"[Heal] won't activate," said Kari, who we'd tracked down in something of a panic. "It's like I'm trying to cast it on thin air. Why the rush, anyway?"
"(It was only a sneeze,)" complained Abigail, sniffling. "(And a bit of a runny nose. I'm hardly dying. Besides, we've only been here a few hours. Nowhere near enough time to get sick. I must have caught it before we came here. Everyone should stop getting so worked up.)"
"What was all that she just said?" complained Kari.
"The way diseases work, exposure to something usually makes you more resistant to it next time. To some extent, resistance can be passed from mother to child, too. Plus, there's a bunch of genetic adaptations that species gain over time to make their immune systems more effective against whatever they live alongside. Bringing two worlds into contact like this, there's none of that. They're facing our diseases with nothing."
"But the worst diseases we have are kids getting the sniffles."
"When they infect us, yes. Earthlings are likely to be hit far harder."
"Wait, then won't it work the other way around, too? Aren't they bringing Earth plague with them?"
"We have healing magic and the endurance stat. Nevertheless, we should keep them away from young children."
Young children like Darren... I very nearly quoted a page out of Doctor Withermark's dictionary, but managed to hold my tongue. Darren hadn't been particularly close to any of them, but I wrote out a couple of sentences to keep him indoors and away from other kids, had Cluma cast [Minor Harm] all over it, then teleported it back to the village. Then I ejected a steel ingot from [Item Box] as forcefully as possible, which alas wasn't very, but the resulting clang was still enough to attract Mum's attention. I'd need to give a better explanation as soon as I had more than a few seconds to spare.
"(What are you talking about?)" interrupted Cara. "(Is Abigail going to be okay?)"
"(You really need to learn [Common] as soon as possible... But she doesn't seem particularly ill.)"
"(I'm fine,)" agreed the sniffly patient in question. "(I'm more worried about passing this cold to you, but you came here without problems, so it should be fine.)"
"(Ah, about that... I think you're all making an incorrect assumption there. All the reincarnates I'm aware of are, well, reincarnates. No-one crossed over from Earth with their bodies intact. Personally, I got run over by a truck.)"
The gang of Earthlings stared at me blankly.
"(Wait. You died?)" exclaimed Doctor Withermark.
"(Yup. Smacked by a truck, bled to death on the tarmac, woke up here as a freshly born baby.)"
"(But... What?! That's impossible.)"
I kept a perfectly straight face as I detached my head.
"(I've seen impossible things on a daily basis,)" said my head, which I tucked under an arm. "(Heck, I'd have called your portals impossible during my Earth life. I have a System skill that lets me see souls. I can see yours, right now. And sorry, but when the body dies, the soul doesn't just vanish.)"
"(It might be best if that information doesn't get out...)" opined one of the guards carefully. I now knew their names, too! Russell and Dominic, although their layers of green plastic made them look similar enough that I hadn't quite grasped which one was which, and now I was too embarrassed to ask for clarification.
"(Are you kidding? Direct evidence of God? We're morally obliged to share it immediately!)" argued the other, who was probably Russell. Maybe. Perhaps I should rename them to Russnic and Dominell.
"(Don't get ahead of yourselves,)" said Doctor Withermark. Or Harry. Calling him by his title every time was getting too long winded. "(We don't know what it is he's really seeing. Do you know what happened to cause you to reincarnate with your memories intact?)"
"(Yup. You.)"
Harry blinked.
"(My brother broke into that experiment chamber of yours, the one with the big ball and all the rods, and my parents chased him while carrying me. Apparently, it was all glowing blue and roaring. And then when all four of us died, we came here.)"
Harry stared, slack-jawed. "(That was you?)"
"(Oh? We're famous?)"
"(Infamous, more like. I wasn't working there at the time, but I've heard the story. Everyone was terrified, given the amount of radiation you were exposed to. They thought they'd killed you.)"
He stopped to consider that.
"(No, you're far too young. You can't have been here since then.)"
