Task: Unknown Poison

Requester: Mary, Nagrand's Healer

Quest Rank: Rank up to D rank

Rewards: Bronze Guild Badge

Description: A patient reached Nagrand yesterday and had an unreasonably strong fever on him. I tried a few spells but none had much success in healing him.

He woke up today and told me he was bitten by a snake endemic to the Eastern region of the Beastmen Alliance... Considering how he is still alive now, it should be safe to assume the snake's poison acts extremely slowly, but he shouldn't live much longer.

However, I'm afraid none of Nagrand's herbalists know how to cure this specific poison, and the man in question doesn't have enough money in him to pay for a Mandragora potion.

Your task is to find a way to cure him.

Zinc rushed over to the patient and quickly checked his pulse with one hand while Zinc laid the back of his palm on top of the man’s head with the other hand. The man’s forehead was burning hot to the touch and his pulse raced unsteadily fast. Zinc touched the man’s arms and chest and felt that both areas were hot yet dry. Generally, people suffering from severe fever would be sweating constantly, however the man before him was dry.

Scratching his head, Zinc closed his eyes and looked through all the medical knowledge stored in his memories. After some thought, Zinc breathed with relief. Luckily, he was able to recall at least a dozen possible solutions for this problem. If he had found none, then even he would have a hard time curing the patient. With twelve solutions in mind, Zinc continued to check for other symptoms. While he continued to check the patient, the man kept pestering him about the situation, despite his shortness of breath. Noting that, Zinc patted the man on the shoulder and told him that there isn’t anything to worry about. The doctor promised the man that he will be cured.

After the doctor calmed down the man with words of reassurance, he glanced towards the copper buckets in the far corner of the room, a permeating stink hovered above the buckets. Holding a handkerchief over his nose, the doctor bravely strode towards the buckets. With a few quick peeks, Zinc was able to confirm that the contents of those buckets were vomit and stools respectively. From the runniness of the stools, Zinc confirmed that the patient was suffering from extreme diarrhea. Zinc could see bits and pieces of undigested food among the mix of feces and water. Strange…but not uncommon.

Next, the doctor glanced over at the vomit bucket and noted that the contents seemed partially digested. Suddenly, Zinc widened his eyes as he stared at the vomit bucket. In disbelief, he glanced back at the stool bucket. Zinc studied the two buckets for a long while before sighing in exhaustion. This doesn’t make sense. This just doesn’t make sense at all! All symptoms indicate drug abuse but just a simple drug abuse couldn’t possibly be incurable at the hands of Nagrand’s herbalists. Not to mention, the cause of this poisoning is an unknown snake. Zinc had checked the bite mark earlier. The affected area was completely black…and it was spreading outwards at a rapid pace. What kind of snake leaves a devastating mark like that? Even as Zinc perused his memories, he could not pinpoint to any of the snakes he had encountered or read about.

“Dammit!” Zinc cursed under his breath. “Even the king of snakes wouldn’t have this much of an affect on a person. Wait! The king of snakes…if the king of snakes wouldn’t work, then what about the god of snakes – the basilisk?”

That’s the right…the basilisk could be the only option. Obviously, Zinc had never encountered one but he had read about them plenty of times. Now, some would say that the poison of a basilisk could turn their victims into stone. That may be true but there were records of people who had slow down the effects of the basilisk poison…in time to jot down the symptoms that came before the fatal symptom. Fever, nausea, diarrhea, shortness of breath, coma…it all fits! Sure, some may argue that these effects happened in a span of a minute yet the patient before Zinc was still alive. However, if they were to consider the possibility of a baby basilisk, then it all makes sense. A baby basilisk’s venom isn’t stable and it isn’t as potent as a fully-grown one. This could explain why the patient was still alive after suffering through all that.

With this in mind, Zinc quickly touched the blackened skin. The skin of the affected area was hard to the touch as if the arm was made of obsidian or some kind of stone. Confirmed! No wonder the herbalists had trouble. How can they heal something as relentless and as persistent as basilisk venom? Having deduced that the poison was basilisk venom, Zinc knew he had a little less than a day to counteract the poison and cure the dying man. He had heard his master talk about curing a basilisk bite with the tears of a phoenix but where could Zinc find a phoenix? The dwelf continued to think about this matter.

“The only reason we use phoenix tears to counteract the poison of a basilisk…was because we needed something extremely hot to deteriorate the components that make up the poison. But using this method was extremely dangerous, especially for an ordinary person. Not to mention, the poison came from a baby basilisk and not from an adult one.” Zinc muttered to himself as he exited the room.

The doctor notified the people watching over the patient that he was going to step out for a while to do some further research. If anything happens to the man, they should notify him as soon as possible. Once he bid his farewells, Zinc strode to his house in wide steps. As soon as he reached his room, Zinc started rummaging through his books on poison and acupuncture. The methods for dealing with poison were numerous…but luckily for him, the methods using heat were fewer than a hundred. If he were to consider using acupuncture to simulate cooling factors into the solution, there was only one answer to his problem. In literal terms…he was going to cook the man alive.

Zinc hurried back and ordered the people watching the patient to bring over some stuff including firewood, buckets of water, and a large cauldron. They glanced at Zinc unusually but nevertheless brought over the items. Once everything was settled, Zinc had them bring the patient to a sitting position in the cauldron. The dwelf filled the cauldron with water and began lighting the bottom with fire. Once the firewood caught on fire, the doctor began to wait. As soon as the water began to boil and the patient started screaming from pain, Zinc stabbed the man in different areas of his head with numerous thin needles in order to stop the pain. Then, Zinc fed him some wild mint while slitting his wrists in order for him relieve some heat.

The juices from the wild mint would cool his insides while bleeding would remove heat and poisonous blood. Zinc reached into his utility belt and pulled out a long needle, about the length of his middle finger. With this needle, Zinc stuck it deep in the depression under the man's collar bone (known as the Shu Mansion), hitting a mythical acupoint that helps detoxify the poison in the man’s body and purge it from the body. There was a faster and surer way to purging the poison, but that involved sticking the needle into the man’s heart. However, Zinc was not confident enough in his abilities to perform such an operation.

As the needles and the hot “bath” purged the poison in the man’s system, Zinc continued to press and massage many of the man’s acupoints in order to relieve heat and cool the body. Every so often, the doctor would also feed some wild ginseng root to the man in order for him to recover blood loss. After a night of boiling and several water replacements, Zinc had finally drained away all of the poison from the man’s body. Once he was done, Zinc quickly had the man lifted from the cauldron and laid on top of a bed. Because of the night of constant blood loss and forceful blood recovery, the man was very weak.

Zinc applied some Blood Lily Salve on the slit wrists in order to stop the bleeding and heal the wounds. After he wrapped the wrists with bandages to hold the salve in place and apply some pressure to the wounds, Zinc slowly fed the man some diluted Rejuvenation Tonic and Revitalizing Solution in order for him to recover. As the man was very weak, the doctor could only dilute the two fluids as feeding them straight could prove counterproductive. Soon, the man recovered and, in a day or two, he woke up. After finishing the request, Zinc salvaged the baby basilisk poison from the “bath” water and stored them into a couple of large rotect jars for research purposes. Then, he headed back to the guild to report on his success.