2025-09-08 15:12:26The chaos of the triage on the lawn of the hospital was a distant rumble in Alexander's head. Sirens shrieked, orderlies shouted, patients moaned. But to him, it was all muffled, distant, as if he was hearing from the bottom of an extremely deep, cold well. He stood stock-still, just behind the triage tape, staring at his hands.
They were clean. In the chaos of the evacuation, somehow, the blood and grime had been washed away. They were just his hands. The hands that had sewn wounds, brought babies into the world, and held the dying. Now they were also the hands that had. what? Un-burned a fire? Recrafted physics?
His mind, a highly developed instrument of logic and biological reality, cringed. It grasped for an explanation that was possible—mass hysteria, a shared hallucination caused by trauma and smoke inhalation, a neurological effect of the head trauma he was certain to have suffered. But the evidence was irrefutable. The oxygen supply was intact. Dozens of people had witnessed it. Sophia's wide, scared eyes, filled with an unspoken question, burned in his mind.
And the words. The blue, icy text that hung just at the periphery of his vision, waiting.
[New Quest Available: The First Carving.]
He blinked, and the world stabilized. The overlay stayed, a distracting, impossible world layered over his own. He focused on the words, and with that they expanded, resolving into a new set of commands.
[Quest: Quest: The First Carving.] [Objective: Get to the village of Oakhaven. Heal the infected population.] [Primary Diagnosis: Vibrio cholerae Infection - Contaminated Water Source.] [Recommended Intervention: Apply the 'Sun-and-Sand' Purification Method.] [Reward: Unlock Skill - 'Healing Hands (Lvl. 1)', 200 Exp.] [Warning: Failure will result in System Recalibration. 97% mortality estimated for Oakhaven if left unattended.]
Oakhaven. He had known. A small, impoverished village roughly thirty miles to the east, in the river valley. They'd had occasional words—a cluster of cases of severe gastrointestinal disease. The strained city health department had taken it offline and done nothing. The resources had been too thin. It had been mere statistics.
Now it was a death sentence. 97% mortality rate. And it was his… assignment.
The term was so ludicrous, so out of his frame of mind, that a guffaw of manic laughter welled up in his throat. He choked it back, the stifled sound emerging as a gagging cough.
"Alexander?"
He whirled around. Sophia was several feet behind him, holding a bottle of water and a foil package. Her complexion was pale beneath the grime, her expression a landscape of worry, exhaustion, and lingering terror.
“You need to hydrate. And you’re in shock,” she said, her voice nurse-firm, but her eyes were soft. She held out the water.
He took it mechanically, his fingers brushing hers. The moment they made contact, her status flickered into his view.
[Individual: Sophia Gray] [Status: Minor Contusions - Adrenal Fatigue - Psychologically Traumatized - Loyal.] [Vitals: BP 110/70, HR 105, SpO2 99%]
Loyal. The word jumped out, a personal human assessment among clinical data. It felt like an intrusion.
"Are you… all right?" she asked, her eyes scanning his face. "What happened out there? With the fire…"
He uncapped the water bottle and gulped down a great big mouthful, buying time. The water was tepid, but it focused him. How could he respond? I died, and then an ancient obelisk granted me a second chance as a magical medical messiah?
"I don't know, Sophia," he said, truthfully a dry, inadequate thing. "I saw the line… I just acted. Maybe it was a pressure fluctuation. A miracle." The lie stung bitter.
She looked at him for a moment, and he saw the conflict within her. The rational part of her, the nurse, insisted on an engineering solution. The woman who had seen the unpossible would accept a miracle. And so she merely nodded, tacit agreement to put the unanswerable aside for the moment.
"They're setting up a field hospital in the university gym," she told him, gesturing towards the pandemonium evident. "They're calling on all hands."
It was the summons to duty. The comfortable, smothering weight of obligation. It was where he was meant to be. He parted his lips to agree, to immerse himself in labor, to try and forget the blue message burning in his brain.
But as he did so, the message of the Obelisk pulsed, a soft, insistent drumming against his brain. The words 97% mortality appeared to blaze brighter, more insistently than any other order here. Here, there were other doctors, other nurses. In Oakhaven, there was just death and punishment.
He was a doctor. His promise was to all patients, not just the easy ones.
"I can't," he had the habit of exclaiming, the words surprising him as much as they surprised her.
"What? Alexander, they need us. Look around!"
"I know," he said, his voice gaining a measure of strength. He looked out east, as if he could see over the city skyline to the afflicted village. "But there's one thing I have to follow up on. It's… a lead. From before the collapse. A suspected cholera cluster in Oakhaven. It's been overlooked. If it is cholera, then it can be a flashpoint. I must go."