"(Yeah, I lived to twenty-eight. Then suddenly, truck. Well, someone was trying to stab me at the time, so I wasn't paying quite as much attention to the road as it warranted. No cancer in our family. I don't think, anyway. I've never asked my parents what they died of. It would be weird...)"
"(How can you be so flippant?)" complained Cara.
"Look, you're going to have to translate," interrupted Kari. "You can't have two conversations on the go at once."
"(I can be flippant because it was a long time ago. I got over it, and I'm enjoying life here,") I answered, reattaching my head. "And Kari, I was just telling them about my reincarnation."
"Don't they already know about that? It's why you speak their language."
"(Umm... Sorry to... interrupt...)" started Abigail before practically detonating with the loudest sneeze I'd ever heard. "(Sorry. I feel...)"
Her staccato sentence was interrupted by her legs giving way beneath her. Her face was flushed, and her breathing was obviously laboured.
Harry swore. Again. It seemed to be a bad habit of his.
"Language!" exclaimed Kari. "I don't even speak yours, and I can still tell that was a bad word."
"I think he can be forgiven that one," I muttered. "Let's get them to their dorm. Cluma!"
"Mmm?!" she responded, surprised. She'd been uncharacteristically quiet, carefully following the conversation trying to get her last few levels of [Language: English].
"Run ahead of us and blast the room with [Minor Harm]. Kill everything in there, even things so small you can't see them. We want it clean."
"Okay," she answered, already running off.
"It's probably best we don't touch her," I pointed out, so the guards carefully lifted her. She was already too far gone to protest.
They'd been assigned three rooms, all in the same corridor. One for Abigail and Cara, one for Harry and Calvin, and one for Russell and Dominic. By the time we piled into the girls' room, Abigail was having serious difficulty breathing.
I didn't miss Calvin sniffing, either.
"(Feed her this,)" I said, pulling a healing potion out of [Item Box] and handing it to Cluma to sterilise. Cara helped her drink it, but it had no effect that I could see. Through [Mana Sight], it didn't seem to react at all. It was no different to if I'd simply poured it into another container.
Just like so many other things, were potions fake too? The System simply applying an effect when it detected someone drinking one? I had a recipe for a potion of cure disease in my head, but I had no reason to believe it would be any more effective than a healing potion.
"(So, we escaped here, only to die of the sniffles,)" sighed Cara, resignedly dropping to her own bed.
"(Not if I can help it...)" I muttered. "Kari, since spells don't work, try raw life affinity. Cluma, sterilise this."
I handed her my physical stat ring, with its health regeneration enchantment. I had no more reason to believe it would work than a potion of cure disease, but unlike brewing a potion, it was only the work of a few seconds to get it clean and onto her. Alas, as expected, it had no effect. Even the comfort enchantment failed to kick in, leaving it an ill-fit for her finger.
The life affinity, on the other hand, did seem to achieve something. Her breathing grew easier, although she was still barely responsive, still in the grip of a deadly fever.
Calvin was flushed and sweating and Cara had started sniffing. In the best case, they were both having emotional reactions to the sickness of their friend.
I was too cynical to believe in best cases.
"I can't keep this up forever, and she's not getting better," pointed out Kari. "Any other bright ideas?"
"Only one... Reattach them to the System."
"Can you even do that?"
"Yes, assuming I can get into the ark."
Cara sneezed. Yup, this was so far from the best case that I wouldn't be able to see it with a telescope.
"(The last thing I can try is to reattach you to the System. Perhaps it'll grant me access to the control room if I say I'm there to attach people rather than detach them, but I can't guarantee anything.)"
"(Yes, please,)" mumbled Harry, his voice giving away the fact that he was infected too, despite his lack of sneezing.
Thank goodness I'd left a teleport beacon there. I dropped to the floor and activated [Redistribute], not caring how it looked.
"I'm here to reattach people, not to detach anyone," I shouted the moment my mouth was fully located in the correct part of the continent, jumping to my feet as soon as they turned up. "Please. We have people who will probably be dead in minutes without healing magic."
