SLV Chapter 9: The First Lesson
April 12
Lin En stopped indulging in the cool relief and climbed out of the urn.
He headed back to the shack to prepare the lesson he was about to give.
His goal was to get Milya to learn as clearly and quickly as possible, so a new positive trait would appear.
At the same time, he left Milya to wash herself properly.
Hearing the sound of water behind him, he glanced back, only to find that Milya had climbed into the water fully clothed in her coarse linen robe.
"You bathe with your clothes on?"
"Master... I, I thought I'd wash my clothes at the same time."
Milya still didn't dare look up at Lin En, who at that moment was being quite candid about his own lack of self-consciousness. Her face was entirely red.
"All right then..."
Lin En naturally guessed the real reason.
Looking at the flustered Milya, he suddenly noticed something he hadn't caught before.
Why had he himself been so completely unguarded, moving around without any trace of embarrassment?
Thinking it over carefully, it struck him all at once. He seemed to have been gradually coming to see Milya as a tool, or perhaps a pet.
"Is this what they mean when they say social existence shapes social consciousness?"
Slaves had been reduced by this slave society into tools and livestock. Freemen who fell into slavery would in time accept their new identity without resistance and he himself was living in this world. Was he not being shaped by it in the same way, quietly reshaped without noticing?
The values he had carried as a modern person were being subtly worn down, gradually taking on the shape of this world instead.
He hadn't expected that crossing over into another world would come with this kind of "detail problem," the slow absorption into the world he had landed in.
No novel, film, or drama had ever mentioned this.
"Interesting..."
If he didn't want to become one of the ignorant, cruel natives he had always held in contempt, it seemed the only real solution was to change this world into something closer to what he believed it should be.
…
"Master, your clothes."
Inside the shack, Lin En had been running through every first aid method in his memory, making sure he had it all straight then the door was gently pushed open.
When he saw Milya in the doorway, Lin En felt a quiet surprise.
Her skin was far fairer than he had realized.
Combined with her slave robe, tattered but now clean, it made her look, in some odd way, genuinely sweet.
If you set aside the scar that stretched from her cheek down to her neck, she could have passed for the kind of unassuming girl next door that made people want to look after her.
He took the clothes from her and found them completely dry, still holding a trace of warmth.
Putting on clean clothes, he was no longer stuck in that grimy, sticky discomfort he'd been tolerating all day.
"Well done, Milya."
"Now I need to teach you something."
"If there ever comes a day when I'm close to dying, you'll need to use what I'm about to show you to bring me back. Understood?"
"Dying..."
With that, Lin En moved on to the first lesson, how to apply pressure to stop heavy bleeding.
He hadn't noticed the faint glimmer of tears that had appeared in Milya's eyes.
Master could die...
What would she do without her master?
Milya watched Lin En, and even as waves of heat kept rolling in through the ventilation gap, she felt as though she had fallen into ice.
"Milya?"
It was only after talking for some time that Lin En finally noticed something was off. She seemed to have drifted away entirely.
At the sound of her name, Milya came back to herself.
"Did you follow what I said?"
Lin En looked at her with some puzzlement.
The next moment, she said something that had nothing to do with the question.
"Master, can you please not die."
"...?"
"I don't generally plan on dying. What I mean is, it's a possibility."
"For instance, if I'm injured and losing a lot of blood, that's when I'd need you to use this method and keep me from dying."
Lin En answered, thoroughly confused.
Milya's eyes shifted instantly from dim to bright.
"So if I learn this, Master won't die."
"Well... that's one way to put it."
Somehow that came out sounding a bit strange.
As though it were inevitable that he would one day find himself at death's door, and Milya would be the one keeping him from crossing it.
Seeing that Milya was now fully focused, Lin En started over from the beginning.
He rolled up his sleeve and demonstrated where the proximal and distal ends of the brachial artery were.
He went through the responses for different situations, including when to elevate an injured limb above the level of the heart.
Once he had covered everything he could remember, he asked Milya to repeat it back to him so he could check for any gaps.
What surprised him was how thoroughly she had retained all of it.
The Fast Learner trait at 30 points was no exaggeration.
It was worth remembering that none of this first aid knowledge had ever existed in this place. When someone was bleeding heavily here, the standard response was to pack the wound with herbs and a fistful of sand yet she had absorbed an entirely new body of knowledge this quickly.
