Outworld Liberators-Chapter 150: The Chance Biscuit Did Not Grasp

Three days had already passed since the ghosts arrived, and they had not stopped moving.

The doctors adapted fast. At first they only watched. Then they started carrying the patients themselves, hauling limp bodies to the cots as if the district had become a forge line and the sick were the iron.

Those who survived the puncture and the draining were handed back to mortal hands.

Scalpels came out. Excess appendages were cut away through plain physical surgery.

The work looked merciful if you stood far enough back. Needle. Wait. Breath returns. Knife. Stitch. Bandage. Another bed. Another miracle.

From a distance, it could have passed for a philanthropic mission.

Up close, Fay saw what it really was. Everyone had a plan. Everyone had a price.

The cured were so thin they looked borrowed, muscle and fat stolen away until their cheeks sank and their ribs mapped themselves under bruised skin.

They suffered, and their suffering became a market.

Agents from each City Lord’s faction pushed into the lanes between tents with baskets and trays, selling elixirs, pills, and miraculous leaves that promised strength, and warmth.

They shouted until their throats turned raw. Their voices became the loudest sound in Highroost District, and it bled outward into Ironcrest Forges, Shopcap Ventures, and Sunkissed Bazaar.

Fay felt sick watching it, not from blood or needles, but from the way people accepted it. As if the world were lying to itself and no one minded.

Relatives clutched their coin purses and bargained like this was normal. Some even thanked the sellers for arriving in time, as if a price gouge came with a ribbon.

Spice Cure did not even frown. Gauge Point watched the shouting like a man watching rain.

Fay swallowed what she wanted to say. If she spoke bluntly, it would sound childish. It would sound like she did not understand how things worked.

So she tried to probe as if she were asking the air and not begging someone to agree with her.

"Do you think this is truly acceptable?" she asked. "Would people not resent merchants who prey on those in need?"

Gauge Point did not answer at once. He kept his eyes on a man leaning on a crutch, face pinched with exhaustion, still reaching for a pouch of leaves.

"Sister Fay," he said, "I think it is normal in a way. Imagine those relatives crossing mountains to buy medicine. This is convenience."

Fay felt something hot push up behind her teeth.

"Then why is it three, no, four, times the market price?" she blurted.

Spice Cure and Gauge Point both looked at her, not offended, just surprised.

"Sister Fay," Gauge Point said carefully, "You do not like merchants, do you?"

Fay opened her mouth, then shut it. Back at the Everwritten Archivists Court, the exchange hall had flat rates.

Clean boards. Clean numbers. A price that did not shift because someone was desperate.

In five months of wandering, she had seen plenty of violence and plenty of hunger, but she had not lived inside the merchantry scene.

Crowds made her skin itch. That was why she had never bothered taking a stroll through Cairnlight Barterhold even when she could have.

Spice Cure did not circle it. She went straight through.

"Fay, listen," she said. "I think you think too lowly and too highly of some things. I know you stole from bandits before."

"Did you ever look at yourself and call yourself a bandit?" "Did you not get rich by taking what they had?"

The words landed like a slap and a lantern at the same time.

Fay’s face heated. Part of her wanted to deny it on instinct. The other part remembered the weight of stolen coin in her sleeve, remembered telling herself it was righteous because the victims were bandits.

She had heard worse than Spice Cure’s bluntness. She had been called crazy. Fanatic. Delusional.

Those insults had never made her change. This one did, because it did not feel like an insult. It felt like a mirror.

She looked back toward the tents. The merchants were still shouting.

The sick were still buying. The healers were still cutting away what corruption left behind.

While Fay wrestled with that, the work did not pause. The ghosts finished most of the infections across the four peaks.

Their white robes grew gray at the hems. Their sleeves smelled faintly of scorched metal from the heated needles.

More than half of the infected still could not make it.

Fay saw the deaths that came even after the puncture worked. Some bodies were too far gone.

Organs turned to ash from within as the corruption demanded energy, eating the person to feed itself.

Some patients simply gasped once, then spat blood that looked too dark, too thick, as if it had been boiled.

Their skin dried and tightened. Their eyes stared without seeing.

The last batches were cultivators. They had internal energy to burn, and so the corruption burned them like a longer wick.

A thousand ghosts working without rest was more than enough to be remembered.

Cairnlight Barterhold was new, but people were not blind.

Those men in white were top fighting forces turned into healers, and that meant something.

It meant sacrifice. It meant sincerity, or at least a convincing imitation of it.

Fay heard the gossip roll through the lanes like smoke.

The mortals who lost loved ones could have aimed their blame at Cairnlight Barterhold.

The old man, Eldric, was working himself down to the bone to build his own city.

Some said he slept standing. Some said he did not sleep at all.

Others whispered that he was nearly alone because so many of his guards were here, and that the previous peak had less than a thousand defenders to begin with.

Later, in an obscure corner of Sunkissed Bazaar, Fay saw how quickly the wind shifted around those who benefited.

Challah stood near a stall post, watching Good Chip, Spice Cure, and Gauge Point as they moved through the crowd.

Their clothes were still pure white. Their cheeks were fed well. Challah gave herself a nod, as if confirming that Radeon had been feeding them properly.

By Challah’s side, Biscuit looked like a man being eaten alive by regret.

His mouth worked as if he were chewing words he could not swallow.

Tears streamed down his face. He hit the ground with his fist again and again until the skin split.

Biscuit was willing to do anything to take back his chance. Kneel. Kowtow. Wail. Anything, as long as it bought him the road he had missed.

Tabulae kept herself half hidden behind stacked crates, small enough to disappear if no one cared to look. 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

Her fingers were bloodied from writing too much. Her eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep. The shadows under them were the kind worn by middle aged scholars and grieving mothers, too dark to belong on someone thirteen.

Notes Radeon had given her were sold for crates of booze, used to celebrate the first man to get a job at Goldkeep Crownmarkets.

Sold like scraps, then toasted like trophies. Every time Tabulae remembered it, she felt like gagging.

Tabulae held a totem in her hand. The girl clutched it so hard her palm bruised around its shape. Her lips moved.

"Please. Please be real. Please help me," she murmured, voice barely there.

Tabulae stared west, at the large green fog that enveloped the horizon like a living thing.

The fog did not care about merchants. It did not care about sincerity. It did not care about guilt.