As Ryan's expression changed from doubtful to frightened, Kraft's forehead hit the window sill heavily. The thin snow accumulated last night failed to act as a buffer, and there was an eye-catching streak on his head.
Red marks.
Some unruly hands and feet and temporarily disabled position sensors did not allow him to react, so he just slid down against the wall and collapsed on the ground.
Ryan, who was still in a state of confusion and panic, quickly stepped forward to help Kraft, and moved him to the bed in an awkward posture like a princess.
When he reached out and lifted the blond hair from Kraft's forehead, he realized that what was more serious than the red mark, which was just a flesh wound, was the unusually high temperature on his forehead.
As his cousin who is several years older, Ryan had taken care of Kraft when he had a fever in his childhood. Even though those memories were blurred, he could still conclude that such a high temperature was too exaggerated, far exceeding the normal fever level and approaching
Extremely hot to the touch.
What's more, Kraft didn't say a word, and didn't even let out a faint cry of pain from hitting his head to being moved to the bed. He was completely in a state of confusion.
"Craft, Kraft!" Ryan used Old Wood's secret battlefield first aid technique and slapped Kraft's cheek hard, trying to bring back his consciousness.
When he found that two slaps failed to wake him up, he decisively grabbed a large handful of snow on the window sill, compacted it, and applied it to Kraft's forehead, performing a simple but effective physical cooling method. Lane straightened Kraft's head.
, and found that he was still staring straight ahead, with no intention of reacting to his atrocities.
"I'll go next door and ask if there's a doctor here. Just lie down and don't move!" After a symbolic warning, Ryan stood up and ran towards the door. After a few steps, he turned back, closed the window that had been open all night, and walked out from there.
Kraft took out half of the quilt to cover him, and then rushed out the door.
……….
I don’t know how long it took, but after Kraft gradually broke free from the chaos and barely regained control of his face, his breathless cousin dragged a middle-aged man who looked no different from other villagers and rushed in.
, followed by the out-of-breath village chief.
After Ryan roped in the village chief, the two of them went to the house of the only person in the village who knew how to do some magic. After searching throughout the village to no avail, they finally found the person they were looking for at the stone pillar. Only then did Ryan know that they had hired him before.
Among the people who dug the hole was the village's "doctor".
This "doctor", who is considered a part-time worker at most, and a few others, who were paid fairly generously but were not able to dig out the whole thing, felt a little regretful. They thought that being idle in the winter was also idle, and seeing that the sunshine was rare today, they decided to
Let's meet up to dig some more hoe and pass the time by chatting.
The three of them ran back to the doctor's house to get his tools and herbs. It was already half the morning.
In this way, when Ryan brought the people back, he could already see Kraft looking at him with an indistinguishable expression, mumbling indistinctly, combined with a bar on his head and red and swollen cheeks.
The image is quite funny. He was lying on the bed, listening to his relieved cousin describing his condition to half a doctor.
With no personal history, no past history, no family history, no history of marriage and childbirth, and no specialist physical examination, this guy, who in Kraft's eyes was far more amateur than the doctor who amputated the shooter's limbs, could rely solely on his family members.
The diagnosis was made based on the oral complaint and half of the medical history - your disease, I think, is a characteristic disease of our village!
In his narration, which was a bit difficult to understand due to his accent, Kraft and Lane learned that this was a doctor with a legacy.
From their ancestors who cannot be verified to this generation, three generations of them have worked in this village part-time as doctors while working as farmers, supporting the primary medical and health care here with technology that is basically in line with the average medical level of this era.
The main business is generally bloodletting therapy and indigenous herbal medicine treatment. Compared with clinics in the city, they win because of the orderly inheritance, but lose because of the lack of high technology such as amputation and enema.
This medical model, which only exists in historical documents and rumors among souls in other worlds, is not to say simple and unpretentious, but it can only be said to be efficient butchering.
However, objectively speaking, after the doctor unexpectedly proposed bloodletting and local potion treatment, it did help Kraft regain his speech ability as soon as possible.
With his still numb lips, he tried his best to squeeze out a few words under the doctor's surprised gaze: "No need, I'm much better."
