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

Bruce felt something warm in his chest that was not the essence of any beast.

"That’s a good choice," he said.

"It’s a smart choice," Kael said, with the air of someone pretending not to be moved. "Stop being thoughtful or you’ll embarrass us, Theron."

The stall keeper retrieved a third small ring. Theron paid. The ring went on his finger. The binding settled.

The three of them stood for a moment at the stall, each with a ring on their hand, each with their first piece of real possession in this realm. The stall keeper watched them with the patient quiet expression of a person who had sold rings to hunters for many years and knew exactly what this moment felt like for them.

"Good hunting," she said, when they turned to leave.

"Thank you," Bruce said.

He meant it.

They walked back through the market in the deepening gold of the late afternoon, and Bruce noticed, with the same quiet attention as before, that the souls who had recorded them earlier were still recording them, and now also noticing the new rings on their fingers.

The watching had a new dimension to it now. The three of them were no longer just an F-rank party that had killed an alpha. They were an F-rank party that had killed an alpha and had immediately, the same afternoon, walked to the spatial ring stall and bought rings. Which meant they had not been just lucky on one kill. They had been hunting at this rate for days, and they had now visibly entered the equipment class of higher-ranked hunters.

Word would move faster after this.

Bruce did not feel anxious about it. He felt the careful awareness of a man who had reached a small visible peak and was now in sight of others. He had been here before, in his physical-realm life. He knew what it required. You walked the same way you had been walking. You did the same work you had been doing. You did not act as if the watching had changed you. You let the watchers reach their own conclusions, in their own time, and you trusted that the work would speak for itself.

"Old soul’s place for dinner?" Kael asked, as they reached the edge of the market.

"Old soul’s place for dinner," Bruce agreed.

"We’re bringing the shell-crab meat?"

"We’re bringing the shell-crab meat. And spine-roller. And the secondary cuts from the alpha that didn’t make it to the exchange."

"They’ll be pleased."

"They’ll be pleased."

Theron, walking beside them, kept looking at his ring. Every twenty paces or so he would lift his hand slightly, turn it, examine the small pale band on his finger as if checking that it was still real. He was not the only person Bruce had ever seen do this on the day of acquiring their first spatial ring. He himself, decades ago in the physical realm, had been the same way for an entire week.

"It feels strange," Theron said.

"What does?"

"Owning something."

Bruce looked at him.

The young man was not being dramatic. He was reporting a real observation. He had died at thirty-two having owned, in his old life, very little. He had been a tax clerk in a small office, single, with a small apartment and a small set of possessions and a small life. He had then awakened in a realm where he had owned absolutely nothing for the entire time he had been here. The ring on his finger was the first object he had ever possessed in the Soul Realm. And the strangeness was a real strangeness.

"You’ll get used to it," Bruce said.

"I don’t know if I want to," Theron said, quietly. "Maybe I should keep finding it strange. So I remember not to be greedy."

Bruce considered this.

He had not, in his thirty-two-year-old self, had a thought that wise.

"Then keep finding it strange," he said. "But put things in it. The strangeness shouldn’t slow you down."

"It won’t," Theron said. He looked at his ring once more. He smiled, very slightly. "It’s a room. Inside the ring is a room."

"Yes."

"And no one can see in. Only me."

"Only you."

"That’s good," Theron said. He did not explain what was good about it. He looked at the road ahead. "Let’s go eat."

The three of them walked on through the late-afternoon city, their first day with rings on their fingers, their pockets emptier and their lives more complete, toward the small doorway at the edge of the food district where an old soul was probably already heating their pots. The third day was nearly done. The climb was beginning to get visible.

The old soul was at their pot when the three of them came through the doorway.

The small place was quieter than it had been the previous evening, only one of the three tables outside was occupied, by a single older awakened soul nursing a small bowl of something that steamed gently in the warm air. Inside, the old soul moved with the same economical motion as before, stirring something in their main pot, checking something in a smaller pot, their lined face calm and unhurried in the soft glow of their workspace.

They looked up when Bruce, Kael, and Theron came in.

Their eyes went, first, to the rings on the three hunters’ fingers.

A small expression passed across their face. Not surprise. Closer to acknowledgement, the look of a person noting a milestone they had expected.

"You bought rings," the old soul said.

"Today," Bruce confirmed.

"Good. You’ll work better with them. Sit."

The three of them sat at the small inside table near the pot. Bruce took out his new ring’s contents, the cuts of shell-crab meat, the spine-roller alpha’s secondary cuts, two smaller pieces of standard spine-roller, and laid them on the work-counter beside the old soul’s pots.

The old soul did not pick them up immediately. They looked at them for a long moment.

Then they reached out and turned over the spine-roller alpha’s flank cut, examining the underside.

"This was the alpha," they said.

"Yes."

"You took the alpha on the third day."

"Yes."

The old soul nodded slowly. They picked up the cut and weighed it in their hand. They turned it over again. They set it down beside the pot.

"This will need different preparation from the rest," they said. "Stone-dungeon alpha cut, especially from a creature in active rank transition, the foundational essence is denser than standard meat. You can’t slow-cook this the same way I’d slow-cook a flame-mane flank. The heat profile is different. The seasonings have to balance it."

"You know what to do with it?" Theron asked.

"I’ve prepared alpha cuts before. Not many. They’re rare." The old soul looked at the three of them. "Will you eat the alpha cut tonight, or save it?"

Bruce thought about it.

The alpha’s essence had hit him hard in the cavern. He was almost certainly at peak-F now, possibly at the very top of peak-F. Eating the alpha’s prepared flank tonight, on top of what he had already absorbed today, would likely push him over the F-to-E threshold. Or it might over-fill his soul’s capacity to absorb, the way the carriage meal had over-filled them when they were too cracked to take it in cleanly. Too much, too fast, could waste the essence.

"How long does proper preparation take?" he asked.

"For this cut, four hours. It’s slow work. The breakdown of the foundational layers has to happen at low heat over a long time."

"Could you prepare it now and serve it tomorrow evening?"

"I could."

"Then save it for tomorrow," Bruce said. "Tonight we eat the standard cuts. Tomorrow we come back and eat the alpha cut after another day of hunting. We’ll have had time to integrate today’s essence and create capacity for tomorrow’s."

The old soul looked at him with the same recognition that the senior clerk at the exchange had shown. A small, professional recognition. The look of a specialist who had just heard another specialist say something correct.

"That’s the right call," they said. "Most hunters would eat the alpha cut the same day. They’d absorb less than half of it."

"I learned this in another field. Same principle. The body, the soul, has to be ready to receive what you give it. Stuff it too fast and you waste the gift."

"Mm." The old soul set the alpha flank aside on a separate clean surface and pulled out two small sealed jars from a shelf behind the pot. "I’ll prepare it tonight. Tomorrow evening it will be ready. Same time."

"Same time," Bruce agreed.

The old soul began the work of the alpha flank with the slow attention it required, and at the same time began heating one of the smaller pots for what they would feed the three hunters tonight. Their hands moved between the two tasks without losing focus on either. It was, Bruce thought, the same quality of focus he had once held in long surgeries, the ability to do two demanding things at once, each one fully, by understanding both processes deeply enough that they did not interfere with each other.

He watched for a while.

He learned something just from watching. There was no way to articulate what he had learned, exactly, but it sat in him after a few minutes, the small wordless lesson of seeing a master at work.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!