I woke up in agony! All I could feel was pain. I tried to scream, but I couldn’t… My body was trying and failing to clear my lungs with some violent fits of coughing. My vision started turning red.

  “Oh, my Lady! She is dying!” screamed Louis.

  “Not on my watch!” said a glowing Vena.

  “What is happening?” sobbed Louis.

  “It is the Red Death… probably the Kinpox as well,” grimaced Vena. “Louis, stop crying and help!”

  “What can I do?”

  “Call Lady Marca, shout at her, don’t go down or get in contact with any of the children under any circumstances. Don’t be afraid, Alice. I will put you to sleep now. You will feel better when you wake up, okay!” said a hazy Vena.

  I tried to nod, but my eyes got heavy and I fell unconscious.

  I opened my eyes to a white ceiling in a white room, warmly tucked in some white bed sheets in a comfortable white bed. I would call it a hospital room if not for a painting of the Lady in front of me. A glance through the window confirmed that I was probably on the second or third floor of the temple.

  I guess a temple with a healing order would have hospital beds.

  I reached for the pitcher of water and forced myself to drink some. My throat was still sore and I could feel my skin was kind of itchy, but overall I was feeling better.

  It took twenty more minutes of resting before Sana came to visit me.

  “You are lucky to be alive, San Alice. I have never seen someone have both the Kinpox and green fever at the same time, let alone the Red Death, a sickness we thought eradicated fifty years ago,” sighed a bewildered Sana.

  “I guess I am lucky to be in a place where clerics are available.”

  “A Life Ability from the bloodlines could have probably saved you, too,” denied Sana. “Even some potions from a good alchemist could help. We do not own a monopoly on healing.”

  “About that… the healing I received, will I gain immunity from the diseases afterward, or am I susceptible to the same illness again?” I asked.

  “Immunity?” wondered the priestess.

  I spent three hours explaining everything I knew about the immune system, microbiology, and general hygiene. The past few years with COVID-19 helped boost my knowledge of epidemiology as well.

  “I must say: tales of tiny things that are so small that we can’t see them are hard to believe,” replied a thoughtful Sana. “But I am not dismissing it either way.”

  “I can show them to you if we make a microscope! With such a device, it would be easy to advance the medical knowledge of this world by leaps and bounds,” I said.

  “A microscope?” asked Sana.

  “Yeah, it’s a device made with glass lenses that makes things look bigger,” I described.

  “Ah! Like that new Soulit invention: the spectacles!” exclaimed Sana.

  “It is similar but far more complex,” I nodded. “I would probably need help from a spectacle maker to create a microscope.”

  “I can probably hire one. But I doubt I could find a Faithful to do it,” sighed Sana. “The technology has not yet left Soulit's hands.”

  “Do they have to be Faithful?” I asked.

  “I could trust a Faithful not to leak the design. So you could make some profit before it gets reverse-engineered.”

  “I see… as long as we only order the lenses to be made, I doubt it would be easy to steal the design. Once I can write, I will make a diagram of how to make a microscope. I will also transcribe all my medical knowledge and how to prove it.”

  “Thank you! I will have Louis and Vena teach you how to write as soon as possible.”

  “So… about the immunity, do you think I will get sick as soon as I get out of here?”

  “From what you’ve told me, I doubt it,” guessed Sana. “You were first attended by Vena, who is a new cleric and only knows how to boost the body's natural healing. Once Marca arrived, you were already out of danger.”

  “That’s good to hear,” I sighed in relief.

  “Still… I am keeping you here for a week to ensure we don’t have a Red Death plague on our hands.”

  Later that day, technically on the second morning, I was quarantined with Louis in a small studio apartment on the fourth story of the temple. Vena, as a cleric, cleansed herself and was never admitted to the hospital in the first place.

  I call it cheating, if you ask me, since I’m sure they could have cleansed me and Louis, too.

  Since I was staying there for a week, I decided to spend the time learning how to read and write with the help of Louis. I also made sure to deactivate my translation spell for a couple of hours to learn the language. To compensate Louis for her help, I started teaching her all I could about food from my world.

  I had one silver coin transferred from my bank account to the temple as an open tab for all the ingredients I could get. They also had one of the orphans make all my purchases for a reasonable fee, and Vena would deliver them to us during her visits since we were not allowed contact with a non-cleric. Finally, I spent all my evenings looking at the stars from a window, hoping to catch another falling star while also practicing my lightning ability.

