WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Haruto
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ The Dark Fantasy Doctor Was Mistaken for a Saint ◈
Chapter 99: God's Dilemma (2)
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* * *
“Then... if evil people who have unquestionably defied the gods’ will are punished in a way that unquestionably defies the gods’ will, how would the gods see it? Would they first praise the punishment of evil, or first hate the act of blasphemy?”
“...”
“Please answer me. Which do the gods value more, good and evil or doctrine?”
The dilemma Simeon had posed.
It was both a complaint and a rebuke directed at the gods.
‘Certainly, if his dilemma is correct, there’s a problem whether divine punishment comes down or not.’
If no divine punishment came down for such an act?
That would mean the gods prioritized good and evil.
But then Simeon would ask again.
Why had they remained silent when the Schnabel couple, my parents, died?
If divine punishment did come down, then?
‘Then the gods would become beings who prioritize their own authority over good and evil.’
That would mean the Church’s fundamental doctrine was wrong from the start.
The doctrine that taught that the gods loved humanity.
If that were true, would people still find such gods worth serving?
They might fear them, but would there be any reason to truly worship them?
“...”
It was not an easy question to answer.
It must have been an extremely important question to him.
Likely the reason a healer priest, and the Schnabel couple’s disciple at that, had wandered as a pilgrim.
‘The problem is, I’m a doctor.’
Not a philosopher.
I had never seriously considered this question before.
There was no way an answer would come to me immediately.
After much thought, this was the answer I gave.
“May I delay my answer for a little while? I need time to consider it seriously.”
It was too weighty a question to answer lightly.
One that could turn his wandering into corruption if I answered poorly.
So I needed to be careful.
Simeon’s narrowed eyes opened slightly.
“You are the first person to take this question seriously, Saint. Other priests always rebuked me, calling it irreverent.”
“Irreverent? To avoid a taboo, one must first understand what it is. How can asking questions to better understand the gods’ will be blasphemy against them?”
Just as one had to dissect corpses to learn how to save lives.
To understand the gods’ will, one had to ask some rather bold questions.
Both medicine and theology had advanced that way.
“Still, since it is such a serious question, even I would be cautious about answering it here and now.”
“Then when may I hear your answer?”
“Let us meet again at the entrance tomorrow morning. I will tell you my thoughts then.”
* * *
The next day.
As promised, I met Simeon again at the entrance to the Necropolis.
I had not noticed it when I saw him underground yesterday.
But beneath the morning sunlight filtered through smog, he gave off a somewhat gloomy impression.
“Oh, you have come, Saint.”
“Good morning, Brother Simeon.”
People’s gazes gathered on us.
The Black Saint and an enormous clergyman standing together were bound to draw attention.
I looked around and spoke to Simeon.
“There are too many eyes on us. I would like to move somewhere else before giving you my answer.”
“May I ask where we are going?”
“D Sector in Limbus Pit.”
His narrowed eyes twitched.
“You, Saint?”
“Should not a healer look after even the lowest places without turning away?”
“...”
Simeon stared intently at me.
It was hard to tell with his narrowed eyes.
Still, he was definitely looking at me.
“... Very well. Let us go.”
The large priest followed behind me.
I climbed into the car first, and Simeon squeezed in after me.
The car listed.
Gregor alone was already quite heavy.
With Simeon added to the car, it felt as though it sank once.
As the car carried us toward Limbus Pit, I looked at the book Simeon held in his arms across from me in the limousine.
“... Today, you have the Scripture of Abundance.”
“I do not devote myself to any one sect, so I serve all twelve gods. Yesterday, I prayed to the Moon Goddess. Today, I intend to pray to the Goddess of Abundance.”
He was quite an admirable believer.
Most people mainly prayed to the gods of their own sect.
But Simeon was saying that he served all thirteen gods, including the Lord of the Sun.
‘As expected, if it’s someone like him...’
While I was thinking that, the car reached our destination.
We arrived at D-4 Clinic.
It was a clinic specializing in infectious diseases.
When we entered, numerous lower-ranking healers were busily carrying things around.
Simeon looked around the clinic with curiosity.
“So this is the Saint’s clinic I have heard so much about.”
“Is this your first visit?”
“Haha. I am a pilgrim, after all. I often spend time outside the wall, or deep in the most remote places.”
“I see.”
Merkuer clinics stood throughout Civitas Square and most sectors of Limbus Pit.
Except for F Sector, the sewage district, and H Sector, the bottom-of-the-barrel district.
Those two places seemed to be Simeon’s primary areas of activity.
‘Pilgrims are the sort of people who go to places like that.’
It made sense that he did not know much about the clinics.
