Plague Doctor

Inside the dim loft, the swaying light reflected on the tall mirror. A mutated face colored in shock and surprise stared back at Gu Jun.

“What kind of sick joke is this?” Gu Jun staggered over unevenly. His heart was clenched with worry. The strange man in the mirror approached him as well. The man was wearing a cotton suit, and underneath the foreign race’s feature and the zombification, Gu Jun could pick out features of his own face.

Was the outward reflection of the self an accurate portrayal of the real self? Certain cultures claimed that the mirror could steal fragments of one’s soul, but how much of that was true? When he looked into a mirror, was it the real Gu Jun that stared back?

Gu Jun reached out to touch his own face in the mirror. The strange man in the mirror did the same thing. It was as if he could feel the protruding bones under the skin through the mirror. The facial bone structure was mutating. Even the touch of the skin was different. It felt mottled like lichen that grew in dampness and darkness. He could hear a whispering in his heart.

‘You are Chandler. This is the real truth. Everything else is part of a hallucination. At the end of the day, they are mere stories that you have told yourself to escape the misery of your life inside this broken house…’

“That is not true!” Gu Jun swiped with his hand, and the sword pierced the mirror. With a crisp shatter, the mirror broke into pieces. He lowered his head to look and saw that millions of the ugly faces were staring back at him.

‘No, no…’ Gu Jun shook his head vehemently. ‘It is this house that is muddling my mind. Is this part of the nightmare? Has it infiltrated my thoughts? Wait, this feels like the draining of my sweet dreams on the ship before it was interrupted… Could this house be the source of Nightmare Illness? It drains people’s sweet dreams to replace them with nightmares?’

He glanced around and saw the drawings on the wall staring back at him.

‘None of this is believable! It’s all unreal!’

He rushed back to the wooden table to pick up the Carlot Scalpel.

‘At least I can be sure that this thing is real… Or is it? After all, I am in the foreign world, and this is something purchasable by anyone who has been to Carlot Academy…

‘Stop! I need to stop doubting myself.’

Gu Jun tried his best to clear his mind, but the ground started to sway underneath his feet. The air felt like they were closing in around him. A person’s mental state was more than just their consciousness. It was related to their physical state as well, and there were too many unknown factors that he was not familiar with since they were inside the dream world. However, there was one thing Gu Jun was certain of. He was currently being infected, and his mind was collapsing. If this continued, he would be pulled into the whirlpool of madness and sucked into the abyss.

Gu Jun knocked and bumped against the wall as he clambered back to the second floor. Wu Siyu was nowhere to be seen, not even the fake one. If she was also enduring the same madness spiral… Gu Jun worried about her because she did not have as much experience dealing with this as he did.

The storm outside the house was still raging. Gu Jun turned to look out the window. The young man was still staying guard at his post.

‘Has the young man been pulled into this spiral as well, sucked into this nightmare that will never end? He is to keep on watching forever… his role becoming a part of his strange manor? But why? That does not explain why the content of the diary in my mind has changed…’

Gu Jun’s head was pulsing with pain, but within that wrenching pain, he was struck by inspiration, but it was quickly overwhelmed by a new voice convincing him, ‘No, that was just your imagination. You are hallucinating.

‘No, there has to be a way to break out from this nightmare…

‘So, I am Chandler? I am a zombie?

‘You have shown me my face, but what about the rest of my body? Through the process of zombification, the human body will mutate into something different.

‘I need to wake up from this nightmare…’

Gu Jun narrowed his eyes as he stared at his two hands. Suddenly, an idea came to him.

‘I am a doctor. I can dissect myself!’

Earlier, the medic kit had been given to Wu Siyu to carry, and it had disappeared alongside the girl, but thankfully, Gu Jun had a toolbox strapped around his waist. He immediately took out a tourniquet and wrapped it tightly around the proximal phalange of his left pinkie to stop the blood circulation. He could feel the finger going numb and the skin turning purple. Everything was ready, well, except the anesthetic.

Thunder boomed outside the house, and it brought with it a heavier storm. The lashing winds took on the sound of screaming ghosts, an ominous portent if there ever was one. Gu Jun planted himself on the floor and placed the oil lamp beside him. He leaned his left hand as close as he could to the light, and the Carlot Scalpel was gripped tightly in his right. The dancing flame was a direct contrast to the cold glint of the steel.

“I am a zombie? Then show me some proof!” With determination shooting through his eyes, Gu Jun used the scalpel and made a deep incision on the skin of his pinkie finger. “Argh!”

The skin tore open easily. The blade sliced through the marrow, and the fresh blood gushed out from the release of pressure. The complicated network of blood vessels and nerves sent jolts of pain to Gu Jun’s brain from the damage. It coursed through his body. The pain was so intense that he could barely bring himself to scream!