  On the second noon of the fifth day, Vena finally arrived with today’s delivery and my backpack, which had been left in the orphanage since the start of my quarantine. I happily hugged my trusty backpack and checked that my laptop and phone were not broken. Louis joined me on the couch after doing her last touches to today’s lunch before putting it in the oven.

  I can’t believe we are having pizza. Louis’s cooking skills are truly amazing.

  “Vena, you look exhausted. What happened to you?” asked a worried Louis. Vena did look a little bit under the weather.

  “I’m beat,” sighed Vena. “We have been roaming the slums healing everyone with a sign of fever, just to make sure we don’t get another outbreak of the Red Death.”

  “It’s good that you are being proactive, but I doubt you’ll have an outbreak on your hands,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” asked Vena.

  “Is the number of sick people different from expected?” I questioned back.

  “No,” Vena shook her head. “Just your run-of-the-mill flu and some fevers due to broken bones and food poisoning.”

  “And how long did the Red Fever ravage the Contested Realm?” I asked again.

  “For a couple of centuries, I think,” responded Vena. “The last case was more than fifty years ago.”

  “I bet that most people who currently live in the Contested Realm have acclimated to that disease, and it is no longer fatal to them.”

  “Humm, that may be true…” nodded Vena. “Especially since people from the Kindred Realm were the first to stop getting affected by that plague, and their powers are often gained through adaptation to their environment.”

  The Kindred people seem to embody the concept of adaptation. It is the easiest magic system to understand. With the writing system of the Common language being a phonetic alphabet, I was able to start reading on the first day of quarantine, and I have done a lot of reading since then. I asked for children's stories since they are the best aid for people who are still learning a new language. And a lot of Kindred stories run in the same vein, people living with, or eating, or (in one disturbing case) mating with an animal and getting their physical attributes.

  But the most popular story was about a man called Ion the Phoenix. His people blocked the sun with chains and lived in a never-ending sun cycle, leaving the other half of the world in darkness. The people with the never-ending day started to absorb the sunlight and use it to power themselves. The story ends with Ion eating the sun and turning into a phoenix, or something similarly ridiculous. When I asked Louis about it, she told me it is a true story and that people of the Kindred adapt within a single person's lifetime.

  She even told me that her mother, who was from a desert tribe, had dark skin from the harsh sun but lost it after twenty years of living in a colder place like Hano. A similar thing, but in reverse, would happen to a white Kindred person if they moved from Hano to that desert location. This makes being racist toward physical appearance completely irrelevant, especially for Kindred people.

  Ah, yes, the enlightened people of the Seven Realms care not about the color of your skin. The only thing worthy of contempt is your realm of origin; that is the heart of the matter.

  A fox person could be from a Kindred tribe that only hunts magical foxes, while another fox person descends from a servant of the elder god of deception who used to bestow fox form upon his most trusted servant. Both of them, despite looking related, are considered from different races and fucking hate each other. While the latter fox person, since he got his form and powers from religion, is considered of the same race as Vena. If race wasn’t complicated enough back home, now it’s a completely different kind of nightmare, especially when you factor in cross-breeding between multiple races. Like poor Louis, who doesn’t truly belong anywhere.

  My mental rent was interrupted by the smell of pizza.

  “Vena, you have to try this! It’s one of the foods from where I come from,” I said with a delighted smile.

  “I have never seen someone this excited about a dish made with this much cheese,” laughed Louis, who brought out the pizza. “Although I must say, it does smell amazing.”

  “I am surprised that the cheese is so cheap around here. It’s even cheaper than bread,” I mused.

  “There are a lot of cattle around here, and since milk goes bad fast, it is mostly used to make cheese,” shrugged Louis, then started to cut the pizza into six evenly sized slices using her newly acquired Soulbook ability: Knife’s Edge.

  “What she is not telling you is that most of those cattle are Kindred megafauna and are two meters tall and weigh at least two tones,” laughed Vena. “We didn’t have this much cheese back in the Mythic Realm.”

  “Oh, elephant-sized cows… That is a lot of milk! How do you even feed them?”

  “Life and Earth bloodline abilities make for powerful growth mages,” answered Louis as she passed the first slice of pizza to Vena.

  I held my breath as I watched my friend try pizza for the first time. The expression she made was hard to describe. Suffice it to say, it was not an expression worthy of a stoic cleric.

  “By the Lady, I have eaten food made in the Veil Holy Castle when I was a kid, and it wasn’t this good,” gushed a delighted Vena.

  Surprised, Louis slowly reached for a piece too. And blinked twice.

  “Something this good can’t be holy,” whispered a teary-eyed Louis. “Are we doomed?”