“Since we are here, may I give you a brief tour? I think it may help with the answer to your question.”
“It is a greater honor than I deserve for the Saint to personally guide such a lowly pilgrim.”
“Then let us start this way.”
Every room in the infection clinic was separated by barriers.
It could be called this world’s first infectious-disease isolation ward, or negative-pressure ward.
Naturally, it cost a tremendous amount of money.
Every day, there were catalysts for the barriers and wages for spellcasters.
This place was the money pit that truly made the Merkuer directors’ hearts ache.
Of course, I was not going to explain all that to our guest.
“This is the syphilis treatment room.”
I stopped in front of one room.
Syphilis.
A disease inseparable from the Red-Light District.
“You treat... syphilis?”
Simeon’s eyes widened.
Like malaria, syphilis was a disease that had plagued humanity for a long time.
For one reason.
“Have you found a catalyst that lets divine magic cure syphilis, like Southern Fever?”
They had not found a useful catalyst.
Divine magic was still a kind of magic.
That meant there needed to be a catalyst to maximize its effects and conserve divine power.
Common colds and some infectious diseases could be treated without such catalysts because they could heal naturally.
The white blood cells in the body acted as catalysts on their own.
But diseases such as syphilis and malaria, which could not be expected to heal naturally, were different.
To treat them, one had no choice but to pour in overwhelming divine power or hope the infected person was absurdly hardy.
Quinine was what changed that situation.
Malaria could be cured with quinine alone, and adding divine magic made the effect dramatic.
Simeon was referring to that.
“A cure for syphilis... When did you develop it?”
“I developed it eight years ago. I made it safe last week.”
I had known a method to treat syphilis for a long time.
The problem was that every method could kill the patient.
‘You can kill syphilis with arsenic, after all.’
Salvarsan, extracted from arsenic.
It could eliminate syphilis.
I had hesitated to use it because of the minor issue that it could eliminate the patient too if things went wrong.
So I developed a second method.
“A few days ago, I succeeded in breeding magical beasts capable of deliberately infecting people with malaria.”
“... Pardon?”
“Oh, and do not worry. I received permission from the Imperial Family and the Church.”
There was a method of treating syphilis with malaria.
1. Infect the syphilis patient with malaria.
2. The heat from the malaria burns the syphilis bacteria to death.
3. Treat the malaria with quinine.
4. Ta-da! Syphilis cured!
Surprisingly, it was an official treatment method.
One humanity had used before penicillin was developed.
It had even received a Nobel Prize, so it was certainly an established treatment.
But there was a reason I had only begun using it last week.
“As you can see, we infect patients with malaria using insect-type magical beasts controlled through black magic, then treat them with quinine.”
“Good heavens...”
There had been no way to infect people with malaria deliberately.
In the world I used to live in, I remembered that they gave patients transfusions of malaria-infected blood.
But that was a little dangerous in this world.
As one could tell from the fact that malaria here had nearly killed my father, a Rank 3 superhuman.
There were magical-beast variants even among malaria parasites.
If things went wrong, the patient would simply die, so I needed a way to stabilize it.
That was why I borrowed the power of black magic a little.
“Is that not an insect-type magical beast from the Southern Front?”
“Yes. We succeeded in controlling them with help from the Imperial Family.”
More precisely, it was the Great Sage, not the Imperial Family.
Controlling those mosquito magical beasts had been a task in itself.
We needed a generation that would not multiply like mad, carried safe malaria parasites, and did not transmit other serious germs.
My master and I had struggled for quite a while, replacing generation after generation of mosquitoes.
‘Without genetic engineering, it was pure manual labor.’
No genetic engineering?
Then make up for it with overwhelming time and numbers.
In any case, we had managed to create safe malaria mosquitoes(?).
“Huh...”
Simeon could not seem to close his mouth.
I led him to the laboratory beneath the clinic.
Unlike the upper floor, which was full of healers, numerous alchemists inside were administering something to mice and pigs.
“This is where we research new medicines.”
Inside the laboratory, filled with the cries of mice and pigs.
The alchemists were carrying red substances around and testing them diligently.
“Failed. This medicine kills the pigs.”
“That one failed too. Junior, burn it properly.”
Simeon’s gaze fixed on the red substance.
“What is this?”
“Dyes.”
“Dyes?”
“I cannot make everything myself, so we are researching whether there is anything useful among things that already exist.”
I had only one body and limited time.
So rather than making everything from scratch these days, I left the search for useful existing substances to other alchemists.
“Is there a particular reason you are using red dyes?”
“They were the most common.”
That was a lie.
I was doing it because I knew the answer lay in red dyes.