I waited, but nothing happened. "Please!" I repeated. The first time it had been very slow, too. Maybe it needed processing time...
With no better ideas, I desperately brewed a potion of cure disease, using [Expert Mana Control] to overload a fire crystal and bringing a beaker of water to the boil in seconds. Less than a minute later, I had a fresh potion in hand, but the doors were still tightly shut.
ding
Skill [Advanced Alchemy] advanced to level 3
Class [Artisan] advanced to level 7
"I really don't understand how you think," I complained to the doors, before lying back down for [Redistribute].
With the screech of metal grinding against metal, the doors swung ponderously open.
"Thank you," I shouted, already back on my feet and running, not having the time to complain about them leaving it to the last second again.
Another minute later, and I was back in the control room. Five seconds more, and I had a list of everyone located in this world with a disabled System shard. As expected, there were six.
I couldn't filter by name. The System didn't know who was who... Screw it. I reattached all of them.
I risked a couple of seconds to check that Earth had indeed developed a sizeable list of infected newborns since my last visit, and every one of them had the 'soul adaptation in progress' tag. But this time, I left them alone. If I cut them off, it not only wouldn't solve the root of the problem, but would likely ensure I'd never be permitted entry here again.
Another handful of seconds, and I was once again mid-teleport back to their room.
"[Heal] should work now!" I shouted the moment my mouth was available.
Kari cast it and Abigail twitched in reaction, but she showed no sign of regaining consciousness, nor did her appearance improve.
I stood up and noticed that Cara was on the bed next to Abigail, sweating and shivering. The reason she was there and not on her own bed was because that was taken up by the male researchers, both still conscious, but not looking at all well. Things had escalated rapidly in the minutes I'd been away, despite Kari bathing them in life affinity.
She cast [Heal] again, and through [Eye of Judgement] I watched Abigail's health jump up. Her status conditions still showed [Diseased], though, and her health was ticking back downwards rapidly. Kari's healing restored her pool, but didn't touch the disease.
"It's doing something, but it's not helping," said Kari.
"It's restoring her health, but not curing the disease," I said. It looked like my potion would come in handy after all.
The guards wouldn't be able to manipulate the small vial with their chunky gloves, and the researchers were all out of it, so it fell to me to feed it to her. The status condition vanished, and another [Heal] left her face the correct colour.
"Right, we can do this. We need rings enchanted with health regeneration from Grover, and Raymond for more powerful healing, and Vargalas can... No; they're rank one. That would just give them instant alchemic poisoning. It's best if I make some more potions of cure disease. Should we move them to the hospital?"
"No," said Kari. "We've declared the institute a quarantine site until we're sure we haven't caught anything from them. We've already sent someone we're certain was clean to fetch Raymond."
Okay. Getting stuck here would suck, but I had to agree it was sensible.
"What about Krana and Serlv?"
"If they've brought a disease that can harm rank five dragons, we might as well give in and jump into the dungeon right now."
Jump into the... ah, of course. Dying in a dungeon resulted in the creation of a new body. A new disease free body. Hopefully. Things wouldn't work out if the dungeon recorded someone's state on the way in. It was like my question of how healing magic knew what to heal. If my current theory that it restored the body based on the template provided by the soul was correct, the dungeon could be used to cure disease.
When it came to Earth related things, I was too stuck in the mindset that I needed to do everything myself. This institute was full of intelligent people. More intelligent than me, for the most part, if a little quirky. That was fine. I was a lot quirky.
Happy with their precautions, I planted myself in the room opposite, not caring who it belonged to, and settled down to brew.
Announcement If my maths is correct, a one-off patreon month now will get you the last regular chapter of the story before your access expires. (But if you join and immediately quit, remember to follow afterwards if you want e-mail notifications.)That's... kinda sad, in a way. When I started writing unbound soul, the intent was to try my hand at a much longer format web serial than A Lonely Dungeon, but I guess 'longer' doesn't mean 'will continue forever'.
