48 - What the Reincarnator Brought
Perhaps thanks to my thorough sesame grinding, I'd managed to wring a seal of approval from Leonardo saying I could help out in the quarantine section. Now I could fend off Alf's 'children who break promises should go home already' attacks. The quarantine section was finally starting to run smoothly. I wanted to keep watching over it a little longer.
...I did promise Royne I'd go visit her, after all.
Breaking that promise and going back to the mansion didn't sit well with me. Royne had entered her second high-fever phase a few days ago. She looked better than Jean-Jacques did when I first saw him, but she'd still become critically ill. By the time she was able to take medicine, it was already too late. At first she'd welcomed me happily when I came to visit, but now she wouldn't let me anywhere near her. Royne was afraid I'd get infected.
"Tina-chan, could you lend me a hand?"
"Otsh kay. Where should I go?"
Lately I'd been getting called in at mealtimes a lot. It seemed the adults' pride was stimulated by the thought that they couldn't scratch themselves disgracefully in front of a child, so when I was watching, they could hold back the itching a little. I was using that to get them to finish their meals while they held back their coughing and scratching.
...If they couldn't eat, they couldn't get better even from a curable illness.
After finishing the meal assistance, I gathered the sheets from patients who'd coughed or vomited during meals, then did the laundry again. Since droplets were the infection source, there was always a lot of laundry. As I was stomping on the sheets, scrubbing them with my feet, Leonardo came by. He'd been showing his face at least once a day lately.
"Ah, Leonyaldo-shan. Thanks for your hard work."
"Tina, thanks for your help too."
Correcting the parts I didn't pronounce right, Leonardo patted my head. Whether because he was conscious of me imitating him, Leonardo's wording had become a bit more polite than usual, which felt strange.
"I hear Jean-Jacques has recovered enough to hold a conversation. Can I talk to him now?"
"Jean-Chack-san ish full of energy lateshly. He'sh been gobbling up hish food."
He'd been able to converse before, actually. Every time I called him 'Jean-Chack,' he'd dutifully correct me with 'Jean-Jacques-sama,' so his head was clear enough.
...Lately, it's a secret that I've been saying 'Chack' on purpose.
I'd been calling Jean-Jacques by name so many times that my tongue was finally getting around it. But when I actually did say 'Jean-Jacques' properly once, he corrected me with 'Jean-Jacques-sama' anyway, so maybe he thought being called 'Jean-Chack' was just a greeting by now.
I watched Leonardo head toward the basement where Jean-Jacques was kept, then resumed my laundry. Less than ten minutes later, Leonardo came back and then strode out of the quarantine section at a brisk pace.
...Something's been noisy around here lately.
Or rather, it'd been going on for a few days now. To be more precise, it might have started since Leonardo visited Jean-Jacques in the basement. The quarantine section itself was the same as before, but the Black Knights I saw on the road back to the mansion had changed. Everyone was restless, walking briskly around the fortress. When I asked a Black Knight standing guard at the quarantine section about it, he told me they'd found the infection source Jean-Jacques had brought in. The knights were moving to capture it, he said.
Alf, who came to check on me in the afternoon, told me the details. Leonardo had apparently heard from Jean-Jacques, who'd recovered enough to talk, that when they were burning down Meiyu Village, during the dismantling work, Jean-Jacques had found a small animal called an Ushiri and brought it back. Because it was a rare animal, he planned to give it as a gift to his favorite prostitute to curry favor with her.
...You can't just bring back an animal from a village wiped out by disease!
I couldn't help but shout that in my head. Even I could tell that, and I barely had any useful knowledge. And Alf had definitely said so back in the village. That there were live livestock, but they'd have to be killed just in case. I hadn't understood it then, but since a small animal had actually carried the infection, Alf's judgment to kill the animals was correct. Despite that, Jean-Jacques had carelessly brought back the infection-carrying small animal (Ushiri) from Meiyu Village, and by giving it to a prostitute, had brought the infection all the way to the city.
...I thought Jean-Jacques hadn't done it on purpose, but he did bring it in through negligence.
