“Mr. Cæ.” The doctor’s tone was gentle and disarming. “I am Doctor Dane, the doctor assigned to your care and recovery.”

Within five minutes of his awakening, Cæ was visited by a doctor and a team of nurses who immediately began tending to him. They stole glances at him with hints of disbelief and incredulity, as if they were looking at a ghost.

And they were.

Cæ’s expression was ghostly.

Dark.

Eerie.

A deep abyss of emotional turmoil lingered in the depths of his gray eyes.

It weighed down on the atmosphere.

“…Mr. Cæ.” Doctor Dane’s tone grew even softer as he tried to coax a response from Cæ. “Are you… having trouble understanding or hearing what I’m saying?”

The doctor gestured towards his ear as a hint of concern appeared on his face.

Cæ’s gray eyes shifted to the doctor with a piercing gaze.

His eyes were bloodshot and wide open.

A perilous intensity lurked in their depths, sending chills across the doctor’s skin.

A single whisper escaped Cæ.

“Lilia.”

The air grew heavy.

It grew heavy under the weight of the emotions that boiled in the depths of his soul.

Sorrow.

Misery.

Despair.

And amid all of them, hope.

The faint light of hope still lingered in the depths of his gray eyes.

The doctor hesitated. “Mr. Cæ... I must insist that we first confirm your condition and state of mind—”

“Where is she?”

The doctor winced.

It was but a whisper.

And yet, it was sharp.

It cut through the well-meaning words of the concerned doctor.

“…Mr. Cæ, we must confirm your state of mind and the neurological function of your mind. Please allow us to perform the necessary tests to verify—”

“No.”

The edge in his whisper grew more intense.

The tension in the air rose as Cæ’s fierce gaze pierced deep into the depths of Doctor Dane’s concerned gaze.

The doctor heaved a deep breath as his demeanor changed.

It grew more solemn.

Serious.

“Mr. Cæ…” The brief hint of hesitation in his eyes was suppressed. “I regret to inform you that Miss Lilia Mandal passed away thirty-six hours after the unfortunate accident. You have my deepest condolences.”

Cæ trembled.

He shook as an endless amount of sorrow and grief crushed his heart.

He knew.

He didn’t know how he knew.

But he knew in the depths of his heart.

And yet, the agony he felt in the depths of his soul was as painful as could be.

Too painful.

His breathing halted, choked by emotion, as his heart palpitated uncertainly. His eyes rolled backward, earning an alarmed grimace from the doctor.

“Patient is going into shock!” He immediately held Cæ down as he lifted his patient’s legs while a nurse hurriedly performed the medical protocols to administer the required first aid.

The doctor pulled out a wand from his robes, one littered with strange symbols that glowed with mana. He pointed the wand at Cæ, murmuring a strange incantation.

“₴₮₳฿ⱠɄ₥ ɆⱧⱤɄ₦₮łɄⱤ.”

A profound and ephemeral light enveloped his entire body.

Magic.

The gentle and warm light of the healing magic stabilized Cæ as he lost consciousness.

And once more, he returned to darkness.

This time, it didn’t seem to last as long as it had the last time.

It wasn’t long before Cæ opened his eyes once more.

For the first time for as long as he could remember, tears fell out of his eyes.

He had hoped that all of it was just a long nightmare.

One that would end the moment he got up.

Perhaps he would wake up with Lilia by his side.

But reality coldly doused his desperate hopes.

She was gone.

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She was gone forever.

He would have to live a life with her absence.

He would have to live in a world without her.

A maelstrom of grief, sorrow, misery, and despair bore down on the depths of his heart.

“Mr. Cæ.”

The familiar old doctor slowly walked before him with an expression of concern. “How are you feeling?”

Cæ’s eyes slowly turned to the doctor beside him.

A single whisper escaped him.

“…Why?”

The doctor was at a loss for words.

“Why did she have to go?”

The old doctor’s expression grew sympathetic. “I’m truly sorry for your loss, Mr. Cæ.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

His tone grew more piercing.

“Why did she have to go?” His gray eyes grew more forceful. “Why didn’t you save her?”

The doctor shook his head helplessly. “We tried our best, Mr. Cæ. I was in charge of both of you as my patients. She had suffered particularly severe damage to her liver, lungs, and kidneys. Far beyond what she or we could have healed with ordinary means.”

“Magic.”

A sharp retort struck back.

The doctor regarded him with a hint of remorse.

An expert magical healer could indeed heal the wounds that the doctor described. Usually, hospitals had at least one of them on standby and on call to administer their services specifically for cases like this.

“I’m afraid to inform you that she… didn’t qualify for magical treatment.”

Cæ’s eyes sharpened with a piercing gaze. “…Didn’t qualify?”

The doctor’s eyes grew more sullen. “The hospital’s magical treatment approval panel judged that she didn’t have enough magicapita for the treatment.”

It was at that moment that hints of old, forgotten rage at the world began resurfacing from their slumber within him.

He despised the way the world worked from the bottom of his heart.

And now, a mind-numbing amount of fury erupted from the depths of his heart, fueled by the grief of his loss.

“They let her die because… she wasn’t wealthy enough?” A chilling whisper escaped him.

“…Her insurance didn’t cover healing magic, either, I’m afraid.” The doctor heaved a helpless sigh. “Emergency aid doesn’t cover healing magic. I did my best to treat her as well as I could, but I don’t have the healing magic needed to heal ruptured and dying internal organs.”

