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

Chapter 7: The Forgotten Cure

The loss in the hut was a heavy, suffocating blanket. Leo's bony shoulders shuddered under Alexander's grip. The girl, Elara, slept restlessly, her mother's body cooling beside her. Alexander had failed. System notifications and unlocked skills were for naught in the face of that hard, cold reality. He was a doctor, and a patient had died in his care with reality-bending tools mere fingers' lengths away.

The Obelisk's mission still resonated, though. It pulsed with a calm, unhuman light, utterly indifferent to his pain.

[Tertiary Objective: Locate and Secure the Origin of the Contamination.]

It was a request. A distraction from the mourning. A way ahead.

"Leo," Alexander growled. "I have to go to the well. Where the water comes from."

The boy looked up at him, his red-rimmed, empty eyes. Alexander was afraid for an instant that he'd broken him. Then the same fierce determination that had made him help build the filter came back to him. Leo nodded, wiping his nose with his soiled sleeve. He was a child of this crisis; he couldn't afford to grieve.

He brought Alexander to the center again. The villagers who had stuffed themselves were now sitting or reclining in the green, their energy depleted. The pure water had saved them from immediate death, but it was not a cure. The bacterium remained in their guts, and unless they received further treatment, the cycle of vomiting and diarrhea would begin again, draining the precious hydration he'd provided. The filter was a band-aid, not a solution.

Alexander looked down into the well's dark, stonelined mouth. The water had a small circle of sky deep beneath. It looked innocuous. His Active Scan painted a different picture, casting its findings onto the placid water.

[Water Source: Village Well - Primary.] [Depth: 15 meters.] [Contamination Level: Critical.] [Primary Pollutant: Fecal Coliform Bacteria - High Concentration.] [Source Analysis: Seepage from subsurface. Probable origin: Proximity to waste pits/defecation fields.]

It had turned out exactly as he had anticipated. The village toilets were situated too close to the water table. Storms or flooding had flushed the waste teeming with pathogens directly into the aquifer that fed the well. A quaint old-fashioned public health mistake, one corrected in the developed world over a century ago by proper sanitation and water treatment facilities. Repairs this village would never see.

A solution the Obelisk had previously provided, then removed.

The memory of the 'Sun-and-Sand' filtration design flashed into his mind. It was a beautiful, clever, low-tech solution. But it was a half-solution. It cleaned the water after it had been fouled. The actual cure, the ultimate solution, was to stop the contamination in its tracks. To interrupt the oral-fecal cycle of transmission.

But how? He couldn't recreate their entire sanitation system. He needed something more. Something from the Obelisk's archive of forgotten facts.

As with the necessity of his need, the world tipped. The sun's warm light, the worried villagers, the smell of disease and dust—all washed away, replaced by the now-familiar weightless darkness. The Obelisk loomed before him, its surface glimmering with whirling light.

This time, the carvings were not of filters or bacteria. They blended together into the shape of a plant. A weedy, lowly herb with serrated leaves and small, white flowers. It was painfully familiar, something he'd seen a thousand times in ditches and overgrown gardens, but never once considered as medically significant.

The vision of the plant whirled, and the Obelisk's silent voice flooded his head with knowledge.

ANALYSIS: SURVIVAL OF WATERBORNE PATHOGENS. INTERVENTION NEEDED: BREAK TRANSMISSION CYCLE. PROTOCOL KNOWN: 'PURGATIVE AND ANTIMICROBIAL TINCTURE'. ACTIVE CONSTITUENT: DYSENTERY SATIVA ('BLOODWORT', 'TRAVELER'S SAVIOR'). EFFICACY: 92% VS VIBRIO CHOLERAE IN VIVO. KNOWLEDGE STATUS: superseded circa 1923. REPLACED BY SYNTHETIC ANTIBIOTICS.

The news was a sledgehammer. A weed that occurred everywhere. A weed that had been 92% effective in healing cholera. It had been eradicated, substituted by costly, patented drugs. The cynicism of it left him gasping. How many millions perished because a lucrative product replaced free, natural information?

The diagram changed. He saw the plant harvested, leaves and flowers milled and steeped in hot water to make a powerful, bitter tea. He saw it administered to patients, its purgative components balancing the bacteria out of the gut while its antimicrobial agents attacked the pathogen directly. It was no gentle cure. It would be a harsh, debilitating experience for the patients. But it was one which healed.

The Obelisk's vision was gone, leaving him staring into the black void. A new quest message glowed in his vision.

[Sub-Quest: The Herbalist's Memory.] [Goal: Locate and harvest *Dysentery Sativa* (Bloodwort) along the riverbank. Distill a medicinal tincture.] [Reward: 150 Exp - Knowledge: Basic Herbalism (Lvl. 1)]

Hope, raging and desperate, flowed through him. This was it. The real cure.

