The Exorcist Doctor

Chapter 112 - Gloam Lantern // Moonflower

Maeve shot forward like a hurled spear of stormlight. Her umbrella spun in her grip, pulling the air into a spiral. Wind rose, funneled, shrieked in its tethering, until the weapon became a living corkscrew of gale.

The Myrmur was quick to react. Every pipe, every girder, and every strut in the shaft gave up silk as it pulled in threads from all around, and with six arms to work with, it wove itself a barricade in no time at all—a wall of essence-enhanced silk so thick it looked more like mortared stone than web.

But Maeve didn’t slow.

Her umbrella screamed through the silk barricade, drilling through layer after layer. The fibers split, shrieked, and snapped, scattering in burning arcs, and then she burst through the barricade and rammed the umbrella straight into the Myrmurs chest.

The impact made the pipes quake.

Toppling over onto its back, mandibles clashing, body rearing, the Myrmur only had another half a second to react, but Maeve was quicker. Gripping the handle with both hands, she poured blood into the shaft and fired a pressurized blood cannon straight into the Myrmur’s chest. Then she fired it again. And again. Each blast pulsed bright green, filling the Myrmur’s shredding chest with heat and steam.

Gael tilted his head, amused.

Swarmblood Art.

Blood drained from him in a hot tide, running through the ankle chain into Maeve. The siphon made him shiver a little—made his joints buzz a little—but he could afford to lose a bit of blood if it meant Maeve could keep firing her blood cannon. Transferring blood was also more useful than when he only had a Standard Wasp Class, too. Now that he had an Advanced Umbrella Wasp Class, using his Art meant he’d give Maeve fifty percent of all of his attribute levels temporarily, meaning she could handle the recoil of her blood cannons even better.

He’d bleed so she could fire, and fire she did. Maeve’s cannon turned into an unending deluge. Great gouts of blood thundered into the Myrmur’s chest, corroding it from the inside-out. Black plates split, seams screamed apart, and pressure hissed out as if the parasite’s own vascular system had been cursed against it.

By the time she fired her twentieth shot, its chestplate had sloughed away like burnt bark, revealing its heart underneath.

A Blight-Class Myrmur’s heart was much, much larger than the average Wretch-Class’ heart. It was a great mass of pink-red meat throbbing, glistening, and half-fused to the man underneath’s chest. It resembled a tumor with tons of hexagonal pores and holes, which didn’t really scare Gael. He was used to removing tumors.

Maeve whipped her head back at him. “It’s done!”

“Good!” Gael barked back.

Then he stabbed his cane into the pipe below and set his gloam lantern atop it. The device hummed as he did. He twisted the side dial, adjusted the light output, and the light that once fanned out in all directions narrowed into a single forward-facing cone instead—a spear of white radiance that enveloped the Myrmur’s body.

The Myrmur started convulsing. Its limbs jittered and collapsed inward, while the man inside screamed with both voices at once.

Maeve blinked, startled. “Gael—”

He raised a finger. “Pull me.”

She didn’t question it. The ankle chain snapped taut as she yanked, and his body sailed across the gulf, leaving his cane and lantern behind as he was dragged like a cadaver on a puppet string. Still he managed to land beside her on the Myrmur’s shredded chest, knees buckling but steady.

While he crouched over the tumor, backlit by the cone of light, he snapped out two scalpels from under his sleeves.

“Stab the heart,” he ordered, already pressing his blades to the edges of the tumor-like tissue, “and pull as hard as you can.”

Maeve frowned. “But the killing curse… if you don’t inject him with the symbiote elixir first, removing the heart—”

“Just do it.”

He started cutting, slicing the tendons and anchors binding the giant heart to the man’s chest.

Maeve hissed air through her teeth—still slightly hesitant—before jamming her umbrella into the pulsing heart. It pierced with a wet pop. She braced herself against the Myrmur’s chest and began to pull up, every muscle straining, as Gael continued cutting away at the invasive flesh.

