WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Haruto

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ The Dark Fantasy Doctor Was Mistaken for a Saint ◈

Chapter 32: The Firefly Prince (2)

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* * *

Several days had passed since my sudden encounter with the Rank 2 black mage and my strange meeting with the old mage named Fitz.

Nothing special had happened since then.

I came down to Limbus Pit with Eri and treated the locals.

“Ba-ra-bam, ba-ra-bam~”

There, I shattered even my calm persona with a ridiculous little tune.

My patient was an eight-month-old baby.

“Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo...”

A doctor’s greatest enemy was a baby.

There was no reasoning with them. No compromise, either.

“Are you the world’s greatest doctor, trained at Harvard Medical School? Yeah. I’m still going to cry.”

Before a baby, all a doctor’s skills and knowledge were useless.

Babies were invincible, godlike beings when facing doctors.

That was why you had to put aside dignity and authority when dealing with them.

“La-la-la...”

This song was a skill pediatricians had developed to give babies injections.

First, you completely distracted the child with a song or toy. Then, while they were unaware, you gave them the shot.

For the record, I didn’t think this skill ruined my lofty persona.

A doctor had to be willing to play the clown for patients, bang their head against the floor in a hospital corridor, and throw tantrums before politicians.

At least, that was what I had learned.

My peers from my time had all been far too stiff-necked.

“Doctor...”

Fortunately, my efforts did not cause the calm Julian persona to collapse.

Instead, I could feel both Eri and the baby’s mother watching me with respectful eyes.

...They were respectful eyes, right?

They weren’t looking at me with pity, were they?

“Ethan, want to see this? What do you think this is?”

“Bababah!”

In any case.

After about fifteen minutes of effort, the baby finally lowered his guard.

His eyes fixed on the beak of my mask.

Taking advantage of his distraction, I pressed a three-by-three grid of needles into his thigh.

It was a vaccine that weakened a virus using a mixture of cow pus and diluted holy water.

Strictly speaking, it was a little different, but I called it cowpox inoculation for convenience.

Prick.

Small dots remained on the baby’s thigh.

Ethan blinked as though he had realized he had been tricked, but the injection was already over.

“Ethan is healthy. You don’t need to worry about syphilis.”

“Oh, thank you, Doctor.”

His mother sighed in relief.

I pinched the cheek of the baby, who was staring at my beak with bright eyes.

“By the way, Doctor. What was that thing you did to Ethan’s thigh?”

“It’s something like a spell that makes him healthier. You could call it an enhancement inscription.”

“Ah, I see.”

Ethan’s guardian nodded.

It was still too early to explain the concept of vaccines to this world.

So whenever babies reached one, three, six, or twelve months old, I had them visit the clinic regularly under the pretext that they might have syphilis, then secretly vaccinated them.

If I got caught, I could be burned at the stake...

Well, wouldn’t the power of being the protagonist in a misunderstanding story handle it somehow?

“Take care, ma’am.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

After sending off the eventful eight-month-old patient, I was organizing the needles when Eri spoke.

“By the way, Doctor. Was that really an enhancement inscription?”

“Yes.”

It was an enhancement inscription.

It made you immune to several plague-type curses, after all.

Even nobles wore holy relics all over their bodies to ward off plague curses.

Considering that, couldn’t vaccinations be called enhancement inscriptions?

“Were you a Carverdoc too, Doctor?”

“Not a Carverdoc. I have studied that field, though.”

Carverdocs were people who performed inscriptions.

Although doctor was part of their name, they weren’t medical professionals.

They were closer to tattoo artists who carved markings into people’s bodies.

I didn’t know that at first. Since doctor was in the name, I studied it diligently.

By the time I realized what it was, it was too late, so I simply kept studying until the end.

“A real genius studies things as a hobby...”

Still, it hadn’t been entirely pointless work.

Thanks to it, Eri had gained another misunderstanding about me.

Well, if it strengthened my persona, perhaps it wasn’t entirely a bad thing.

I was preparing for the next patient when Eri, who was organizing Ethan’s records, clicked her pen and spoke.

“Doctor, I’m seriously asking. Rather than putting your heart and soul into entertaining them like that, wouldn’t it be better to just take off that mask?”

“...”

“Honestly, I think babies start crying the moment they see you because of that.”

Silently, I stroked the beak of my plague doctor mask.

Then I shook my head.

“I don’t think it would change anything if I took it off.”

