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He 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 flask 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 come to that. Now would be a fine time to use himself as a guinea pig, and then afterward, he could cure the dying healer.

Centering 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 to purge all the bacteria from his body, that would have some kind of terrible consequence because he was pretty sure there were supposed to be good ones, too. So, instead, he focused on the plague bacteria and imagined them as little black bugs desperately looking for a way inside his body.

Once he had that image fixed and he could feel a connection to it, he finally uttered the new word he had yet to use before. “D̶͓̐e̵͚͛l̸͔̑z̵̙͋á̵̜m̴̜͊.” Cure. Simon felt a slight tingle as the word rippled through him, but once it passed, he felt no worse, so he turned his attention back to the dying man.

“D̶͓̐e̵͚͛l̸͔̑z̵̙͋á̵̜m̴̜͊,” he repeated, focusing on the stranger’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. Between the two spells, he looked almost as good as new, though 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 magic on your side.

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

A search of the makeshift hospital this guy had been working on yielded a few more answers. It definitely wasn’t religious or spiritual in nature. Instead, it was alchemical. Most of the contents 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 medicine that had been administered to the sick or research about the pestilence that was killing them.

It seemed more likely to be the former, though. He seemed to recall that things as toxic as mercury had been considered medicine once upon a time on Earth. Who knew what they would consider 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 check on him a few minutes later. “The Black Plague is a little advanced for people that haven’t invented microscopes.”

The stranger stirred, but not enough to wake, and Simon set his water skin down next to him just in case he woke up and was still thirsty, and then went in search of the ingredients for the most powerful medicine he knew how to make: Chicken Noodle Soup.

Inside the 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 invented in this world, and he had no idea how to make them, he did find a live chicken 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 techniques 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 chicken 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 centaurs for some sweet and sour or some honey mustard.

“Failing to invent microscopes is one thing,” he said to himself as he started walking back to the square, “but not inventing sugar? Unforgivable.” If he was ever going to be one of those isekai protagonists that invented all the crazy shit they missed from the modern world, he was going to use it to invent sugar or chocolate, 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 black flies increase along with the stench of death as the temperature rose, but that was a later problem.

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For now, he found a kitchen 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 was probably something that he was never going to be good at, Simon decided, but he’d come an awfully long way in the last two lifetimes. He could dice vegetables, roast meat, and even make bread, though it never really came out right.

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 chicken and set it aside before adding the fleshy carcass to the pot, then he started dicing some vegetables. He’d let that simmer along with the salt for a while, then toss in everything else later.

Several hours later, 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, reaching up to his face in a panic as he realized he was no longer protected from the plague.

“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?"

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

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

“But all my experiments,” the man answered. “They showed that the plague couldn’t be defeated, not with tinctures of Suvalin or even with drops of enlightenment. 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 other guy 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 Klarr.”

“Well, Mister Klarr, 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 exclaimed, “But what about my master and patients? Surely they—”

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

He took a few minutes longer than he needed to, strictly speaking, to give the man some time to deal with his grief alone, but when he returned with the chicken soup, he wasn’t crying. He still seemed to be in shock.

Simon let 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 invented 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 magic in chicken…”

“Well, obviously, you’ve never had it fried,” Simon said with a laugh, suddenly craving something extra 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 can do for a sick person the next time 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 reactions and reagents to make it sound more believable, and by the second bowl of soup, the alchemist was at least partially convinced that there could be a magic in food if it was cooked the right way.

Before bed, Simon made his patient change 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, Simon knew that the rats would be worse once it got dark, and he wanted to avoid that as much as possible.

. . .

Simon had originally intended to keep going the next 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 next few days. They found a pomegranate tree, and Simon explained the miracle substance known as vitamin C to the alchemist. For his part, Robin tried to explain the mysterious fall of Hurag and the complicated mysticism of his alchemy, which was based on the trine. 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 wrong exactly. 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 fallen metal. It was an interesting 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 magic. Not even after they started burning bodies. When he used fire magic, he did it in secret. 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 understood more about the systems of this world, he wasn’t going to risk it.

They didn’t burn every corpse in the city. 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 once that was done that Simon told the other man he had to be off.

“But I could come 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 need to 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 in the pit, the more true that would probably become.

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

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