"Alright, thank you," she replies. "As to my comfort — this probably isn't the time to get into technical details, but I should be able to repair the crystal from in here, given time. Right now, I can't really do much except talk and twinkle — but in a few weeks I should be able to move myself, polish and sharpen myself, etc."

"Perhaps I can help?  This one is Wei Ying, courtesy name Wuxian."  He just couldn't keep quiet any longer.  He had been leaning on a pillar.  After bowing, he quickly returns to leaning on it again.  The pallor of his handsome face indicates that this isn't just a preference for being casual.

"I am a member of the Yunmeng Jiang Sect, one of the preeminent cultivation sects in this land.  We're well versed in spirits of various kinds and a wide variety of spiritual tools."

"I admit I'm unfamiliar with the way spirits and spiritual tools work here, so I don't know how much help they could be. I'm from very far away, from a place with different rules. But it's a kind offer, and I would be fascinated to learn anything you would be willing to teach, in case it does prove helpful," she replies.

She considers asking more about what cultivators here are like — just because the word translates, she cannot assume they are like any particular story — or about whether she can do anything for his health, because Wei Wuxian does not look well. But that's probably better to discuss in private, not in front of a crowd of sword-shoppers.

"I'm sure we both have a lot we can learn from each other."

"I'm sure!" she cheerfully agrees. "Er ... could I ask you to get someone to carry me?"

The other Yunmeng Jiang disciples have easily kept up with Wei Wuxian.  Three have formed a small group near him, including Jiang Cheng, while the rest wait outside of the crowd.  All are easily distinguished by their purple robes and the distinctive bell kept on their belts.

"Tong-jie, could you get her?" 

The purple-clad woman next to him puts her own sword in a loop on her belt.  She approaches Weeping Cherry and picks her up. 

Jiang Cheng mutters about how Wei Wuxian really ought to be made to crawl to the inn on his own after running off like that, but he simultaneously bends in such a way that Wei Wuxian can easily loop his arms around his shoulders.  Wei Wuxian does so.  Now both Wei Wuxian and Weeping Cherry can be carried to the inn.

Being able to perceive individual air molecules gives one really quite extraordinary hearing, but she doesn't comment.

"Thank you again, Qiu Ling," she calls out as they leave the shop. "May the rest of your day be more usual."

Then, in a quieter voice, she speaks to the woman carrying her.

"Forgive me if this is too private a question, Tong-jie, but from what does Wei Wuxian suffer? He is noticeably pale. I have some knowledge of medicine, and I might be able to help."

"He was bitten and knocked around while fighting a monster, then was trapped in a cave for a while.  He has blood loss and several large injuries, and had no food for seven days.  We would normally have preferred to let him rest in the nearest town to there, but... circumstances around the hunt require us to get back to Lotus Pier quickly.  I can tell you the full story later if you'd like."

"... ah. Yes, I cannot help much with wounds of that severity right now," she agrees. "I think I should be able to diminish pain if touched to the area near a wound, if that would help him."

"Although — hunt? What are you hunting?"

"Had hunted," she corrects.  "They - meaning Wei Wuxian, Young Master Jiang, and a few others who have since split off - were hunting the monster that Wei Wuxian fought.  It's dead, now.  I just joined the rescue party to retrieve the ones who had gotten trapped in the cave."

"Diminishing pain will likely be appreciated.  We have meditations and medicines to ease pain but I know from personal experience that they aren't perfect."

One of the cultivators had run ahead to arrange things for them at the inn.  Once they arrive, they immediately get waved to a seating area with enough space for a group of nine humans and one sword.

"Well, no medicine is perfect," Weeping Cherry agrees. "But we do what we can. Would you bring me over to him, so I can explain what I hope to try?"

She does so.

Wei Wuxian has been placed onto a cot.  He does look worn out from the recent adventure, but still clearly interested when Tong-jie and Weeping Cherry come over. 

"Hello, Wei Wuxian," she greets him. "I was just discussing with Tong-jie the possibility that I might be able to help with your pain. I know it's not much, but it might help your recovery all the same. I don't know what customs your medicine-workers follow here, but in my homeland it is customary to describe to the patient what the treatment is and what it entails, and then let them make the final decision. That discussion is also usually private, although you may have people you trust involved if you want to. And no matter whether you accept treatment from me or not, I am required to keep the details of your care confidential, so you need not worry that I will tell anyone else about your choice. Would you be interested in having me try to dull your pain?"

"Those don't fit any medical ethics I'm familiar with.  What if the patient needs treatment but is too stubborn to take it?  Not that I intend to be, I mean just in general. 

"You can dull my pain if you want to, as long as it won't interfere with my getting to ask you questions."  Wei Wuxian glances around the room.  "Everyone here already knows where I was injured.  I suppose if anything else comes up I might want privacy for that, then?"

"Alright," she agrees. "Reach out and touch my gem, so that I can get a look at your blood and choose a medicine that won't hurt you, please."

