Chapter 5: To Revive a Healer’s Guild

01 — Yenice, the City of Freedom

One month had passed since we’d set out from the Holy City for Yenice, and we—the Order of Healing—hadn’t even crossed the border yet. Our work reviving the Healer’s Guild would have been well underway already if not for the orders Her Holiness had given us, so at the moment, we were stuck in a village to the south, fulfilling her wishes.

Jord and I stared at the guildmaster cowering behind his desk, pale-faced, while Piaza, one of the knights under my command, delivered his report.

“Two members of staff were found guilty of corruption, and we’ve received reports of malpractice regarding healers from several clinics. Procedures for their removal and transfer to the capital have already been carried out.”

“Thank you, Piaza,” I replied. “Get the team ready to move out and wait for me downstairs.”

“Sir!”

I watched the knight withdraw from the room, then turned my focus back to the guildmaster. “Please let Headquarters know as soon as possible if there’s any more trouble.”

“I-I’m not being dismissed?” he whimpered.

The lack of color in his complexion made sense now. I couldn’t blame him, given his position. A young man with new ideas and untested authority like me couldn’t have been good for the heart.

“No. Not this time, but that can change fast. Don’t make me come back here, okay?”

“Y-Yes, sir! I’m very sorry to have troubled you, sir!” he cried, head lowered.

Jord and I looked at each other and shared a dry smile. “Let’s work together here. I want us healers to be admired for our work, not shunned for our business practices, and I hope you do too.”

We left the office and descended the stairs.

“You really laid into him, sir,” Jord said with a grin.

“I didn’t even do that much. What’s so funny?”

“Their faces, obviously. I never get tired of that dumb look they always give when you drop that line.”

“How humble of you. But it wasn’t anything special—just the Church’s goal. You know that. Personally, I’m more surprised by how readily everyone’s been going along with exposing all these clinics and guilds.”

“You inspire them.”

“Do I? In what way?”

“Well, how could you not after they saw how well-respected you were in Merratoni? They’re sick of collecting dust at HQ. They want to be like you, and that goes for me as well.”

“Come on, don’t make me blush. I’ll take that last part with a grain of salt, though. You want to be like me?”

“You wound me.”

The Order was waiting for us on the first floor, standing in a neat line.

“Thank you all once again for your help with wrapping this incident up nice and quick. I couldn’t have done it without you,” I told them.

We’d encountered trouble in just about every village we had visited so far, and needless to say, I was very happy that I wasn’t alone.

“We’re glad to be of service. And it’s thanks to your holy magic and connections that our journey’s been this smooth,” one of them replied.

“Yeah,” another knight agreed. “If those adventurers hadn’t lent us a hand, we’d have been in a bad way.”

“Still, I want to thank you all. Now, seeing as we’ve cleaned up everything here, it’s time for us to go.”

“Yes, sir!” they replied.

We left the guildhall, and the knights mounted their horses with their heads held high. The healers got into the carriage, and I leaped onto the black-as-night back of my trusty steed, Forêt Noire. With cheers at our back and resolve in our hearts, we set out once more for the city-state of Yenice.

I hadn’t expected our journey to take as long as it had, but orders were orders. The pope had asked us to stop at each village along the way and send any problematic individuals to Headquarters at once, so that was what we were doing. There had been more than a few guilty parties needing our attention, and more just kept showing up. Before we knew it, we’d spent weeks on the road.

“It’s a straight shot from here, isn’t it?” I asked Piaza.

“That’s right. There’s a small village where we’ll spend the night, then we’ll reach the border.”

“I’m looking forward to having a bed tonight.”

“Likewise.”

Much like the rest of our voyage, we reached our next stop without so much as a single run-in with any bandits or monsters. And we had the local adventurers to thank for that. After our going-away party, Grantz, the guildmaster, had sent his people ahead of us to thin out the opposition on our route and ensure our safety. I was extremely grateful and hoped I’d be on equally good terms with Yenice’s Adventurer’s Guild.

