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

Theron, beside him, was looking at the shell of one of the smaller spine-rollers that Kael had brought as a sample.

"Are these used for anything?" he asked the old soul. "The spines, the shells, beyond cooking?"

"The spines, yes," the old soul said, without looking up. "Crafters use them. Weapon-makers, particularly. The spines hold an edge when reworked. Some go to soul-script practitioners, who use them as styluses, the natural point holds ink-energy unusually well." A pause. "The shells are rendered for paint and dye. Stone dungeon shell makes a deep grey-blue color that doesn’t fade. There’s a small market for it."

"And the spine-roller specifically?" Theron asked.

"The alpha’s spine-blades are particularly prized. They’ve been carrying the creature’s accumulated essence for years. A weapon forged from an alpha spine carries a fraction of that. Makes a useful blade for someone whose talent works with weapons. Not for someone like you, since you summon your own, but the right buyer pays well for it."

Theron filed that away. Bruce could see him filing it. He was looking at the world with the careful attention of a man whose tax-clerk instincts had survived his death and were now applying themselves to a new economy.

The old soul served the standard cuts.

The pot they had heated was something different from the previous night’s preparation, the same general method, slow-cooking with herbs, but the cut underneath was shell-crab. The pale stone-colored meat had been broken down through long cooking into something tender and rich, served over a small bed of soul-grain that Bruce did not recognize, with a thin sauce around it that smelled deeply of mineral and herb.

Bruce took a bite.

It was different from the spine-roller, and different again from anything he had eaten before in this realm.

The taste was quiet. The flavor did not announce itself the way the heat-dungeon meat had. It came in slowly, expanding through his palate over several seconds, opening into layers that he had not initially registered. The stone-cold of the dungeon was in the flavor, but transformed, softened, made into something that warmed rather than chilled. The mineral note was present. The herb note balanced it. The soul-grain underneath was nutty and slightly sweet.

The essence landed in him deeply.

He felt it go down into his soul-body the way the raw meat in the dungeon had, but more organized, the slow cooking having pre-arranged the essence into forms his soul could absorb cleanly without doing all the breakdown work itself. Less waste. Better integration.

Theron made a small involuntary sound at his first bite.

The old soul, working at the alpha flank, allowed themselves a tiny smile at the sound.

"He’s the one who notices loudly," the old soul said to no one in particular.

"He is," Bruce confirmed.

"It’s a good quality."

"I think so too."

Theron, mouth full, attempted a dignified expression. He failed. He went back to eating.

...

They ate for a while without talking.

The food was good enough that conversation was not the point. Kael, who normally would have filled the silence with banter, was for once just eating, methodical, focused, working through his bowl with the attention of a man who understood that this preparation was meaningfully different from the morning stew, and who was paying for it accordingly.

When Kael finally did speak, it was to the old soul, and the tone was different from his usual.

"How long," he said, "before someone can taste the difference between a stall meal and what you’re doing here?"

The old soul did not pause in their work.

"That depends on the eater," they said. "Some never can. Some can on their first bite. Most learn over months." They added something to the alpha flank pot. "You’re learning faster than most. The young one had it on the first bite. The quiet one was three bites in. You took longer."

Kael, who had been called the quiet one, glanced at Bruce with a small grin. Bruce kept his face neutral.

"I took longer because I was eating fast," Kael said.

"Why were you eating fast?"

Kael thought about it.

"Because I was hungry, and because in my old life eating fast meant other people could not take your food."

The old soul made a small thoughtful sound. "That habit doesn’t help you here. Food is not scarce in this realm if you can hunt. Slow down. Taste what you’re eating. The essence absorbs better when you give it time."

"Noted," Kael said. He did slow down for the rest of the meal. Bruce noticed.

...

After they finished, the old soul brought out a small clear cup of something, a thin pale liquid, faintly luminous, served in a cup not much larger than a thumb-tip, and set one in front of each of them.

"What is this?" Theron asked.

"Soul-clarifier. Drink it slowly. It helps with the integration of what you’ve just eaten. Stops the essence from settling unevenly."

"How much extra?" Kael asked.

"On the house. For the first time."

Bruce sipped it. The liquid had almost no flavor, just a faint coolness, like spring water, with a barely-there mineral note at the back of the taste. It went down smoothly. He felt, for a moment after, his soul-body’s interior settle in a small way he could not quite describe, the day’s essence absorption, which had been a slightly disorganized weight in his core, aligning, moving into a cleaner configuration.

He understood the value of it immediately.

"Where can we buy this when we want more?" he asked.

"I make it here. Same place. Eight points per cup, normally. You’re welcome to buy it any time you eat. Many of my regulars do."

"We’d like to," Bruce said. "From now on."

"Noted."

Theron was sipping his with eyes closed, paying careful attention to the sensation. Kael had finished his in one swallow before he heard the old soul’s instruction to drink it slowly. He sighed at himself, then sat back and accepted that he had once again moved through a thing faster than he should have.

The old soul, watching this, said: "You can have a second cup, since you didn’t taste the first one properly. On the house."

Kael laughed, genuinely, and accepted it. The second one he drank slowly, with proper attention. His face shifted in the middle of it, the moment when the soul-clarifier did its work in him. He set the empty cup down carefully.

"That is," he said, "the most expensive eight points I have ever respected the value of."

"Mm," the old soul said.

...

The conversation, after that, drifted into the kind of comfortable talking that comes after a good meal.

The old soul, working on the alpha flank, was less guarded than they had been the previous evening. They answered Theron’s questions about ingredients. They explained what a soul-grain was, it was a kind of grain that grew on certain Tidewater islands, harvested by soul-farmers, traded into Xiltra by regular ferry, and they noted that good food in this realm required not just hunters but the whole supply chain of grain-growers and herb-gatherers and salt-collectors and oil-pressers, each of which was its own profession, each with its own awakened souls.

"There are awakened souls who don’t hunt?" Theron asked.

"Many. Most, in fact, once you get past the F-rank crowd. Hunting is dangerous work and it pays well at the beginning, but most awakened souls who reach C or B settle into a profession that suits their talent. A soul with a growing-talent farms. A soul with a binding-talent crafts. A soul with a sensing-talent investigates. Hunters tend to be either the very ambitious, who want to keep climbing past the safe ranks, or the very unlucky, who don’t have a talent that fits any other profession and have to keep killing to keep eating."

"Which are you?" Kael asked. "Was. Whatever, the past version of you."

The old soul did not look up from the pot.

"I’m the third kind," they said. "The kind who found something they wanted to do, and did it. I was a cook in my last life too. Not in the soul realm, in the world I came from. I died at seventy-one of nothing dramatic, simply an old body wearing out. I awakened in the mist, was carried in by the harvesters, found out that my talent in this realm was a refined version of what my hands had already been doing for fifty years, a preparation-talent, specifically for food. So I have been doing here what I was already doing there. Two hundred years now."

"Two hundred years," Theron said quietly.

"It does not feel as long as it sounds. Most days feel like one day. The work is the work." The old soul stirred the alpha flank with slow attention. "I do not regret coming here. I would have regretted a soul-realm life where I had to do something I was not suited to. That would have been a long miserable run. The luck of my talent matching my craft saved me from that."

"And the rank?" Bruce asked. "If you don’t mind."

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