Condoms.
They're good.
They're good, but there was one problem.
"Do people in this era even use condoms...?"
Would they even feel the need for them?
Thinking about the Lister family from Upton, it seemed like they wouldn't have a need for them.
Even though they were Quakers who sold alcohol, their private lives were incredibly strict, weren't they?
Of course, condoms are used between married couples too, but...
Using them before marriage...?
"Ugh..."
I'd probably be burned at the stake.
"No, but this is such a great item."
It's too valuable to back down just because of the threat of being burned at the stake.
Alright, I'll have to weave this into a story somehow.
I neatly placed the rubber next to me and fell asleep.
The next morning, I was shaken awake by Alfred, my clumsy senior.
"H-hey, wake up."
Rubbing my sleepy eyes, I saw my pale-faced senior standing there.
His voice was trembling uncontrollably, so it seemed like something serious had happened.
So, instead of looking at his face, I first looked at his fingers.
"Ah... it's swollen."
"This... this is exactly what you warned me about! I'm going to die..."
"Hold on a second. Let me take a look first."
"Ughhh."
"No, just hold still. I need to see it."
"Ugh."
"Joseph."
"Yeah."
I left the panicking senior to Joseph, who was over 175 cm tall, and carefully examined the finger.
It was swollen.
Definitely... this was an inflammatory reaction.
"Yikes!"
When I pressed on it, he screamed in pain.
There was tenderness, which meant there was inflammation packed inside.
'This isn't good...'
Of course, it wasn't good.
Even in the 20th century, you could just go to a pharmacy, buy some antibiotic ointment, and that would mostly solve it.
'Wait, no. This is from a corpse... Hmm. Maybe he needs antibiotic injections?'
Even if he got antibiotics, it would solve the problem immediately, but...
Here, there wasn't even any edible antibiotic substance.
'Should I start growing mold now?'
Penicillin flashed through my mind, but...
At this point, it was a meaningless thought.
Most molds would just eat people instead of showing beneficial effects.
"Give me a knife."
"Huh...? Are you going to amputate it? No... you can't. Without my index finger, I can't perform surgery..."
"I'm not going to cut it off, stop freaking out. Where's the knife?"
"Freaking out? Did you just say freaking out?"
"If you keep resisting, I'll curse even more, so just tell me where the knife is. I'm being polite right now."
"Of..."
I stopped the unnecessary thoughts and focused on finding the knife.
It's unclear if it's normal, but my senior didn't even know where the knives were in his own house.
No, he didn't even know the exact location of the kitchen.
He's never cooked before, or so I heard.
It made sense, though.
A boy of his size living in a mansion like this, frying his own eggs... that kind of thing only exists in idealistic fantasies, right?
"Alright."
I said it was alright, but it wasn't.
The kitchen I finally found wasn't exactly clean.
The first thing that caught my eye was a large pot, boiling something strange.
"Ah, that's stew."
"Stew?"
Stew.
A familiar name, but at the same time, an unfamiliar dish.
I've heard of it, but I'm not exactly sure what it is.
But I can confidently say that the stew I've had in the 21st century wasn't like that.
If you sold something like that in South Korea, you'd be killed by the customers, not the police.
"Yeah. Umm. Let's move away for now."
I tried to separate my senior and Joseph from the food that looked like a river leading to hell by moving slightly inward.
Then I told them to boil some water.
It seemed like all the dishcloths and such were rotten, so I told them to boil a piece of cloth that looked like it had been prepared recently.
There was no gauze or anything to clean with, so this was the best I could do.
"Here's the knife."
"Ah... this needs to be cleaned."
"Ah, yeah. If it mixes with food, the taste will..."
"I'm not going to cook my senior."
"Then do we really need to clean it?"
"I'll... I'll clean it."
The knife brought by someone, whether a servant or an employee, wasn't clean.
No, it was dirty.
'You bastards... you're all going to die like this...'
Do they not know about food poisoning?
Ah, they probably don't.
I heard that cholera swept through London not long ago.
A lot of people died.
You have to keep filling the water, but they don't know that now.
Damn it.
I thought that as I boiled the knife in water and scrubbed it clean.
Looking at the steaming knife, I felt strangely at ease.
It felt like the resentment I'd been holding onto was melting away.
Since when had I been holding onto this resentment?
Ever since I saw Dr. Liston's strange knife, a part of my heart had been blocked.
"Alright."
This time, I really meant it.
A clean knife, and my senior, held by Joseph, looking at me with a frightened face.
No, wait.
A frightened senior isn't good.
It would be nice if we had anesthesia.
"Then... I'll clean my hands with the alcohol we made yesterday."
"O..."
"Does it hurt?"
"It hurts!"
"Yeah. You'll have to endure it, what else can we do?"
"Hey."
Saying "hey" won't help.
It's not like I enjoy seeing you in pain.
It's easier to cut if it doesn't hurt.
"Hmm."
Anyway, I cleaned my senior's finger with alcohol and examined the wound inside.
It would be nice to have tweezers, but since we don't, I used the end of a sterilized fork to lift the flesh.