“There, that’s everyone. Does anyone else need healing?”

“No, sir. I have no idea how we can repay you. You’re certain a room is all you need?” The elderly mayor frowned anxiously. He and I had struck a deal. We would heal his town, and he would give us a place to rest.

“No need to worry about food. I’m trying to get better at cooking, so we’ll make do with whatever I can whip up.”

“If you’re certain, but please don’t hesitate to ask if you need anything. Anything at all.”

“Appreciated.”

I left the mayor for the old row house he’d offered my team for the night. Once upon a time, it had been used as a town hall of some sort, but it had seen better days. It wasn’t anything that a Purification spell couldn’t fix, though, and it was just big enough for us to all huddle into.

We got straight to making dinner.

“This magic item is amazing. It’s so simple, even I can use it,” Piaza marveled as he operated the automatic vegetable cleaner, codenamed Lil Shiny. Rina, who I still suspected was one of the reincarnated, had developed the appliance at my request.

The idea had come to me during my cooking lessons. I’d remembered hearing in my past life that washing veggies with a little warm water helped to bring out their freshness. But when I’d run it by Rina, clearly lacking basic cooking sense, she had come to me with blueprints for a giant, drum-style washing machine, which I promptly vetoed and replaced with the current miniature dishwasher. At any rate, it made the process that much simpler.

“It’s definitely faster than scrubbing enough food to feed a dozen people,” I said. “Is the water in the pot boiling yet?”

“Yes, and I have to say, that magic stove is just as incredible. I’ve never seen a device maintain its heat so precisely. I’ve got to buy one for myself when we get back to the capital.”

Rina would go far with her talent, although fame wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. That was something I was painfully aware of.

“I don’t think that’ll be for a while, but I’ll show you where to find a good artificer when we do get back. Now, you guys can leave dinner to me if you can take care of the horses. Just don’t expect some sort of gourmet meal.”

Those not helping with the cooking sounded off, then got to work. Today’s menu was pot-au-feu with extra vegetables and freshly baked bread, made from yeast extracted from fermented grapes (or what looked, smelled, and tasted like grapes in this world). A Gulgar recipe. It wasn’t much, but our supplies were limited while on the road, so I wasn’t taking any chances.

Fun fact: the Purification spell didn’t actually affect the bacteria needed for bread to rise. It only got rid of the harmful kinds. The same, unfortunately, couldn’t be said for blue cheese. Maybe it had something to do with the spellcaster’s own knowledge and preconceptions.

We finished preparing dinner, and I heard everyone’s report on the day’s events as we ate—our usual mealtime routine. The conversation consisted of a variety of things, mainly advice on magic, training, how to best utilize the Physical Enhancement skill, or the most effective spellcasting methods. It wasn’t anything new, but our advice-sharing sessions had definitely taken on a new level of passion (right after visiting Merratoni, coincidentally—my master was a frightening man).

Still, it was easy to forget sometimes, but my team was nothing to sneeze at either. There was a lot for me to learn from the capable Knights of Shurule, and learn from our back-and-forth I did.

After dinner, I led the Order in Magic Handling practice, which ended up increasing my Leadership skill. Was that really all it took? If so, it must’ve been a fairly common ability.

“We’ll be in Yenice tomorrow,” Jord informed me. “How are you planning on rebuilding the Healer’s Guild there?”

“You know, I haven’t really thought about it,” I admitted. “I have no clue why it’s defunct in the first place, and I’d rather see it with my own eyes before making judgments. At the very least, I’ll do what I’m asked.”

“I guess that’s all you can do. But make sure you remember they don’t call Yenice the City of Freedom for nothing. Don’t expect the same racial interactions you’re used to in Shurule.”

“It’s like Grandol, right? Lots of diversity. I remember hearing Yenice’s population is mostly beastpeople. What’s your point?”

“It’s not that it’s just diverse, the entire city-state was founded by beastfolk races. So I don’t think we’ll be seeing many humans. Maybe the odd adventurer or two.”

“Oh. I get what you’re saying.”

