The preparations started immediately.

Malt gave his consent with surprising ease, and seemingly without proper forethought. The ma’am, likely already used to his ox like stubbornness, left the matter there, returning to the siblings.

It was decided that they wouldn’t be told of the operation. In the unlikely event of his death, it was agreed that the tragedy would be under the guise of a hiking ‘incident’.

Jackie reassured him of course, reasoning that given the extensive and thorough nature of her research, the chances of grievous injury or death were minimal.

He was still afraid of course. He’d never had to undergo surgery on earth, but the mere idea of it made him uneasy. The prospect of being put to sleep and cut open was shady enough as is, but now it involved fantastical, seemingly illogical magical elements.

There were so many unknown variables, every survival instinct that he had cultivated throughout the past few months, no, his entire life, was screaming in disapproval.

Logic states that every decision should be evaluated through the concept of risk and reward. The benefits should outweigh, or at the very least, balance the detriments.

Yet here he was, wagering his life on an operation that most definitely wasn’t leaning toward the benefits.

Why did he give his consent despite this dilemma then?

The reason was simple. Take away all the reasoning and fear, and all that was left was the indisputable bottom line: if he didn’t get his body moving now, he and most of the village would die anyway.

Increased calorie requirement? Child’s play.

No magic? Who cares?

Cancer? Par for the course.

Living with these ailments was better than not living at all, and that reasoning made his decision blaringly easy to make.

Even as he sat shirtless in Jackie’s basement, which also doubled as her operating room (laboratory would be a more apt term), he repeated this mantra in his head over and over to ease his nerves.

The racks of dangerous looking medical instruments; scalpels, scissors, tweezers and the like, definitely weren’t helping.

A bright glass orb filled with what was likely some kind of magical medium illuminated the room, painting everything a reddish hue. It revealed all of the secrets that she wanted to hide from the rest of the world. Various...interesting looking contraptions that had more needles than he felt comfortable with filled the small but uncharacteristically neat space.

In fact if he hadn’t been explicitly told that they were medical instruments, he would’ve easily mistaken it for some niche torture device.

Even the operating table that he sat on gave him bad vibes. Leather straps on the edges, each corresponding with one of his limbs, gave some worrying implications.

Jackie, who was now covered from neck to toe in substantial leather, lifted his left arm, examining it constantly.

“You’ve quite the muscle mass despite your age...it has something to do with your profession I assume?”

“...yeah something along those lines.”

“Being vague are we? Well I can more or less guess just by looking…”

She kneaded one of the numerous pale scars behind his forearm.

“Let’s see...was it a sword? No, it’s too large, maybe an axe?”

“Close, it was a halberd.”

Eyes still glued to the old wound, she furrowed her brows.

“How long ago did you get this?”

“I dunno, maybe...five-no, four weeks ago?”

Her eyes widened in slight surprise,

“Lori was right, you do heal pretty quickly. Perfect.”

“Perfect?”

“Yep. Subjects with a strong constitution and robust body generally adapt to the specimen better. Those without the necessary vitality allow it to grow rampantly, so it spreads through the body where it disrupts other processes.”

“That sounds...dangerous.”

She smiled sympathetically,

“It is, but you should be fine. Since you’re healthy and young, your body’ll kill the the cancerous cells before they have a chance to do any damage.”

“Doesn’t that mean the ‘specimen’ will die too?”

“That’s impossible, it’s too big.”

“...too big, you say?”

She reached into a wooden container and pulled out a glass vial filled with a dubious dark yellow liquid.

“I just thawed this little guy out last night, so he might be slightly agitated.”

She held it up for him to see in all it’s disgusting glory.

A small, dark shape floated within the liquid.

At closer inspection, he very quickly realized that it was in fact an entirely intact, and very much alive slug nearly the size of his thumb.

It wriggled violently whenever Jackie shook it a bit, waving it’s thin feelers around in a vain attempt to escape from it’s transparent cage.

“Excuse me, what the fuck.”

She looked at him questioningly,

“What do you mean?”

He replied by staring back at her in disbelief.

“What do you mean ‘What do you mean’? That’s a whole ass slug.”

She looked at him as if he were the weird one.

“Of course it is. I thought you’ve seen one before because of the way you talked about it.”

It was now blaringly clear that the term ‘cancer’ might’ve had different implications here than it did on earth.

“I…”

“I…?”

He looked downward, too blinded with culture shock to go any further with the subject.