It was a half-truth woven around the impossible reality of the Quest. It was the best he could give her.
Sophia’s brow furrowed. “Oakhaven? Alexander, that’s a day’s journey with the roads the way they are. You’re exhausted. You’re not thinking clearly. Let the public health teams handle it when they can.”
“There won’t be a ‘when they can’,” he said, his tone final. “There will only be a body count.”
He caught the ache dance in her eyes, the confusion. He was abandoning his station. He was abandoning her. But the pull of the Obelisk was a physical force now, a frigid talon in his chest, tugging him east.
"Take this," she finally said, her voice tight. She thrust the foil blanket into his hands. "And for goodness' sake, grab a med-kit from the supply tent. Don't be an idiot on an empty stomach." It was her way of telling him that she didn't understand, but she wasn't going to stop him.
He swallowed, hard, and nodded. "Thank you, Sophia."
He walked away from the lights and the sirens, from the ordered chaos of a known calamity, and onto the dark, quiet streets of an irreparably altered city. Each step from the hospital was another step further from the man he knew. The tug of his stethoscope in his pocket was an anchor to a past life.
He ran into an abandoned bus stop and sat on the bench, covering his shoulders with the foil blanket. The night air was cold. He was alone.
He closed his eyes, and the Obelisk stood ready for him in the blackness behind his eyelids. Not a memory; it was there. He felt its enormous, silent bulk. The lines on its face rippled and flowed, telling stories of lost fevers and lost cures.
With care, almost fear, he focused his mind on the System. The blue print reappeared.
[User: Dr. Alexander Carter] [Level: 1] [Exp: 100/200] [System Points: 90/100] [Title: Novitiate of the Obelisk] [Skills: Diagnostic Insight (Lvl. 1), Minor Rewrite (Locked)] [Quests: The First Carving (Active)]
He learned Minor Rewrite. A tooltip was displayed.
[Minor Rewrite: Enables the modification of small-scale physical events. Cost unknown. Locked until Level 2.]
He had used it instinctively, applied 10 points, to save them. The cost of a miracle. He then focused on the quest itself, to the intervention it talked of.
['Sun-and-Sand' Purification Method: A little-known hydrological technique. Utilizes sunlight and special layered filtration through sand and cloth to eliminate microbial disease agents. Efficiency: 99.8%. Knowledge: Eradicated about 1892.]
Erased. The term was a cold horror. Knowledge did not just fade with age; it was erased. On purpose. The concept was a darker, deeper disturbance than the reality of the Obelisk itself. Who did this? Why?
He was no longer merely a physician on a quest. He was an archaeologist of fact, digging up graves that someone had tried to make eternal.
A deep, resonant weariness, much deeper than physical, insinuated itself upon him. He was caught in between two worlds. The one he knew—the world of science, of hospitals, of Sophia—slipped away behind him. Before him lay a path of stone and light, of quests and misplaced truths, a path that demanded he trade his certainty for power, his knowledge for the potential to heal on a scale he could never have dreamed.
He was halfway between living and stone. The man he had been had died in the stairwell. The man he was becoming was slowly waking up, and he had no idea what this new man would be capable of, or what he'd lose.
He opened his eyes to the dawn's gray shadow. The first wave of light was touching the horizon. He had no vehicle, little money, and a thirty-mile drive.
But he had a Quest.
He stood up, letting the foil blanket fall to the ground. He tightened the strap of the stolen med-kit on his shoulder and started moving in an easterly direction, towards the east and the dying village of Oakhaven. The inscription on the Obelisk was his only map, its cold glow his only guide.