Nanaella had taught me years ago that Yenice was home to many beastfolk, and before we left Merratoni, Galba had told me to trust no one but myself. The pieces certainly fit, but all the beastfolk I knew were good guys. There was no point in worrying about it now.

“We’re not human supremacists,” Jord continued, “but that doesn’t change the fact that we’re outsiders from a country most beastfolk end up fleeing for exactly that reason. I’m not gonna lie—I’m a little nervous.”

I understood his concern. There was no guarantee that we, the human minorities, wouldn’t be subject to persecution once we were on Yenitian land.

“I think we’ll be okay as long as we act natural and stay humble. If we have trouble, we just need to communicate with each other. We’ll make it through.”

“Right.”

My master always said that when you’re running blind, preparing for the worst is always better than preparing for everything. And the wolf brothers had told me to use their names if we ever found ourselves in trouble, for whatever that was worth. So what was there to worry about? They were the ones who’d asked for us, after all.

“I’m sure I’ll need your advice once things get started. Mind sticking close to me?”

Jord smiled and nodded.

Once our magic practice was finished, we all got a good night’s sleep.

The next morning, we departed for the Yenice-Shurule border. The trees and forests began to thin out, and the sprawling fields of grass started to brown, giving way to a rocky wilderness as we followed the road towards a large valley.

“Yenice is just through that pass,” one of the knights announced. “Our welcome party should be waiting for us on the other side.”

“Nearly there. Come on, everyone, one last push!”

As usual, no monsters or bandits appeared on the road. Nevertheless, I trusted my guard to be alert at all times, and the healers continually cast Area Heal and Purification (Forêt’s favorite) on their tired horses to help boost their Holy Magic skills. I looked at the gate in the distance and knew that things weren’t going to be that easy once we passed through it.

“I’m casting Area Barrier just in case,” I announced. “Stay sharp, everyone.”

“Yes, sir!”

Right on the border, nestled tightly between sheer cliffs, towered a citadel. The road through the gate looked like it was barely wide enough to squeeze our carriage through. The geography was practically asking for brigands or fiends to be waiting to ambush us. And the gate just sitting there, wide open, didn’t bode too well for us either.

Maybe I ought to let the pope know that someone forgot to shut the front door.

Past the gate and farther along the road, our view widened once again. All of a sudden, the air seemed to thicken with heat, and the sun beat down with new intensity. The others looked slightly uncomfortable with the sudden change in climate, but thankfully my magically enhanced clothing and armor made it almost unnoticeable to me. My attention was far more focused on the numerous silhouettes approaching us from afar.

Suddenly, a smaller figure leaped away from the taller ones and shouted, “Mister healer!”

I lowered my guard. It must have been the party from Yenice that had been sent out to greet us. The girl sprinting towards me was... What was her name again? Shera? No, wait, Sheila.

“You can relax, everyone. I think they’re from Yenice. I recognize the little girl.”

I dismounted from Forêt and opened my arms for Sheila, but she straight up dove into me and all but tackled me to the ground.

I couldn’t stop myself from instinctively free casting Area Heal. If I hadn’t fully understood before just how much stronger beastfolk were, I sure did now.

“Well, hey, Sheila. You can talk now.”

“Yeah! It happened right after we left!”

“Oh, yeah? Well, amazing things happen for good girls, and I don’t know anyone who tries as hard as you.”

Strange. It shouldn’t have worked when I’d tried to cast Extra Heal on her all that time ago—my skill level hadn’t been high enough. Talk about miracles.

The little beastgirl giggled and grinned as I pulled Forêt Noire along towards the rest of her group. My team followed.

“Saint Weirdo, we can’t thank you and your companions enough for making the journey to our homeland,” the man at the front said. “My name is Shahza, the representative for all tiger-folk at present.”

I had never met a tiger-person before, and they weren’t quite how I’d envisioned them. His beard and sideburns merged into a shockingly lion-like mane.

“Thank you all for coming out to meet us. I’m Luciel, S-rank healer, and this is my team. We look forward to working with you.”

