A bout of lung-tearing, violent coughing yanked my muddled consciousness out of the boundless dark by brute force.
The first thing I felt was my throat. It hurt—raw and burning—every swallow like someone had poured a spoonful of crushed glass down my gullet. The second was a strong, strange sourness clogging my nostrils, mixed with the smell of herbs, mold, and something like aged cured meat.
"Catch your breath, outsider." An old, hoarse voice—like two pieces of sandpaper grinding together—spoke right beside my ear. "If you're walking around our 'Cargo Stack Seven' turf, you at least need to cover your mouth and nose with cloth soaked in vinegar. Otherwise, the toxic smoke in the air will have your throat swollen up like a sausage in less than two hours…"
The voice had that uniquely elderly, nagging rhythm, slow and unhurried as it echoed by my ear. I forced my lead-heavy eyelids open, and what filled my vision was a face I would never forget for the rest of my life.
To be honest, the face itself was a work of weathered art. Her cheekbones jutted high, like two bronze gears etched again and again by acid rain. Deep, stacked folds of wrinkles layered her skin, and in those creases were embedded indigo stains that looked like they would never wash out—like some ancient tattoo. When she leaned closer and checked my pupils with those cloudy eyes, I thought I saw countless wispy metallic specks drifting inside the lens of her right eye, as if the permanent smog of Spirepeak City's Lower City had been concentrated and sealed inside this aging amber.
"Tsk. This isn't a place for pampered upper types like you." She muttered it again and again while checking my wounds, half like she was talking to me, half like she was talking to herself. "Not even a single implant on you, either. I can't tell if you're poor or rich…"
Her rough, shriveled hand seized one of my shoulders and flipped me over like a salted fish. Then she used a blackened wooden spatula to dig out a lump of greasy ointment from an iron tin—an ointment reeking strongly of cured meat—and carefully smeared it over the burn on the back of my neck. It felt ice-cold, and the fiery sting eased at once.
"…Old hag like me, I can't make sense of it either. And I sure as hell won't ask."
I reached up blankly, instinctively wanting to rub my neck. All that remained there now was a cool, comfortable relief.
Seeing my movement, that ravined face split into a strange grin—her lower lip was inlaid with a half-ring of brass ornamentation, while her upper lip still held the faded outline of an indigo lip-tattoo. When she smiled, the two lips formed a crooked, uncanny crescent moon in mismatched colors.
"Three-day-aged glowcap spores, mixed with the purest gear lubricant, then cut with a little condensate gathered from under the chassis of corpse-wagons." She explained with the pride of someone showing off an ancestral secret recipe. "The last breath of living air the dead swallow? It's all in there."
At that bizarre "formula," I shuddered hard, and my mind involuntarily flashed to the gruesome way a certain "Horse King" had died.
"Don't you look down on our folk remedies, kid." The old woman seemed slightly displeased by my reaction. She rapped my forehead lightly with a knuckle. "Other medicine? Maybe we can't match you outsiders. But down in the Lower City, burns are as common as breathing. If we didn't have a few tricks kept under the lid, people would've died out long ago…"
As she spoke, she turned to a huge earthenware crock—like the kind we used back home for pickling vegetables—scooped out a big ladleful of something black and writhing, and with a wet slap, plastered it onto my bare chest without the slightest hesitation.
"These little ones love lead-poison."
I looked down, focused, and nearly blacked out on the spot. It was a mass of black, soft-bodied worms as thick as my thumb, shaped like leeches. The moment they hit my chest, they started wriggling excitedly, scrambling over one another to punch their puckered, flower-like mouths into my skin and suck greedily.
"If you don't want to end up a babbling idiot later, lie still and stop thrashing!" The old woman saw me trying to struggle and smacked my forehead—not hard, but not gentle either. "You were bare-ass naked and covered in wounds, lying in that mud for so long you were almost pickled through!"
The old crack along the bridge of her nose—crudely stitched together with a few staples—twitched with her expression like an earthworm crawling.
"…Those little bastards were messing around blind. Saw some well-dressed loner and dared to rob him. Then they realized they might've beaten an upper to death, and they scattered like startled rats…" She kept muttering as her hands moved briskly, using tools I couldn't begin to understand to treat the rest of my injuries. "If it weren't for that kid 'Little Spark' still having a bit of conscience—sneaking over to tell me—what you'd be suffering right now wouldn't stop at this. Forget the filth in the air and on the ground. Odds are you'd have been dragged into some pitch-black corner and carved up as fresh meat…"
The one who saved me was this old woman, who called herself "Marta."
I started taking in where I was. This had to be Marta's "clinic." The main body was two battered railcar compartments—no idea what model—spliced together, then connected through various hatches and windows to other expanded spaces. It didn't feel like a hospital. It felt more like a tiny, cramped, chaotic general store mixed with a slaughterhouse, plus a private museum filled with countless bizarre specimens.
That smell—vinegar, herbs, and machine oil—was coming from the things around us. The walls were hung with dried specimens of plants and animals I couldn't name, as well as bundles and bundles of fungi that reeked oddly. And the medicine cabinet against the wall held a collection that made my scalp crawl: a fetal specimen of some rodent-like creature with three eyes, preserved in cloudy, unknown liquid; an antique cupping tool set with several yellowing human teeth; a crude, rusty centrifuge cobbled together from some kind of motor, its interior still stained with dark red blood-filth…
Everything here carried a thick, uncanny vibe—steam-punk spliced with voodoo—both novel and horrifying to a modern person like me. Yet for some reason, in this cramped, crowded, foul-smelling place, my heart—hung taut ever since I'd fallen into the Lower City—settled more than it had at any point before.
It was like a tiny, unremarkable safe harbor hidden in this filthy, chaotic, hostile steel rainforest.
And the old woman in front of me—who looked like a horror-film villain—was the harbor's only guardian.
"Drink it."
At some point she thrust a crooked tin cup up to my lips. Inside was half a cup of thick black-green sludge, stinking of damp earth, with unknown fragments floating on the surface.
"W-What is this?" I stared at the thing that looked like a biological weapon, and my Adam's apple bobbed involuntarily.
"Good stuff. To get your body sorted." She snapped, impatient. "No idea where you crawled out of, but a 'factory-original' like you—no upgrades, no enhancements—soft skin, pampered look, your bones are flimsier than paper. Down here, you'll be lucky if a single sip of water doesn't have you shitting for three days and three nights. This bowl will scald the delicate little nonsense in your guts to death and replace it with a batch that can fight the filth down here. Drink. Stop dawdling."
Under that unquestionable stare, I clenched my teeth, shut my eyes, pinched my nose, and poured it down like bitter medicine.
The taste…
I swear I'd rather lick a mop once than taste it a second time. It was the ultimate flavor—rotten mud, alcohol, stinking socks, and bile—burning straight down my esophagus, leaving a scorched wreck in its wake. I felt my stomach protest more violently than it ever had in my life, and then…
Then a warm current bloomed from my gut, spreading gradually through my limbs and bones. My arms and legs, cold from injury and shock, warmed up in a way that felt almost miraculous.
"Heh. You're good stock." The old woman nodded in approval when I didn't vomit on the spot, then lowered her head and went right back to her work.
(End of Chapter)
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