A few days ter, I was attempting to mend a pair of trousers that Canaan had utterly destroyed while fighting monsters in the wilderness.

  It was actually a very troublesome conundrum. Like many pre-industrial societies, hand-made textiles were incredibly expensive in the Kingdom of Adelgracia — on the scale of 15 to 20 coppers (the equivalent of 450 - 600 USD) for the cheapest shirt in the market.

  When you considered the fact that there were multiple days per week when my boyfriend would return home with torn shirts or shredded cloaks… clothing expenses ate a massive chunk out of Canaan’s weekly income. We simply couldn’t afford to keep buying new ones, and I more-or-less had been forced to stitch his clothes back together whenever I could.

  And just to be perfectly clear… I had zero experience with sewing in my past life.

  I wasn’t good at it at all.

  Other than a crochet kit that my younger sister once tried to give me as birthday present, I had never bothered to read a single book on tailoring in my entire life. It simply wasn’t a topic that I had been interested in as a child. While I knew a number of surgical stitches (e.g. simple interrupted, running subcuticur, horizontal and vertical mattress stitches), this didn’t mean that surgical sutures were the proper technique to attach multiple pieces of clothing together.

  The final result looked like a patchwork Frankenstein, and I kept undoing and redoing the stitches in a vain attempt to make something that appeared semi-presentable.

  It was very frustrating, and I hated being bad at it.

  + + +

  “Canaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan,” I whined as I ran over to my boyfriend.

  I didn’t want to do any more sewing.

  I snuck up behind my boyfriend who was sitting on a wooden footstool, and then I recklessly flung my arms around his neck.

  “Fuck me again,” I demanded with a pout.

  Canaan had been diligently scratching some runic symbols on the ground with a wooden stick.

  Ever since one of their party members had been struck was an ogre’s club, Canaan’s party had voted to cancel their more dangerous quests. They were missing one member due to severe injuries, and it wasn’t very smart to blindly charge around the wilderness without a dedicated tracker/scout. As a result, their party was on a reduced schedule, and my boyfriend had been spending much more time at home.

  Currently, it was close to 3 o’clock in the afternoon on a regur work day.

  “Skyr… we just had sex two hours ago.” He responded with some degree of mild exasperation.

  “But I want to do it again…” I whined irresponsibly.

  My boyfriend was trying his best to to ignore me while he focused on scratching squiggly symbols into the dirt. From an outsider’s perspective, I probably looked like an overly clingy stay-at-home girlfriend who couldn’t stop bothering her boyfriend despite his valiant attempts to concentrate on actual work.

  Currently, I wasn’t wearing any pants (or skirt), and my lower body was stark naked apart from some slivers of dried cum that had dripped down my legs. I didn’t have a bra (they didn’t exist in this era anyway), and I was wearing one of Canaan’s massive oversized shirts since I only owned a single decent dress which I didn’t want to get dirty.

  As for why I wasn’t wearing pants — how was my boyfriend supposed to fuck me without warning if there was something in the way? At least, I had hoped that the easy access would inspire him to do it with me yet again… but so far it seemed like he hadn’t taken any of the bait that I had been not-so-subtly dangling in his face.

  …Who knew that he would really choose the squiggles in the dirt over me… :(

  He was concentrating very hard on his task, and as a matter of fact, he was applying so much force on his writing implement that the stick suddenly snapped.

  He put the broken end of the stick down before he finally turned around to face me.

  “You should study,” Canaan announced sternly. “We should learn how to read the local nguage.“

  However, a frown immediately appeared on my face.

  “I don’t want to studyyyyy,” I compined. “I’ll just do it ter… so let’s have sex now.”

  Canaan rubbed his tired eyes with his hands.

  “I can’t believe you went to medical school,” he remarked.

  “That was the past… now I don’t want to study another minute for the rest of my life…”

  “…”

  Truthfully, I was mostly joking, and Canaan knew me well enough to know that I was py-acting in ’rolepy’ mode. In reality, I didn’t have any legitimate objections about learning how to read and write. In fact, it was actually an incredibly good thing that my boyfriend was using his spare time to study. Both of us had gone to a very prestigious university on Earth, and we both pced a very high value on education.

  I leaned over Canaan’s shoulder in order to take a better look at the rows of practice runes he had scratched into the floor.

  I pointed to the rune on the third row, second from the right.

  “That letter — ? — you made the initial curve too short and the loop needs to be bigger. If you write it like that, it’s ambiguous with the ? or ? symbols.”

  The Adelgracian written nguage was a mixture of a phonemic glyphs and ideographs, which was essentially simir to modern Japanese which featured a combination of hiragana and kanji. While I hadn’t formally started to study the Adelgracian writing system yet, I estimated that there was somewhere around 150 symbols that made up the phonetic alphabet, as well as a countless number of kanji-like runes that would require pure memorization.