If the people in the quarantine section started shouting 'It's Jean-Jacques's fault' again, I didn't think I could stop them this time. Even if it wasn't intentional, now that they knew it was negligence.
...But this was pretty much what we predicted at Aurelia's place, wasn't it?
We'd figured at Aurelia's house that the infection source was probably merchandise from a merchant who'd passed through the village at the end of autumn. The merchandise was small animals for pets, and the infection spread from Marcel, who'd kept a pet, to the village. It was strange that the Ushiri had survived even after its caretaker disappeared, but maybe it had hibernated through the winter. I remembered someone in the village saying it was a rodent like a squirrel. Squirrels did hibernate, as far as I knew, so maybe Ushiri hibernated too. And if Jean-Jacques had found it around the time it woke up from hibernation and started looking for food, then even if it was the same animal that had brought the infection to Marcel, the story would hold together.
"...Huh? If the pet wash the infechion shource, wash the merchant who carried it okay?"
"The merchant who was transporting the pets as merchandise is already..."
He trailed off, but I more or less understood. The merchant was probably dead already. Since he'd been carrying the infection source, the first to die should have been that merchant, not unlikely.
"Won't it be a big problem if they don't recollect the merchantesh other goodsh?"
"We thought so too and chased the merchandise, but..."
Another merchant had apparently bought the dead merchant's goods, and the infection along the highway never stopped. The infection spread through towns and villages along the road, and by the time they finally caught up with the merchant, he'd already been killed by bandits or thieves, leaving only corpses around. The goods the merchant had been carrying were stolen by the brigands, and the surrounding Black Knights were investigating where they'd disappeared to.
"...Knights have it tough, don't they?"
"At least it's hard for the infection to spread in cities and large towns. That's some consolation."
"Cities and large townsh... beshcause they have bathsh?"
Meiyu Village didn't have established bathhouses, but cities had bath culture. I'd heard that keeping your body clean by bathing and raising your body temperature helped prevent disease.
"The quarantine section proved that keeping clean can prevent it to some extent. You need to stay clean to recover too. Aurelia's medicine is actually starting to cure people in the early stages... now if we could just contain the infection source."
"It's hard to find bandits hiding in the forest," Alf said, shrugging his shoulders.
"If they find the infechion shource, will it be resolv'd?"
"No, there's still more to do. We need to retrace the merchant's itinerary and check the towns and villages he stopped at. Survey the extent of the infection spread, and since the goods apparently came from a neighboring country, we'll need to contact that country and warn them. Depending on the situation, we might need to provide medicine, but..."
Sending medicine to a neighboring country. Wouldn't that take a huge amount of effort and time? There might be tariffs, import and export of dangerous goods, all sorts of complications. I was worried about that, but Alf didn't seem particularly concerned.
"To a neighboring country... can they jusht shend medicine across the border?"
"Normally, exporting would require troublesome procedures and inspections... but this time it's about an infectious disease. We'll leave it to the Sedovara Church, so it shouldn't be that complicated."
"I know the Sedovara Church. I was told it'sh a church that wurshhips the god of medicine."
But why would leaving it to a church that worships a god make it easier to export medicine? When I asked, Alf explained that the Sedovara Church's network was amazing.
I'd vaguely understood the Sedovara Church to be something like a hospital or pharmacy, but it seemed to be a bit different. Of course it fulfilled the roles of hospitals and pharmacies too, but that wasn't all. There were national borders between countries, but what connected the Sedovara Churches in each region was Sedovara, the god of medicine arts. Under god, the lines humans had drawn meant nothing. The Sedovara Church and its believers weren't bound by borders. In times of emergency like disease outbreaks, the Sedovara Church lent hands and knowledge across borders, and any country that had even one Sedovara Church had to recognize this as a right. If they refused, they'd be stripped of all such benefits.
"...In the old days, medicine was a technology monopolized by a select few like royalty and nobles. The Sedovara Church had medicinal baths and such, but it wasn't a place that prescribed medicine like it does now. It was just a place where sick people gathered and prayed to Sedovara for salvation."