Fibers snapped. Membranes tore. Veins sprayed. Finally, the heart came free enough for Maeve to rip it out completely, and she hurled it behind them with a powerful swing.

It hit a pipe with a meaty slap, bounced once, and burst into a small shower of blood that quickly disappeared down the shaft. The heart aside, the rest of the Myrmur’s giant body started to shrivel. Plates caved, and muscle fibers shrank as if deflating.

Gael could watch the body break apart slowly, but instead he thrust both hands down, seized the man by his shirt, and dragged him out before tossing him aside like laundry.

The man hit the pipe, groaning, but still breathing. Still alive.

“… Nice,” Gael mumbled. “So the lantern works after all.”

While he scratched the back of his head to get rid of an itch in his scalp, Maeve whirled on Gael, eyes narrowing.

“What’d you just do?” she asked. “You didn’t give him the elixir, so how’s he still breathing?”

“Question of the year,” he said cheerily. “But look—no cod pile, no skylight, no moat. Man’s alive, parasite’s dead, and I’m still handsome—”

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“Gael.”

Her tone made him chuckle, so he pointed at the lantern in the distance, its cone of light still shining on the two of them.

“That’s

the symbiote elixir,” he said. “Prototype number four.”They hopped off the collapsing carcass and landed beside the groaning man.

“Airway, breathing, circulation,” Gael said. He rolled the man with two fingers under the jaw and a pinch at the nose, clearing clots and listening for breath. “He’ll live.”

Maeve was already unwinding linen from her thigh pouch, tearing it lengthwise into tidy strips. She pressed one to a split along the man’s scalp and another to a constellation of claw-gouges along his ribs.

“Compression here,” she murmured. “And here.”

“Stitch later,” Gael agreed, palming a small tin of saint-balsam and rubbing it along the ragged edge of a nasty cut. The salve smoked where his chest had been attached to the Myrmur heart earlier.

They worked in silence for a minute, applying first aid to the man just to ensure he wouldn’t bleed out beneath them, but eventually Maeve cracked.

“... What do you mean that’s the symbiote elixir?” she asked.

Gael dusted his palms on his coat and checked the man’s nails for residue: black hemolymph crust, yes; his own blood, yes; nothing else that sang of curses.

“Prototype one was the original symbiote elixir in liquid form,” he said, holding up a finger. “I inject it straight into the bloodstream, ideally intravenous, and it works. But it’s slow, it requires me to stand very close to the guy, and manual injection means I have to stay there the entire time I’m doing the injection. Not so easy when the guy’s still thrashing around.”

“I remember.

“So prototype two was the symbiote elixir in powder form,” he said, lifting a second finger. “Same recipe, but evaporated and reduced to a fine dust curried in a pouch. In theory, it works when a guy breathes it in after I scatter it like spores, but in practice, a sneeze from the wrong saint or a wind flying the wrong way fucks it up completely. Air pressure, humidity, and temperature affects the accuracy of the powder elixir far too much.”

“You used prototype two on the Myrmur hearts inside the Mournspire Pines, right?”

“Mhm. Trees don’t move, so they’re easy to throw powder on, but I needed a more robust delivery method for targets that could move.” He lifted a third finger. “Prototype three was the powder elixir contained in a bomb. Impact detonation causes the powder to reach right where I want it to reach. Accuracy shoots way up. Unfortunately, there are two significant issues. One, the powder elixir is inside a fucking bomb, and two, I have to carry bombs around in my coat.

He held his hands out, demonstrating the nonexistent endlessness of his coat. “Contrary to rumors, I am not a traveling wardrobe. I can’t carry enough bombs around for how little powder elixir I can actually stuff inside each bomb—so I’ll need to carry five bombs to deliver the same amount of elixir as two pouches of powder elixir, or one vial of liquid elixir—and mass-production of those bombs isn’t easy, either, so I started thinking about a delivery method that could be mass-produced without taking up a lot of space… which is why I’ve been hunting the moonflower.”

