SSS-Ranked Surgeon In Another World: The Healer Is Actually OP!

Chapter 431: Road to Soul City

But the moment the food touched his mouth, taste arrived, full, real, exactly as if his living body in the labyrinth far away were the one eating. Salt. Fat. It was good...

It had a deep savory note he could not quite name, like the broth of a stew that had been cooked for two days. The texture was right. The temperature was right. He chewed and swallowed and felt the warmth of it go down inside him, and the hollow ache in his core eased a little where it landed.

He sat for a moment with the spoon in his hand, surprised.

He had been doing many things since he arrived in this realm, walking, fighting, feeling pain, feeling exhaustion, without quite registering that he was doing them. His soul-body had simply worked, the way his real body worked.

He had thought of it as a strange numbness, or as habit carrying him through. He understood now that it was not numbness. The soul-body could do everything a body could do. Hunger. Pain. Taste. Warmth. Tiredness. All of it.

He filed that away with everything else.

He took another bite.

Across from him, Kael had already worked through half a bowl with the speed of a man who was not bothering to be polite. His face was lit faintly by the glow of the food. He looked up, caught Bruce watching him, and gave a small unrepentant shrug.

"What?" Kael said, around a mouthful. "I almost died. Don’t judge me."

"I’m not judging."

"You’re judging."

Bruce ate another bite of his own. Kael grinned at the small victory and went back to his bowl.

The young man with the scythe, the one Bruce still had not learned the name of, was eating more slowly. He had picked up a small plate of glowing meat and was working through it one careful bite at a time, with the wary attentiveness of a man who half-expected the food to disappear if he ate too fast. His wrenched arm was cradled against his chest while he ate one-handed. His face, in the glow, looked very young.

After a while, the young man cleared his throat.

"I’m Theron," he said.

The other two looked at him.

"In case." His voice was still tight from the fight, still raw. "Since you two saved my life. Figured you should know."

Kael set down his bowl and made a small bow from the waist, mock-formal.

"Kael. Hated by most, loved by some. I like it like that. It’s after all the consequences of greatness."

"Bruce," Bruce said. "Human."

Theron managed a thin smile. "Just Bruce?"

"Just Bruce."

Kael snorted. "Don’t bother trying to get more. He’s like that."

Theron filed the name and went back to his food. He chewed for a while, swallowed, then asked, with the careful tone of someone testing whether a question was allowed:

"What you did out there. With the, the ink. That was your soul talent?"

"Yes."

"What’s it called?"

Bruce considered. He had already decided he was not going to say Godly Writer in front of Kael, at least not yet. He kept that decision now.

"Writer," he said.

Theron blinked.

"...Writer."

"Writer."

"He’s very humble about it," Kael said, around another mouthful. "It’s annoying."

"It hit hard," Theron said. "For something called writer."

"That’s what I said." Kael waved his spoon. "Anyway, kid. You. Tell us about that scythe."

Theron set his plate down.

His class was soul reaper...

The scythe, he explained, had come to him on his first day in this realm. He had arrived in the Mistlands like everyone else, disoriented, freezing, breathing the wrong air, and he had panicked. He had run.

He had run for what felt like hours, sometimes through clusters of drifting souls, sometimes through patches of thinner mist where he could see further. At some point during the running, something inside him had opened, and he had felt a weight in his hand he had not known he was carrying, and when he looked down he was holding a scythe he could instinctively increase it’s sharpness and use telekinesis on it...

However, he had not known how to use it. He had no training with weapons of any kind. He had been a clerk in his old life, he said. When Kael raised an eyebrow at that,

Theron shrugged: I worked in a tax office. He had been a tax clerk who liked to read, and who had died at thirty-two of a fever, and that was the whole story. He had no idea why his soul had given him a scythe.

But the scythe killed hollows. He had figured that out quickly. The first one that drifted toward him with empty eyes had reached for him, and he had swung the scythe out of pure terror, and the hollow had come apart at the cut. After that, he had used it. He had cut down dozens of them on his own.

"And then they started chasing me," Theron said. His voice went tight again. "I don’t know what changed. They had been ignoring me for days. They didn’t move. They drifted. Then one day a group of them turned and looked at me at the same time and they all started walking toward me, and then walking turned into running, and they didn’t stop. Even when I cut them down. Even when I ran. They just kept coming. More and more of them. I’d been running for hours when you found me. I don’t know if it was something I did. I don’t know if I attracted them somehow. I just..."

He stopped. He looked down at his good hand, which was shaking a little.

"I just thought I was going to die for a second time. And I didn’t know what dying again would feel like, and I didn’t want to find out."

Bruce was quiet for a moment.

"You won’t," he said.

It was not much. But Theron looked up at him, and something in his face loosened. He nodded once, jerkily, and went back to his food.

Kael had gone quiet during Theron’s story. He was frowning again, the real frown, the one Bruce had learned to pay attention to. He was looking at Theron’s hands, then at the empty air where the scythe had been before it dissolved, then off into some middle distance.

"What?" Bruce asked him.

"Nothing." Kael shook himself out of it. "Just, a scythe. Of all the talents. A scythe."

"What about it?"

Kael waved a hand. "Later. When we’re not all half-dead on a moving carriage. Eat your food."

Bruce ate his food. He filed the moment away with the rest of the things he was filing. Scythes. Why the scythe bothered Kael. Why the hollows had started chasing Theron after ignoring him. Why an aboriginal had been given a harvester’s weapon. He did not have answers. He had only a growing pile of questions, and a sense that the pile would keep growing for a long time before any of it started to make sense.

While they ate, the bell kept ringing.

Bruce had registered it dimly at first, ding, every few minutes, soft and clean, and then, as he started feeling stronger from the food, he began to notice the pattern. Each time the bell rang, a small vibration passed through the floor of the carriage. Each time, faintly, he could feel a wave of soul energy spread outward from somewhere very near.

But not from the carriage itself.

He had thought, earlier, that the wave that had saved them came from the carriage. Now, sitting inside the carriage with a clearer head, he could feel that the source was different. The wave came from the skeletons. From the harvesters themselves. The carriage was simply the vehicle they rode on. The energy, the purification, the ringing impact of every wave, all of it came from the bodies of the riders. The carriage was carrying them. They were the weapon.

Bruce considered that.

He thought of the slow, steady, methodical sweep the wave had performed across the field of hollows. He thought of how it had touched every hollow without hesitation, dissolved them in a single pass, and then continued outward into the deep mist without losing any of its strength. The skeletons did this routinely. The skeletons did this easily. From the casual way the harvester serving them food had spoken, purifying this many souls must have been tiring, that level of soul-purification was their normal work.

He looked at the skeleton standing by the carriage wall.

It was watching him back. The star-orbs of its eyes were fixed on him with quiet attention. It did not look threatening. It did not look friendly either. It looked, simply, patient.

He set his spoon down for a moment.

"May I ask a question?"

"You may."

"The food." He gestured at his bowl. "It was cooked from soul beasts that were killed. That’s what these glowing pieces are. The flesh of soul beasts."

"Yes."

"Then why hasn’t it dispersed?" He frowned at his own dish, trying to find the words. "The hollows out there, when they were destroyed, they came apart into mist. Their soul energy spread back into the realm. But this food. It’s the flesh of dead soul beasts. The soul energy is still inside it. It hasn’t dispersed at all. It’s holding together. Why?"

The skeleton was quiet for a moment.

Then its voice came, calm and cold as before:

"You will find out when we reach the Soul City."