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
Chapter 20: The First Truth Restored
The hush that came after Dr. Thorne's cut-off threat was the most profound Alexander had ever experienced. It wasn't an absence of sound; it was a presence. It was the silence of a line drawn in the sand, a slamming shut of a door on a future of gilded compromise. He had threatened war on a giant, and for a long, breathless moment, the only thing he could hear was the sound of his own defiance echoing.Then the world began to change.It started as a vibration, a low, subsonic hum that reached him not through the air, but through the earth itself. It rose up through the soles of his feet, a sympathetic frequency that caused his bones to sing. The walls of his hut began to shine with a soft, inner radiance, the mud bricks glowing as though they were packed with ground crystal. Outside, he heard the villagers cry out—not in fear, but in awe.He stumbled towards his door. The entire village of Oakhaven was radiating a light. The thatch on the roofs, the soil of the green, the leaves on th
Chapter 19: Test of the Healer
The revelation of the deliberate epidemic placed Oakhaven in a whole new, more acidic context. Every meeting, every look, was now charged with the knowledge of the plot they were struggling against. Alexander doubled the guard, scheduling shifts to guard the village perimeter and, most importantly, the water system. Those humble hand-washing stations he had dreamed up now appeared as front-line checkpoints.He had spent hours immersed in The Archive, his clearance now permitting him to dig deeper. He studied schematics for early warning systems capable of detecting airborne pathogens, diagrams for community-level quarantine methods that didn't include barbed wire and soldiers, and herbal remedies capable of bolstering the immune system against a host of synthetics toxins. He was not just a doctor anymore; he was a general mobilizing his men for biological warfare.It was on one of those deep dives that the test arrived.The Obelisk's warning was a soft chime in his head, rather than i
Chapter 18: Shadows of Greed
Elara slowly regained. The neurotoxin had weakened and quiveringly attacked her hands, but the light in her eyes was restored. The attack, however, had irreparably changed the mood of Oakhaven. The new confidence was now tempered with cautious paranoia. Trust that was once freely extended to Alexander was now a spent medium. Every stranger was a potential threat, every gift a potential Trojan horse.Alexander knew. His Truth-Sense thrummed with their mutual fear, a continual background thrum of dissonance. He had promised them safety, and his promise had been revoked by a sugar-savoring poison. His failure stuck to him, a blight he could not shake.But desperation was a luxury he could not afford. Hale's words haunted him: "They are digging in the dark places." The attack was not a threat of terror; it was a record in a database. His enemies were discovering him. They had probed his defenses and his response. To counter them, he has to know them better. He has to move from reaction he
Chapter 17: Whisper of Forgotten Plagues
Alexander haunted Oakhaven for three days. He called on Elara, frail but healing with the strength of a child. He stood guard over the Earth Kidney. He spoke little. The villagers gave him space with an open circle, their admiration now tempered with a healthy fear. They had seen the cost of his power on his face.He slept uneasily, his visions a crazy combination of dead patients, crumbling concrete, and the unforgiving, critical eye of the Obelisk. In one vision, he was holding a scalpel that was also a bolt of lightning, and he never knew if he was healing a patient or dissecting them.On the fourth night, sleep was not possible. The green-tinged foam on Elara's lips was too vivid. The weight of the city's suffering was too crushing. He wanted… something. Guidance. A sign. Not from the calculating mind of the System, but from the wisdom once his. He recalled Professor Hale, his mentor. The man had been an island of ethics in a sea of compromise.As if the pain of his longing had a
Chapter 16: The Weight of Healing
Elara's small body was a battlefield, and Alexander was lagging behind.The Healing Truth's energy pouring out of his hands was a searing, desperate gold, grasping her small heart pounding, forcing her lungs to attempt ragged, poor breaths. But it was damming back a flood. The artificial toxin worked its way into his nervous system, a smooth, calculating malice that bypassed his energy's attempts to neutralize it, cutting at the very junctions where her nerves attached to her muscles. It was a poison synthesized in a lab, an exercise in cold artifice that his reality-based healing couldn't comprehend, much less defeat."Charcoal!" Alexander bellowed, his voice straining with exertion. "I need activated charcoal! Now!"Blank, white faces greeted him. Activated charcoal was de rigueur in any emergency room, a basic antidote. In Oakhaven, it was as foreign as a spaceship.His mind, screaming through the Truth-Sense's alarm and the drain of incessant healing, fought its way through The Ar
Chapter 15: Resisting in the Shadows
The city didn't forget Oakhaven.In a high-tech, air-conditioned office on the thirty-fifth floor of the Aethelred Pharmaceuticals building, Liam Creed sat sipping a glass of good whiskey and looking at a satellite image on his wall screen. It was a thermal overlay of the valley east of there. Most of the heat signatures were weak, scattered. But one cluster, massed in and around the village of Oakhaven, burned with a hot, fierce yellow.It was an abomination.He sipped slowly, the alcohol not burning away his fury. The "routine survey mission" had been a failure. Voss was dead, his body ravaged by an alkaloid strain of cholera so deadly it had turned his internal organs to liquid in forty-eight hours. Creed himself had lived only because he'd been in another, walled compartment for the majority of the return, and because he'd had the connections to arrange an immediate, experimental Aethelred antibody cocktail the instant he experienced the initial cramp.The cover-up was a tragic ac
You may also like
System Blessing For The Poor Son-in-law
Pein43.2K viewsFake Regressor Apocalypse
Autistically19.6K viewsLevel Up With My Bastard System in Fantasy World
Oceanna Lee25.6K viewsThe Ability Steal System
Icemaster36043.0K viewsVillainous Sect Leader
Peace1.1K viewsRise of the Greatest Prodigy
Khay Phynom 2.3K viewsVengeance System A Bullied Man
Alma Saja4.7K viewsThe Fugitive's Touch
4lpukatmentega555 views