Remember how painful it was after accidentally kicking your toe against the table? Imagine that pain intensified one hundred times, and that was exactly what Gu Jun was experiencing. Gu Jun did not try to repress the biological pain. His work was not yet over. His slightly shivering right hand raised the scalpel again. “Ah!”

He had no time to prep the dissection. He went for brute force over precision. His aim was to study the phalanx, and considering the situation, it would be much quicker to directly sever the end of his fingertip than to slowly peel back the flesh and skin. The result was that he would lose a segment of his pinkie, but that was little price to pay considering the bigger picture.

However, Gu Jun did not opt for that option because he was worried that once the fingertip was cut off, it would be considered a separate part of his body and thus disconnected from his mind. In that case, he could not guarantee that the house would not take hold over it. The house could change, disguise, and confuse everything within it. Gu Jun had learned not to trust anything, so if he dissected the finger while it was still attached to the rest of his body, at least the pain from the surgency would inform him that it was all real.

“Ah!” The scalpel made another cut, and this time, it scoured off the finger pad. The pain was causing Gu Jun to quiver in cold sweat. “Hang in there, Gu Jun…”

Even with maximum-level Hands of Dexterity, his right hand was shaking violently. This was the first time he had such trouble controlling a scalpel, and the patient under his knife was his own self.

“F*ck…” he cursed. With ragged breath, he steadied his left hand and quickly cut off the fibrous partition, dorsal aponeurosis, and the rest. Scraps of bloody flesh landed on the dirty ground with a wet squish.

At the same time, the watcher’s diary in his mind appeared to have gained a new entry.

“Not long after that, I heard a gut-wrenching scream coming from Mr. Chandler inside the house. It sounded like he was being tortured. I have heard from the others that the process of zombification is extremely painful, but sitting here in the rain, listening to it, I only understood I did not have the stomach to do this job.”

“Is that so?” Gu Jun was drenched in sweat. The skin and muscles of his fingertip had been shorn off to expose the bone inside. But the wound was still covered in too much blood and residual tissue for Gu Jun to see clearly…

He grabbed the bandage to wipe away the blood and then used the scalpel to par away the excess. Each slice of the knife sent an electrifying pain through his body. His heart was almost bleeding from the pain. His face was a mask of terror, and he was sure his screams were getting more and more demented. The storm appeared to have picked up. It knocked against the manor until the whole structure felt like it was shaking. The light from the oil lamp was dancing so wildly that it could be extinguished at any moment.

From Chen Defa’s autopsy, Gu Jun knew that the surface of every bone in the zombie’s body would be covered in that corrosive pattern. It was a biological change brought on by the mutation. This was the knowledge that would provide Gu Jun with the needle to poke through the nightmare. With the shimmering light, Gu Jun moved his shuddering left hand to the oil lamp. It lit up the dissected fingertip and the bone inside it. Gu Jun widened his eyes to look. The surface of the phalanx… there was no pattern at all. It belonged to a normal human being.

“I told you I am not Chandler. I am definitely not a zombie,” Gu Jun grumbled under his breath. It was not a loud proclamation, but something was lifting from his mind. It was as if a haze had been blown apart. The darkness that had enveloped his body earlier slowly faded away. Now, Gu Jun was sure he had been trapped inside a nightmare. Gu Jun looked around him. The manor was a prison for many people’s souls, including their sweet dreams and nightmares. One of them was the nightmare of the watcher and perhaps even the nightmare of Chandler himself.

The watcher’s diary should be a creation of this nightmare and not the actual one from the foreign world. In other words, the system’s reward was not just a diary but a figment pulled out from this nightmare that provided Gu Jun the connection to it. The system remained an unreadable factor, but the fact that the abyssal mission would give this kind of reward meant that the watcher’s nightmare was going to be the key. This nightmare the watcher had about the epidemic sweeping over the foreign world might be what the R’yleh Cult and Ol’ Uncle Dog had used to cultivate the Nightmare Illness that was currently ravaging Eastern State.

Since a change in the dream would cause a shift in the watcher’s mind, causing a change in his diary entry, could the reverse be true as well? Gu Jun settled down and believed it was worth a try. He opened the diary in his mind and focused his mind to write a new entry.

“Just as I thought the night was going to end in the worst way possible, the Carlot Doctors have arrived! They have rushed ahead of schedule to come rescue this poor town. To our village’s hope and surprise, there was one notable member among the doctors. It was the legendary Son of Steel. He has arrived at our humble village!”

Gu Jun watched as the outpouring of happiness, and joy filled the page. Suddenly, it felt like an earthquake had hit the surroundings of the house. Everything was shifting and changing again.