“Then may I ask what you are trying to make?”
“... A poison that kills disease, and only disease.”
“Pardon?”
“For now, I am thinking of calling that poison an antibiotic.”
* * *
Antibiotics.
A doctor’s friend.
A doctor’s lover.
A doctor’s lord.
Honestly, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the very concept of a doctor could not exist without antibiotics.
Especially for a surgeon!
‘How did I make all those other medicines, yet find one antibiotic so difficult?’
To someone from the twenty-first century, antibiotics were familiar medicines.
Honestly, there probably was not a modern person who had never used antibiotics even once.
But despite how common they seemed, they were practically endgame-level medicine in the history of medical science.
Anesthetics came before antibiotics, you know?
‘Even when I want to take the easy route, this world refuses to let me.’
At first, I thought I could make penicillin easily if I just knew the recipe.
Bread covered in blue mold.
Everyone knew how penicillin had originated, did they not?
Since I had even memorized the Viagra formula, I thought making penicillin would not be difficult.
But it was.
‘I don’t know how to make blue mold grow whenever I want...!’
Not all blue mold was the same.
There was a specific mold that produced penicillin.
And to mass-produce penicillin, an even more special strain of blue mold was necessary.
That was why, even after more than twenty years, I still had not been able to make penicillin.
So I turned to other antibiotics first.
‘All I need is to find the dye.’
Prontosil, the first antibiotic used clinically, was made from red dye.
A sulfonamide antibiotic, it was penicillin’s senior.
Penicillin itself had originally been discovered first.
The problem was that researchers had spent years failing to find a way to produce enough penicillin to administer to hundreds of people, so Prontosil stole the title of the first clinical antibiotic.
In other words, Prontosil was the first antibiotic used in clinical practice.
‘If I can just find this, I’ll finally be able to breathe easier.’
So I searched markets throughout the world and ordered every red dye I could find, telling the alchemists that any red dye would do.
Then we tested those dyes on sick mice and pigs.
Hoping one would happen to work.
We had not found the antibiotic we wanted yet.
For one reason.
“Simeon. Among poisons, there are some that kill disease. But most of them kill people too. That is why I want to find a poison that kills only disease.”
There were plenty of red chemical compounds that killed both bacteria and people.
But finding an antibiotic that killed only bacteria without harming people was extremely difficult.
“... Why are you showing me this?”
Inside my office in the underground laboratory.
I sat facing Simeon, teacups between us.
Gregor was waiting outside the office, for reference.
“Does this have something to do with the question I asked yesterday?”
“It certainly does.”
Out of habit, I almost lifted my teacup, then remembered I was wearing a mask and barely lowered my hand.
“Before answering, we should define divine punishment first. What do you believe divine punishment is, Simeon?”
“It is when those who commit sins are ultimately punished.”
“Such as lightning striking them?”
“Even if it is not that, I believe it encompasses all misfortunes, such as those who prosper by the sword falling by the sword, or becoming ill.”
In other words, he was saying that every result in which evil people became unhappy might be divine punishment.
“Though no one can know whether it truly is divine punishment.”
“Of course. We are only human, after all.”
In any case, we had defined divine punishment.
“Then you asked whether divine punishment falls upon evil.”
“Yes, that is correct.”
“I gave it some thought...”
I moved the beak of my crow mask toward the closed office door.
“I believe divine punishment is like an antibiotic.”
“An antibiotic...?”
“The gods must have many weapons with which to punish humanity.”
It was written in the scriptures, too.
In the era when the gods communicated actively with humanity.
The gods punished those who defied their words with floods, earthquakes, and the like.
But divine punishment on such a massive scale only happened when a city was as depraved as Sodom and Gomorrah.
“If every human were evil, the gods would have an easy method of punishment. But if good people were among them, they would have no choice but to consider their method.”
If you used arsenic on a syphilis patient, it would kill the syphilis.
Along with all the healthy cells.
If you gave a sepsis patient any red dye, it would kill the bacteria.
If not for the minor issue of the patient being poisoned to death.
Because of problems like this, medicine twists itself in every direction to find other treatment methods.
Perhaps that was why the world was in such a state as well.
“I think the gods may be cautious when intervening in human affairs because they are so powerful. That is why divine punishment may come slowly, or sometimes appear as though nothing happens at all.”
Honestly.
I did not know whether this was the right answer.
If the gods loved humanity, did it make sense for the world to be such a mess?
If they truly loved humanity, should this not be a romance fantasy rather than a dark fantasy?
Still, compared to the twenty-first century where I had lived, the gods of this world did not seem completely silent.
They subcontracted divine power to us when we prayed.