  “Hey, don’t blaspheme. All foods and drinks are holy,” reprimanded Vena.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  “Not all of it,” denied Louis. “What if the Lady makes a decree about this ‘pizza’ like she did about the weird mushrooms that came from the Dreaming Realm? Or what about alcohol? You can’t drink wine as a cleric.”

  “This pizza is made of tomato and cheese. There is no way it’s unholy. Do you think Lady Laurel the Fair has nothing better to do than appear here to judge your pizza?”

  I smiled at their shenanigans and tried a slice. I was a bit apprehensive since the ingredients aren't 100% the same.

  Can you believe that they don’t have onions? More than half of my recipes need onions! How can they have tomatoes and not onions?

  I took a bite, bracing myself while eyeing the bits of vegetables Louis selected as a replacement for onions.

  “Dear god, this is good!”

  I quickly wolfed down the rest of my pizza and reached for a second slice. My action kicked the two teens out of their argument, and they started fighting over the last piece...

  Last? This is weird. I thought that two slices would remain. Did one of the girls sneak one on us?

  “Fine!” shouted Louis after being pushed around by Vena. “I will get the second plate ready, but I am taking extra this time.”

  To kill the time waiting for the next pizza, I decided to introduce my new friends to something just as good.

  “How advanced is the music game around here?” I asked Vena while starting up my phone for the first time since I arrived here.

  “Better than the Mythic Realm, where the best you can get is a tavern bard singing about past glories,” replied Vena. “But probably not as good as the Dreaming Realm.”

  “Yeah, I was eight years old when the last Longest-Night Festival happened. I still remember the songstress from the Dreaming Realm who entertained the audience,” added Louis. “She switched between six different instruments, and I could swear I could hear the old instruments when the new ones were played.”

  “That is one hell of an ability! Is it safe to guess you guys don’t have magical devices that could store music and play it later, right?” I asked.

  “If there is, it would be in the Soul Emporium, and it’s too expensive for us,” added Vena. “Can that device do that? What magic is this?”

  “This is made with science. It’s the most powerful magic back home.”

  Both Vena and Louis looked interested in a new kind of magic they had never heard of. I didn’t have the heart to tell them it was not magic.

  But hey, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

  I looked at my phone and got an idea.

  “Listen to this song! It’s the story of the 189 soldiers who stood in the defense of a holy place against insurmountable odds in a desperate last stand.” I proceeded to play The Last Stand by Sabaton.

  Both girls were mesmerized and didn’t make a single noise until the song was done.

  “This is intense. I have never heard anything like that,” gasped Louis.

  “What did it say? Can you translate it for me?” asked Vena.

  “Sure.” I decided to play it back while pausing after each line and let my translation ability do the hard work.

  “I didn’t know that you believed in the Holy back where you came from,” frowned Vena.

  “We don’t,” I shook my head. “Some of us believe in a god that is considered Holy. We do not believe in an abstract flow of power.”

  “What kind of miracle do you gain from that faith?” asked Louis.

  “There were no miracles in my lifetime. However, some people still believe that miracles did happen in the past,” I shrugged.

  “I see…” said Vena.

  “Do you have more songs?” asked Louis.

  “Sure!”

  To avoid translating more lyrics, I chose to play the first ten minutes of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 and Ride of the Valkyries. The girls were visibly impressed with the orchestra and the number of instruments played. With pizza on hand, we ran through a wide range of music for at least an hour, from rock to opera to even some children's songs. Sadly, to the chagrin of both girls, I had to stop to conserve the battery.

  “I am sorry, but this device works with electricity. I have yet to master my lightning ability to a point where I feel comfortable using it on my phone,” I sighed. “Once I manage that, we’ll have unlimited music.”

  “Is that why you’ve been training nonstop?” asked Louis.

  “Hardly. While the music on my phone is fun, it doesn’t hold a candle to what’s in my second device.”

  I started my PC and opened the encyclopedia app I downloaded just for this occasion. I researched microscopes and started writing down in the Common language every detail about that device I had. I also copied a diagram about how they are made.

  Vena was reading over my shoulder while Louis started to clean the table and kitchen. Vena got more and more interested when I started writing about bacteria, viruses, and vaccines. I only had surface-level information, but it was perfect to set researchers on the correct path to finding more. I finished my writing by explaining how to make penicillin.

  I shut down my PC after four hours of frantic writing. I still had some battery left and a lot more information to share, but I decided to wait in case I needed knowledge about electricity to master my new lightning powers.

