Tim's POV
The cooking levels dried up on the eighth day.
I knew it was coming, had felt the progression slowing through the week. Four more levels in a week had been extraordinary, the system responding to the shock of genuinely novel culinary knowledge being applied in a context that had never encountered it. Simple things like pasta from my world that were remarkable in this one.
But knowledge gaps closed. Aldric had watched everything I made and asked careful questions and his eyes had the brightness of a man whose understanding of his own craft was being fundamentally reorganised. The other kitchen staff had drifted closer over the week, watching the preparation with the professional attention. Within a month, this kitchen would be producing food that bore little resemblance to what it had produced before I arrived.
The levels slowed. And then they stopped.
Danger level forty-eight. Level sixteen total. Sixteen levels at eight years old, which was, I ran the comparison against what I knew of this world's population, somewhere in the range of what a moderately experienced Gold Ranked adventurer might carry. remarkable by adventurer standards.
I needed the next job class.
I had been thinking about the healing ward for weeks before I walked into it.
The church's medical facilities occupied a wing of the ground floor, two connected rooms that I had mapped early and observed from a distance. The partition between the rooms was physical but the real division was economic.
The first room had real beds with linen. It had priests who could cast genuine healing magic, warm light and closed wounds and the near-miraculous repair of bodies that would otherwise take weeks to recover through natural processes alone. It had a fee structure, posted on a board near the entrance, that placed its services firmly in the category of things that the comfortable could access and the poor generally could not.
The second room had wooden boards raised off the floor, which were technically beds in the sense that they were horizontal surfaces for sick people to lie on. It had the smell of a space where too many unwell people existed in too little ventilation. It had priests, junior ones, the newly arrived students, the ones not yet trusted with the paying patients, who provided what assistance they could without healing magic, which in most cases meant water, cloth, and some good old blood-letting.
What it did not consistently have was anyone who understood what they were doing in a medical sense.
The junior priests moved through the space with a mix of genuine compassion and visible discomfort, the discomfort of people who had been told, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that the occupants of this room were a charity exercise, that their presence here was a demonstration of the church's benevolence rather than a genuine priority. Most of the senior clergy didn't visit. Most of the magical healers didn't visit. The poor room was staffed by people who couldn't yet do anything else, supervised by no one in particular, operating without protocols.
The medical knowledge available in this room was pre-germ theory, pre-sterilisation, pre-anything that a modern person would recognise as systematic medical practice. Which meant, again, I was best Doctor here, as sad as that is.
I prepared carefully. Several layers of cloth wrapped around my hands and forearms, a covering over my nose and mouth that the junior priests would likely find eccentric but wouldn't find inexplicable in a space with sick people. Boiling water I could request from the kitchen, which was adjacent. The alcohol, I had sourced a bottle of high-proof spirits from the church's own stores, used liturgically, repurposed here without asking permission.
I pushed the door open and went in.
The room held eleven people that first morning. A family of four, father, mother, two children, occupying a corner, the father with a wound on his leg that someone had wrapped in cloth that was no longer clean. An elderly woman whose breathing had the particular wet quality of something settling in her lungs. Three men who looked like labourers, various stages of a fever that had probably come from the same source. A young woman with an infant. Two old men sitting together, brothers maybe.
A junior priest named Colm, perhaps seventeen, genuinely kind, visibly overwhelmed, was moving through the room with water and doing his best with inadequate tools. He looked at me when I entered with the automatic assessment of someone checking whether a new arrival was a patient.
I explained what I wanted to do. Briefly, plainly, I wanted to help. I had some knowledge of wound care and sickness management. I would work under whatever supervision was appropriate and explain everything I was doing.
Colm looked at me for a moment. Then he looked at the room. Then he looked back at me with the expression of someone who had no basis for refusing an offer of help and was sensible enough to know it.
"The man in the corner has a bad leg," he said. "The priests who came before didn't know what to do with it."
I crossed to the corner.
The wound on the father's leg was infected. Not catastrophically, not yet at least, but the signs were clear to anyone who knew what to look for. The surrounding skin was hot and red in a spreading pattern. The wound itself, when I unwrapped the cloth carefully, had the colour and odour of a site where bacteria had been working undisturbed for several days. The cloth that had been on it was doing more harm than good at this point, holding moisture against the wound rather than protecting it from anything.