The proof was Fried, our youngest.

He always seemed to want to cry whenever he saw me.

This face really did look rather gloomy.

“Fried didn’t seem to like my face very much, either.”

“I heard this from Freya, but I think that’s because you jab a needle into Fried’s thigh every time you see him.”

“...”

Ignoring Eri’s words, I turned toward the entrance.

“Next patient.”

* * *

After the day’s appointments ended, I headed to Wangcho’s restaurant for research for the first time in a while.

“Wangcho, I’m here.”

“Welcome, Doctor. What sort of research are you doing this time that you’re buying so many eggs? And only fertilized ones, at that.”

“They’ll all be used.”

The research that had caught my interest this time was vaccine research.

The reason was the grimoire left behind by the black mage Belgian.

It contained detailed information on ghoul-type magic and plague curse-type magic.

What caught my attention was the plague curse section.

‘Biological immunity nullified a magical curse.’

Then could the reverse be possible as well?

That was how this research began.

The biggest reason vaccines could not be made in this world was that there was no way to control viruses or bacteria.

There was cowpox inoculation for smallpox vaccines, at least, but there was nothing similar for other vaccines.

Under those circumstances, the plague curses Belgian had left behind were welcome guests.

At last, I had acquired a way to control viruses or bacteria as I wished.

‘Of course, I can’t directly give this to people.’

Existing curses had no concept of regulation.

They had been designed to kill people from the beginning. There was no way their power could be adjusted.

If I went around administering this to people as a vaccination, I would become an otherworldly Hitler instead of the protagonist.

So I decided to refer to a method used to make vaccines in the twenty-first century.

‘Embryonated-egg culture method.’

It was one of the most common and traditional methods used in modern medicine to mass-produce influenza vaccines and the like.

As the name implied, it involved injecting viruses into fertilized eggs before they hatched and culturing them there.

With this method, I would not have to do something insane like place curses directly on people.

I planned to curse the eggs, then later extract and purify only the weakened viruses from them.

“Doctor, can you really not tell me?”

“No. It’s confidential.”

Naturally, I was carrying out this entire line of research alone and in secret.

Black magic itself was not forbidden.

If you asked whether burning someone to death or making them die of disease was crueler, it would be difficult to rank one above the other.

Likewise, as long as it was not directly used for a crime, research into black magic as an academic discipline was not completely forbidden by the Church or the Empire.

However, considering the instinctive disgust and rejection people in this world felt toward black magic, it would be difficult to receive favorable looks even in an alley like this.

And in a world without any concept of vaccines, I could not exactly tell people that I planned to inject curses into human bodies.

That was not the only reason, either.

Research involving viruses or bacteria required safety above all else.

But in this world, where even the concept of hygiene was lacking, finding people capable of following every safety protocol was no easy task.

For safety’s sake, I was conducting this research alone.

“Tch... Understood.”

Perhaps Wangcho sensed my seriousness. He nodded, though he still looked dissatisfied.

But he did not seem completely convinced, so I lowered my voice as much as possible.

“I’m sorry, Wangcho. This research could put everyone involved in danger if things go wrong.”

Wangcho’s face instantly turned gray.

“Eek!”

However, contrary to my intentions, Wangcho seemed to have misunderstood in a different direction.

“Understood. I will absolutely, absolutely not let anyone snoop around the laboratory. I’ll make sure no one can steal a look at your research either.”

“You don’t need to go that far...”

Tch.

Just as the misunderstanding that I didn’t have burn scars had been cleared up, another misunderstanding appeared.

I considered explaining again, but decided to leave it alone.

What I had learned from the Belgian incident was that misunderstandings could not be resolved with words.

Once the research was finished, the misunderstanding would naturally clear up. And if it didn’t, that was fine too.

Too lazy to make excuses, I simply nodded.

That sort of misunderstanding might actually help preserve secrecy.

“Eri, carry the eggs. We’re going to the clinic warehouse.”

“Are all of these for the research?”

“...I’ll cook the unfertilized eggs separately, so don’t worry about wasting them.”

“Then I want an omelet.”

“Very well.”

Excited, Eri picked up a basket filled with fertilized eggs in both hands.

Her physical strength had grown so much day by day that I could no longer compete with her.

We headed to my small private laboratory behind the clinic.

My private laboratory in Limbus Pit had been made by renovating a warehouse.

“Eri, wait outside.”

