A month passed, and the snow kept falling. According to Wolf, only a quarter of the year on Swallow Island was actually warm. I was getting accustomed to the cold, though, and swinging my sword and doing hard work in the fields raised a sweat. Of course, Bepo was a polar bear, so the cold didn’t bother him in the slightest.
Bepo turned out to be more useful than I had anticipated. He helped with Wolf’s work, did some cooking and laundry, and studied the tricks of the trade of navigation in his spare time. The bear was pretty smart after all.
One day, while Wolf was off developing new inventions in his lab, Bepo and I went into the greenhouse to harvest vegetables. We could grow veggies in there that you couldn’t usually get in the winter, and manage the different harvest times of the various crops. I had to admit that when his contraptions actually worked, the old man was a pretty good inventor.
“Hey, Law, can we harvest these plums yet?”
“Don’t you dare! I mean…you aren’t planning to make dried sour plums, are you?” I asked, suspecting the worst.
“Well, of course I am. They taste great, and they go well with rice balls, so…”
“I don’t care! Listen, don’t you ever talk about sour plums around me, ever!”
“Yikes! F-fine, I won’t. Just stop yelling at me…”
Great, he’s sulking again. That polar bear really takes things to heart. But I’m not going to apologize—it’s his fault for talking about dried sour plums. How can they be so sour? It makes my tongue tingle in the worst way. If you ask me, dried plums are the real Devil Fruit!
On second thought, I realized that one way or another, the Junker would harvest those plums, and as long as I didn’t have to eat them, I shouldn’t be so upset…
Suddenly, an explosion rocked the air. The sound came from the forest, and the blast must’ve been huge if we could hear it from the greenhouse.
“Law!” Bepo called out to me.
“Yeah! Let’s go, Bepo!” I shouted, and we rushed out of the greenhouse and ran for the forest. As we got closer, I could see a great plume of smoke billowing up to the sky. I didn’t know exactly what was happening, but I figured there was the possibility that this might be the work of someone who meant us harm. Bepo and I crept carefully through the forest toward the source of the smoke, trying not to make a sound. We could hear a voice ahead of us—it sounded like the crying of a small child.
We came to a clearing in the forest and found two injured children who seemed to have lost a lot of blood. After a minute, I recognized them as the two bullies who’d been picking on Bepo. The one with the casquette cap was bleeding from his side, and the one with the penguin hat had somehow had his right arm ripped off at the elbow.
It was a bad scene. Even if I hadn’t known anything about being a doctor, it was obvious that these two would die if they were left here.
“Bepo! Pick up the one with the casquette cap over there! I’ll get the penguin hat! We’ve got to take them back to the house to fix them up!”
“Y-yeah! Let’s do that!” said Bepo. He didn’t hesitate for a minute about helping them, despite the fact that they’d tormented him before.
We picked up the kids and ran. I made sure to grab the penguin hat kid’s forearm.
“Oww! Owwie…”
Good—he’d lost a lot of blood, but at least he was still conscious.
“We were attacked by a boar, and…”
“Don’t talk! Just shut up and let me carry you!” I interrupted, hurrying back toward the house.
My breathing was getting heavier. Sprinting while carrying another person was really hard, but I knew that with the severity of their wounds and the blood they’d lost, there wasn’t a second to waste.
“Junker!” I shouted, kicking the door open.
“Law! There you are again, bringing people here without permission…” he trailed off after noticing the kids. “What in the world? That’s a lot of blood!”
“They’re both hurt really badly. I need to operate on them here,” I told him.
“All right! I’ll heat up some water, you focus on helping them!” said Wolf, springing into action. He could tell how serious the situation was from the tone of my voice.
We set down the two kids in the living room, and I rushed to the bedroom to get my surgical tools.
“W-what should I do, Law?” Bepo asked, his voice quavering. He was clearly rattled.
“I’m going to start with the casquette cap kid. You stop the bleeding for the one in the penguin hat. Tie a tourniquet around the joint of his arm, nice and tight, and keep it pointed upward. Then put the other part of his arm in a plastic bag and stick it in ice.”
“Aye aye!”