  Vena was nose-deep in the papers I wrote, then decided to start making cleaner copies of them and even recruited Louis as a scribe.

  Look, I’m new at this language; of course, my penmanship would be bad. Especially since I wasn’t even using a pen. Stupid quills and their stupid spillage of ink.

  After four copies were made, Vena took off to give them to the head cleric.

  I lay down, exhausted from the hard effort, when Louis sat next to me.

  “Why are you doing this?” asked Louis.

  “What do you mean?” I turned toward the girl.

  “I may not be as medically savvy as Vena, but I could tell that information in such detail is either true or easily disproved,” said the girl. “And you don’t seem to be the kind of person to be caught in a lie.”

  “Yeah, that information is true,” I shrugged. “At least it was true back in my world.”

  “Then why do you offer it freely without asking anything in return?”

  “Because the Temple of the Holy provides free healing,” I answered. “I have enough information in my device to sell for a lifetime. I would rather have the health knowledge spread as soon as possible. Millions of people’s lives will improve thanks to that.”

  “What about the pizza?” she asked.

  “What about it?” I frowned.

  “I could run to Silnar tomorrow and start making a lot of money with a new dish like that,” said the teen.

  “So you do want to be with Silnar after all,” I smiled. “In all honesty, I would love for you to start making money using my recipes. But I wouldn’t recommend it for now.”

  “Why is that?” asked the girl.

  “Do you know how hard it is to replicate pizza?” I asked. “Not hard at all. In a week, a bigger, more well-known chef would steal your recipe and claim it as his own.”

  “But, but… people would know I did it first.”

  “His word versus yours. Who would win: an orphan from nowhere or a nobleman’s chef?” I shook my head. “You need a sponsor or, at the very least, a reputation. Maybe we can talk with Tan Je’e and see if she would sponsor you.”

  “Do you think she would bother with me?” said a slumped Louis.

  “Hey! Now, chin up, of course, she will. After all, once she eats all the delicious food you can make with my help, she’ll have no choice but to sponsor you.”

  “Thank you!” smiled Louis.

  “For now, let me teach you how to make crepes.”

  The next morning, I was surprised by a visit from Sana, Marca, Vena, Gray, and five other people I had never met before.

  “Good morning, San Alice,” greeted Sir Gray. “I hope you are doing better.”

  “Good morning, Sir,” I replied formally. “I am doing great, thank you.”

  “That’s good!” smiled the judge. “We have summoned every cleric in Hano to talk about the medical knowledge you shared with us yesterday.”

  “Let me formally introduce everyone,” said Lady Sana. “You have already met Lady Marca. This is Lady Sharon.” She was an older woman in her forties with dark hair and a motherly smile. “Sir Price.” He was a portly man in his forties with strong laugh lines and a balding head. “Lady Camille, Sir Gray’s wife.” She was a short woman with black hair and a Mediterranean complexion similar to the average woman I left in the streets of Tunis before I got isekai’ed. “Lady Lilly.” She was a platinum blonde-haired woman with an expressionless face; I couldn’t even tell if she was looking at me or looking through me as if I was invisible. “Sir Jaime,” a handsome, dashing young man with black hair who looked similar to Ami, maybe because he was wearing similar armor. “Last but not least, you already know Vena.”

  I am pretty sure people were introduced in the order of their ages. Is that a tradition of theirs?

  “My name is Alice, nice to meet you all.” I smiled. “Why don’t we sit down, and I will answer all of your questions to the best of my ability.”

  Louis ran off to the dinner table and started arranging the chairs next to the couch so we could make a large circle. She also started making popcorn.

  Brave girl! I would never have served something I only cooked once to such important guests.

  I sat in the middle of the sofa with Sana on my right and Vena on my left. The other guests sat on chairs, with Gray taking the center position. I was expecting him to cast his truth spell again, but he did no such thing. I guess he doesn’t need to cast it if he can always detect lies.

  “I must say I was surprised by the number of details provided in your work,” said Sir Price. “I don’t know what I expected when I heard that someone was providing some new medical knowledge, but it definitely wasn’t this.”

  “You can tell as well that it is aged knowledge and not a new unconfirmed theory just from reading it,” nodded Sharon.

  “I don’t know…” said Jaime, who was holding his helmet and looking at it with an amusing amount of consternation. “After I read the papers you sent to me, I ran to the closest Soulbook shop and subscribed to their best vision skill. I still can’t see those ‘bacteria’.”

  “Oh! What kind of skill did you choose?” I asked.