"[Heal] won't activate," said Kari, who we'd tracked down in something of a panic. "It's like I'm trying to cast it on thin air. Why the rush, anyway?"
"(It was only a sneeze,)" complained Abigail, sniffling. "(And a bit of a runny nose. I'm hardly dying. Besides, we've only been here a few hours. Nowhere near enough time to get sick. I must have caught it before we came here. Everyone should stop getting so worked up.)"
"What was all that she just said?" complained Kari.
"The way diseases work, exposure to something usually makes you more resistant to it next time. To some extent, resistance can be passed from mother to child, too. Plus, there's a bunch of genetic adaptations that species gain over time to make their immune systems more effective against whatever they live alongside. Bringing two worlds into contact like this, there's none of that. They're facing our diseases with nothing."
"But the worst diseases we have are kids getting the sniffles."
"When they infect us, yes. Earthlings are likely to be hit far harder."
"Wait, then won't it work the other way around, too? Aren't they bringing Earth plague with them?"
"We have healing magic and the endurance stat. Nevertheless, we should keep them away from young children."
Young children like Darren... I very nearly quoted a page out of Doctor Withermark's dictionary, but managed to hold my tongue. Darren hadn't been particularly close to any of them, but I wrote out a couple of sentences to keep him indoors and away from other kids, had Cluma cast [Minor Harm] all over it, then teleported it back to the village. Then I ejected a steel ingot from [Item Box] as forcefully as possible, which alas wasn't very, but the resulting clang was still enough to attract Mum's attention. I'd need to give a better explanation as soon as I had more than a few seconds to spare.
"(What are you talking about?)" interrupted Cara. "(Is Abigail going to be okay?)"
"(You really need to learn [Common] as soon as possible... But she doesn't seem particularly ill.)"
"(I'm fine,)" agreed the sniffly patient in question. "(I'm more worried about passing this cold to you, but you came here without problems, so it should be fine.)"
"(Ah, about that... I think you're all making an incorrect assumption there. All the reincarnates I'm aware of are, well, reincarnates. No-one crossed over from Earth with their bodies intact. Personally, I got run over by a truck.)"
The gang of Earthlings stared at me blankly.
"(Wait. You died?)" exclaimed Doctor Withermark.
"(Yup. Smacked by a truck, bled to death on the tarmac, woke up here as a freshly born baby.)"
"(But... What?! That's impossible.)"
I kept a perfectly straight face as I detached my head.
"(I've seen impossible things on a daily basis,)" said my head, which I tucked under an arm. "(Heck, I'd have called your portals impossible during my Earth life. I have a System skill that lets me see souls. I can see yours, right now. And sorry, but when the body dies, the soul doesn't just vanish.)"
"(It might be best if that information doesn't get out...)" opined one of the guards carefully. I now knew their names, too! Russell and Dominic, although their layers of green plastic made them look similar enough that I hadn't quite grasped which one was which, and now I was too embarrassed to ask for clarification.
"(Are you kidding? Direct evidence of God? We're morally obliged to share it immediately!)" argued the other, who was probably Russell. Maybe. Perhaps I should rename them to Russnic and Dominell.
"(Don't get ahead of yourselves,)" said Doctor Withermark. Or Harry. Calling him by his title every time was getting too long winded. "(We don't know what it is he's really seeing. Do you know what happened to cause you to reincarnate with your memories intact?)"
"(Yup. You.)"
Harry blinked.
"(My brother broke into that experiment chamber of yours, the one with the big ball and all the rods, and my parents chased him while carrying me. Apparently, it was all glowing blue and roaring. And then when all four of us died, we came here.)"
Harry stared, slack-jawed. "(That was you?)"
"(Oh? We're famous?)"
"(Infamous, more like. I wasn't working there at the time, but I've heard the story. Everyone was terrified, given the amount of radiation you were exposed to. They thought they'd killed you.)"
He stopped to consider that.
"(No, you're far too young. You can't have been here since then.)"
