The moment she realized that, she felt a soft, familiar warmth on her head—so reminiscent of the way her mother would rest her hand on her head. She pulled her eyes off the floor. And when she looked up, what she saw in front of her was the very same gentle smile she had been longing to see.
“Mom...”
From the faint light she gave off and the way Misha could see right through her, the little apothecary knew this figure wasn’t from this world, but Misha didn’t care about details like that.
“Mom!”
The person she wanted to see more than anyone else in the world was right in front of her. The tears she had been holding back burst forth.
“I... I...”
So many feelings sprang to life in her chest, but none of them could make their way into words. Meanwhile the wispy figure of her mother, still with a gentle smile on her face, lifted a transparent hand to point down the hallway—toward the room where Ryne had just gone, where the patients were waiting.
“But... I...” Misha shrank back, head dropping again. No matter how hard she tried, she just didn’t have the courage to face the results of her own arrogance.
All of a sudden, a nostalgic scent swept over her, as did a warm embrace. A precious, unforgettable warmth wrapped around her.
“It’s okay, Misha. Just smile.” And with that small whisper, the scent and the warmth vanished.
“Mom, wait!” Misha’s eyes snapped open, but she was alone once again.
Maybe it had just been a hallucination born of her own weakness, but she could still remember how clear that scent had been, how real that warmth had felt.
“I’m sorry, mom,” she muttered weakly, finally picking herself up off the ground. “I must be an awful daughter for making you worry after you’ve already passed on.”
Then she forced her mouth into a smile.
“Even if it hurts, even if it’s a bluff...right?” she murmured again, this time to herself. Then she forced her trembling legs to step forward one after the other. There was still more she could do. No matter how much pain she was in, no matter how pathetic she felt, she had to do what she could. For the sake of the young girl who had vowed to become an apothecary like her mother.
The Redford doctors and those from the People of the Forest continued to administer the medicine according to Miranda’s instructions. As they had expected, the worse the symptoms the patients were suffering, the less effective the medicine seemed to be. While their conditions certainly improved, they were nowhere near cured. The medicine was effective at killing the parasites and expelling them from the body, but the eggs were relatively unaffected, so patients needed to repeatedly take the medicine as those eggs continued hatching before the new generation of the parasite could start reproducing. Those with lighter symptoms could get away with two or three doses, but others needed much more.
The frustrating part was that it was a parasite. If even a small number of them remained in the body, they’d reproduce and start the whole process over. If they couldn’t be entirely exterminated, those who appeared to have recovered would find themselves getting sick again eventually.
In short, the medical professionals here had even less medicine available than they realized. Reducing the number of the parasites in the body did help relieve the patients of their symptoms, so instead of taking repeated doses to perfectly cure them, they focused on giving the minimum dosage to as many people as possible, hoping to extend their lives and buy some time.
Likely thanks to the banning of eating karas, new cases of the Red Eye plague became rather rare. In truth, it would have been ideal to give a dose of the medicine to anyone who had eaten raw karas at some point in the past, but resources were strained as it was just handling those who were definitively sick.
In the end, all they could do was wait for more medicine, which had to come from the far northern part of Carmine, past numerous nations. Not all of those nations were especially stable, so no one but the gods could guess when it might arrive.
The days dragged on slowly and painfully.
“You can do it. Just drink a little at a time,” Misha whispered softly, pouring a tiny spoonful of medicine into an unconscious patient’s mouth. She had run into many cases where they appeared to be unconscious but would respond to her voice, so she had started giving fever reducers and nutritional supplements to them.
Trying to give a large amount of water to someone who was unconscious threatened to send it down to their lungs instead of to their stomach, which would cause significantly worse problems. So she had to be painstakingly slow and careful as she administered the medicine to them.
“Great work. Okay, just one more. Let’s get better soon so we can smile with everyone.”
Whenever she had a spare moment, she was here giving patients medicine. Once she finished, she would go back to the medicine room and experiment with what herbs they had available, looking for something that would be even slightly more effective. Those two activities made up her life for those days.
Redford was currently concealing the fact the Red Eye plague had struck the capital once more. They were afraid that foreign adversaries would see their weakness and pounce, as they had in the past. Instead, countermeasures for these very same emergencies took effect throughout the kingdom; resources poured into the locked-down capital, sparing them from shortages of food or medicine.
The chaos of the first plague had stagnated the flow of goods in the kingdom, causing starvation to become a real problem, never mind a lack of medicine. This time, thorough preparations and careful rationing had prevented that from happening.
Getting her hands on as many herbs that were effective for dealing with parasites as possible, Misha tirelessly continued working on developing new medicine, and she regularly asked Ryne and Nel for advice.