Chapter 214Chapter 214: End-of-term exam (3)

“Hehehe......”

Ayla hugged the dressing set to her chest and laughed.

It was the third time since we left Kal’s tent.

Even while making that silly smile, whenever her eyes met mine, she kept looking straight ahead again.

“Is something good happening, Ayla?”

“No, it’s nothing, Teacher.”

Ayla pressed her lips together to hide her smile.

After repeating that for a while, she casually spoke to me.

“Teacher. You said you keep the flowers I send you—is there any flower you particularly like?”

“Any flower Ayla sends me is good.”

Whatever you send, it doesn’t rot.

Considering those flowers might later become Holy Relics, it didn’t matter what she sent.

“Then may I send sunflowers again this time? I heard the sunflowers in the southern region are a little different, so I’d like to try growing one at the Academy.”

“If you succeed in making it bloom, please do.”

“Yes!”

Ayla answered with a beaming smile.

After that exchange.

Before we had taken even a few steps, Ayla brought up a new topic.

“By the way, Teacher. Um...... if I want to become an excellent Healer, when a patient like Brother Kal comes in, should I be able to be considerate of what he doesn’t say, too?”

“I can’t say it’s absolutely required, but if you can treat the patient well and do that as well, you’d be worthy of being called an excellent Healer.”

The essential virtue of a Healer is skill, but.

Considering it’s ultimately a job dealing with people, there was some truth to Ayla’s words.

......Wait.

“Come to think of it, I misspoke. Yes. I should know to do that.”

Ayla tilted her head at my answer.

It was understandable, since I suddenly reversed what I’d said within seconds.

For her sake, since she’d be curious, I explained why I had reversed myself.

“I emphasize this every time, don’t I? A Healer’s skill begins from what kind of heart?”

“You said it begins from altruism.”

“That’s right.”

All excellent examinations and fine deductions begin with observation.

And the energy source of observation is ‘interest in others.’

By this syllogism, the logic that a Healer’s skill originates from altruism was established.

“If you can’t be considerate of the patient, you might miss a minor symptom. So it must be a necessary virtue for an excellent Healer.”

“Then will I also be able to have observation skills like yours someday, Teacher?”

“Yes. If it’s Ayla, it’s entirely possible.”

Though I find it hard to agree with the claim that I ‘have the observation skills of an excellent Healer,’

There was no doubt that Ayla would gain such observation skills.

“Ayla is someone who can pray for people whose faces she doesn’t even know.”

She has the disposition to voluntarily hold up a lamp and stay up the night for the sick.

Add to that the extraordinary brain that never loses the top spot in the Department of Healing Arts’ first year.

If she has those two things, she will someday become an excellent Healer.

“Even now, you aren’t letting what the patient said pass by. Rather than what I said just before, you keep thinking about what Student Kal was thinking.”

Ayla closed her mouth, then slowly nodded.

Looking at her like that, I briefly recalled my previous life.

'That was when I started thinking like that.'

The disaster site in my previous life.

There, I failed to recognize early a patient who had begun suffering from explosive lung damage.

He was a firefighter who had saved many people.

Just hours earlier, we had been patting each other on the back, saying good work.

Yet my observation, standing before him, had not been sufficient.

It was observation I began cultivating afterward, because I felt sorry toward him.

But Ayla was realizing the need for it before even experiencing something like that.

'There’s no need for a tragedy just to learn a lesson.'

It was a good thing.

There was no reason to tell my successor to step in the shit I’d stepped in.

“Then shall we start training to develop your observation skills, taking this chance?”

If an opportunity had come, there was no reason to hesitate.

Rather, before her passion cooled, it would be better to add firewood to burn that passion.

“Really? Then what should I try?”

“At first, try just one thing.”

I recalled the method I had trained with, for the first time in a while.

“You look once more at something you thought was nothing.”

It wasn’t that I could see more than others from the beginning.

I simply tried not to forget that even my judgment that something was fine could be wrong.

“Even if it’s nothing, you stop once.”

“Something that’s nothing?”

“It’s fine if the patient says so, and it’s fine if Ayla thinks so. Check just once more whether the explanation really ends with that.”

Ayla’s brows drew together slightly.

Her expression said she had heard the answer but still didn’t know where to put her hand.

But it was fine.

I intended to have her learn through actual practice anyway.

Just then, over there, I spotted a good case.

“Ayla, do you see that student?”

“Yes. Is something on his hand?”

At the pump in the direction I pointed, a student was rubbing his hand under running water, then scratching his palm with his fingernails.