"(Yeah, I lived to twenty-eight. Then suddenly, truck. Well, someone was trying to stab me at the time, so I wasn't paying quite as much attention to the road as it warranted. No cancer in our family. I don't think, anyway. I've never asked my parents what they died of. It would be weird...)"
"(How can you be so flippant?)" complained Cara.
"Look, you're going to have to translate," interrupted Kari. "You can't have two conversations on the go at once."
"(I can be flippant because it was a long time ago. I got over it, and I'm enjoying life here,") I answered, reattaching my head. "And Kari, I was just telling them about my reincarnation."
"Don't they already know about that? It's why you speak their language."
"(Umm... Sorry to... interrupt...)" started Abigail before practically detonating with the loudest sneeze I'd ever heard. "(Sorry. I feel...)"
Her staccato sentence was interrupted by her legs giving way beneath her. Her face was flushed, and her breathing was obviously laboured.
Harry swore. Again. It seemed to be a bad habit of his.
"Language!" exclaimed Kari. "I don't even speak yours, and I can still tell that was a bad word."
"I think he can be forgiven that one," I muttered. "Let's get them to their dorm. Cluma!"
"Mmm?!" she responded, surprised. She'd been uncharacteristically quiet, carefully following the conversation trying to get her last few levels of [Language: English].
"Run ahead of us and blast the room with [Minor Harm]. Kill everything in there, even things so small you can't see them. We want it clean."
"Okay," she answered, already running off.
"It's probably best we don't touch her," I pointed out, so the guards carefully lifted her. She was already too far gone to protest.
They'd been assigned three rooms, all in the same corridor. One for Abigail and Cara, one for Harry and Calvin, and one for Russell and Dominic. By the time we piled into the girls' room, Abigail was having serious difficulty breathing.
I didn't miss Calvin sniffing, either.
"(Feed her this,)" I said, pulling a healing potion out of [Item Box] and handing it to Cluma to sterilise. Cara helped her drink it, but it had no effect that I could see. Through [Mana Sight], it didn't seem to react at all. It was no different to if I'd simply poured it into another container.
Just like so many other things, were potions fake too? The System simply applying an effect when it detected someone drinking one? I had a recipe for a potion of cure disease in my head, but I had no reason to believe it would be any more effective than a healing potion.
"(So, we escaped here, only to die of the sniffles,)" sighed Cara, resignedly dropping to her own bed.
"(Not if I can help it...)" I muttered. "Kari, since spells don't work, try raw life affinity. Cluma, sterilise this."
I handed her my physical stat ring, with its health regeneration enchantment. I had no more reason to believe it would work than a potion of cure disease, but unlike brewing a potion, it was only the work of a few seconds to get it clean and onto her. Alas, as expected, it had no effect. Even the comfort enchantment failed to kick in, leaving it an ill-fit for her finger.
The life affinity, on the other hand, did seem to achieve something. Her breathing grew easier, although she was still barely responsive, still in the grip of a deadly fever.
Calvin was flushed and sweating and Cara had started sniffing. In the best case, they were both having emotional reactions to the sickness of their friend.
I was too cynical to believe in best cases.
"I can't keep this up forever, and she's not getting better," pointed out Kari. "Any other bright ideas?"
"Only one... Reattach them to the System."
"Can you even do that?"
"Yes, assuming I can get into the ark."
Cara sneezed. Yup, this was so far from the best case that I wouldn't be able to see it with a telescope.
"(The last thing I can try is to reattach you to the System. Perhaps it'll grant me access to the control room if I say I'm there to attach people rather than detach them, but I can't guarantee anything.)"
"(Yes, please,)" mumbled Harry, his voice giving away the fact that he was infected too, despite his lack of sneezing.
Thank goodness I'd left a teleport beacon there. I dropped to the floor and activated [Redistribute], not caring how it looked.
"I'm here to reattach people, not to detach anyone," I shouted the moment my mouth was fully located in the correct part of the continent, jumping to my feet as soon as they turned up. "Please. We have people who will probably be dead in minutes without healing magic."
