The suit wasn"t working out for Gren. The lack of communication meant that he couldn"t perform his mission and a revision needed to be made. The only parts that needed to be replaced were the head and chest pieces. Adding microphones and speakers on the helmet while placing the electronics and battery on the chest of the suit allowed him to hear everything that was going on around him. The batteries would last a while but he expected them to die so they were in an easy to access spot. There was the added problem of the radio system adding weight to the suit which made it harder to move in but it was a trade-off that Gren could handle.Switching out the new head and chest piece wasn"t difficult. Gren just needed to take off the arms and detach both pieces from the abdomen piece before putting on the new pieces. The chest piece was especially heavy with the air tank and radio on it but at least now it felt a bit more balanced. After attaching the hoses and wires between the two pieces and turning on the airflow from the tank, Gren was ready to switch on and test the radio. There were two dials on the radio; one for the outside speaker that would pick up the noise from his microphone and one for the headphones inside the helmet that picked up the noise from the microphones on either side of his helmet. It was designed this way to help prevent a feedback loop between the two systems; making sure that the microphones never picked up the audio from the speakers.
After turning on the internal headphones, Gren could now hear birds chirping and the trees rustling that was previously muted to him. He was away from the others but, after turning it up even further, he was able to hear them. It wasn"t completely clear but when he focused he could hear that they were asking the healer what he was doing away from everybody else. "ARE YOU DONE?" The sudden loud voice from next to his head caused Gren"s ears to hurt. He wasn"t sure how Georgia was able to sneak up on him but he definitely turned it up too much.
Gren turned down his own volume and turned on the external speaker. "Almost. I just need to get the volume correct. How do I sound?"
"You"re a bit quiet so it"s hard to hear you. Speak up a little." There"s no way that Georgia would know that the volume of his voice was controlled by the small dial he just turned.
"Is this better?" It was difficult for Gren to judge the sound of his voice from inside the suit so he really couldn"t tell.
"Yeah, but you still sound odd. I can"t tell what"s off about your voice but but it"s like there"s something else in your voice." The radio equipment attached to his chest wasn"t perfect. It was certainly better than what it was based on but, in the end, it was still a vacuum tube radio. There would always be some distortion that Gren couldn"t fix without researching things further. That seemed pointless at the moment since the system already offered him everything he needed. He would rather be without higher-quality equipment than do something that might cause him harm; researching too much might leave him without the system when he needs it, after all.
"As long as you can understand what I"m saying then it"s fine. I just need to make sure that the guy doesn"t move while I"m treating him." The idea of injecting medicines was new to this world. n.o.body could develop a needle with a hole in it that was thin enough to insert into someone"s skin.
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Gren broke the news that he would need to remove the dead parts of the man"s body in order to heal him. He wasn"t happy about it but losing his toes was better than losing his life so he agreed to it. In order to not cause unnecessary pain to the guy, Gren used a mixture of gases that would knock him out first. Although Gren had killed people, the idea of performing surgery was something that bothered him. The guy in front of him didn"t do anything wrong, as far as he knew, so accidentally killing him would mean that Gren was breaking his principles; in his eyes, the innocent should never be killed.
With an unconscious man to work on, Gren produced surgical equipment that was recommended by the system. The skin needed to be clipped away which caused infected blood to get on the tools. That revealed one way that the disease could spread so Gren needed to be careful not to come into contact with their blood. With the dead tissue and bones removed, Gren healed the open wounds and cleaned away the mess using water magic to wash it away and fire magic to kill the bacteria.
With the man still under general anesthesia, Gren went to work inserting the intravenous needle. The saline solution had the antibiotics in it already so Gren just needed to wait for it to start working. This left Gren with the time to inspect the wagon with the infected animals.
All of the animals they had were young but only a few had the disease. The young cattle were all infected while the goats were clean. They were side-by-side so either the goats were safe from the disease or they somehow managed to not get it on their journey so far. As for the cattle, they weren"t showing any external signs of the disease.
The cattle weren"t the only things on the wagon that were infected. There were some butcher"s tools and small cuts of meat found hidden away in a small compartment that had signs of the bacteria; although the bacteria in the meat was already dead. However, the meat had gone bad already so it still needed to be disposed of.
This gave Gren a possible explanation of how the man became infected while n.o.body else did. Either they ate the meat when the bacteria had died or he was the only person that ate it. Either way, it was a mistake to eat the calf instead of the billy. For now, it would be best to inform the others of what happened so that he could figure out what exactly happened with the meat. Winning against the disease would only be possible if Gren could figure out what was causing it.