The Paralel World Doctor

Ten Pills

Apartment 307 still smelled of stale alcohol when Peter returned.

He placed Mr. Wong’s package on the narrow table, one of its legs propped up by cardboard. Around it were a small pot, a cracked bowl, an old mortar, and several silver needles. They looked like poor jokes beside the knowledge that had once made Zicari nobles kneel outside his treatment room. There, he had a jade furnace, spirit water, and disciples waiting for orders. Here, he had an old stove whose flame sometimes died on its own.

Peter opened the package slowly. The scent of Red Ginseng and Snow Lotus rose faintly, weak compared with Zicari ingredients, but still enough to awaken his physician’s instincts. He did not waste time complaining. This world was poor in Qi. His body was also poor in strength. If he wanted to live, he had to use that poverty like a small knife, not cry over it like a child who had lost an inheritance.

The refining began before the sun leaned west.

He washed the ingredients with boiled water, dried them with a clean cloth he had sterilized, then ground them slowly so the medicinal essence would not be damaged. Earth’s Qi was so thin that every breath felt like drawing thread from empty air. When he forced that small current into his palm, the wounds from fighting the Red Sickle began to throb. His hand trembled for a moment, but he held it over the mortar until the shaking passed.

One small mistake could ruin all the ingredients.

There was no second batch. No second sum of money. No second chance tonight.

Toward evening, the thick golden red liquid began to shrink at the bottom of the pot. Peter adjusted the flame, moved part of the heat with his thin Qi, then shaped the medicinal paste into ten small pills. Their surfaces were not perfect, but a faint light moved beneath the red color like embers hidden under ash.

In Zicari, pills like these were only basic medicine for new disciples learning to regulate their breathing. On Earth, if the human body could still absorb them, the effect would be enough to make ordinary people think they had witnessed a miracle.

Peter arranged the ten pills on a white cloth. After calculating the cost, the debts, and the seven day threat, he set the price at sixty dollars per pill. Six hundred dollars from all ten pills would not be enough to repay Goro. It would not even clear his debt to Mr. Wong. But the first step did not need to fill the entire abyss. It only needed to prove there was a path down into it.

The afternoon market was crueler than his calculation.

Peter set up a small folding table at the edge of the pedestrian path. A cardboard sign in front of him read, Forging Qi Pill, sixty dollars. A few people passed by, glanced at it, then looked again as their expressions changed from curiosity to amusement.

A man in a shabby suit stopped first. His shoes were cracked at the toes, but he laughed like a building owner. “Sixty dollars for a red pill? Are you selling medicine or dreams?”

A market woman held a bag of vegetables against her waist. “Son, if you are sick, go to a doctor. Do not go to a fraud like this. His face looks like he has not slept for three days.”

A teenager carrying a plastic drink took a photo of Peter’s price sign. “Bro, if it is drugs, do not write the price so clearly. The police will not even need to work hard.”

The street vendor beside him leaned over, his eyes sweeping over Peter’s plastic table. “If your medicine is that amazing, why does your table look like it came from a neighborhood party?”

Small laughter spread. Not loud, but enough to make others stop. Some only looked at the pills. Some read the price sign aloud so their friends could laugh too. One person offered a coin and said he wanted to buy it for a sick cat.

Peter did not explain much. He had once seen Zicari nobles push each other just to obtain leftover powder from his furnace. Here, without a license, without a white coat, without a shop, without a powerful name guaranteeing him, he was only a thin man with a plastic table and pills too expensive to be trusted.

Evening turned into night. The ten pills remained untouched.

Peter was folding the white cloth when a young man who had been watching said, “Bro, tomorrow just write stamina pills. They sell better here.”

The street vendor laughed, but when Peter looked at him, the laughter shrank and disappeared behind the wok.

Peter put the pills back into the small box. He had not lost to the medicine’s effect. He had lost to the stage.

When he was about to lift the table, neon lights in the distance lit up one by one. The sign of Melody Paradise flashed pink above a livelier street. From there came laughter, music, motorcycle exhaust, and the clink of glasses, sounding far more alive than the entire market.

Peter looked at the unsold pills, then at the neon light.

If this world bought the stage before buying medicine, perhaps he had to bring his medicine to the place where people liked pretending to be strong the most.