A student scratching so hard it seemed his skin would peel off.

Ayla didn’t take her eyes off that student’s hand for a while.

“......Thinking about it once more, it looks like he touched something and it itches.”

“Why do you think that?”

“He’s barely washing the back of his hand and only rubbing his palm. Rather than washing off dirt...... it looks closer to scratching.”

This was a passing grade.

Are you asking if I’m showing absurd favoritism?

Absolutely not.

'The hardest part is overturning the result of an observation and putting it into a logical sentence.'

The point of this training isn’t to get the right answer.

The flexibility of thought to overturn your own judgment once.

And the logical ability to explain in words why you judged that way, without leaving it to intuition.

These are the elements I want to cultivate in the first stage.

In that sense, Ayla’s answer was a model answer.

It was a test where the solution mattered more than the answer from the start.

“Good. Then let’s ask him directly.”

Still, I couldn’t not check the correct answer.

Ayla and I approached the student.

The student, sensing our presence, pulled his hand from the water and straightened his back.

“Hello, Lord Saint!”

“Is your hand uncomfortable, student?”

“Uh......yes. It stings and itches a little. I don’t really know why either.”

The student held out his wet hand.

Ayla’s body leaned toward it.

After examining his palm closely, she opened her mouth.

“Have you ever touched a tree in the forest? I think you might have touched a poison ivy tree.”

“Ah! I have a poison ivy allergy.”

The student rubbed his palm and nodded.

The answering student’s expression was bright.

“As expected of the Saintess. I wondered why it was like this, and that was the problem.”

“No. It wasn’t even that difficult.”

Ayla also looked quite proud.

It probably wasn’t that she was happy simply to have identified a poison ivy tree allergy.

She must be happy because she felt her observation skills had improved a little.

Because I was the same.

'I can’t lose either.'

My first impression of that student had been similar to Ayla’s conclusion.

Where the water had run down, faint redness and mild edema were visible.

With that kind of itching and rash, there was a high probability it was due to a poison ivy tree.

But......

'As expected.'

If I dug a little deeper, clues that were easy to miss began to appear one by one.

First, I focused on the center of the student’s palm.

There was a spot where small dots gathered.

To say it was caused by contact with poison ivy, it was closer to marks as if pricked repeatedly with a needle.

Of course, even this clue could be interpreted as a clue to poison ivy allergy.

As in, he was scraped by tree bark, that mark formed, and then poison ivy seeped into that wound.

But the moment I discovered the bruise on his ankle, I overturned every hypothesis.

“Student.”

“Yes?”

“When did that bruise on your ankle appear?”

“Huh? This is......”

He bent down and looked at his ankle.

Judging by his attitude, he had clearly discovered it only after hearing my question.

“I must have caught it on something or bumped into something.”

“You don’t remember anything?”

“Isn’t it common when moving through a forest? It’s not an injury Lord Saint needs to concern yourself with.”

I stopped the student’s hand as he tried to lower his pant leg.

“This isn’t a situation you can explain away as common.”

“What do you mean......”

The irritation marks on his palm could be due to a tree.

The bruise on his ankle could have come from bumping into something.

Forests are originally places like that.

There must be plenty of students with one symptom like this.

But if you add the blood seeping between his teeth and gums, visible every time the student answers, the meaning changes.

“I’d like to check your blood a little. May I roll up your sleeve?”

“Ah, yes.”

As soon as the student agreed, I took out a needle and drew blood from his vein.

While Ayla pressed firmly on the blood collection site.

I looked at the blood in the syringe and counted the time in my mind.

'......15 minutes.'

I removed the syringe plunger and turned it over.

The blood flowed out of the syringe just like that.

The two people questioned my actions.

Only after pouring all the blood out of the syringe did I open my mouth.

“It seems it wasn’t a poison ivy tree after all.”

“Um......Lord Saint?”

“I’ll take the student under a red flag. Ayla, bring His Highness Edmund.”

“Yes? Lord Saint? What in the world is......”

The student kept hesitating in confusion,

I explained the situation in the most concise and accurate way he could understand.

“The student doesn’t have much time left. Five hours at most.”

“......Yes?”

The student and Ayla froze.

Was my explanation lacking something?

After worrying for a moment, I exercised as much altruism as possible,

and supplemented the explanation in the way easiest for a student to understand.

“Considering the environment of a battlefield, there may not be enough divine power to use on the student. Under normal circumstances, it could be treated with Divine Magic, but now it seems difficult.”

Burst into tears.

Tears poured from the student’s eyes.