“Nothing, please continue.”

“...? As I was going to say, this is one of the weaker specimens, but it’s still robust enough to survive inside your body. The moment I place it into you, it’ll begin rapidly creating its own cancerous cells to try and overtake yours. After a few hours though, it’ll run out of energy and realize that it’s better off just leeching off of your body’s nutrients and mana.”

“And this helps me how?”

“Well, at that point it more or less becomes a part of your body. A pseudo-organ, you could say. It can sense when you’re injured, and produce cells accordingly. It wouldn’t want to lose its source of sustenance after all.”

“I see...by the way you’re talking about it, it makes it sound as if this thing has intelligence.”

“That’s because it does.”

“...it does?”

She flicked the vial lightly, watching as the slug squirmed in response.

“Not as we understand it though. It can definitely react to stimuli and make basic decisions, whether it does that based on logic or instinct, even I do not know. Whether it’s conscious is a matter for you to decide. After all, is a rat conscious? If so, how about an ant? Where do we draw the line between conscious and unconscious, whether a being does or doesn’t have a soul?”

“...philosophy ain’t my strong suit, Miss.”

She clicked her tongue.

“How boring. Women are into men who can have a discussion, you know?”

I’m not sure I should take your tastes as a standard.

Saying this out loud to the person about to operate on him seemed like a bad idea though.

After fiddling with some intricate looking machinery, she passed him a water-filled vial along with a needle.

“Put a drop of blood in there, would you?”

He obeyed, watching as the bead of crimson disintegrated into the vial, leaving only a faint reddish mist.

“What’s this for?”

Without looking, she gestured for the vial.

“Measuring the amount of mana that you have. Shouldn’t take too long.”

She grabbed the vial and poured it into a circular glass bottle, adding various other unidentified liquids into the container. After a quick swirl, the different liquids, each bearing a different consistency and color, homogenized into a single milky brown solution.

“Now that that’s done,” she produced a pure white strip of paper. “This’ll tell us all we need to know about your mana.”

“Huh, so it’ll tell me my stats?”

Just from her expression, he could pretty easily tell that he’d said something out of the ordinary.

“Trust me, if I owned a device that could determine statistics I wouldn’t be living in the middle of nowhere.”

He didn’t dig any further. Doing so would only flaunt his ignorance of the world.

“...I see.”

She submerged the paper with a pair of tweezers. They both watched intently, although Malt had no clue of what he was looking for.

A few seconds passed.

Jackie furrowed her brows once again.

She took the paper out and set it aside, placing another one into the solution. A few, painfully quiet minutes passed and she replaced it once again.

This process repeated several times, her expression growing more and more bewildered with each cycle.

She repeated this five times, after which she simply sat there quietly, rubbing her chin deep in thought.

“...is it supposed to stay white like that?”

She shook her head, “It usually starts to darken after a few seconds, maybe they’ve just spoiled? No, I made those recently and in different batches…”

Drawing on his vast, albeit fading memory of earth media, he couldn’t help but be a little hopeful (cheeky).

“Does this perhaps mean that I’m amazing?”

She shook her head once again.

“No, the paper being pure white implies that you have no traces of mana whatsoever in your body.”

The memory of his less than pleasant experience back at the palace resurfaced.

“I told you that I couldn’t use magic before, didn’t I?”

“That’s not what I mean. Most people may not be able to use magic, but every living being has to have some traces of mana within them. But this...this is abnormal.”

She eyed the solution with mild bewilderment.

“I’ve been a researcher for decades, and I’ve done mana readings with almost every animal you can think of, rabbits, humans, trolls, goblins, you name it, and I’ve drawn blood from them.”

She leaned closer to the glass bottle, as if eying it closer would make things clearer.

“The blood of monsters, people, and animals are all different. Some are blue or purple, some are as thick as porridge while others boil and evaporate the moment they make contact with open air. But no matter how different they are, they have one thing in common: they all contain some form of mana inside of them that can be measured using this method.”

She carefully grabbed his arm, revealing the veins populating his wrist.

“I still don’t completely buy it, but this really is true and you have no mana within you whatsoever, then you’re a completely one of a kind individual.”

“...so I am amazing?”

“I think ‘abnormal’ is a more apt term. Your body doesn’t make sense at all…”

They made eye contact, but he really wished they hadn’t. Her eyes reflected a cocktail of emotions; disbelief, curiosity, confusion, and most worryingly of all, horror.

“Just what are you?”