I asked Colm for boiling water. He brought it. I submerged the small knife and the clean cloth strips I'd prepared in the water and waited while the family watched me with expressions that ranged from hope to a bit of wariness.
I explained as I worked. just narrating mostly to myself, the way I'd seen good medical practitioners in my previous world operate, keeping patients informed because informed patients were calmer and more cooperative and because understanding what was happening to you was a basic dignity.
The infected tissue had to come out. I was precise and quick about it, which was better than slow and careful when there was no anaesthetic, and the father bore it with the silent endurance of a man who had already been in pain for days and had decided that worse pain with a visible purpose was acceptable.
The wound cleaned, alcohol was applied, which provoked a sharp intake of breath and a bitten-off word that was probably a profanity, and then wrapped in clean dry cloth.
"Change the wrapping each day," I told him. "With clean cloth that's been dried in the sun if possible. Don't let it stay wet."
He nodded, looking at his leg with a pained expression.
I moved on.
The elderly woman's lungs were something I couldn't fix with wound care and alcohol. What I could do was position, I rearranged the boards she was lying on to prop her upper body at an angle that reduced the fluid accumulation, showed the junior priest Colm why this helped, explained the mechanism in terms simple enough to be actionable. I showed him how to make a simple steam inhalation from hot water and the aromatic herbs I'd got, form in the kitchen stores thyme, primarily, which had genuine antimicrobial properties that this world's cooks used for flavour.
The fever cases I assessed individually. Two of the three labourers had the same presentation, which confirmed a shared source. I asked questions, where they worked, what they'd eaten, where they'd gotten their water. The water source came up quickly. I told them to drink only boiled water until they recovered, explained why without going into germ theory, framed it in terms this world could accept, someone shat in the water and had made them sick, heat destroyes poopy water.
The infant concerned me most. Too young, too small, the mother's face had that particular exhausted terror, as she watchs her tiny infant barely struggle. The infant had a fever and was not feeding well, which was a combination that in this world, in this century, killed a significant percentage of the children it touched.
I positioned myself at the side of the wooden board the infant lay on, ostensibly adjusting the cloth coverings, my back partially to the room. My right hand, the one not visible to Colm or the watching family, I placed against the infant's small back.
The *Light Healing* spell was still the only tier one holy spell I had fully internalised, and it was not designed for fever, it closed wounds, promoted tissue repair, addressed physical damage rather than infection. But the promotion of the body's own healing processes had secondary effects that I had been quietly studying through my private use of the spell over the past year. Applied low leveled body, it seemed to accelerate recovery in ways that went slightly beyond the spell's documented function.
I held it for thirty seconds, feather-light, the minimum that seemed to produce a consistent effect. Released it. Adjusted the cloth covering and straightened up.
The mother looked at me with worried eyes and her hands together in prayer.
"Keep her warm and try feeding her again in an hour," I said. "She'll be better tomorrow."
I didn't know that with certainty. But I believed it, and in this case believing it and saying it was the correct thing to do.
Days accumulated. I came back each morning, working through the room systematically, maintaining the protocols I'd established, boiling instruments, clean cloth, alcohol on wounds, the steam treatment for respiratory cases, the water sourcing interrogation for fever cases. Colm became a genuine collaborator within three days, By the end of the first week he was applying the wound care procedure correctly on his own, asking good questions about the reasoning behind it.
The levels came steadily. Not with the dramatic suddenness of the cooking jump, the doctor class was building on real medical knowledge, but the knowledge was being applied incrementally in real situations rather than deployed in a concentrated burst of novelty. Three levels in two weeks, which translated to nine danger levels, danger level forty-eight [level 16] climbing toward fifty-seven [ level 19].
I kept my head down and my hands occupied and did not examine too carefully the way the room felt different by the end of the second week, the elderly woman sitting up and eating, the father's leg clean and closing *with a little help form holy magic, the labouring men returned to their work, the infant feeding properly while her mother's face had reorganised itself entirely from the expression it had worn on the first day.
This was a nice month.
Tim's stats (he can't see his true stats)
Level: [19]
Vermin Killer: [2/10]
Assassin: [2/10]
Pirest: [1/10]
Gardener: [1/15]
Chef: [9/15]
Doctor: [3/15]