Occasionally, they even gave revelations to the Holy King.
Seeing things like that, I could at least say the gods definitely existed.
Unlike in my previous life, where I could not even be certain they existed.
I could not deny their existence, so I interpreted things this way, almost as if I were forcing the pieces together.
What if I was wrong?
That would be unfortunate.
I was not a religious person. I was a medical professional.
Honestly, I did not think anything would happen just because I was wrong.
“Is that your answer, Saint? That the reason they remain silent is because divine punishment is still coming slowly?”
But it seemed like an endlessly disappointing answer to Simeon.
Naturally.
Divine punishment was not the only focus of his question.
Since I knew that, I continued.
“No. This is only an answer for Brother Simeon, who is fixated on divine punishment. It is not the answer to your question.”
“... Pardon?”
“The heart of your question was why the Schnabel couple had to die, was it not?”
“...”
Why did good people always suffer and vanish in vain?
I had asked that question many times myself.
And I still had not reached a conclusion.
But.
“At the very least, I believe I can say with certainty that God did not abandon that couple.”
“What did you...”
At that moment.
Simeon’s narrowed eyes opened, glaring at my crow mask.
“Can you take responsibility for those words?”
“...”
“Even if you are a saint, you must speak carefully.”
“Yes. I can take responsibility.”
This answer could not represent every case of a good person suffering.
But I thought it could at least explain the case of my biological parents to some extent.
“At the very least, they did not pass away in vain.”
Crunch.
“Their will was cut off, and I cannot see where the later generations who should enjoy the fruits of their good deeds have gone.”
It was a side effect of memory alteration.
By cutting off all traces of the Schnabel couple’s child.
It had created someone wandering like this.
“Where on this earth does their will remain?”
“No. It remains.”
I had gone home yesterday and thought long and hard.
As soon as I reached my conclusion, I asked my father-in-law at the Inspectorate for one permission.
For just one person.
To end that one person’s wandering, could I make a small crack in the memory alteration?
The answer I received was:
“If you believe that person can be trusted like family and will keep their mouth shut, you may tell them. But dealing with the consequences will be entirely your responsibility.”
It was permission that said, do it if you dare.
And now.
I was facing Simeon.
“Is it not right here? The one who carries on their will and enjoys the fruits they achieved.”
I pointed at myself.
After thinking about it carefully, I felt that my existence was the answer.
I was happy, unusually lucky, and living while carrying on their will.
Did that not mean their deaths had not been meaningless?
Well, I was not a philosopher, so.
“You. Your arrogance goes too far. There are words that even a saint must never dare to say.”
Dense magical power poured out from Simeon.
His manner made it seem as though he would fire magic into my face if I said one more word.
I could only smile bitterly inside my crow mask.
‘Tch.’
I needed to study how to speak better.
I had originally intended to reveal it while persuading him slowly.
Instead, I seemed to have provoked him.
Thinking things would become a problem if I continued, I raised my mask to my forehead instead of speaking.
Simeon froze on the spot.
“That hair... those eyes... Could it be...”
“You are thinking correctly. My godfather often told me that my face resembled my father’s, while my eyes and hair color resembled my mother’s.”
Thud.
I placed two cross necklaces on the desk.
The Schnabel couple’s final keepsakes, with the names of the two clergy engraved upon them.
Their traces, which only one person had the right to possess.
“I do not know whether this will be an answer, but I hope it can be the answer that ends your wandering.”
“Huuuh...”
Simeon’s narrowed eyes opened as wide as full moons, tears streaming from the whites around his eyes.
Then.
“Huuurk...!”
“...?”
“Gasp! Huuurk...!”
“Brother Simeon?”
“Hrk... Hrk...!”
“Brother! Breathe! You need to breathe slowly! Breathe into this bag! Gregor! Get him upstairs, quickly!”
He clutched his chest, gasping amid symptoms of hyperventilation.
Then he fell backward with an ecstatic expression on his face.
Author's Note
Did you know?
Penicillin was the first antibiotic discovered, but Prontosil was the first antibiotic to be commercially used.
Surprisingly, penicillin required quite a lot of time and trial and error after its discovery before it could be properly used in clinical practice.
Also, regarding the syphilis treatment method.
Treating syphilis by infecting the patient with malaria and then curing the malaria with quinine was recognized strongly enough to receive a Nobel Prize.
At the time, syphilis was treated with Salvarsan, an arsenic extract, but its mortality rate was rather high.
The malaria treatment method was more difficult, but its mortality rate was much lower.
Interestingly, it was the previously mentioned penicillin that brought the era of syphilis to an end.
Footnotes:
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