he was certain he’d officially caught whatever this guy had. He shrugged it off. He’d kill himself before he ever got this bad, but he was certain it wouldn’t e to that. Now would be a fiime to use himself as a guinea pig, and then afterward, he could cure the dying healer.

  tering himself, he imagined all the bacteria that were crawling all over him now, trying to make him sick. He was sure that if he tried te all the bacteria from his body, that would have some kind of terrible sequence because he retty sure there were supposed to be good ooo. So, instead, he focused on the pgue bacteria and imagihem as little bck bugs desperately looking for a way inside his body.

  Once he had that image fixed and he could feel a e to it, he finally uttered the new word he had yet to use before. “D???e???l???z???á??m???.” cure. Simo a slight tingle as the word rippled through him, but o passed, he felt no worse, so he turned his attention back to the dying man.

  “D???e???l???z???á??m???,” he repeated, fog oranger’s body with the same care and attention he’d done on his own.

  Nothing happened immediately, but then Simon hadn’t expected it to. He followed that up with healing, trying to heal the worst of the man’s physical symptoms, which seemed to be mostly successful. Betweewo spells, he looked almost as good as hough he passed out almost immediately as a result. Simon was more than a little bit familiar with how hard a recovery from death’s door could be, even with magi your side.

  So, he watched the man’s chest slowly rise and fall peacefully for a few minutes, and the up and started looking around for answers. The stranger wasn’t much youhan Simon thought of himself as being. He erhaps twenty-five, and he had no identifying symbols or marks on him.

  A search of the makeshift hospital this guy had been w on yielded a few more answers. It definitely wasn’t religious or spiritual in nature. Instead, it was alchemical. Most of the tents of the jars and vials smelled positively putrid to Simon’s nose and looked even worse, but he had no way of knowing if what he was looking at was supposed to be medie that had been administered to the sick or research about the pestilehat was killing them.

  It seemed more likely to be the former, though. He seemed to recall that things as toxic as mercury had been sidered medie once upon a time oh. Who knew what they would sider here with mythological creatures to add to the mix.

  “You really got in over your head, didn’t you,” Simon said when he came back over to the man to che him a few mier. “The Bck Pgue is a little advanced for people that haven’t ied microscopes.”

  The strairred, but not enough to wake, and Simo his water skin dowo him just in case he woke up and was still thirsty, and the in search of the ingredients for the most powerful medie he knew how to make: Chi Noodle Soup.

  Ihe bounds of the small city, everything was rotten, but he found a string of garlic, a jar of salt, and some dried herbs in one of the nicer houses he explored. Later, he found carrots and celery, too, and though he never did find anything resembling noodles because they had yet to be ied in this world, and he had no idea how to make them, he did find a live chi in an abandoned farmyard just outside the city walls.

  Standing in the shadow of the gates with the word “DEATH” painted across them, he beheaded it and plucked it, using the same teiques that his wife had shown him a couple times. While he did so, he tried not to cry. “Man, if I’d known how much work went into nuggies, I would have appreciated them more,” he sighed to himself as he washed the skinny, ugly-looking chi with some well water.

  He probably wouldn’t have, though. Truthfully, more than anything, it was the dipping sauce he missed. Ketchup would have been nice, of course, but he would have fought a whole band of taurs for some sweet and sour or some honey mustard.

  “Failing to i microscopes is ohing,” he said to himself as he started walking back to the square, “but not iing sugar? Unfivable.” If he was ever going to be one of those isekai protagonists that ied all the crazy shit they missed from the modern world, he was going to use it to i sugar or chocote, though that was hardly an immediate goal.

  Today’s goal was simple: ‘keep the alchemist from dying’ and ‘have dinner ready when he wakes up.’ Simon would probably add, ‘figure out what to do about these bodies’ as he watched the clouds of swarming bck flies increase along with the stench of death as the temperature rose, but that was a ter problem.

  For now, he found a kit free from dead bodies that was close enough to his sole survivor that Simon could keep an eye on him, and then he filled up a cauldron and started to boil some water. Cooking robably something that he was never going to be good at, Simon decided, but he’d e an awfully long way i two lifetimes. He could dice vegetables, roast meat, and even make bread, though it never really came ht.

  Soup was easy enough, though. Maybe he would save the bread for tomorrow, or perhaps never. While he tried to decide how long he should stay here, he cubed the chi a aside before adding the fleshy carcass to the pot, thearted dig some vegetables. He’d let that simmer along with the salt for a while, then toss ihing else ter.

  Several hours ter, he was almost done, and he was really wishing he had some crackers to go with this when he heard the sound of his patient stirring outside.

  “Take it easy, man,” Simon said, walking out as he wiped his hand with a towel. “You’ve been through a lot.”

  “M-my mask…” the man said, reag up to his fa a panic as he realized he was no longer protected from the pgue.

