Chapter : 753

“It is a tragedy,” Lloyd began, his voice a low, somber murmur. He was staring out the grimy window at the moonlit alley, his expression a perfect mask of troubled contemplation.

Sumaiya paused her work, looking up at him. “What is, Zayn?”

“The whispers,” he said, not turning to face her. “The ones you spoke of. From the palace. I heard them again today, from a merchant who was delivering linens to the upper city. A story so sad it chills the soul.” He let the statement hang in the air, a carefully baited hook.

Her shoulders slumped slightly. She knew exactly what he was talking about. “Lord Qadir’s son,” she said, her voice soft with a sorrow that was clearly genuine. “Tariq. A sweet boy, by all accounts. Full of life and laughter. Or he was.”

“They say the Royal Physicians have given up,” Lloyd continued, slowly turning from the window to face her. He had filled his eyes with a profound, almost overwhelming empathy, the look of a healer who feels the pain of all the world’s suffering. “They say the alchemists have exhausted their arts. They are simply waiting for the end. A great house, with all the power and wealth in the kingdom at its disposal, and they are as helpless as the poorest weaver in the Coil. It is a cruel irony, is it not?”

“It is a monstrous injustice,” she replied, her voice laced with a familiar, fiery anger. “To have everything and to be able to do nothing. I cannot imagine their pain.”

“I can,” Lloyd said quietly, and the lie was so profound, so layered with the truth of his own two lifetimes of loss, that it felt more real than any fact he had ever spoken. “To be a healer and to hear of such a case… it is a special kind of torment. It is a failure of our craft. It gnaws at the mind.”

He walked over to his small shelf of medical texts and pulled down a thick, leather-bound volume—one of the advanced anatomical atlases his mother had given him. He opened it on his desk, the pages filled with intricate, beautifully rendered diagrams of the human nervous system.

“The symptoms the merchant described,” he mused, tracing a delicate network of nerves with his finger, “a creeping paralysis, a slow wasting of the muscles, a fever that does not break… conventional medicine sees these as separate ailments. The physicians try to cool the fever. The alchemists try to strengthen the muscles. They are treating the leaves of the tree, but they cannot see the rot in the root.”

Sumaiya came to stand beside him, her curiosity piqued by his intense, academic focus. She looked down at the complex diagrams, her brow furrowed. “And what is the root, in your view?”

This was the critical moment. The planting of the seed.

“It is a theory,” he said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, as if he were sharing a dangerous, heretical secret. “Unorthodox. The kind of idea that would have me thrown out of the Healer’s Guild for blasphemy.” He looked up at her, his eyes burning with a passionate, intellectual fire. “What if it is not a sickness of the body at all? What if the body is merely the battlefield? The symptoms—the fever, the wasting—they are just the smoke. The true fire is a sickness of the spirit. Not a curse, not a demon, as the priests would say. But a… a disharmony. A knot in the very energy that gives us life.”

He was weaving a beautiful, compelling fiction, a perfect fusion of this world’s spiritual beliefs and his own advanced, scientific understanding. He was describing a neurological autoimmune disorder in the language of a mystic.

“Our Spirit Core,” he continued, tapping a diagram of the human torso, “is the heart of our vitality. If something were to cause it to… misfire, to attack the body’s own systems instead of protecting them, the results would be catastrophic. The body would begin to consume itself. The physicians, looking at the physical symptoms, would be utterly blind to the true cause. They are trying to rebuild a fortress while a saboteur is still inside, tearing down the stones as they are laid.”

Sumaiya stared at him, her dark eyes wide with a dawning, electrifying comprehension. His theory was radical, it was insane, and it also made a terrifying amount of sense. It was the first explanation that seemed to fit the strange, inexorable nature of the boy’s decline.

“A spirit that attacks the self,” she whispered, the concept both horrifying and brilliant. “Is such a thing even possible?”

Chapter : 754

“Anything is possible,” he replied. “We simply lack the vision to see it.” He closed the book with a soft, final thud. “But it is all just idle speculation. A theory from a humble doctor in the slums. Who would listen? To even suggest such a thing to a man like Lord Qadir would be an insult. He would have me flogged for my arrogance.”

He turned away, a mask of deep, intellectual frustration on his face. He had presented the problem. He had proposed a revolutionary, unique solution. And he had established the insurmountable social barrier that stood between that solution and the dying child.

He had planted the seed. Now, he just had to wait and see if the compassionate, determined, and incredibly well-connected woman beside him would be the one to water it.

---

Lloyd allowed the silence to stretch, a heavy, contemplative blanket settling over the small clinic. He had presented Sumaiya with a revolutionary idea, a concept so far outside the bounds of conventional healing in this world that it bordered on the arcane. He watched her from the corner of his eye, seeing the intense, focused look on her face. Her mind, which he knew to be sharp and analytical, was grappling with the implications of his theory. She was not just accepting his words; she was dissecting them, testing their logic, searching for flaws.

“If your theory is correct,” she said at last, her voice a low, thoughtful hum, “if the boy’s own spirit is the source of his illness… then how could one possibly treat it? You cannot cut out a man’s soul with a scalpel.”

“You cannot,” he agreed, turning to face her fully. He adopted the tone of a passionate scholar, a man so consumed by an intellectual puzzle that he had forgotten his humble station. “A conventional approach is useless. You cannot fight fire with fire. You must use water. You would not treat the body at all. You would treat the spirit. You would need to… soothe it. To recalibrate it. To gently untie the knot in the energy, not cut it.”

He began to pace the small room, his movements filled with a restless, creative energy. He was no longer just planting a seed; he was cultivating it, showing her the beautiful, impossible flower it could become.

“Think of it,” he said, his eyes distant, as if seeing something only he could. “Not with potent, violent potions that shock the system. But with something far more subtle. Harmonic resonance. Certain crystals, when struck, produce a tone that can calm a troubled mind. Certain herbs, when burned, release an incense that can quiet a raging heart. What if there is an alchemical equivalent? A treatment that doesn't attack the sickness, but persuades the spirit to heal itself?”

He was speaking utter, glorious nonsense, weaving a tapestry of mystical-sounding concepts that had no basis in any reality, his or hers. But he delivered it with such profound, unshakeable conviction that it sounded like a revelation.

“It would require a level of diagnostic precision that is… unheard of,” he continued, shaking his head as if at his own audacity. “One would need to perceive the spirit directly, to see the disharmony, to identify the precise frequency of the imbalance. And then one would need to create a counter-frequency, a specific, tailored remedy for a single, unique soul. It is not medicine as we know it. It is… more akin to the art of a master musician, tuning a priceless, impossibly complex instrument.”

He finally stopped his pacing and looked at her, his expression a perfect blend of intellectual excitement and profound, tragic frustration. “But, as I said, it is a dream. A fantasy. The ravings of a madman in a slum clinic. The great Lord Qadir would listen to his Royal Physicians, with their ancient texts and their expensive, useless elixirs. He would never risk his son’s life on the radical, unproven theory of a nobody like me.”

He let out a long, theatrical sigh and went back to his desk, slumping into his chair as if the weight of his own brilliant, useless ideas was too much to bear. “We can save the poor souls of the Coil, Sumaiya. We can mend their broken bones and cool their fevers. But the gilded cages of the great houses… their doors are closed to men like me. The boy will die. And all the knowledge in the world cannot save him.”