Lin En found himself thinking that this kind of learning ability could probably handle something more demanding, physiology, mathematics, that sort of thing.
"Well done, Milya. You did very well."
He said it without holding back, and Milya's face broke into a bright, open smile.
Lin En then moved on to teaching her about unconsciousness caused by heatstroke and similar conditions.
Milya again absorbed it rapidly.
He had her repeat everything she had learned so far.
Without exception, she had it all.
Outside, the sky had shifted back to the warm colors of dusk.
Time had moved fast. But there was still enough left for one final item, CPR.
"Press here, then push down thirty times, like this. Count as you go."
"Zero-one... zero-two... thirty."
"Then..."
Milya felt the warm, steady pressure of his hands on her chest and concentrated as hard as she could then she felt a gentle force tilt her chin upward.
Lin En's lips met hers, and he breathed in.
For one instant, Milya's mind went completely blank.
"Milya, did you get that? This is called rescue breathing."
Lin En finished the final demonstration, checked the color of the sky outside, then turned to ask her.
"Mas... Master."
Milya surfaced as though waking from a dream.
"Just like that. Go ahead and do it once through."
Lin En was feeling pressed for time. He still planned to repair the other two sand spirit arrow towers before night fell.
With all three towers active, the coverage area would expand significantly, and by tomorrow morning the source stone yield would increase substantially as well.
They switched positions. Lin En lay down on the bed and felt Milya's small hands pressing on his chest. It was about as forceful as a cat kneading.
Her strength really was something.
Still, it wasn't as though he actually needed to be resuscitated any time soon. As long as she had learned it, that was what mattered.
When he heard Milya begin counting, he decided there was no need for her to continue the full demonstration.
"Milya, go over everything I taught you in your head. Review it until it's fixed."
He stood up, walked to the doorway, and turned back to add one more word as he went.
"It's important."
"Yes, Master."
Milya nodded quickly, and as she watched Lin En's retreating figure, she unconsciously flicked out her small tongue and touched her lips, where a faint warmth still lingered.
The moment Lin En pushed the door open, he found the lame she-wolf.
She had climbed up onto the bathing urn beside the heart well and was helping herself to the bathwater.
He paid the desert wolf no mind, picked up his bag, and walked quickly to the ruins of the other two sand spirit arrow towers.
He finished restoring them both just before night fell.
"All done!"
Lin En felt the day had been remarkably full, and remarkably exhausting.
Now that the first aid lessons were finished, he wondered whether Milya would bring him a new trait by tomorrow.
With all three sand spirit arrow towers active, the coverage area was now three times what it had been.
Would the haul tomorrow be three times as much as well?
More, or less? He would find out.
…
The night was ink-dark, the stars blazing overhead.
Across the oasis, the sound of the towers charging and firing came in a steady rhythm.
Lin En was deep in sleep. But in the darkness, Milya lay with her eyes wide open.
Her mind was running without pause through everything Lin En had taught her.
"Proximal brachial artery... distal."
She didn't know what the words meant, but she could picture clearly in her mind exactly where Lin En had pointed during his demonstration, which end was which.
From the moment she had lain down, she had been going over it again and again in her mind, drilling it until it was settled.
By now she had fixed all of it, every strange and unfamiliar piece of knowledge, firmly in place then, without warning, a sharp wave of unease rose in Milya's chest.
"Is Master dead right now?"
She quietly turned over and looked at Lin En lying beside her.
She confirmed he was still breathing. But even so, she couldn't quite shake the fear.
Just because he was breathing didn't necessarily mean he wasn't dead, did it?
The thought surfaced, and her worry deepened.
"Oh, right. There's that last method."
"If I do that, he won't be dead."
An idea came to her suddenly, a way to put her unease to rest.
Whatever the case, she might as well apply what she knew but she was afraid of disturbing him, so Milya decided to skip the pressing steps at the beginning.
She brought her lips quietly closer...
Her mind had gone entirely blank during the lesson, so what she was doing now was what she believed, in her own estimation, to be the correct approach.
"Even if he was dead, he should be fine now."
After the gentle kiss, Milya finally felt completely at ease. She turned back over and drifted peacefully to sleep.
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