Chapter 12:
From Terminally Ill to Unbreakable: I Became the Greatest Healer With My Medical Knowledge, but the Sisters Only See Me as Their Test Subject
"You're a match," I told her. "But this is dangerous. If something goes wrong during the procedure"
"Wait," I said, stopping myself mid-sentence. An idea was forming, reckless but logical. "There's another option."
I rolled up my own sleeve and drew a sample of my blood. When I mixed it with Lady Anastasia's, it remained perfectly smooth.
"I'm compatible too," I said quietly. "And unlike Kaguya, if something goes catastrophically wrong with the procedure..."
"You'll regenerate," Karin finished, understanding immediately.
The physician looked confused. "What does that mean?"
Kaguya said nothing, but I saw her jaw tighten. She stared at the vial of poison in my hand, then at Lady Anastasia's bleeding form.
"But we don't know what a transfusion will do to your regeneration," Karin warned. "What if mixing your blood with someone else's breaks whatever makes you unkillable?"
I considered this. It was a genuine risk. My immortality was poorly understood, even by me. But Lady Anastasia was dying, and if I could test the procedure safely on myself first...
"Give me a small dose of that poison," I said.
The physician recoiled. "Are you insane?"
"Probably," I admitted. "But if I can induce the same bleeding condition in myself and then test treatments, we'll know exactly what works before we risk Lady Anastasia's life."
Kaguya's knuckles were white where she gripped her quill, but she didn't object. We'd done worse experiments than this. Much worse. The incinerator incident alone had been orders of magnitude more extreme than voluntary poisoning.
"Or you could die horribly," Karin pointed out.
"I die horribly at least twice a week," I said. "This would at least be for science."
I took a measured dose of the poison. Much smaller than what Lady Anastasia had been consuming daily, but enough to test the mechanism. Within an hour, I could feel the effects beginning. Small bruises appeared on my arms, and when I pricked my finger, the bleeding took longer to stop than normal.
"Fascinating," I muttered, examining the spreading bruises. "The onset is faster than I expected. Kaguya, are you getting this?"
She was scribbling furiously. "Dosage, timeline, visible symptoms. This is incredible data."
The physician looked horrified. "You're deliberately poisoning yourself."
"I'm conducting a controlled experiment," I corrected. "And unlike Lady Anastasia, when this goes wrong, I'll recover completely."
The truth was more complicated than I let on. My body followed rules I didn't understand. Complete immunity to sickness but not injury. Regeneration that could rebuild me from nothing, somehow reassembling nearby if I was destroyed entirely. And the curse of remembering every death, every moment of agony, whether I wanted to or not.
What bothered me most wasn't the pain. It was the questions. Where did the matter come from when I regenerated? What defined "nearby" if I was completely destroyed? Was my consciousness stored somewhere, or did it somehow persist through obliteration?
I'd tested the limits before, not by choice. The sisters had been thorough in those early days. Fire, drowning, poison, even that damn incinerator. Each time I'd learned something new about what I could survive, but nothing about why I could survive it.
By the second hour, I was experiencing the full effects: spontaneous bleeding, bruising that spread across my skin like ink in water, blood that refused to clot properly. It was exactly what Lady Anastasia was experiencing, but compressed into a much faster timeline.
"Now for the treatment," I said, despite the blood trickling from my nose.
I drank the concentrated vegetable juice we'd prepared, applied the herbal compresses, and had Kaguya monitor my clotting function every fifteen minutes. The results were immediate and dramatic. Within an hour, my bleeding had slowed significantly.
"It works," I said, wiping blood from my face. "The vitamin K in the vegetables is directly counteracting the poison. But the dosage needs to be higher than I initially calculated."
"And the transfusion?" Kaguya asked.
"Let's test that too." I looked at my still-bleeding arm. "Take some of your blood and give it to me. If there's going to be a rejection reaction, better I experience it than Lady Anastasia."
The mini-transfusion was crude but effective. Kaguya's healthy blood, rich with clotting factors, began working immediately. My bleeding stopped, my bruises started fading, and my body's natural regeneration began cleaning up the damage at an accelerated rate.
"Remarkable," the physician breathed. "You've tested an entire treatment protocol on yourself in the span of three hours."
"And proved it works," I said, feeling my body return to normal. "Now we can treat Lady Anastasia with complete confidence in the procedure."
◇◇◇◇
The treatment of Lady Anastasia proceeded exactly as my self-experimentation had predicted.
We administered the concentrated vegetable juice in the precise dosage I had tested on myself. We applied the herbal compresses using the technique that had proven most effective. And when the time came for the transfusion, I performed the procedure with the confidence that came from having survived it myself.
"Her bleeding is stopping," the physician observed with wonder, watching Lady Anastasia's nose finally cease its constant flow. "The bruising has stopped spreading."
Kaguya checked the patient's clotting time using the same finger-prick test I had perfected on myself. "Normal coagulation restored. The transfusion worked exactly as Ken predicted."
