The Obelisk of Healing Truths: When History Heals, the World

Chapter 3: Between Life and Stone

The 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.