In the continuous fright, Kraft still had difficulty moving his trunk and limbs, but his brain had returned to normal. When Lane applied ointment to the scar on his forehead, he could clearly feel that the high fever had subsided, which at least ruled out the possibility of contracting the disease.
possible.
Regarding everything that happened last night, Craft only remembered fragmentary words such as snakes and scales, which could be summarized as having a nightmare in front of the window of a big snake crawling in front of him.
This is nothing new to everyone present. In this era when neurology has not yet reached the top of the contempt chain, various diseases with complex principles are still explained by some supernatural factors.
Whether you have speech dysfunction and hemiplegia caused by a stroke, weakness caused by hypokalemia, or limb twitching caused by febrile convulsions, delirium, or gibbering, it can all be interpreted as the intrusion of something evil.
It is perfectly reasonable for a nightmare about snakes to bring disease and explain it as a trick of evil spirits. Since Kraft has improved rapidly, from the perspective of the village chief who has some faith, it should be God's blessing and he can naturally do without medicine.
And get better.
Ryan was hesitant to speak. Not to mention whether the church’s gods would protect the relatives of collectors of heretical gadgets. As for Kraft’s condition, he didn’t know whether the accidental impact caused by his pat on the shoulder in the morning had added fuel to the fire.
I suspect that a small illness turned into a serious illness.
Kraft, who was lying on the bed, quickly caught a word in their conversation out of the professional sensitivity of an alien soul. He reluctantly moved his hands to push himself, and Ryan noticed his movements.
He stretched out his hand to help him up, piled a small bag behind him with a quilt, and gave him a sip of water from a kettle so that he could sit up and talk.
"What's the 'special disease' you just mentioned?" Kraft asked in a hoarse voice. Ryan moved the kettle closer to let him take another sip, but he tilted his head to avoid it, "What?
Call it a characteristic disease of your village? Sudden high fever like mine is very common here?"
He was vaguely aware of something, but there were only fragmented fragments of last night's memory, and more content was lost in the depths that he could not discover. Now he needed some clues.
Maybe it’s because this symptom is so distinctive that the amateur doctor showed good memory in this regard: “According to my father, and of course he also listened to what my grandfather said, I don’t know how early it was. This has been here for a long time.
People get strange illnesses, mostly young people, one every eight or nine years. They all suddenly get hot on their heads, as if they have been roasted in a fire, and they talk nonsense about snakes and the like, and in the end..." he said.
He suddenly paused and observed the faces of Lane and Kraft. He felt that they would not be angry with him in this situation. "In the end, they didn't live for more than two days. The same happened to my father."
Seeing that Lane and Kraft looked unconvinced, the doctor took out his set of bloodletting tools: "My grandfather was a serious doctor outside before coming here, and this set of things was left by him. He said he had never seen it elsewhere.
This kind of disease, even if you have a high fever and talk nonsense, it's not all related to snakes, right?" As he spoke, his voice became softer, "Of course, this is also what my father said, he guessed that there is a snake here.
The spirit, after eating the fresh and strong soul, goes back, and comes out again when it is hungry.”
Kraft habitually filtered his words: the onset is acute, usually occurs in young adults, with fever and delirium as the main symptoms, and has obvious regional characteristics. The fatality rate is extremely high, and it cannot be ruled out that local medical measures may be counterproductive.
possible.
Of course, there is also "snake". This inexplicable element is still lingering in his mind, lingering. His current state is like waking up from a dream, being pulled back to reality from a distant dream. Except that the impression is the most
Apart from the profound content, he didn't know anything else. The only difference was a hazy feeling that wouldn't go away, making him feel that something had been completely changed in a place he didn't know about.
This hazy feeling was like that of a rafting project on a trip in the past. He was on the kayak looking down at the turbid water where algae was overgrown. Suddenly, an underwater black shadow flashed through his peripheral vision. When he looked closely, there was nothing there. Self-doubt
, it may be an illusion caused by the rippling water waves, or the mottled shadows cast by the rugged rocks and old trees above. It is impossible to imagine and dare not imagine what kind of living creatures are moving in the bottomless deep pool.
If he discovered some shocking truth in the dark night, it was now beneath the calm surface of reason, because the body's self-protection mechanism was temporarily hidden. Instinct told him not to reach down and test the depth.