  Canaan rolled his eyes.

  “Life is really unfair,” he compined. “Having a photographic memory is cheating.”

  + + +

  My friends often cimed that I had an eidetic memory.

  This was somewhat of a misnomer, since it wasn’t actually a photographic memory.

  Actually, I was quite bad at remembering entire pictures, and I often couldn’t remember what color shirt that person X, Y, or Z was wearing. I often forgot faces of the people that I met, and it was quite common that I’d shake hands with someone and then bnk out on their name ten seconds ter. I really couldn’t memorize emotions, concepts, feelings, sounds, smells, tastes, textures, or anything that moved.

  I was really only good at remembering high-contrast bck-and-white patterns that I could see with my eyes, and I had always been like that ever since I was a child. It was more-or-less effortless for me, and I didn’t even realize that this was an abnormal skill until 5th grade when I found out that the rest of my cssmates could only recall 15 or 20 digits of pi.

  It was honestly shocking to discover that nobody else could remember such an easy thing.

  Generally speaking, I only ever needed to read a book once in order to picture each sequential page of text inside of my head. It was a lot like having a OCR scanner for a brain.

  When I took assessments in medical school, it was like every test was an open-book exam. Of course, I didn’t have a ctrl+f function inside of my head, so it didn’t necessarily help that much given that there was a limited amount of time with each question… but I couldn’t deny that it certainly helped my grades a lot. I genuinely was not as good at studying or critical thinking as the rest of my cssmates, and my memory quirks were honestly a huge crutch that I relied on in order to catch up to everyone else.

  …I honestly wasn’t that good of a doctor compared to the amazing people around me.

  Plenty of people in medical school had 10/10 memorization skills.

  + + +

  “Give me a kiss then,” I pleaded, lowering my bottom line. “Just one kiss?”

  Canaan sighed and stood up.

  He turned around and gave me a friendly — yet deeply unsatisfying — peck on my forehead.

  “I really should get going now,” my boyfriend said. “A messenger from the guild came by an hour ago, and it seems like I’ve been invited to something.”

  However, this only caused the frown on my face to deepen even further.

  “What for?” I asked. “…I thought you’d spend the entire day with me.”

  “You can come along, if you like.” Canaan said. “I’ve been speaking much more with the Guild Master tely, and he promised to invite us to dinner at some point. He appears to be quite interested in us, so there’s a fairly good chance he might even personally take us under his wing. He’s honestly an incredible person to develop a connection with.”

  I wrinkled my nose.

  There wasn’t anything that I despised more than networking and social politics.

  Back on Earth, Canaan had a job in the federal government, so the nonsense reted to building interpersonal retionships was much closer to his professional wheelhouse than my own. Frankly, I never really cared to learn about exactly who he was having dinner with or which political fundraiser that he had gone to, but I knew that he used to send a rge stack of over a hundred Christmas cards at the end of every year on Earth.

  “He’s been saying for a few days now that he would love to meet the mysterious and elusive woman who saved his nephew’s life,” Canaan reminded me.

  —Red fg!

  I crossed my arms in the shape of an X in front of me.

  “Refused!” I decred.

  “The Guild Master did mention that he would like to personally treat us to a feast showcasing Rupelweld’s local cuisine at some time this week. There’s going to be roast duck. And eggs. As well as an entire pork and imported fruits.”

  There was a sly smile on Canaan’s face, almost evil and calcuting.

  My stomach immediately began to growl.

  In medieval societies, meat was an incredibly rare and expensive treat. As a matter of fact, it was quite common for peasants to go an entire year without eating any significant source of protein, which was part of the reason why malnutrition was so widespread.

  Technically, it was possible to cook monster meat, but it was virtually always foul-tasting (it smelled and tasted rotten) so nobody ever ate it unless they were completely desperate.

  Needlessly to say, I had been eating wild mushrooms and turnips for nearly three weeks.

  “Can you… bring some leftovers back for me?” I pleaded weakly.

  “That wouldn’t be good manners,” Canaan rejected this suggestion ftly.

  “Uuuugh….”

  I groaned in despair while clutching my head.

  My boyfriend was really pying unfair.

  He had pnned this, hadn’t he? This was his nefarious scheme all along!

  + + +

  A few hours ter, I found myself unhappily sitting in a very bumpy carriage ride.

  The Guild Master of the Adventurer’s Guild was sitting politely across from me. Canaan was seated next to me and holding my hand, but the expression on my face was utterly miserable like a drenched domestic cat who had been forced into a bathtub.

  Apparently, there hadn’t been any food waiting for us.