I waited, but nothing happened. "Please!" I repeated. The first time it had been very slow, too. Maybe it needed processing time...
With no better ideas, I desperately brewed a potion of cure disease, using [Expert Mana Control] to overload a fire crystal and bringing a beaker of water to the boil in seconds. Less than a minute later, I had a fresh potion in hand, but the doors were still tightly shut.
ding
Skill [Advanced Alchemy] advanced to level 3
Class [Artisan] advanced to level 7
"I really don't understand how you think," I complained to the doors, before lying back down for [Redistribute].
With the screech of metal grinding against metal, the doors swung ponderously open.
"Thank you," I shouted, already back on my feet and running, not having the time to complain about them leaving it to the last second again.
Another minute later, and I was back in the control room. Five seconds more, and I had a list of everyone located in this world with a disabled System shard. As expected, there were six.
I couldn't filter by name. The System didn't know who was who... Screw it. I reattached all of them.
I risked a couple of seconds to check that Earth had indeed developed a sizeable list of infected newborns since my last visit, and every one of them had the 'soul adaptation in progress' tag. But this time, I left them alone. If I cut them off, it not only wouldn't solve the root of the problem, but would likely ensure I'd never be permitted entry here again.
Another handful of seconds, and I was once again mid-teleport back to their room.
"[Heal] should work now!" I shouted the moment my mouth was available.
Kari cast it and Abigail twitched in reaction, but she showed no sign of regaining consciousness, nor did her appearance improve.
I stood up and noticed that Cara was on the bed next to Abigail, sweating and shivering. The reason she was there and not on her own bed was because that was taken up by the male researchers, both still conscious, but not looking at all well. Things had escalated rapidly in the minutes I'd been away, despite Kari bathing them in life affinity.
She cast [Heal] again, and through [Eye of Judgement] I watched Abigail's health jump up. Her status conditions still showed [Diseased], though, and her health was ticking back downwards rapidly. Kari's healing restored her pool, but didn't touch the disease.
"It's doing something, but it's not helping," said Kari.
"It's restoring her health, but not curing the disease," I said. It looked like my potion would come in handy after all.
The guards wouldn't be able to manipulate the small vial with their chunky gloves, and the researchers were all out of it, so it fell to me to feed it to her. The status condition vanished, and another [Heal] left her face the correct colour.
"Right, we can do this. We need rings enchanted with health regeneration from Grover, and Raymond for more powerful healing, and Vargalas can... No; they're rank one. That would just give them instant alchemic poisoning. It's best if I make some more potions of cure disease. Should we move them to the hospital?"
"No," said Kari. "We've declared the institute a quarantine site until we're sure we haven't caught anything from them. We've already sent someone we're certain was clean to fetch Raymond."
Okay. Getting stuck here would suck, but I had to agree it was sensible.
"What about Krana and Serlv?"
"If they've brought a disease that can harm rank five dragons, we might as well give in and jump into the dungeon right now."
Jump into the... ah, of course. Dying in a dungeon resulted in the creation of a new body. A new disease free body. Hopefully. Things wouldn't work out if the dungeon recorded someone's state on the way in. It was like my question of how healing magic knew what to heal. If my current theory that it restored the body based on the template provided by the soul was correct, the dungeon could be used to cure disease.
When it came to Earth related things, I was too stuck in the mindset that I needed to do everything myself. This institute was full of intelligent people. More intelligent than me, for the most part, if a little quirky. That was fine. I was a lot quirky.
Happy with their precautions, I planted myself in the room opposite, not caring who it belonged to, and settled down to brew.
Announcement If my maths is correct, a one-off patreon month now will get you the last regular chapter of the story before your access expires. (But if you join and immediately quit, remember to follow afterwards if you want e-mail notifications.)That's... kinda sad, in a way. When I started writing unbound soul, the intent was to try my hand at a much longer format web serial than A Lonely Dungeon, but I guess 'longer' doesn't mean 'will continue forever'.
