Chapter 24: Violence.

I snatched the patient from the arms of his sect mates before they did more damage than good. I laid him on the ground and began inspecting the wound.

"Hey, what are you doing?" One of the two members of the Profound Palace shouted the moment he realized he wasn't carrying his mate anymore.

"I'm a doctor, and I'm helping this person," I replied briefly. I looked at the patient's face; he was conscious and very confused as to who I was. Good, if he could wonder about that stuff, then he wasn't at too much risk.

"Hello," I told the boy, "I'm your doctor, and I will make sure that you will be able to recover without problem. On a scale from one to ten, in how much pain are you?"

Based on his answer, I would knock him out. "Seven," he replied, pain evident in his voice.

That was enough. I applied a rune on the boy's forehead, and his eyes closed into sleep, letting me analyze the wound without risking giving him more pain.

It didn't really change anything, but at least he won't move while I do my thing.

A hand grasped my wrist, stopping me from doing my job. I turned to look calmly but firmly at the person that had grasped me. I could bear to waste a few seconds to explain the situation: "What have you done to him? Who are you?"

"I'm Doctor Paracelsus; I was invited here to help anyone who gets injured and prevent complications. I have knocked him out to prevent any more pain for him." I explained with a calm and composed voice to give Palace Chief Qin an understanding of my intentions.

I couldn't name him for his overreaction; I was, after all, a stranger that he had never seen before, clearly from my clothing, not from his organization or any of the other groups, and I was putting my hands on one of his precious disciples.

The man looked at me in the eyes, but I didn't back down in the slightest; I wasn't guilty of anything.

The big boss of the Palace slowly released my wrist. "I apologize then; go ahead."

I nodded and went back to my work.

The situation wasn't that bad; I looked at the major impact area, the boy's stomach; there was a visible injury; the area had reddened; and the sky tore, causing blood to spray, but not too much, thankfully.

I treated the wound with a cold compress I had prepared for any occasion and applied it to the injury, while at the same time I scanned the injury with my own energy, and it was weird.

It seemingly had a residue of the other boy's energy; it didn't seem too malign, but it didn't help either.

I had to expel this energy residue to prevent any complications, but I had no idea how; maybe if I wrapped it in tendrils of my energy...

It worked, but it wasn't efficient enough to be done in any useful amount of time.

So, obviously, it's time to try the method that has always worked when everything else has failed: runes.

I waved a few runes with a couple of failsafes to make sure that it wouldn't purge more than it was meant to, and I applied the runic matrix to the wound.

I could visibly see the purplish energy residue being expelled in an instant, it was probably a process that his body would have done eventually, I just sped up the process.

Then I could just treat the injury as any other blunt trauma injury of similar level, like being hit by a cannon ball at point blank range—a weak cannon ball, but still a cannon ball.

A minute later, I was done; my every movement sped up to as fast as I could manage thanks to my cultivation.

I wondered if I could adapt that movement technique to increase my dexterity.

Meh, not the time. At that moment, I stood up and sighed, my work perfectly done. I looked at the Palace Chief and nodded, "I'm done. A few days of rest and he will be as good as new. If any pain continues, I suggest coming to my clinic or any other doctor."

I could have written it down, but I wasn't sure if my writing could be comprehensible to anyone other than myself; I probably didn't even need to write in code with just my awful handwriting.

"You didn't use any pills or medical concoctions?" Asked the old man, an eyebrow raised in clear distrust.

"What kind of concoction would I need? It's just a concussion; I expelled the foreign energy; he'll be good if he just rests for a couple of days." I myself raised an eyebrow to the old man; did these savages need magical mumbo jumbo to heal such an easy thing? "He should keep a cold compress on the area; that should be enough."

These people were really way behind in certain things, and basic first aid was one of those things.

"Is that so?" the old man mumbled, but my job was done and I had given every indication that I needed to give, so I turned back to the ring just in time to see another person joining the ring, another member of the Profound Palace.

This was going to be a long day.

Another guy got blown away; once again, it was the guy from the Profound Palace who then left the stage, but this time it was ridiculous. What the hell was that other guy thinking?

This poor boy has at least two broken ribs. Three broken ribs, I discovered from my scan.

Such an injury could have been fatal had the bone shrapnel punctured a lung. The guy had even been knocked out on his own; I didn't even have to do it myself.

I used a few threads of energy to reposition the broken bones to their normal place, but the situation was bad; a few of the more important blood vessels had been ripped, causing serious internal bleeding, but at least it hadn't hit the more vital organs. Thankfully, I was here, and I had no idea how the people of this world could deal with this kind of injury.

They might even just throw a magic pill in his mouth and hope for the best.

I activated a sterilization rune matrix to clean the area and opened the guy's chest with a scalpel—not too big of a recision, but enough to balance his body's natural resistance to my energy, letting me operate longer and in more depth.

It took ten minutes of intense energy control and runic usage; I had to create on the fly a bunch of runes that would promote the reconstruction of the blood vessels and stop the blood from leaving.

