SSS-Ranked Surgeon In Another World: The Healer Is Actually OP!

Chapter 418: The Soul Realm 2

The first thing Bruce noticed was the cold.

It came in through his mouth and nose at the same time, thick and wet, and it did not feel like air at all. It felt like he was breathing damp ash. The taste of it sat at the back of his throat, not bitter, not sweet, just wrong, the way a flavor is wrong when you cannot place what it is.

He looked around.

The mist stretched out in every direction. There was no sky above and no ground below in the way he understood those words, only a soft grey expanse that gave faintly under him when he shifted his weight. The mist itself was slow-moving and pale, and where it thinned slightly he could see further; where it thickened, the world ended after a few paces.

He was not alone.

Other souls were scattered across the grey, near and far. Some sat where they had arrived, knees drawn up, not moving at all. Some wandered without direction, turning slow circles, drifting on as if they had forgotten what they were looking for.

One, far off to his left, was screaming. The sound did not carry the way a scream should. It came through the mist muffled and wet, as if the air itself were drinking it.

Bruce stayed very still.

He felt, faintly, the link to his body. An invisible thin thread, somewhere behind his chest, leading back to the labyrinth and to Sophie and to his still form sitting cross-legged on Axiom’s floor.

The thread was thin but it was still there. He could feel it. That was a comfort. It was his last connection to his body in the physical realm and the way he can go back, but he could feel the thread thinning, it made him tensed but he took a deep breath to calm himself...

He still had his memory. He knew his name. He knew his wife’s name. He knew what he had come here to do.

But his soul, His soul was nothing.

He could feel its weight inside the shape of him, and the weight was small. It was the weight of a candle, where his body in the physical realm carried the weight of a sun. Stripped down. Reduced.

F-rank, if he had to put a number to it, which the Akashic had warned him he would be when he arrived. He had understood that intellectually. He had not understood, until now, how it would feel.

For the first time in many years, he was weak and he had no idea what the way forward is, he knew little to nothing about this place or this realm...

And something deep inside him, something older than cultivation, the same instinct that had warned him before bad outcomes in his surgeon days, was telling him that he was in danger.

He did not know why. There was no enemy in front of him. There was no claw, no blade, no spell. There was only the mist and the silent drifting people and the faint distant scream.

But the dread sat in him like a hand on the back of his neck. He felt that maybe it was that thinning link between him and his physical body, but he also felt like it isn’t that simple, it’s not just that...

Sighing, he pushed himself to his feet.

He took stock the way he always did.

First the body, the soul-body, here, but the habit was the same. Limbs intact. Posture stable. Breath steady, though he was not sure breath meant anything in this place. Then the surroundings. Then the people.

The nearest soul was perhaps ten paces away. A middle-aged man, heavyset, in clothes that might once have been a baker’s apron and might once have been something else; the mist had blurred the edges of his garments so the cloth was not entirely cloth anymore. He was sitting on the grey, staring forward at nothing.

Bruce approached carefully.

"Hello," he said.

His voice came out clear. That, at least, worked here.

The man did not respond. His eyes were open but they did not track. Bruce knelt in front of him and waved one hand slowly across his line of sight. Nothing. The man’s gaze passed through Bruce’s hand and out into the mist beyond.

Bruce leaned closer, looking at him properly, and that was when he saw it.

The man’s edges were wrong.

His shoulders, his hands, the line of his jaw, they were not solid. They were soft. Faint trails of pale mist were rising off him, the way steam rises off hot water on a cold morning, and as Bruce watched he could see, very slowly, that the man was less than he had been a moment ago. The mist around him was thicker for it.

The mist was eating him.

Getting more tensed, Bruce stood up and stepped back.

The man did not notice him leave.

He walked.

He kept his steps slow and careful. The grey gave under his feet with each step and he had the unsettling sense that if he moved too fast, he might sink through it entirely.

He passed two more souls in the same condition as the baker, sitting still, eyes empty, edges smoking gently into the mist. He did not stop for them. There was nothing he could do.

Further on, the mist thinned a little, and he saw movement that looked more deliberate.

A small group. Five souls, maybe six, sitting close together in a loose circle. They had pulled in toward each other the way people do when they are cold, even though the cold here did not work that way. He approached at a distance they would notice him from, raised a hand, and called out.

"Excuse me."

Heads turned. They saw him.

Bruce felt a small, sharp relief at the simple fact of being seen.

He came closer. The group watched him approach without hostility but without warmth either, they had the wariness of people who had already lost too much to bother with strangers.

An older woman in the middle of the cluster met his eyes and, after a moment, nodded permission for him to sit.

He sat.

"Where are we?" he asked.

The older woman looked at him a long time before answering. Her own edges, Bruce noticed, were softer than his but firmer than the baker’s. She was being eaten more slowly. Maybe she had been here a shorter time. Maybe she was holding on better. He could not tell.

"No one knows," she said. Her voice was thin. "We died and found ourselves here. We don’t remember how or where we died we just know we’re dead and found ourselves like this. We have been trying to remember."

"How long?"

"I do not know how long. Long enough."

He nodded. He had expected something like that.

"Has anything happened? Has anyone come?"

The older woman exchanged a look with the man beside her. The man looked away.

"They come," she said. "Sometimes."

"Who?"

"Figures. In grey." Her hands moved a little in her lap, drawing a shape she could not quite finish. "On carriages. Pulled by, I do not know what pulls them. The wheels do not touch the ground. They carry scythes."

Bruce felt something cold move down his spine that had nothing to do with the mist.

"What do they do?"

"They take people."

"Take them where?"

"I do not know. They come, and they look, and they choose, and they take. The ones they do not take, they leave."

"Has anyone come back?"

The older woman was silent for a moment. Then she said, very quietly, "No."

Bruce let that sit.

He looked around at the small group. None of them met his eyes after that. Whatever they had been telling each other in the time before he arrived, this was a topic they had already exhausted and chosen to stop discussing. He could see it in the way their shoulders were set.

"Thank you," he said. "For telling me."

The older woman nodded once. Then she looked back into the middle distance, and the conversation, by some unspoken agreement, was over.

Bruce walked on.

He needed to think.

He found a slightly clearer patch of mist, not safer, he understood now, but less crowded, and stopped there to put the pieces together.

The mist was eating people. He had seen it with his own eyes on the baker. The older woman, who had been here long enough to have a story, was being eaten more slowly but was still being eaten.

The screaming soul in the distance had stopped screaming some time ago; Bruce did not let himself look in that direction to find out why.

The mist felt good to breathe. That was the trap.

It came in cool and refreshing, and it cleared his head when he drew it in, and every breath of it made him feel a little better, and that was exactly the problem. Whatever this energy was, whatever it was made of, it was invigorating on the way in and consuming on the way out, and by the time you noticed the cost, your edges were already soft, soon you’ll turn to mist yourself and drift with the mist too...