“Oh, that is wonderful to hear. How can we call ourselves the City of Freedom when our citizens have to make do with only a Doctor’s Guild? Yes, this is wonderful news.”

“I’m glad we can be of service. Let’s take things slow, though. I need to see the situation for myself and get some information before we start making changes.”

“And we thank you for that. Our city is still about three days’ journey from here, but I hope that will not be an issue.”

I stifled a sigh. Figures.

Shahza held out his hand, and I took it, brushing the dust off my best business smile.

“Not at all,” I told him.

His grip was firm. Really firm. Then again, it was possible that all of Yenice’s delegates simply needed some form of physical prowess to get elected. At any rate, we’d finally made it and were now on our way to the heart of the city-state.

It became clear almost immediately that we weren’t in Shurule anymore. Monsters assaulted us several times during our journey, but Shahza, Yenice’s head delegate, refused to let his honored guests lift a finger and protected us along with his fellow warriors.

I didn’t like sitting around doing nothing while they fought for us, so we supported them with barrier magic and healing. In fact, that little bit of assistance even leveled us up a few times. According to Jord, combat support counted towards fighting experience, which gave me some ideas for power-leveling strategies, but I put a pin in that until I could actually test my theories.

The knights seemed a little fidgety, like they were itching to join the fight. Probably a side effect of Brod’s hell march of a training regime. They’d need a place to let off steam before too long, so I considered having them train at the Adventurer’s Guild when they weren’t busy guarding what we’d be rebuilding, or even letting them accept missions as adventurers. I was running pretty low on Substance X and could use a refill.

Speaking of “the X,” I’d had a mug of the stuff that morning but had still leveled up, meaning its experience-hindering effects only lasted, at most, for half a day. I looked forward to possibly investigating the mysterious liquid further once we got things at the Healer’s Guild settled.

Thought after thought of all the things that needed doing rushed through my head, so I started jotting down notes during one of our breaks, and soon the entire page was covered with ink. There was nothing for it but to take things one step at a time.

Three days came and went, and our long journey finally came to an end. We arrived at the heart of Yenice, the City of Freedom.

＊

There had once been a Healer’s Guild branch in Yenice, until circumstances several decades ago had necessitated their withdrawal. At least, that was what I’d been told, but I’d never known it was this bad.

We stood before the dilapidated guildhall, if it could even be called that anymore, completely lost for words. Not because it was rundown; rather, because of where it was located.

“It’s...in the slums?” I asked hesitantly.

“Yes, sir. This is where the Healer’s Guild has always been. I apologize for the location, but there was no available land to transfer it to,” Shahza replied with regret. But he wasn’t doing a good job of hiding the amused smile behind his hand. He was obviously provoking me.

The other beastfolk didn’t share his joy, though, and looked away awkwardly, confirming my hunch that the tiger-man was the top dog in these parts.

I thought back on our trip and remembered the times that Sheila had tried to talk to me but stopped herself. She and the others (beastfolk I’d met two years ago in the Holy City) seemed particularly on edge around Shahza. At first, I’d thought it was just racial tensions of some kind, but Shahza hadn’t once left my side on our way to the city, forcing me to leave poor Sheila to herself. And during that time, he’d pelted me with question after question about healers and their magic, which I’d simply assumed was his way of welcoming us. But his true goal was to keep me away from the girl, to hide the true state of affairs that we were now faced with.

He got me good.

Now that I thought about it, all his brazen requests from the guild made a little more sense. He wanted lower healing prices in relation to other commodities, patients of various races to be treated as prescribed by Yenice’s local laws, healers present at battles against monsters, and the Church of Saint Shurule to shoulder the cost of founding new clinics. It went without saying that there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell I could do all that at the snap of a finger.

“I’m sorry, but let me be clear about something,” I had told him earlier. “We’re not a charity organization. But let’s leave all that for when we’ve actually got the guild up and running. That comes first. Deal?”