I put the unconscious Casquette Cap on the table and examined the depth of his wound. Thankfully, it wasn’t too bad. There was a lot of blood loss, but no damage to his major organs. I wouldn’t need to use the Op-Op Fruit on him.
“You still awake, Penguin Hat?” I asked the other kid.
“Y-yeah…”
“Do you know his blood type?”
If he didn’t get a blood transfusion, he was going to die. But if we put the wrong type of blood in him, he could have a hemolytic transfusion reaction. If that happened, the red blood cells in his arteries would get broken down and dissolve into nothing. So it was vital that we knew the blood type.
“I know it…” the kid said. “It’s type X. I remember because it’s the same as mine. I guarantee it.”
“Type X?”
This wasn’t good—it wasn’t my blood type. And we didn’t have time to go and get blood from elsewhere.
“Take my blood, Law! It’s type X!” said Wolf.
“Junker…”
If Wolf’s blood was type X, then he could donate blood that their bodies would accept. But there was a problem.
“They’ve both lost a lot of blood, old man,” I said. “If you’re going to donate for both of them, we’re going to need a ton of it. If it all comes from you, then it might actually…”
“Yes, you fool, I know what might happen!” the old man said. “And I’m telling you that I’m giving them blood! Don’t worry about me. I couldn’t tell you the number of times I lost blood on the battlefield in my youth. I’m made of tough stuff—giving blood to two kids isn’t going to kill me.”
“All right, then. I’ll do it!”
We were in a race against time. I filled a syringe with the old man’s blood, then I transferred it to a clean plastic pack and ran a tube into a vein in Casquette Cap’s arm so that it would flow into his body slowly. I repeated the process for Penguin Hat.
That would do for the blood transfusion, at least.
“You all right, old man?!” I yelled to Wolf. I’d taken a lot of blood, and though I tried to be as careful as possible, the blood loss could have sent him into shock.
“Nothin’ to worry about! Just a little dizzy, that’s all…” said the old man, looking woozy. “I got a bit lightheaded, maybe. Stop wasting your time on an old man and get to helping out those boys!”
“All right, I will. And thank you.”
“Hmph. Remember, it’s all give-and-take… you and Bepo will be taking on all the chores next week,” said Wolf groggily, before he went to sit down on the sofa.
“The rest is up to me,” I said. I gave Casquette Cap an injection of a medicinal plant–based powder dissolved in water. It was a powerful anesthetic I’d mixed up after settling at Wolf’s house. This would ensure the kid didn’t wake up during his operation.
Using a scalpel sterilized by an open flame, I wasted no time in cutting open his stomach. A section of his intestines was ruptured, but it wasn’t too bad. I got the needle and thread and quickly sewed the wound up, then checked for other damage. I found nothing else, so it was time to close his stomach back up. One down, one to go.
“Bepo!” I called out. “Bring Penguin Hat over here!”
“You got it!”
We moved Casquette Cap from the table to the sofa and put Penguin Hat on the table in his place. He’d lost so much blood that he couldn’t speak, and he flopped back without a sound. This operation was going to be much more difficult than the first one. If all I wanted to do was save his life, I could sew up the wound from his severed arm to stop the bleeding, and he’d probably survive. But I wanted to reconnect his arm and make sure it could move properly again.
I didn’t know why I felt so strongly about this. But if I took the easy road in this case, I knew I’d be putting to shame all the medical knowledge I’d gained in my life thus far. My parents ran a hospital because they wanted to heal people so they could go on to lead good, happy lives, and I wanted to live up to their example. It was as simple as that.
As I did with Casquette Cap, I administered a general anesthetic to Penguin Hat. Then I examined the spot where the explosion had torn his arm off—the tissues were a real mess. It wouldn’t be so difficult to reconnect if it’d been the clean cut of a sword, but when the opening was as messy as this, repairing it became much harder.
Can I even do this? Having the powers of the Op-Op Fruit didn’t magically make you better at performing surgery or reattaching severed body parts. The only thing that would help me in this case was knowledge and technique. And yet…
“I’m going to do it,” I muttered to myself. I wasn’t doing it out of sympathy, or because I wanted them to be grateful to me. I’m not even a particularly good person. There’s just one reason I made the decision I did: my pride as a doctor!