Kraft avoided the parts he didn't like and picked the parts he was most accustomed to. He asked whether those people were related by blood, whether they had any other diseases before the onset of the disease, whether they had been bitten by snakes and insects, and whether they had been bitten by snakes and insects when they were children.
Fever, cough, etc.
Combining the characteristics of this world, he focused on asking about the eating habits of the lower village and the creek used as the main water source by the village. Are there any problems upstream? Ryan was surprised to see his cousin showing off his unknown and meticulous side.
, and then gave him some more water to ask him to speak slower.
The doctor and the village chief patiently answered the guest who had increased the village's GDP. The main components of the answer were "don't know", "unclear" and "no".
However, the elderly village chief remembered the names of a few people in his memories, and sighed that they were all good young men, but they were clever, and the evil spirit really knew how to pick people.
"Okay, I've finished asking, thank you." Unsurprisingly, even the patient's family may not be able to answer this information, let alone two people who have never had such awareness. "Since this strange disease is the only one here."
, haven’t you considered going elsewhere?”
As soon as he said it, Kraft knew that he had said something stupid. For a disease that only occurs once every few years, there may not be a fraction of the common causes of death here. Besides, the location of this village is not bad, and it happens to be stuck in a place without a lord.
It is responsible for tax collection, and it is not too far from Wendeng Port where things are bought and sold. There are even traveling merchants passing by here.
Although this also means that there is not enough protection, it is not difficult for a relatively united village to drive away some wild beasts together. The exemption of taxes will allow them to accommodate more people. Over time, they may not be able to develop into a small town.
.
In contrast, the "special disease", apart from looking scary, is probably scabies.
Kraft, who said something stupid, consciously ended the topic and sent the village chief and the doctor away on the grounds that his brothers had some private matters to discuss. Before leaving, you could see on their faces, "He is indeed a rich young man, maybe something else."
Nobility" and the like.
Regarding this disease, considering that he is a semi-time traveler, it is understandable that other supernatural events will occur. Of course, he can explain it this way. Oh, no, it should be called a paranormal phenomenon here.
However, from a rigorous perspective, it is more reasonable for you to interpret this as a special acute central nervous system disease. It may be caused by some opportunistic pathogenic bacteria or parasitic infection. Because everyone's immune system is different, so only
It starts under specific conditions, and the incidence rate is relatively low.
They all mentioned snakes in a vague state of consciousness, which may be due to the influence of rumors from generation to generation in the village. They subconsciously felt that they were related, and naturally they felt that they were entangled by the evil spirit of snakes.
As for me, I just happened to see snake-like patterns all over the ground. I thought about it day and night and dreamed about it at night? Is this the course of the disease... Forgive me for my lack of knowledge, but there are so many messy cases in the world, not less than this
one.
Kraft tried to move his arms again, this time moving himself into a more comfortable position without his cousin's help.
"Okay, I'm sorry for scaring you. Although it looked serious before, I feel like I'm getting better, so can you put away the bloodletting kit?" He looked at Ryan beside the bed and stretched out hard.
The feet indicate that he is fine. The abundant energy is returning to this young body, and the control of the limbs has basically recovered. Now he feels a little hungry.
Kraft refused Lane's help and climbed out of bed. He walked to the luggage and pulled out a piece of dried meat, twisted it in the middle, and handed one piece to Lane.
For a patient who was half-dead just now, his condition was incredibly good. The powerful chewing muscles gave his teeth the power to bite the delicious marinated meat: "Look, there is nothing wrong with me."
"I'm a little bit suspicious that you were just faking it." Ryan carefully took the dried meat, still fearful, "How about we rest here for a few days before setting off?"
"No, I feel like I can leave tomorrow morning. And that damn pillar, let them fill the hole back. The soil is solid. I don't want to come to this unlucky place again." I didn't get any souvenirs, and I lost a lot of money.
Silver coins, and almost killed his own people, which is a lighter-level job.
"you sure?"
"I'm sure, we'll leave tomorrow. You don't want to wait for the snow to melt and ride in the mud. Also remember to remind me to let them fill the hole." Kraft was a little eager to put all this behind him.
He could feel that he was resisting from body to mind to delve deeper into this matter from certain angles, and it just so happened that he had long wanted to leave.