I became Granny's assistant and odd-job helper, entirely of my own free will—after enjoying so much of her unpaid kindness and care, especially considering how brutal this place was, continuing to eat and drink for free every day would've been downright inhuman. She dismissed any questions like "how can I repay you," only saying simply that I could talk about it when I had the ability someday.
In truth, there wasn't much I could do anyway: washing the instruments and rooms smeared with blood and medicine stains, sorting and processing those foul-smelling herbs and fungi, and occasionally helping by handing her something at the right moment.
And it was precisely through this process that I witnessed, with my own eyes, the near-miraculous medical skill Granny Marta possessed—and gradually understood why she could be respected by everyone on this chaotic land.
Late that day, the clinic's sheet-metal door was suddenly slammed open. Several workers in grease-stained overalls rushed in, half-carrying, half-dragging a companion who was nothing but a bloody mess.
"Granny Marta! Hurry! Save Hassan! He got caught in the drive belt—dragged into the promethium refining machine!" the lead worker howled, his voice stuffed with terror and despair.
I lifted the greasy blanket serving as a curtain to the back room and poked my head out. The worker named Hassan lay on an iron plate being used as a makeshift stretcher. He looked like a tomato smashed to pulp. His right arm was the worst—between shoulder and elbow, the flesh had been peeled open, and you could even see bone and torn muscle. The wound was stained pitch-black with machine sludge and all kinds of debris, reeking of scorched rot and blood. His whole body shook violently; it wasn't even convulsing so much as spasming on the edge of death.
"Hold him down! Don't let him move and wreck the bone!" Granny's hoarse voice was unnervingly steady, like this was nothing new. Her hunched silhouette stretched long under the oil lamp, thrown onto the mottled sheet-metal wall like the shadow of an old, gnarled tree. "Cut his sleeve! Clear the filth out of the wound first!"
I stared wide-eyed as the other workers, clumsy and frantic, used big shears to cut open Hassan's coveralls, soaked through with blood and grease. Then they used fingers and tweezers to carefully pull embedded junk and metal shards out of the rolled-back meat. The scene was more real, more bloody, than any horror movie I'd ever watched.
"The torn flesh and broken bone are small matters," Granny leaned in, took one look at the worker's darkening face and lips, and cursed under her breath. "The real trouble is whatever garbage inside that machine has gotten into the wound!"
While barking orders and directing the panicked workers, she yanked down a half-transparent soft tube from the ceiling clutter—something like an IV line. The end of it was connected to a bladder-like sac made from some animal organ, packed full of tiny insects that flickered with blue light like fireflies.
"Bite down," she said, and shoved the other end—wrapped in thick tape—straight into the patient's mouth.
"Bzzzz—!"
In an instant, the blue glow inside the sac exploded brighter. The entire clinic washed into an eerie blue, like one of those old monitors from my era suddenly throwing a blue screen. The patient's limbs snapped taut like bowstrings, accompanied by a horrifying crackle of bone.
Then something even stranger happened. From the mangled arm, black blood and tissue fluid began to be forcibly "pulled" out—like iron sand drawn to a magnet—torn from the wound and from countless tiny pores, forming black misty clots in the air before rapidly liquefying and streaming down his skin in dripping lines, pooling into a stinking black sludge.
Granny had already produced a tin basin, perfectly positioned to catch it. The fetid liquid hit the metal with a faint sizzling corrosion.
When the last drop ran out, the wound that had been blackened—impossibly—returned to the fresh red of living flesh, then began to seep clean crimson blood. Hassan let out a long breath, as if he'd been released from a vise, and collapsed limp like a rag doll.
"Don't just stand there, boy!" Granny suddenly turned and winked at me with her right eye—the one set with metal eyebrow studs. "Bring me the spider silk from the third row, seventh drawer."
I flailed over to the sheet-metal cabinet that looked like a specimen case and started rummaging. I swear that cabinet would put any museum's "rare curiosities" exhibit to shame: butterfly specimens sealed inside pressure gauges, bundles of dried eel as long as a pinky, heaps of unknown crystals glittering like shattered stained glass… It took me forever to find what she wanted—a roll of spider silk tucked beneath a pile of nonsense.
The spider threads, soaked in some solution and shining with a silver-white luster, unfurled under Granny's fingers into a faintly luminous, translucent mesh. She began to hum a song I'd never heard, with a strange, crooked melody. As her humming rose and fell, the web—guided by a silver needle shaped like a fishhook—settled gently over the worker's horrific open wound, then began to weave and bond with muscle at a speed too fine for the eye to track.
Like silkworms under moonlight, spinning life-saving thread, it stitched the torn flesh back together—alive, seamless, impossible.
When the injured worker finally sank into sleep on the crude cot, Granny used several slabs—plastic or wood, I couldn't tell—to brace the newly "woven" arm in place.
"This is steel-spider cocoon silk. Needs to soak in lye for three cycles before it's usable," she explained to me as she adjusted a crude IV device made from a brass valve near the patient's neck. "Ten times stronger than what the medical temples up above use, and it helps the meat grow back together. Most important—no need to remove it. After a while, the patient absorbs it on their own…"
The dark red fluid running through the tube made my scalp prickle—but what truly left me sweating was Granny's nonstop instruction. I hoped she was only showing off to an outside country bumpkin like me, and not genuinely trying to teach me…
The workers who'd brought Hassan in left after countless thanks. They didn't pay money. Granny didn't ask for any.
But they paid in a different way.
They left behind a half-full oil can bearing a gear-ringed skull emblem I recognized instantly, a small sack of assorted springs and washers, and a heavy lump wrapped in layers of oiled paper.
Carefully, I peeled back a corner of the wrapping—and a flash of brilliant white appeared, violently out of place in this murky, filthy world.
Inside was a tightly packed mass of clean, pure white cotton gauze.
"All gathered by the neighbors, piece by piece, from wherever they can," Granny explained, seeing my expression. "Otherwise, with an old woman like me, where would I get enough materials to keep this place running…"
She told me to tidy it up and take it upstairs to the storeroom in the loft.
I carried this unusual "doctor's fee" up the creaking wooden ladder to the clinic's second-floor stockroom. It was piled with junk as well. I even saw a baby cradle braided from thick scrap cable, and beside it a twisted icon made of gears and screws. I carefully stepped over dried flowers stuck to pressure-gauge housings and bundles of herbs, and set everything onto an empty shelf.
When I lifted that bundle of white gauze, I suddenly felt it—how heavy it was. Heavy enough that it nearly stole my breath.
This wasn't just gauze, oil, and parts.
It was trust. It was hope. It was the tiny light that countless people, trapped in a filthy steel jungle, protected together while staring into the abyss.
And Granny Marta… was the one holding the lantern.
(End of Chapter)
[Get +30 Extra Chapters On — P@tr3on "Zaelum"]
[Every 300 Power Stones = 1 Bonus Chapter Drop]
[Thanks for Reading!]