He turned to Leo. "The saw-toothed weed with white flowers. The one that grows near the river. Do you know it?"

Leo frowned, trying to remember. "The bitter weed? The goats won't eat it."

"That's the one! I need it. As much as possible."

They gathered a few of the healthier survivors—two teenage boys and an older woman whose Active Scan showed she was but mildly infected. They moved to the riverbank, and Alexander used the Obelisk's embedded image to guide them, pointing to the lowly plant that grew in clusters in moist dirt.

They worked quickly, filling a basket with the robust leaves and flowers. The sun was beginning to set, painting the sky oranges and purples. It was running low.

Going back to the village green, Alexander found a large, clean pot. He had no specific measurements, only the general data from the vision. He set the pot of clean filtered water over the fire. As it heated, he began to grind the bloodwort leaves with a stone, and a sharp, astringent, and very foul smell was emitted.

What's that?" one of the boys asked, curling his nose in disgust.

"Medicine," Alexander said, speaking with a strained effort of will. "The old medicine. From when things were bad."

When the water hit the boil, he added in the crushed herb. The water turned slimy, greenish-brown and the air filled with bitter, medicinal smoke that burned their eyes. He let it simmer, following the instinctive timetable the Obelisk had provided.

As it steeped, a new presence brushed against his mind. It was not like Obelisk's chill data-stream. It was warm, soft, a touch of personality and recollection.

The world didn't go dark. Instead, a pale, feeble outline appeared close to the frothing pot. It was the face of an older man in tweed, hair combed back, his eyes drawn and kind behind spectacles. Professor Richard Hale.

Alexander's breath was caught. His mentor. His friend. The man who had taught him that medicine was as much an art as it was a science.

The picture didn't say anything to him, not in words. But feelings, impressions, and memories churned into Alexander's mind. He felt Hale's deep sorrow, his anger at the greed of institutions that had allowed so basic, life-saving information to be lost. He saw fleeting images of old, worn leather-bound books with pages torn out, of pharmacological company journals from the early part of the 20th century, of backroom deals where public health was traded for money.

The word was unmistakable: This was not a mishap. This was a robbery.

The presence of Hale looked upon the seething cauldron of bloodwort, and a profound feeling of righteousness washed over Alexander. This was right. This was the path.

Then Hale's face turned its gaze to the road north, the road that would bring them back into the city. A cold, hard warning went with the look. The feeling of being watched. Of resistance forming. The cure he was preparing wasn't so much a medical remedy; it was an act of defiance. And defiance would be met with violence.

As soon as it arrived, Hale's vision disappeared, leaving only the pungent smell of the brewing remedy.

The tincture was finished. Alexander took the pot off the stove and let it cool until it was just warm. It looked and smelled foul.

"This is the cure," he said to the gathered villagers. They regarded him warily, with fear. "It will be… difficult to swallow. It will make you sick, to rid you of the sickness. But it will be effective. You have to trust me."

He looked at Leo. "You and the others who are able to. We need to get this into all of you. Starting with the most downtrodden."

The first patient was a thirtysomething man, writhing on a pallet. Alexander leaned his head against his hand. The man writhed, fear in his eyes.

"It is the old way," Alexander said to him, spooning a small amount of the liquid into a cup. "The way before the city doctors forgot."

The words 'the old way' were more powerful than he had expected. The man's resistance began to give. He drank, gagging worse than before at the bitter taste. Within minutes, he was convulsing about, vomiting the little he had in his stomach out in a wrenching, purging spasm. It was worse than awful to see.

But once the convulsions stopped, the man leaned back, and his Active Scan told a different story.

[Status: Post-Purgative - Worn-Out - Dehydrated]

[Pathogen Load: Rapidly Decreasing.]

It was working.

They moved from hut to hut, handing out the foul tea. It was a scene of brutal, sloppy treatment. But with each wracking purge, Alexander's Active Scan reported the same reading: cholera's grip was being broken.

As he handed one to Elara, who swallowed it with a faith that shattered his heart, a final warning flashed.

[Sub-Quest Completed: The Herbalist's Memory.] [Reward: 150 Exp - Acquired: Basic Herbalism (Lvl. 1).] [Level Up: Level 3 Reached.] [System Points: 150/150] [New Learning: You naturally know and understand the properties of 17 common medicinal herbs.]

He was in the entrance of a hut, watching the sun set in the sky. The air still stank of vomit and bitter herbs, but the terrible, waiting quiet had been broken by the sounds of recovery—weak wails, exhausted sighs, soft whispers of nurses.

He had used a forgotten weed to cure a contemporary plague. He had seen the ghost of his mentor confirm a conspiracy. He had saved a village.

But at the end of the road darkening in the north, he couldn't shake the weight of Professor Hale's warning. The cure had been found. The fight was only beginning.