"And I do have medicines that could probably knock you out, but if you want to be awake I won't use them," she notes. "When patients are too stubborn to take treatment ... well, sometimes, like for children, their parent can give consent instead. But if an adult doesn't want to be treated, why should anyone force them? It's their body and their problem. Plus, the really stubborn ones would just avoid healers entirely, if they thought they might get treated without agreeing to it."

Wei Wuxian thinks he'd know better than any hypothetical patient he'd have, but concedes that not everyone has his confidence.  He's not going to keep arguing when there's interesting things that could be happening instead.

He reaches out and touches the gem. 

And Weeping Cherry gets her first look at the local people's biology.

The good news is that it is ... mostly human, probably. There's some stuff that doesn't make sense, but his blood has the kinds of signalling molecules she'd expect, and that gives her reasonable hope that he will respond normally to painkillers.

The bad news is what those molecules are signalling.

"Have you got a broken bone?" she asks, dealing with the most urgent question first. The miscellaneous inflammation and stress markers are to be expected, really. "Where? I thought I would be able to see a splint."

"Yeah.  Nothing serious though, just a rib or two."

"You do know that if not set correctly, bones can heal wrong, yes? Let me take care of the pain like I mentioned, and then maybe I can look to see if there are any bone splinters to worry about and whether its healing in place correctly," she says, tone mildly disapproving.

She transmutes small amounts of his blood into different painkillers, and watches the adjacent cells for allergic reactions.

"Okay, I've found a medicine that I don't think will cause any problems. It will make you feel slightly drowsy, but you should be able to stay awake. It's a bad idea to participate in combat until it wears off — it is a little bit like being drunk, in how it impairs your reflexes, but it's much better than alcohol for this purpose, because it won't impede your healing or give you a hangover, and it leaves you mostly clear-headed. It will take about 15 minutes to kick in, and then should significantly numb the pain for several hours, depending on how fast your body processes it. To give you a large enough dose, I need a little bit more contact with your blood, though. If that sounds like something you want, then Tong-jie should touch me to the side of your neck, inside of your thigh, or inside of your elbow, where your biggest veins are."

"We do have methods for checking on bones and keeping them in place.  Which is why it's no big deal.  Cultivators get into dangerous circumstances and fight monsters all the time, and our healers are the best."  Wei Wuxian flashes a grin at one of the closer cultivators, an unusually tall man who looks to be in his mid-thirties and is presumably the one who has been patching him up.  "You can check too if you want."

The elbow seems like the least weird of the options, but would likely require unlacing his wrist guards.  Neck it is.  He bares it for them, and Tong-jie complies.

"A little to the left ... there. Just a moment."

She grabs onto his blood and transmutes a measured fraction of it into her chosen painkiller, letting it wash away into his circulatory system. Thank goodness for first aid training and expert systems.

"Okay, all done. Let me know immediately if you experience any nausea. You shouldn't, but if you do it's the sign of your body rejecting the medicine," she informs him.

"If you have your own ways of keeping a bone in place without a splint, then that's fine. I can still take a look if you would like, and identify any problems, but I wouldn't do that just to sate my own curiosity, if you have already been treated by your own methods."

It's frustrating, to have to rely on indirect detection methods to see anything, instead of being able to just check and set the bone instantly.

"Thank you," he says.  "No need to worry about checking on my ribs; they've been well taken care of."

Wei Wuxian had already looked relaxed, but relaxes more genuinely knowing that he isn't going to be in as much pain.  Not that he can't handle it, but he does prefer not hurting.  It frees up some of his attention for the important task of asking all of the questions. 

"Back at the shop you mentioned being from somewhere far away.  Is it somewhere I would have heard of?"

"I would be very surprised if you had!" Weeping Cherry replies.

These people have shown no negative reaction to her objectively very weird situation and healing, so she decides that there's no reason not to be honest.

"I'm fairly sure it was a different world entirely, because my world also had a China, but it was quite different. Plus, if I were in my China, I would still be in contact with my — I'm going to need to introduce a neologism at some point, so it might as well be now — with my forks. We can talk to each other across the entire planet."

"Really, the fact that you speak Mandarin is probably the weirdest part of this whole thing; I was expecting to need to learn a new language from scratch."

"I had been wondering how you spoke our language so well despite being from far away.  Another world, with another China...  How detailed does that go, I wonder - maybe there's even another me!  Though you said that it was very different.  What sorts of differences have you noticed so far?"

"Also, what are forks?"

"Well, we don't have any haunted swords, for one thing," she replies. "Or any cultivators. We have stories about them, but they're fictional. Other than that, the clothing and technology I've seen strongly resemble my China a few hundred years ago at least. I'm not actually a historian though, so there could be more subtle differences that I'm not spotting."

"As for forks — In broad terms, we are all people who used to be the same person. When someone forks, they split in two, with both of them continuing on as independent people. Hence, 'fork', as in 'fork in the road'. Not everybody is comfortable with the idea, and most people who do fork don't do it much. But I get on unusually well with my forks so there are a lot of us. We spread out to work on and learn different interesting things, and then send each other letters and meet back up to keep each other up to date. Everyone will be very excited about this trip when I can send them a letter about it."