Chapter : 715

With a final, silent acknowledgment, Ken Park melted into the throng of the crowd, his large frame vanishing with an unnerving ease that was a testament to his lethal skill. Lloyd was now truly alone.

The persona of “Zayn” required a physical space, a foundation upon which to build the fiction. Lloyd spent the next few hours navigating the city’s poorer districts, his senses on high alert. He needed a place that was both visible enough to attract patients and obscure enough to avoid the scrutiny of the city’s guilds and authorities. He found it on a street that was a tributary to the main slum, a small, forgotten storefront sandwiched between a loud, boisterous laundry and a grimy tenement building.

The shop had been a failing apothecary, and the ghost of its former business still lingered in the air—the dusty scent of dried herbs and powdered minerals. The windows were clouded with grime, and a faded sign depicting a mortar and pestle hung askew from a single rusty chain. It was perfect.

The landlord was a fat, sweating man with a suspicious squint who was overjoyed to have a paying tenant. Lloyd, adopting a quiet, humble demeanor, introduced himself as Zayn, a healer from the countryside looking to set up a practice to serve the community. He paid two months’ rent in advance with a handful of silver coins he had kept, a sum that made the landlord’s eyes widen with avarice. The deal was struck, and Lloyd was handed a heavy, rusted key.

The next three days were a trial in humility. Lloyd single-handedly cleaned the filthy clinic. He scrubbed the floors until the original wood shone through the layers of grime. He washed the windows until the weak, watery sunlight could finally pierce through. He repaired the broken shelves and organized the few remaining jars of common herbs the previous tenant had left behind.

His body, accustomed to the privileged life of a lord, ached with the unfamiliar labor. His hands, which had commanded spirits and forged steel, were now raw and blistered from soap and lye. The Major General within him was quietly furious at the indignity of it all, but the strategist knew this was a necessary part of forging his cover. Every speck of dust he wiped away, every splinter he pulled from his finger, was an investment in his anonymity.

He used the last of his silver to purchase a few essentials: a simple cot for the back room, a sturdy wooden desk and chair, and a slate board for notes. He then made his most important purchase, visiting a back-alley bookseller and acquiring several well-worn medical texts. They were crude by his standards, filled with superstition and flawed theories, but they were the perfect props. He displayed them prominently on his new shelves, alongside the anatomical atlases his mother had given him. To any visitor, the room now looked like the humble but dedicated study of a serious, if impoverished, practitioner of medicine.

On the fourth day, he was ready. He painted a new, simple sign himself: a stylized serpent coiled around a staff, the ancient symbol of healing that was universal even in this world. Beneath it, in clean, clear script, he wrote: “Dr. Zayn. Healer.”

He opened his door to the city of Rizvan. For the first few hours, there was nothing. The river of humanity flowed past his small clinic, ignoring the new sign. Lloyd sat at his desk, pretending to read, and waited. His patience was that of a sniper, a deep, abiding calm that was his greatest weapon.

Just as he was beginning to wonder if his cover was too unassuming, his first patient arrived. A young woman, her face etched with worry, hesitantly stepped inside, clutching the hand of a small, feverish girl.

“Are you… the doctor?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper.

Lloyd looked up from his book. He offered a gentle, reassuring smile, a carefully practiced expression that he hoped conveyed compassion and competence. The mask of Doctor Zayn slipped perfectly into place.

“I am,” he said, his voice quiet and calm. “Please, come in. Tell me what ails the little one.”

The game had begun. The Lord of Ferrum was gone, and in his place was a humble healer in a grimy port city. The assassins were hunting a ghost, while their true target was hiding in plain sight, preparing to turn the city itself into his weapon.

---

Chapter : 716

The district of Rizvan known as the ‘Lower Coil’ was a place where hope went to die. It was a festering sore on the city’s underbelly, a maze of narrow, unpaved alleys that turned to sucking mud in the rain and choked with dust in the sun. The air was a permanent miasma of human waste, cheap gin, and the metallic scent of sickness. Here, life was a currency spent quickly, and the only healers were charlatans who peddled useless tinctures or priests who offered prayers for a soul already halfway to the grave.

Into this pit of despair walked Doctor Zayn.

His first patient, the little girl with the fever, had been suffering for a week. Her mother, a gaunt woman named Jahanara, explained that three other ‘healers’ had already taken her money. One had sold her a useless poultice of river-clay and dung. Another had performed a noisy ritual to exorcise a ‘fever-demon.’ The child had only grown weaker.

Lloyd—Zayn—listened with a practiced air of solemn compassion. He nodded gravely, his expression a mask of serene focus. But beneath the surface, the Major General was conducting a cold, ruthless analysis. He guided the child to a small examination cot, his movements gentle and deliberate.

“Let’s have a look,” he murmured, placing a cool hand on the girl’s forehead to check her temperature. It was a simple, human gesture, a piece of theater. In the same instant, he activated his [All-Seeing Eye].

The world of flesh and fabric dissolved. Before his inner vision, the girl’s body became a translucent schematic of life. He saw the frantic, panicked fluttering of her heart. He saw the architecture of her bones, the web of her nerves, and the slow, sluggish flow of her blood. The power, once a deluge of overwhelming data, was now something he could focus with pinpoint precision. He directed his gaze to the source of the heat, her immune system’s desperate battleground.

He saw it instantly. Her lymph nodes were swollen and inflamed, glowing with a dull, angry red in his perception. And within her bloodstream, he saw them: microscopic motes of hostile life, a specific strain of bacteria he recognized from his Earth-life studies. It was a common but aggressive infection, one that this world’s medicine, with its focus on balancing humors and exorcising spirits, was utterly unequipped to even identify, let alone treat.

He deactivated the power, the world snapping back into its mundane form. The entire diagnostic process had taken less than three seconds.

“It is a fire in her blood,” he told the anxious mother, using the metaphorical language of this world. “The body’s natural waters are not enough to quench it. But there is a cure.”

He went to his sparse shelves and ground a simple combination of two common, cheap herbs—a willow-bark derivative for the fever and a specific type of root known for its mild antibacterial properties. It was the 19th-century equivalent of aspirin and a weak antibiotic, but for this world, it was a miracle. He gave the powder to the mother with precise instructions for dosage. He refused payment, asking only that she return in two days.

She returned the very next day, her face a mask of tearful, disbelieving joy. The little girl, whose fever had broken overnight, was weak but alert, clutching a small wooden doll. The fire in her blood had been quenched.

The story of the miracle spread through the Lower Coil like wildfire. It was a whisper at first, a desperate rumor passed between neighbors in hushed tones. The new doctor, the quiet one with the sad eyes, he was different. He didn't ask for coin you didn't have. He didn't sell you false hope. He healed.

His second patient was an old fisherman, a man whose hands were so crippled by arthritis that he could no longer mend his own nets. The man had resigned himself to a slow starvation. Zayn examined the gnarled joints. With his [All-Seeing Eye], he saw the inflammation, the eroded cartilage, the calcium deposits. He couldn’t cure the incurable, but he could manage the pain. He prescribed a potent anti-inflammatory salve made from a common marsh weed, and within a day, the old man could move his fingers without screaming. He brought Zayn a small, perfect fish as payment, his eyes shining with a gratitude so profound it was almost painful to witness.

The trickle of patients became a steady stream, then a daily flood. They came with the endless, miserable litany of poverty: hacking coughs from the damp air, skin rashes from the filth, infections from untreated wounds, the deep, gnawing hunger that was a sickness in itself.