Maeve’s fingers paused mid-knot on a strip of bandage. She followed his gaze to the lantern, then back to him, brows drawing in. “What’s the moonflower have to do with it?”

Gael grinned, slapping an adhesive patch on the man’s forehead bruise. “The moonflower’s a very rare and special flower that grows only on the bare backs of the Hagi’Shar Mountains—and less commonly on other sky-piercing mountains on the continent—and while it sure is pretty, it also has a very fun property when it’s crushed and turned into a liquid extract.”

“That is…”

“It works as an amplifier. Swirl the moonflower extract with another liquid, and it’ll magnify the liquid’s natural tendencies—potency up, persistence up, volatility tamed,” he said. “In layman terms, I swirled the moonflower extract with a vial of symbiote elixir to make a super symbiote elixir, and then I infused the resulting mixture into the glass panes around the lantern. Now, any light that shines through them carries the properties of the symbiote elixir.”

The waterfall roared. The sagging webs around them ticked and cooled. Maeve stared at him, still, as if he’d just stepped out of a storybook and stolen a page on his way.

“... Wait,” she said softly. “So you’re saying… if anyone stands in this cold white light, their illnesses will be cured, their toxins will be neutralized, and their curses will be intercepted.”

Gael shrugged. “Well, the elixir was initially designed to counter a Myrmur’s killing curse first and foremost, so the lantern’s light is most effective against that particular curse… but yeah, that’s about right. Sit someone with a severe lung infection under the lantern for three, maybe four weeks straight, and the infection should dissolve. Someone stung by a fish’s toxin? Give them a few days under the light and their veins should stop bubbling.”

Then he tapped the side of his mask, as if to punctuate the point. “Now, the lantern isn’t perfect. There are still kinks and limitations I’ve gotta work through. For one, the glass panes won’t stay infused forever. The moonflower extract isn’t that powerful. Eventually, the panes’ll turn back to mundane glass, and the lantern will become nothing more than a very stylish lamp. I’ll need to reinfuse them once a year at least, maybe even more depending on the bloom’s potency, and that means I’ll need more moonflowers—”

“You’re mad,” she muttered. “Do you even hear yourself? Are you saying that if you could mass produce these lanterns—replace the street lamps all around the city with them—nobody would ever get sick again?”

“As I said, I need more moonflowers to run some more tests first. If it took you a whole year to get a single moonflower imported, I can’t imagine finding someone from the Hagi’Shar Mountains who might be able to give me hundreds and thousands of them—”

Maeve pulled her Raven mask down, then leaned forward and pressed a quick peck against his cheek.

For once, he was the one caught unbalanced, blinking behind his night vision lenses.

“... What was that for—”

“You might actually do it,” she said, grinning from ear to ear. “Not just make our clinic the best in the city, but you can save tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives. If you can pull this off, then people like Old Banks’ daughter, Miss Alba’s husband, and even Evelyn’s hounds… nobody will have to die of ailments ever again.”

Gael wagged a finger at her, still flustered. “No, no. We will pull it off. Don’t you dare mistake me for the sole martyr. I’ll work you like a slave when it comes to refining this prototype, so ready your wrists.”

She laughed, bright and unguarded, and for once, Gael found himself grinning back without a trace of irony.

For a change, she sounded truly delighted.

After all, if such a lantern existed years and decades ago, maybe her birth parents wouldn’t have died.

And he was already preparing another quip—something about chaining her to the forge until she learned to boil tinctures without ruining the pan—when the body convulsed.

The unconscious man jolted awake with a rasping gasp. His chest hitched and his throat rattled, so Gael peered down at him with clinical satisfaction.

“Oh, good,” he said cheerily. “Still breathing. Don’t fret, old boy. We’ll have you up at the clinic and stitched like a hymn in no time, so stay still and—”

But the man’s hand darted into his bloodstained coat, and a glint of steel flashed as a knife shot up at Gael’s throat.