SSS-Ranked Surgeon In Another World: The Healer Is Actually OP!

Kael can think whatever he wants, Bruce won’t hold anything against him, after all he’s the one that guided him on the path of awakening his talent. With him telling him just writer it’s only natural he thought like like that...

Anyways, Kael shook his head and muttered something about lowering his standards again. Bruce let it pass. Then they started walking.

Kael led, and Bruce followed, and they moved through the Mistlands looking for souls, specifically, for souls that still had a chance.

Souls not yet hollowed. Souls that, with help or with luck, might still awaken a talent and join the group Kael wanted to build.

The route took them back the way Bruce had come.

He had not wanted that. This was the stretch he had already crossed, the long miserable walk of his first hours, and he had no desire to see it again. But Kael had been firm about it. Better to follow the current than to go against it, he had said.

The mist had a flow to it, slow and constant, and the harvesters moved with that flow. Going downstream gave them a better chance of crossing paths with the grey carriages.

So they went downstream.

And Bruce saw, as they walked, what had become of the souls he had passed before.

The baker, the heavyset man Bruce had knelt in front of, the one whose edges had been smoking gently into the mist, was a hollow now.

He stood where Bruce had left him, but there was nothing behind his eyes at all. The slow leak of him had finished its work. He did not move. He did not react to Bruce or Kael passing by. He was a shape that had been a person, waiting now only to finish dissolving.

The small cluster Bruce had spoken to, the older woman, the man who had looked away, the four or five who had grouped together for comfort, they were hollows too. All of them. The older woman, who had told him about the figures in grey, who had answered his questions with the last clear thoughts she had, was gone. Her body still sat in the circle. There was no one inside it.

Bruce slowed as he passed her.

He felt the sympathy come, real and heavy. She had been kind to him. She had been afraid, and tired, and being eaten alive, and she had still taken the time to tell a stranger what little she knew.

But as he walked on, he made himself look at it a different way.

These souls had all died. Every one of them had lived a life in the physical realm or the mind realm and that life had ended, that was why they were here. The Soul Realm had not killed them. It was only doing the next part.

And when the mist finished purifying them, when their identities fully dissolved, they would not feel it as loss, instead they’ll see it as a form of rest.

There would be no one left to feel anything. They would simply become clean, blank souls again, and those clean souls would be sent back out, born fresh, somewhere, with no memory of the pain and struggle and grief of the lives they had just left behind.

A new start. With none of the old wounds.

Maybe that was not a tragedy. Maybe, for souls that had already lived their lives and lost their bodies, the purification was mercy, the only door out of remembering everything that had hurt them.

That was what Bruce told himself, at least. He did not know if it was true. He had no way of knowing. It was what made the most sense, given what Kael had explained, and so he chose to believe it, because the alternative was to walk through this grey expanse grieving every hollow he passed, and there were far too many of them for that.

He kept walking.

They passed more hollows. More clusters that had finished their dissolving. More souls frozen in place, mist rising slowly off them. The Mistlands, Bruce was beginning to understand, was mostly a place of the already-lost. The conscious, the savable, the not-yet-eaten, those were the rare ones.

”By the way,” Kael said, after a while. ”What rank is your soul talent?”

Bruce thought about it.

”I don’t know,” he said.

Kael stopped walking.

He turned and looked at Bruce, properly, the way he had looked at him when Bruce said Writer, but with something more careful in it this time.

”You don’t know,” he repeated.

”No. I genuinely don’t.”

Kael studied his face. He was checking, Bruce understood, whether Bruce was lying, whether this was some Ascendant’s trick, some game, some attempt to seem more mysterious than he was.

Bruce simply held his gaze and let him check. He had nothing to hide on this point. He truly did not know. He had awakened a soul talent perhaps an hour ago. He had no frame of reference for what rank his soul sat at, no instrument to measure it, no experience of this realm at all.

After a few seconds, Kael seemed to accept it. The wariness left his face. But it was replaced by a small frown, and the frown did not go away.

”Strange,” he said quietly.

He turned and started walking again. He did not explain what was strange about it. Bruce noted that, and filed it with the other things he had filed, the Akashic’s odd silence, the Latin in his soul, the rhyming talents, in the growing stack of questions he could not answer yet.

He followed.

They had not gone much further when the screaming started.

It came from ahead of them, through the mist, loud, ragged, and moving. Not the thin distant shrieks of souls being purified, the sounds Bruce had been hearing on and off since he arrived.

This was different. This was a voice, a real voice, in real terror, and it was getting closer.

Kael held up a hand. They both slowed.

The mist ahead thinned for a moment, the way it sometimes did, and Bruce saw.

A young man was running.

He was sprinting across the grey expanse, arms pumping, head down, and his face, what Bruce could see of it, was pure panic. He was clutching something in one hand as he ran. A long handle. A curved blade at the end of it.

A scythe.

And behind him, chasing him, was a cloud.

There were dozens of them. Maybe more. Hollow souls, Bruce recognized them instantly, the dim glow, the dull lifeless eyes, but they were not still. They were not drifting. They were moving, all of them, surging across the grey in a loose ragged mass, and every one of them was reaching for the running young man. They let out sounds as they came, thin warbling shrieks, rising and falling, not quite in unison.

It looked, Bruce thought, like nothing so much as a crowd of dim, glowing dead men chasing one terrified living one. Like zombies. That was the word from old earth stories. A horde of slow, hungry, empty-eyed things, and one man running for his life ahead of them.

Kael had stopped completely now, and he was frowning hard.

”He doesn’t have the aura of a harvester,” he said, half to himself. ”But he’s carrying a scythe. That’s the harvesters’ weapon. Strange.”

Then his frown deepened.

”And that’s not supposed to happen at all.” He nodded at the chasing cloud. ”Hollows don’t move. The mist suppresses them, they can’t travel, I told you that. But look at them. They’re running.”

He watched for a moment longer, and then, against everything, a slow note of fascination crept into his voice.

”So a hollow that’s lost its identity can hunger badly enough to fight off the mist’s suppression. Badly enough to chase. As long as there’s a soul with a self in front of them, dangling what they want.” He shook his head slowly. ”Interesting. I’m learning a lot today.”

Bruce, hearing the fascination, could not help frowning himself. If that was the case, why did the hollow they passed not chase them but stood like lifeless stones...

The young man was still running. The cloud of hollows was still gaining. And Bruce could see, with simple arithmetic, that the chase was heading in a line that would cross the path he and Kael needed to take. If they went forward, they would meet it. There was no clean way around.

”Should we help him?” Bruce asked.

He already knew the practical answer. With that many hollows, and the young man’s route bending toward theirs, they would have no real choice, to go on at all, they would have to fight through. But he asked anyway. He wanted to see where Kael stood. He wanted to know, before anything started, what kind of soul Kael was..

Kael turned to him.

And he grinned, wide, bright, the same grin he had worn in the swirl, the grin of a man who had just been handed an excuse to enjoy himself.

”Of course,” he said.