“Okaaay~”

After confirming that Eri had left the laboratory, I firmly locked the door and began preparing for the experiment in earnest.

‘First, Belgian’s grimoire.’

I turned the dial of the safe and took out the cow pus and Belgian’s grimoire stored inside.

Then I opened the bottle and laid Belgian’s notebook beside it.

[Sanio et Putro. (Pus and decay.)]

I felt mana draining from my body.

I could not activate magic anywhere else, but within the laboratory, I could use suitable spells.

The reason I could not become a mage was that I lacked the talent to grasp the state of variables in an uncontrolled environment.

In other words, as long as the conditions were controlled, even I could activate magic as much as I wanted.

‘If I can’t call myself a mage, I can at least call myself a spellcaster.’

Most research-focused magic users who had failed to become mages were similar to me.

They could use a certain degree of magic within their laboratories or workshops.

Though even then, the conditions had to be so precise that if a cleaner came through once, they would be unable to cast spells the next day.

[Morde Cuten Eos. (Gnaw at their skin.)]

As the chant continued, pale smoke rose from the bottle of pus.

It was a different color from Belgian’s black smoke.

The catalysts were only slightly different, but I did not know why this difference appeared.

That was a question I would need to solve gradually.

[Efflora, Morbiflos. (Bloom, flower of plague.)]

The chant ended.

White mist followed the formula values I had set and enveloped a tray of eggs placed on the experiment table.

I studied the eggs, then selected ten.

“Twenty misfires...”

Since I had altered a curse originally intended for humans to work on eggs, the failure rate was quite high.

I soaked the ten eggs in holy water.

No matter how much I had weakened it through the formula, it was still a curse designed to kill people.

For the eggs to withstand such a curse, they had no choice but to rely on holy water.

‘It’s like making a vaccine from a biological weapon.’

Normally, the order would be reversed.

With a self-deprecating smile, I placed the remaining ten eggs into a warming box.

I wrote today’s date on the box and pushed it into a corner of the laboratory.

Then I took out a box that had been sitting there already, marked with a date from four days ago.

Those were the eggs I had cursed in the same way four days earlier, suppressed with diluted holy water, and placed in an incubator.

“Now, let’s see.”

There were six eggs in the box.

With a little anticipation and tension, I brought one beneath the lamp.

If it had succeeded, shining a light through the egg would reveal a chick embryo wriggling inside.

‘The first one...’

The inside of the egg was a murky dark brown, like sewer water.

It had looked suspicious even before I shone the light through it.

The shell was covered in tiny cracks, as though it had rotted.

With a bitter smile, I tossed the first egg into the waste bin.

“The next one...”

The second egg.

The shell looked pretty enough.

But when I held it to the light, there was no embryo inside. There was only pus.

It was a failure.

“Next.”

The third... the fourth...

And the sixth.

“Another failure...”

I let out an empty sigh and pressed a hand to my forehead.

Not one of the six fertilized eggs had survived.

They had all either rotted black, burst with pus and filled the room with a foul smell, or shriveled up.

‘Either the curse is too strong, or the holy water’s suppressive power is too weak.’

But I could not use too much holy water.

If I did, the curse itself would die.

‘There are too many things to adjust.’

First, I needed to modify the formula so it worked better on chicks. Then I needed to find a way to reduce its power further and balance it with the holy water.

‘Phew...’

It had been a long time since I had felt this directionless.

Not since quinine.

I had struggled under the assumption that the sap was the raw ingredient, only to discover later that in this world, the bark was the ingredient.

‘Well, that’s what research is like.’

Magic research was especially so.

Unlike science, there was no feedback even when you failed.

When magic failed, it simply took your mana. It gave no clue as to why it had failed.

This had also been explained in detail in the grimoire given to me by the mage Fitz.

‘That old gentleman also failed thousands of times while researching holy water.’

The grimoire he had given me contained a detailed account of his journey to discover magic using holy water as a medium.

The research diary, which appeared to still be ongoing, ended with its 5,214th entry.

‘Compared to that, this is only my fifteenth failure.’

Wasn’t scholarship the record of failures?

So even though I had failed today, I was not especially impatient.

I was only twelve years old, and I had far too much life left ahead of me.

‘More importantly, I’m the protagonist of a misunderstanding story.’

I snickered and put the box away.

Then I recorded today’s experiment and the improvements needed in my research journal.

Footnotes:

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