It sounds psychopathic, but it wasn't as strange a sight as you'd think.
At least not to me.
It was quite visible.
'Damn... the muscle color...'
Muscles are supposed to be a bright red.
But the muscle color of my senior's finger in front of me was a pale pink.
Not a pretty pink, but the pale pink you see just before flowers wither.
The kind of pink that makes you feel like it's about to die.
"Huh?"
"Does it smell? The inside is a bit rotten."
"No... Lord..."
"It's not hopeless, but pray just in case."
"L..."
It was clear that pus had formed.
The only saving grace was that there wasn't too much of it.
'Thinking about it... yesterday, I should have cleaned the inside, not just the surface.'
When I was at the hospital, I never saw wounds like this.
A wound from handling a corpse?
That's something you'd report to the police first, not the hospital.
And if it's a rotten corpse, even the police would be at a loss.
"It hurts."
"I know!"
"No, it's going to hurt more."
"What? Ugh, ahh!"
Anyway, I made a small cut with the knife around the swollen area.
Then, along with blood, yellow pus mixed in and flowed out.
The smell wasn't very pleasant.
It seemed like anaerobic bacteria had started to grow.
Speculating what kind of bacteria it was would be pointless.
All kinds of bacteria would be growing there.
"O...O!"
"What are you doing! Hold him down so he can't move!"
The servants, startled by the sudden transformation of the cooking area into a gruesome scene, hesitated but quickly came over and held down their master at my shout.
"You, you!"
"You've seen surgeries before, right? This is how it is. Don't panic, just hold him down."
Alfred gave a few servants a look of betrayal, but it was no use.
They've already seen a few surgeries—no, surgical scenes—in the square because of the young master who wants to be a surgeon.
Compared to what they've seen before, this was nothing.
It's just a finger, after all.
Of course, the pain he's feeling probably isn't much different.
*Squish*
Our brains have a limit to the pain they can handle.
Of course, regardless of the concern, my hands didn't stop moving.
Even though I was holding a fork and a kitchen knife instead of tweezers and a scalpel, my experience as a surgeon didn't go anywhere, so I was already getting used to it.
"Ahhhh!"
"It hurts, it hurts."
"You bastard!"
"I know it hurts."
With my senior's screams as background noise, I opened the wound further and drained all the pus inside.
Then I scrubbed the open wound with alcohol.
Not a single treatment came without pain.
At this point, isn't this more efficient than any torture method in history?
"Ugh..."
Anyway, I finished the treatment in about 10 minutes.
The wound, which had been oozing yellow pus earlier, was now dripping red blood.
"Ah..."
It might seem like a horrifying scene, but...
For a surgeon who just cleaned out a rotten wound, it was a satisfying sight.
Whatever it was, the dead tissue was all removed now.
The stuff that came off the knife was all rotten flesh.
There were probably a lot of bacteria in there too.
"Senior, look at this."
"...What? It hurts too much."
"This is your flesh."
"I know, I can feel it!"
"It's rotten flesh."
"Huh?"
My senior was about to get angry at my words, but when I said it was rotten flesh, he snapped out of it and looked at the knife.
"You've probably seen this during amputation surgeries... but muscles are supposed to be a bright red. Larger muscles are a bit darker, but since this is a small muscle..."
"Hmm. But this is..."
"When muscles die, they turn this color. Smell it."
"It smells rotten."
"That's because it's mixed with pus."
"Why did pus form?"
Since he dreams of becoming a doctor, he forgot the pain and became very studious.
I also felt like I was facing a student for the first time in a while, so I spoke without thinking.
"Pus is a collection of dead white blood cells that fought bacteria."
"Huh?"
"Ah."
At the same time, I was met with several pairs of questioning eyes.
'Is this how I get burned at the stake?'
Have I ever been this flustered since being reborn?
I don't think so.
Is that why my head is spinning?
"It's a term used in Joseon... haha. My mistake."
"Joseon's language sounds a lot like English, huh?"
"Uh, well. People's languages are all like that."
I brushed off Joseph's comment and continued.
"When this bad energy... enters, we need to protect ourselves, right?"
"Is that so?"
"Yes. First, the skin blocks it. That's why you don't die if you don't get hurt."
"Ah."
"Then, inside the skin, there's something that blocks it too. If it loses the fight, this yellow pus forms."
"Ahh."
It wasn't easy.
Teaching at their level isn't easy, is it?
Damn it.
"Well, we're not exactly sure either. It's just what they think in Joseon, that's all."
"People in Joseon think really deeply."
"Yeah."
It wasn't exactly a lie.
There are probably a lot of experts in Neo-Confucianism there.
Wouldn't they think deeply?
Probably.
"Anyway, let's leave this open for now."
"Leave it open? Without bandaging it?"
"Bandage..."
My senior pulled out a bandage he had brought at some point.
It looked like it had been made a while ago.
It smelled sour.
The bandage smelled sour.
"No. It's not a big wound... let's leave it open for now."
As I said that, I looked out the window in the kitchen.
'Is this place even Earth...?'