Within hours, Lady Anastasia was awake, alert, and asking pointed questions about exactly what had been done to save her life.
"You tested the poison and treatment on yourself?" she asked, studying me with sharp noble eyes that missed nothing.
"Someone had to," I said. "And I'm uniquely suited to survive medical experimentation."
Her gaze moved to the sisters, then back to me. "The stories about you are true, aren't they? The ones that claim you cannot be killed."
I met her stare evenly. "I can be killed. I just don't stay that way."
She absorbed this information like a merchant calculating profit margins, then surprised me by sitting up straighter despite her weakness. "That apothecary, Cornelius Blackwater. He's not just selling poison by accident."
The physician went pale. "My lady, you shouldn't accuse"
"I should have realized sooner," she continued, ignoring him. "Three weeks ago, at Wilhelm's feast, Cornelius was there. He made a point of approaching me, asked about my health, mentioned his new 'miracle tonic' for circulation problems."
Kaguya's quill stopped moving. "He targeted you specifically?"
"Worse than that." Lady Anastasia's eyes hardened. "He asked about my family's mining interests. Our silver mines have been producing less lately. The ore veins are playing out. But if something happened to me..." She paused, her voice growing colder. "My younger brother inherits everything. And my brother has been seen frequently at Blackwater's shop."
The room fell silent except for the scratch of Kaguya's quill.
"You think your own brother is trying to kill you for an inheritance?" Karin asked bluntly.
"I think my brother is an idiot being manipulated by someone much cleverer." Lady Anastasia struggled to sit up further. "Blackwater isn't just an apothecary. He's a businessman. He's been buying up property in the merchant quarter, always from families who've suffered sudden 'illnesses.' Always paying far below market value to desperate heirs."
I felt pieces clicking into place. "How many other nobles has he approached with miracle cures?"
"At least six that I know of. All wealthy, all with heirs who would benefit from a sudden death." She looked directly at me. "You didn't just save my life, Ken. You exposed a systematic poisoning scheme that's been hollowing out the noble houses for months."
"That's why he'd know to disappear when word spreads about your recovery," I realized. "He'll know someone can identify his poison now."
Lady Anastasia smiled. "Then we'd better catch him before he runs."
"That makes you invaluable for advancing medical knowledge," she added, her tone shifting back to business. "No other physician could test dangerous treatments without risking their patients first."
"That's the idea," Kaguya said, still scribbling notes. "We could establish an entire research program around controlled human trials using Ken as the test subject."
Karin cracked her knuckles. "Just remember he still feels the pain, even if he recovers from it."
"Pain is temporary," I said. "Knowledge is permanent. And if my unique condition can help solve cases like this one, then the suffering serves a purpose."
Lady Anastasia nodded slowly. "Practical. Ruthless. Effective. I like that in a physician." She paused, then added, "And I owe you a debt that gold cannot repay."
◇◇◇◇
After Lady Anastasia's guards carried her home to complete her recovery, the three of us sat in the clinic's kitchen, sharing a quiet meal and processing what had just happened.
"Today changes everything," Kaguya said, her notes spread across the table like battle plans. "We've proven that your regeneration can be used systematically to advance medicine. Poison identification, treatment testing, surgical procedure development: all of it becomes possible with you as our test subject."
"It's brilliant," Karin admitted grudgingly. "Dangerous, painful, and probably insane. But brilliant."
I sipped the broth I had prepared, tasting the familiar comfort of marrow and herbs. "Sometimes I wonder if there's a purpose to all this: the immortality, ending up in this plague-ridden world, meeting you two."
"Maybe it's not a mistake at all." I met their eyes across the table. "An unbreakable body means I can test anything, try everything, push beyond every limit that holds other healers back. Every poison, every disease, every impossible procedure: I can attempt them all without permanent consequences."
Karin was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, "Just promise me something."
"What?"
"Don't start enjoying the pain. I've seen what happens to people who get addicted to suffering."
I laughed, the sound carrying genuine warmth. "I hate every second of it. That's what makes it worthwhile: the fact that I'm willing to endure it for the results."
Kaguya looked up from her notes, quill poised. "So what's our next impossible case?"
I thought about the apothecary still selling poison as medicine, about the guild doctors who clung to fire therapy while people died, about the thousand medical mysteries that this world treated as incurable because no one was willing to experiment.
"All of them," I said. "Every impossible case, every mysterious disease, every treatment that seems too dangerous to try, everything the Sephis throws at us. We solve them all."
The sisters exchanged glances, then broke into matching grins.
"Together?" Kaguya asked.
"Together," I confirmed. "One impossible case at a time."
Outside the clinic windows, the city hummed with life. People who didn't know how close Lady Anastasia had come to death, or how her salvation had opened a door to medical advances that shouldn't exist for centuries.
But they would benefit from it all the same.
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