  “It’s over there, but I wouldn’t worry about that too much. You’re immune now, probably.” Simon said with a shrug. You got a name?

  “Immuhe other man asked, processing the world. “Is this magic?”

  “Nah,” Simon lied. “Biology. Antibodies. I’d expin it, but - I don’t really uand it myself.”

  “But all my experiments,” the man answered. “They showed that the pgue couldn’t be defeated, not with tinctures of Suvalin or even with drops of enlighte. Nothing worked!”

  “Listen - I’ll show you a potion that will really save lives, but before we do that, I’d like to get your name…” Simon said, starting to get frustrated that the uy wasn’t listening and probably wouldn’t enjoy it if Simon had to keep referring to him as the alchemist or the sole survivor.

  “Oh, Robin,” he mumbled. “It’s Robin Krr.”

  “Well, Mister Krr, today’s your lucky day,” Simon said, helping him into a sitting position and handing him the water skin. “I found you when you were dying and nursed you back to health.”

  “Thank you!” Robin excimed, “But what about my master and patients? Surely they—”

  “No one else made it,” Simon said as he walked to the kit. “Sorry about that.”

  He took a few minutes lohan he o, strictly speaking, to give the man some time to deal with his grief alone, but wheurned with the chi soup, he wasn’t g. He still seemed to be in shobsp;

  Simo Robin feed himself, and it was only several minutes into the meal that he finally said, “I thought you were bringing me a potion. This is just soup.”

  “It is,” Simon agreed. “And since cough syrup hasn’t been ied yet, it’s the only thing that’s likely to keep you healthy anywhere near here.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense,” Robin protested, though not so forcefully that he ever stopped eating. “There’s no magi chi…”

  “Well, obviously, you’ve never had it fried,” Simon said with a ugh, suddenly craving somethira crispy. “Seriously, though. There’s a kind of magic you’ve never heard of, and it’s called nutrition. Other than making sure they have plenty of water, it’s the most important thing that you do for a sick person the ime you’re treating them.”

  Robin didn’t believe him, not at first at least, but he asked questions about what the words meant. Simon didn’t know much about proteins or vitamins, but he tried putting it in alchemical terms about reas and reagents to make it sound more believable, and by the sed bowl of soup, the alchemist was at least partially vihat there could be a magi food if it was cooked the right way.

  Before bed, Simon made his patient ge into clothes that were less filthy, and he found them a room that was free of the dead. The fresh air outside might have done Robin some good, of course, but as bad as the flies were, Simohat the rats would be worse o got dark, and he wao avoid that as much as possible.

  . . .

  Simon had inally inteo keep going the day. After all, he’d done his good deed. But when Robin still looked so weak, Simon couldn’t bear to abandon him just yet. He might be a stranger, but the man had watched a city die, so Simon decided he could spare another day or two for the man while he got on his feet.

  They did a lot of things over the few days. They found a pomegraree, and Simon expihe miracle substanown as vitamin C to the alchemist. For his part, Robin tried to expin the mysterious fall of Graz and the plicated mysticism of his alchemy, which was based orine. Apparently, only metal, air, and water were elements, and everything else was just a mixture of those.

  It was different than the 4 elements he was used to, but Simon didn’t see how it was wroly. In Robin’s version of the world, fire was just elevated air, and that was why the sun burned. Likewise, earth was just unrefined or falleal. It was an iing worldview, but more than anything, it reminded Simon of the mumbo jumbo parts of his evil book, so he didn’t take them too seriously.

  The only thing Simon didn’t talk to his new friend about was magiot even after they started burning bodies. When he used fire magic, he did it i. That wasn’t because he was trying to be greedy, though. It was because he had no idea how bad an eager young guy like this could screw himself up with magic. Simon didn’t know if the aura some people could see, his premature aging, or both was because of his spell casting, but he wasn’t about to give that burden to someone else. After all, Simon had a reset button, and until he uood more about the systems of this world, he wasn’t going to risk it.

  They didn’t burn every corpse iy. They didn’t even try. What they did do, though, was burn every person that Robin cared about, as well as his patients. It was only ohat was dohat Simon told the other man he had to be off.

  “But I could e with you,” Robin said, “You still have so much to teach me about your strange magics.”

  Calling soup and juice magic was enough to make Simon chuckle, but he shook his head. “No, you said so yourself. You have to deliver the news of your master’s death to his people, and I… well, I’ve got people I o see, too.”

  They shared one more meal of leek and potato soup that night, and once Robin had started to snore softly, Simon quietly got dressed and made for the temple. Long goodbyes weren’t really his thing, and the longer he spent i, the more true that would probably bee.

  There might not be any real mei this stupid dungeon, but he still felt like he had a bar for socialization, and though it had beey when he’d found Robin, it had finished filling up days ago, and he’d just been looking for reasons to move on.

  Whe to the temple, the portal wasn’t quite what he’d expected.