  Other than a few cookies and biscuits that had been offered as a quick snack, the Guild Master had quickly ushered us onto a horse-drawn carriage. It turned out that Canaan had been summoned for some other business that involved urgently traveling to an aristocrat’s residence. Meanwhile, the two co-conspirators casually rescheduled the ‘banquet’ to another date while I silently watched in utter betrayal as the dangling carrot was pulled away from me.

  —How exactly did my boyfriend trick me into this again?

  The carriage hit a rge bump in the road, which caused everything to lurch, but none of us reacted. Horse-drawn carriages did not have suspension technology in this isekai universe, so noisy and shaking carriage rides were typical for this mode of transportation.

  The Guild Master had a curious glint in his eyes.

  “You and your wife have quite an exquisite vocabury,” he remarked to Canaan. “And pardon me for being blunt, but your wife is very beautiful. I can’t help but notice that her hands are completely fwless. It doesn’t look as though either of you have worked any hard bor in your lives, which makes me otherwise suspect that you are both of noble birth.”

  Soaps and detergents in medieval societies were highly caustic, so any woman who did a lot of undry was sure to have thick calluses on her hands. The Guild Master, in essence, was pointing out the fact that I clearly had not done much housework in the past.

  It was a very astute observation.

  My boyfriend ughed good-naturedly.

  “Was it that easy to see through us?” Canaan fluidly adapted to the Guild Master’s reasoning as if he was a fish swimming in water. “I’m sorry for not mentioning it sooner.”

  “No, no, don’t apologize. It was not my intention to pry about your personal circumstances. Many people who come this remote frontier city in the middle-of-nowhere are often running away from something, and I can assure you that you certainly wouldn’t be the first nobleman looking to escape from his past.”

  Evidently, my boyfriend had spun up some kind of eborate story about our background — presumably something about being newlywed ex-aristocrats who had eloped from a foreign country. It was probably very simir to the vomit-inducing Romeo and Juliet stories about star-crossed lovers and ’pure love’ that the traveling bards often sang about, although I really had no idea about the specific details.

  …In either case, it was probably fine if my boyfriend did all of the talking.

  “I am indebted to your kindness,” Canaan thanked the Guild Master. “If there is anything that we can do for you, please do not hesitate to ask us.”

  “Oh no, as a matter of fact, it should be the other way around. I should be thanking the two of you for offering your skills to my nephew. We have never seen anything like this strange foreign healing technique from the Far East, and it appears to have been highly effective.”

  The uno-reverse fttery and gratitude and a little bit irritating, but there really was no way to avoid it when you had a professional schemer for a ‘husband’.

  + + +

  The Guild Master eventually switched topics to the meat of the conversation.

  “I asked you to come along today because Lord Asherbaun pced a fairly unusual request with the guild. It’s a collection (gathering) quest that shouldn’t be too difficult, but I wanted to offer it to your party before I post it publicly on the job board.”

  Just as it was on Earth, favoritism, cronyism, and nepotism were widespread practices at the core of the Kingdom of Adelgracia. It simply wasn’t possible to obtain any decent jobs without an existing connection, and a person’s social network was directly reted to their success. Even in the Adventurer’s Guild, it was very common for the most lucrative quests to go to specific adventurer parties of the Guild Master’s personal choosing.

  “Is there a reason why we are meeting with Lord Asherbaun personally?”

  “He has a seven-year old daughter mysteriously fell ill a few days ago. Strangely, she has been seen by multiple healers from the Church who have failed to cure her. The Holy Seer is now saying that her only hope is ’God’s Blood’— an alchemical potion also known as quicksilver.”

  I couldn’t help to blink a few times.

  Wasn’t ‘quicksilver’ the same thing as elemental mercury?

  “The Holy Seer is saying he needs vermillion ore in order to concoct this miracle potion, some of which can be found in local caves around the old mountain of Tartarus. The quest, in essence, would be to gather some of this ore as soon as possible.”

  Thinking back to my old history textbooks, I recalled that elemental mercury had a famous role in world history. Specifically, many societies believed that it had miraculous healing properties, and the first Chinese Emperor Qin Shi Huang allegedly died by drinking a mercury elixir thinking that it would grant him powers of immortality. King Khumarawayh ibn Ahmad ibn Tulun of Ancient Egypt simirly slept atop of a basin filled with mercury and likely also suffered from chronic mercury poisoning.

  Elemental mercury was highly toxic.

  ‘Vermillion ore’, by the process of deduction, must have been cinnabar, more scientifically known as mercury (II) sulfide (HgS), which was typically found near volcanic areas. The mountain of Tartarus, which loomed in the sky over the western side of the city, therefore must have been an inactive or extinct volcano.

  The Guild Master then turned to look directly at me.