  “An eagle-eye variant using a kindred attribute,” answered Jaime after he put down his helmet. “The seller told me it would make my vision twenty times better.”

  “An eagle vision would help you see far objects; it does not make close objects bigger," I shook my head. “You also need to see at least five hundred times closer to see them.”

  “I see…” said a disappointed Jaime.

  “I am sorry…” I cringed, thinking about how I inadvertently wasted at least five silver, which was the price of a horse around here.

  “That was a smart attempt, Jaime,” said Gray. “Maybe once we make a microscope, the Soulit will find a way to replicate its effect using Soulbooks.”

  “That would be amazing!” I said.

  “I have a question,” interjected Camille. “You said on the last page to be wary because some people can’t handle penicillin. What do you mean by that?”

  “Most of what I wrote was on autopilot while relying on my translation ability to do the heavy lifting.” I frowned. “But I am pretty sure I was talking about allergies.”

  “A-le-r-Ji?” asked Vena. “What’s that?”

  Shit! I assumed they already know about allergies!

  “Allergies are when the body negatively reacts to a harmless substance as if it were poison,” I explained. “On the second page, you wrote down how the body fights against an external element. It’s the same thing but with harmless things like specific food, pollen, or insect bites.”

  “That’s why some people get sick eating eggs?” asked Price.

  “Or why only a small number of people die from bee stings,” remarked Camille.

  “I always thought that it was the kindred blood in people that negatively reacts to new things their parents never experienced,” frowned Marca. “But I guess those kinds of things sometimes happen to non-kindred people too.”

  “That’s it!” said Jaime with a loud crinkle of his armor. “That's why fully blooded Kindred easily cure themselves with overexposure to their weakness, while other races can’t. It’s not the same ailment. The first one is magical and is a by-product of their adaptation magic, while for other people, it is a natural weakness and can’t be cured.”

  Louis interrupted the young cleric with a big bowl of popcorn.

  It was the salty kind of popcorn since sugar still cost an arm and a leg.

  No one remarked on the food except Vena, who eagerly took a serving since she had already had some three days ago. I guess those holy men and women are too stoic to pitch a fit over popcorn. Still, they all tried it and seemed to enjoy it.

  “Us being unaware of the concept of ‘allergy’ was news to you,” spoke Lilly for the first time while looking at the pages in her hand. “What other nuance are we missing because of the depth of our ignorance?”

  “Thank you for bringing down the mood,” scowled Jaime.

  “I guess it would be best if we went over everything written here with you at least once just to be safe,” sighed Sharon.

  We spent over eight hours going over everything. We were only interrupted with a couple of breaks when Sana and Price had to help heal some people on the first floor of the temple. Those priests were relentless and asked me questions about anything and everything. Each person tried to lead me into a new rabbit hole whenever I introduced a new concept.

  Gray was especially interested in DNA and genetics. His wife exhausted my meager knowledge of pregnancies. Marca did the same with my pediatric knowledge. Sharon was all about old age–related ailments. Price asked me a lot about diabetes and blood pressure. Neither concept was new to them, but he wanted to know if they were permanently treatable. Vena and Sana were all over the place, but to my surprise, Jaime only cared about psychology, while Lilly was intensely focused on sexually transmitted diseases.

  After all that was said and done, each one of them had turned my eight-page essay into a small booklet of quadruple the size.

  “I guess that’s all for now,” said the head cleric. “We will focus on proving this knowledge and at least make a working vaccine for the green fever before the next visit from the Holy Messenger, six weeks from now.”

  “Six weeks! Aren’t we a little bit ambitious?” I asked.

  “Six weeks is long enough,” shrugged Vena.

  “Gray, you have a few days to make a microscope. Use as many resources as you deem necessary and try not to leak the design. We don't want it spread until we can make sure that everyone benefits from the new knowledge,” ordered Sana.

  “Yes, my Lady!” said Gray.

  “Jaime, get in contact with the ten best Faithful alchemists in Hano, as well as the most trustworthy Dreamer alchemist. Tell them it’s a special project and that they will be paid handsomely.”

  “Understood!” bellowed Jaime.

  “Vena, I need you to go to every bookseller and library and try to cross-reference any knowledge here with already existing information. Ask Sara to check her workplace’s library.”

  “Yes, Lady Sana!”

  “Alice, please remain available. And if you have any requests from the temple, we will be glad to help you.”

  At the end of the day, I was too exhausted from stargazing. So I went to bed early, especially since I needed to be ready for tomorrow.

  After all, that day marked the end of my quarantine.