That was quite a shocking fact. No matter how much you prayed to a god, illness wouldn't be cured.
"The Sedovara Church started healing illness through compounding medicine like it does now after the appearance of the saint, Yuuta Hiraga."
...There he is again, Yuuta Hiraga! He really is revered as a great man.
"It was the saint Yuuta Hiraga who declared that the Sedovara Church, as believers of god, wouldn't be bound by borders, and who spread that claim to various countries. Thanks to him, the Sedovara Church is surprisingly quick on its feet when it comes to medicine arts."
Alf said that since they'd sent the first report as soon as they noticed the infectious disease, the Sedovara Church in the neighboring country should already be moving to contain the situation. They were prepared to lend a hand if needed, but probably that 'need' itself wouldn't arise.
"The shaint Yuuta Hiraga-shama ish amazing."
I knew he'd created various medicines, but I hadn't known he'd also built organizations and systems. Maybe I should have read that biography I'd given Leonardo the other day, the one he apparently donated to the Sedovara Church, a bit more carefully.
"Yuuta Hiraga is amazing, and he certainly deserves to be called a great man, but..."
"Ish there shome thing?"
"Have you heard that the saint Yuuta Hiraga was a reincarnator?"
"Yesh, I heard from Leonyaldo-shan. At Aurelia-shama's houshe."
I was sure that when I first saw the bath at Aurelia's house, she told me that bath culture was spread by a reincarnator named Yuuta Hiraga. Apparently his real name was different, but since he achieved great deeds using his knowledge from his past life as a reincarnator, he decided to leave his name from his previous life, and only the name Yuuta Hiraga remained.
"Yuuta Hiraga brought benefits to this world, but the reincarnator born in the neighboring Zugari Empire about two hundred years ago..."
"...Did he make shome thing bad?"
I ventured a guess as Alf trailed off, seeming reluctant to say it. The kinds of things a reincarnator might bring to another world would usually be scientific knowledge that didn't fit the era, or food culture. Yuuta Hiraga, who brought compounding techniques to the Sedovara Church when it was just a place of prayer, was one example in a sense.
"They say he made a tube that spits fire with a sound like thunder, and a chimney that launches iron balls bigger than a human head a long distance. It's thanks to those weapons that the Zugari Empire could claim nearly half the continent as its territory."
...So, in a world where knights and soldiers swing swords, he made weapons that go beyond that. Weapons that use gunpowder.
From what Alf said, that was the gist of it. The sound like thunder would be gunfire, and the iron balls being launched could only be cannons. Though I was aware my imagination was limited.
"...Shoinds like a fairy tale, like magic."
Not knowing what to say, I ventured something childlike and off-topic. I couldn't very well blurt out "That tube is called a gun, you know." At my forced response, delivered while tilting my head, Alf gave a wry smile.
"If it were magic used peacefully, I'd welcome it too."
Seeming to take it as a child's fanciful remark, Alf played along with the 'magic' word. A tube that spits fire with a sound like thunder would seem like magic in a world without guns.
"...Come to think of it, are there any reincarnators who made magic?"
When it comes to reincarnation in another world, the protagonist being an overpowered mage is practically a given. There might be some kind of magical something that existed that Alf and the others just didn't know about. Wasn't there some story like that? Driven by a sudden whim, I pressed on, aware that this was a childishly random notion.
"You can't make shomething that doesn't exisht..."
When I stared up at him with hopeful expectation, asking if there was anything like that, Alf ran his hand through his hair in dismay. The wry smile from before had vanished, replaced by a troubled frown.
"You asked before if magic existed too. Are you really that interested in magic, Tina?"
"I wish there wash magic that could cure illnesh, ish all."
Three days after this conversation with Alf, Royne departed on a journey to be with her child.
Tina's lines without her halting baby talk are hard to read. Hard enough that checking for typos and misspellings is painful... She's scheduled to start speaking properly eventually.
I have an errand tomorrow, so no update.