Now, I knew that I hadn’t imagined the coldness in his leer at the time. The guy never took his eyes off me, so I couldn’t bring up my concerns to the team for some time. It was only after entering the city that I’d managed to slip in a quick word to Jord, who shared my suspicions.

“Sounds like the knights’ll have work before the healers, eh?” he’d joked.

I didn’t find it particularly funny myself. I’d told everyone to stay on guard after that but had never imagined our gut instinct would be right. At least, not in this way. The neighborhood wasn’t the safest I’d seen, to put it lightly. Leave it to Gulgar and Galba’s hometown...

“We’ll make it work,” I said to the smirking tiger-man. “Until we get everything up and running, we’ll set our own prices. And we’ll have people pay with labor if they don’t have the money.”

“I hope you don’t mean slave labor,” Shahza shot back with a fierce glare. It was nothing compared to my master, though, and carried all the weight of a house cat eyeing a toy mouse.

The team waited patiently and quietly for my reply. This guy wasn’t as tough as he thought.

“I mean regular labor. There’s a lot to rebuild. In the Church, we create ‘contracts’ by binding two parties to an oath before the divines, and they work nicely for situations like this.”

“How is that different from slavery?” he spat back.

I kept my composure. “First of all, it’s an oath to the gods. It’s not something someone can be forced into or else they’d be divinely punished. What that punishment is—your magic, your life—I don’t actually know, though. Wait, you know I’m planning on making one with you, don’t you?”

Shahza’s calm, collected mask finally started to slip.

“Why so scared? It’s not going to kill you. It might drop your level a bit, that’s all. You can handle it, can’t you, Representative? It would go a long way towards helping us restore the guild’s presence here.”

“L-Let’s not be hasty! I’m sure we can find better ways to assist you!”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. I hear you have quite a slave market here. We’ll find plenty of help that way and get this thing built however we can. We can’t wait for volunteers to come knocking, after all.”

I shot him a blinding smile. No one came to the flustered politician’s aid. Thankfully, Jord and I had planned for many eventualities.

“Wait, that’s right! We were going to hold a welcome banquet for you guys!”

“Really? Wow, I appreciate that.”

A bit of the color returned to Shahza’s face. I wondered what he was planning. Poisoning? As if that’d work on me.

“Unfortunately, I can’t really let things stand like this. Our Divine Healer must be grieving at the sight of it. We may be healers, but we’re also from the Church, and we have to right this wrong. So I have to insist that we form this contract before anything else. Will you, Mister Shahza?”

I offered my hand and noticed sweat trickling down his face.

“What’s wrong? Is the heat getting to you?” I asked innocently.

“I’m very, very sorry, Saint weirdo, but wouldn’t you know it, I’m just not feeling well all of a sudden. Maybe another day, but I really ought to excuse myself now.”

“Oh, that’s awful. Here, let me help you. High Heal! Recover! Purification! Dispel!”

I knew that casting all those spells wouldn’t keep him from running away, but I had to try.

“Impressive!” he gasped. “Wait, I mean, I’m afraid I can’t spare any more time here! Head delegate duties!”

And off he went. Sheila and her father, Orga (a former representative), politely bowed before promptly following their superior. Sheila was waving back at me so hard I almost thought her arm was about to fly off. Her father must have told her not to speak to me.

“Well,” Jord sighed, “we’ve got our work cut out for us.”

“We sure do,” I answered. “Let’s just make the place sanitary with some magic first. Also, I was serious about getting slaves. Things might become dangerous here. We could do with more guards.”

“Sir!” the team replied.

Inside the guildhall, we were met with a leaky ceiling, broken floorboards, and spiderwebs as far as the eye could see. The latter could be dealt with by using Purification, but the others would take a bit more elbow grease to solve. We’d have to get ready to do some serious renovations.

Thankfully, the Order seemed to light up at the idea. Once the place was decently clean, we sorted out sleeping arrangements, then I divided us into two groups: one to watch the horses, and one to accompany me to the slave market.

Little did I know I’d find a certain Monsieur Luck waiting for me there.