  “My dy of the Far East, if it would not trouble you — I would be incredibly grateful if you could take a look at Lord Asherbaun’s daughter. While the client has not explicitly requested your specific talents, the Asherbaun family is a close friend of mine, and I believe you may be able to offer some additional insights. At the very least, I feel deep sympathy for Lord Asherbaun, as he does truly love his daughter.”

  “…”

  I struggled to formute a response.

  Should I tell him right away that mercury is a poison and the Holy Seer is a total hack?

  “We graciously accept,” Canaan immediately jumped in on my behalf.

  …There was a dead expression on my eyes.

  I resisted the urge to stomp on my boyfriend’s feet.

  What if I couldn’t help in this situation??

  I didn’t want to make any promises that I couldn’t deliver.

  …And there might be trouble if we contradicted and offended the Holy Seer from the Church.

  + + +

  After we arrived at Lord Asherbaun’s residence, Canaan helped me off the carriage.

  I was wearing a much heavier dress that was significantly harder to move in.

  The Guild Master had been kind enough to provide us with some better clothing that was more suitable for visiting an aristocrat, and he had generously insisted that we keep it. Specifically, he called it a “gift” for the sake of friendship.

  (…It was clearly an investment) …Or so I thought to myself privately.

  He clearly believed that we were runaway foreign nobility, and there was no way the Guild Master would have treated us so well if he thought that we didn’t have significant connections or assets overseas. By helping us out now when the price was cheap, there was a strong likelihood we would yield a fairly high return-on-investment in the future.

  I kept behind Canaan and the Guild Master.

  Some maids came out to greet us, and we were quickly ushered into a dimly lit bed chamber where two men were already standing. Presumably, this was ‘Lord Asherbaun’ and the ‘Holy Seer’. An ill-appearing young girl was lying lethargically in bed, periodically vomiting and retching while attended by a small army of maids who were trying to coax her into drinking some sips of water.

  The atmosphere in the mansion was somber and grim.

  Some scented candles were burning, which cast deep shadows in the room.

  The younger man who appeared to be in his mid-40s turned around when he realized there were visitors. There were deep bags underneath his sleep-deprived eyes, and his unkempt beard clearly had not been shaven in multiple days.

  This was clearly the father of the girl.

  “Thank you for coming urgently on such short notice, Master Theocred,” he spoke with a deep bow.

  “The Adventurer’s Guild will see to it that your request is promptly fulfilled,” the Guild Master replied. “I swear upon this as your dear friend and long-time colleague.”

  “My daughter…” Lord Asherbaun mumbled, “You must understand that this is a matter of upmost urgency. Every hour is a matter of life and death, and the final compensation will depend on the speed of your people. Please let the adventurers know that the sooner that they return with this special Vermillion Ore, the more of a reward I shall offer.”

  “Understood. And do you have the sample material?” The Guild Master asked.

  The Holy Seer removed a small reddish rock from the sleeves of his white robe.

  “It looks like this. The deeper the red, the better the ore,” the old seer expined with a thin and raspy voice. “I will need at least 20 pounds of material, but more is better.”

  The Guild Master accepted the stone politely.

  Meanwhile, I stared bnkly at the girl who was lying in bed.

  + + +

  A maid rushed past by me while holding a cy chamber pot that was full of urine, clearly intending to dump the contents in the street outside of the building.

  It smelled faintly sweet.

  The seven-year-old had remarkably bored and tachypneic (fast) breathing. She id perfectly still with her eyes closed, but she was inhaling and exhaling so heavily that I could clearly see the prominent rise and fall of her chest.

  The eponym for this type of breathing was known as “Kussmaul respirations.”

  It was a compensatory respiratory mechanism that occurred in the setting of severe metabolic acidosis. The human body had a bicarbonate buffer system (HCO?? + H? ? H?CO? ? CO? + H?O) in the blood, and an excess of acid propelled an equilibrium shift resulting in higher levels of carbon dioxide. Hypercapnia (high blood CO?) triggered brainstem chemoreceptors to promote faster and deeper breathing, colloquially termed ‘blowing off CO?’ through the lungs.

  The sweet-smelling urine, on the other hand, was a phenomenon had been described by historical figures since at least the 6th Century BCE. Ayurvedic texts from the Indian subcontinent called it madhumeha ("honey urine"), named as such because the sweet urine would attract ants and flies. Glycosuria (high glucose/sugar in urine) occurred when the concentration of glucose in the blood exceeded the ability of the human kidneys to reabsorb it.

  It was needless to say that the diagnosis was obvious.

  This girl had diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) secondary to autoimmune type I diabetes mellitus (T1DM). Her body was literally starving and breaking down energy stores due to an inability of the pancreas to produce an essential metabolic hormone.

  And I knew within seconds of seeing her that this 7-year-old girl was going to die.

  Prior to the advent of insulin injections, type 1 diabetes was universally fatal.

  ?