“So… the hospital could have saved her, but didn’t.”

Cold wrath boiled in the undertone of his whisper.

The air tingled.

The atmosphere grew electric.

“Where is her body?” His whisper quivered with grief and rage. “I wish to see her. I wish to see her right now.”

“Mr. Cæ…” The doctor hesitated. “Please calm down. What I need to inform you isn’t going to be easy to digest.”

Cæ’s chilling gaze shifted to the doctor silently.

“I was going to inform you last time, but…” the doctor’s expression grew grim. “Mr. Cæ, you have been in a coma for the past six months.”

Cæ’s pupils quivered with shock as his expression crumbled with horror. “…What?”

“Not only was your body gravely injured, but our tests and scans showed that you had suffered some brain damage as well,” he explained patiently. “Frankly, after the first three months, we were almost entirely certain that you would never wake up ever again. That was why we were deeply and urgently concerned about your neurological state of mind before we answered your questions.”

He stared at the doctor with stunned horror.

“Breathe, Mr. Cæ. It won’t do you any good to fall back into shock.” The doctor placed a hand on his shoulder.

It was only at that moment that Cæ realized that he hadn’t inhaled for almost half a minute, immediately gasping for air.

“Six months…?” His eyes widened with horror. “What about Lilia…?”

He turned to the doctor with a fearful expression.

The doctor lowered his head. “…I’m afraid that, in accordance with protocol, the hospital has disposed of her cadaver. The hospital… disposes of unclaimed bodies after six months.”

Pure fury and rage bubbled up from within the depths of Cæ’s heart. The sheer wrath that erupted within him distorted his expression with vengeance, unlike anything the doctor had ever seen.

“I’m truly sorry for everything that you have suffered through, Mr. Cæ.” The doctor lowered his head lightly. “But I must insist that you let us conduct our cognitive, motor, and sensory neurological tests so that we can identify potential disorders or lapses in your ability and function as early as possible and treat and potentially even heal them as soon as possible.”

Cæ wasn’t even listening.

He didn’t even hear a word the man uttered.

His gaze grew vacant.

His eyes grew hollow.

His body grew limp.

His expression grew empty.

He might as well have been a corpse.

“…How would Lilia feel if she saw you abandon yourself like this?”

Cæ stirred.

As though her name was the key to earning his undivided attention.

Like a magic spell.

“…It would break her heart.” A whisper escaped him as a tear fell from his eyes.

And that was when the full weight of her death truly hit him. Doctor Dane patted his shoulder as he broke down, sobbing uncontrollably at the loss of the person he loved the most.

Tears fell from his eyes.

They fell more that day than they ever had in his entire life.

He had never been an emotive or an expressive person, having learned the importance of not projecting anything other than steely stoicism after all the years he had spent on the streets and the slums.

And yet, today, a dam broke.

A dam that held back an avalanche of emotion.

He broke down with a flood of emotions for the rest of the day in a long-awaited cathartic release of grief and sorrow. By the time he calmed down the next day, it was only because his body physically couldn’t cry any more.

His eyes were so bloodshot that they were light red across the entirety of their corneas. His face was a mess, completely disheveled and unsightly after the tears that he had shed. He was exhausted at the depths of his soul.

And yet, he hadn’t forgotten the doctor’s words.

“…Please conduct your tests.”

“We will get to just that immediately.” Doctor Dane smiled with a hint of relief. “We have detected troubling signs, so we will administer particularly extensive and challenging tests to truly discern whether or not cognitive impairment has occurred or not.”

Immediately, Doctor Dane and a nurse got to work as they subjected him to a variety of neuropsychological tests that measured the countless parameters through which the functions of the mind could be inferred.

They administered tests measuring verbal, quantitative, and deductive cognition to truly investigate in detail whether or not his cognition was impaired or not. They measured his sensory acuity, fine hand-eye coordination, and motor skills to also verify the other avenues of neuromotor impairment.

They expected to find at least some impairment and loss.

They hadn’t told him yet, because of very valid concerns about his mental state and whether it would trigger another state of shock, but the fact of the matter was that his cranium had been deeply injured in the accident. So much so that the hospital had essentially written off any chance of recovery from this particular patient but were still obligated to keep him in care as part of his right to emergency care.

The fact that he woke up alone was miraculous enough.

To be entirely free of any cognitive impairment would be even more shocking.

Yet, what their tests revealed was far beyond anything they could have ever even begun to fathom.

He displayed extraordinary cognitive function.

He showcased an impressive amount of verbal intelligence while his quantitative, qualitative, and deductive reasoning were truly incredible. However, the most extraordinary avenue of cognitive function was his creativity. He displayed a truly otherworldly degree of creativity on the preliminary divergent thinking test that they administered.

“This…” Doctor Dane widened his eyes with bewilderment as he read through the results of the cognitive tests. “This is…”

He understood what he was looking at.

“Acquired Savant Syndrome.”

An extraordinarily rare condition where a non-disabled person developed extraordinary aptitude in a particular domain or field after a brain injury or neurological disorder. For the first time in his entire career, Doctor Dane had run into a patient who genuinely possessed Acquired Savant Syndrome.

An unimaginable boon.

An unimaginable boon that came after an unimaginable price.