Basically, I created a bunch of magical patches to apply to his vessels.

I looked at the Palace Chief, who had been looking at my operation this entire time, but it seemed that he had warded off everyone else from coming close to me, except for Lan Xueruo herself, as she had been talking to the old man as I was operating.

I closed the cut with a bandage since it wasn't big enough to need stitches, and I could finally sigh in relief. The boy was in a safe condition; his profound veins hadn't been impacted; it was a normal wound without any weird magical complications, and those were my strong fields.

I cleaned my clothes with a cleaning rune and sent my gloves back into the green inventory in my tattoo.

"He'll be fine," I told Lan Xueruo and the old man, "he had severe internal bleeding, but I managed to close him up; his life would have been at risk without rapid care; he should be back on his feet in a few weeks to give his bones time to heal naturally."

I had a wry smile on my face as I saw the girl looking at me with sparkling eyes and a renewed respect, and the old man had also changed the way he looked at me, no longer with distrust but as if he had witnessed a master at work.

But someone else had been looking at me with angry eyes for a while, even after he left the ring. It was the outsider from whatever sect he was from who had just sent two people to the Paracelsus portable hospital, whose name I didn't even slightly remember.

The girl was the one to reply to my words, "Thank you, doctor; even for us, that kind of wound would have taken a lot of resources to stabilize his condition, and you did it with pure technique alone; that was truly marvelous."

"Indeed," Muttered the Palace Chief, looking at me as if he had found a precious stone among stones.

To me, it seemed like they were focusing on the wrong thing; who cares how I did it? The important thing was that I was forced to do that much in the first place, so I warned, "Anyway, I suggest you guys tone down on the injuries; things could have gone bad."

He gave me one final nod before leaving, taking the girl with him and telling her that they had to discuss what to do.

I looked back to my previous patient, who was already back on his feet, keeping my ice on his injured stomach area. He seemed to be feeling better already. I might have underestimated cultivator's healing, but it seemed that my estimations for their recovery times would be far higher than what the real time was.

Oh well, the more you know,

Jing also healed more rapidly than I thought he would post-op. I needed to observe more cultivators to know if my methods would be redundant or even just harmful for people at different cultivation stages.

"Hey!" I felt my shoulder get tugged forcefully, forcing me to turn back as I was taken by surprise. "Who are you? I don't like the way you looked at me!"

Who even was this guy? Oh yeah, he was probably the guy fighting earlier, the one who beat the two boys up mercilessly.

I guess I did look at him in disgust earlier; he even looked like a cunt.

"You went overboard; things could have gone badly." I replied, looking at the child straight in the eyes. Had the broken rib penetrated a bit further, it could have stabbed his lung. At that point, even with whatever magic I could use, it wouldn't have been enough.

"So what, incidents happen all the time," he replied with a sneer, but it was obvious; I could see it; it wasn't an incident; he looked proud of being a violent savage, "Are you from the Profound Palace? If so, why didn't you come on stage to stop me from doing that to this week's trash? Or are you too scared to face me as well?"

"I'm the doctor; I'm here to help anyone who gets hurt, not only the Profound Palace's people." I replied with a straight face: I wouldn't be intimidated by a madman who enjoyed hurting people.

"What, you're just a doctor?" he sighed, seemingly losing interest in me at all. "Don't waste my time then, weakling."

"You're the one who came to bother me, not the other way around." I replied by reflex, used to bantering with every bastard that looked for a verbal fight.

But what could I say when I saw that the other people were just as mad as him? When I saw the way those from the Profound Palace looked at him, both before and after the first match, they looked as if they wanted to skin him alive. That child I healed first, the one who had his stomach hurt, had that same look in his eyes.

Just what was wrong with these people? Were they incapable of empathy?

Maybe being insane was a prerequisite for advancing in cultivation, but none here that I knew of—not one single person other than me—cared about the fact that these were teenagers putting their lives on the line because of petty politics guided by a bunch of old bastards.

I sighed deeply; I couldn't even be mad about it. People weren't born this way; they were taught. If anyone was at fault, it was those elders of theirs who failed to teach them how to be good human beings.

He didn't seem to like my words, nor the pity that my eyes held for him. "Oh, you dare to talk back to me? You aren't even part of one of the sects; know your place, ant; if you bow before me, I might not break your bones!"

"Back off, kid," I replied, tired of this whole interaction. The wine might have been clouding my mind, making me more aggressive, or maybe I just needed someone to take my grievances against this world out on, but I know that I just said, "I don't want to talk with crazy people."

"What did you say, you coward?" He replied while raising his voice, and I felt a slight bit of pressure pressing over me.

I felt for it, trying to find out what it was—profound energy.

He had released his profound energy to create a pressure variation around him; it was a nifty trick, somewhat useful to intimidate other people.

It was truly unfortunate how crude it was.

I didn't know this was a possible thing for cultivators, but I had to admit that now that I knew, it was easier than I thought.

And so, my own pressure crushed him.