"Y....es? I - think I'm missing a lot of context here. Is that going to be hard to get–" 

She stops herself. 

"- Actually, never mind. Answer that question in a minute. Just stay with him and - do the thing you're doing." It's magic. It's totally flaming magic, isn't it. "I need a minute to take care of something." 

Merrin ducks out of the tent and stifles a shriek. She forgot about the CORPSES STANDING AROUND STARING. She's not sure how she forgot that, it's kind of memorable, but to be fair there is a lot going on right now. 

She manages not to scream and instead to emit only a quiet, strangled "eep", and then she takes ten seconds to catch her breath. 

Glares at the stupid corpses. 

"Tsi-imbi," she says, clearly and very grumpily, "and if this is some kind of horrible LARP, it's not funny and I'm angry about it." 

...Merrin wishes she were more surprised by the fact that nothing happens. The corpses do not seem moved by her commentary. 

She turns around and stumps back into the tent. "Sorry. I just had to - check something. Any change?" 

"No, Mistress Foreigner. Do you want this useless one to boil water?"

Merrin would really like it if he stopped saying that but having that discussion is probably not a priority.

(Is this a fiction trope? If so it's not one from a genre she has any familiarity with, not that this is saying much. It's not that she dislikes reading, exactly, it's just that she's been intently focused on her career ambitions since she was fourteen, and grinding her way to being okay at her job despite her disadvantages has taken a lot of stubbornness and diligence and extra hours of study, and not left very much time for side hobbies. Most of the fiction she does consume is medical-themed.) 

"Yes, please. And find me sugar and salt. I'll stay with him. I - have a lot of questions - but I think we should deal with that first." 

And she is going to take the opportunity while he's out of the tent and she doesn't need to worry about keeping him calm, to tug aside various bits of blanket and examine the unconscious kid more thoroughly. She's confused and worried about the bleeding; the rest all fits with the scanty medical history she's been informed of, but neither starvation nor dehydration nor lack of sleep should cause that, so the least-worrying scenario is that he...fainted and fell and bit his tongue in the process? And the more worrying explanation is that he picked up some serious injuries. She's not sure how but maybe it has something to do with the WALL OF DEAD PEOPLE STANDING AROUND outside the tent. Her local guide might not know, given that he confessed to not having been around that much. 

(She is quietly hoping in the back of her mind that this isn't real and she's about to wake up in a hospital somewhere having miraculously survived an unsurvivable plane crash, but she's no longer really expecting that to happen. Which mostly leaves her anticipations full of ?????????? and noise.) 

The teenage boy looks at a flute on the floor, and then Merrin, and then the flute again, and then the unconscious boy, and then Merrin, and then apparently decides to go find water and salt and sugar.

Before he leaves, he bows and says, "Zhuren's courtesy name is Wei Wuxian."

Wei Wuxian is extremely pale and emaciated; she can see a somewhat terrifying number of his ribs. He's covered with scars, including several which seem to be human bite marks and others which seem to be from attacks, with weapons and without. He doesn't have any recent injuries.

He moans softly as she's examining him.

(...What is up with the flute. It looks like a normal musical instrument to Merrin. Or, well, actually it doesn't look like anything she's ever seen before, but it's a plausible design for a flute in Bizarre Low Tech Magic World. She's not sure what the boy is worried about. She can ask him LATER.) 

This is concerning. Merrin has concerns. She is making a mental list of them. The signs of old injuries aren't an immediate medical concern, but she's updating that the broader situation they're in is probably a medium-term medical concern. For herself as well as her patient. She needs to obtain clarification on what's going on here as soon as the other boy gets back from his water-collecting mission. 

Moaning is a promising level of responsiveness. With a bit more concerted effort she can maybe wake him enough to actually consume some homemade oral rehydration solution, which is an urgent priority because he's clearly very dehydrated as well as emaciated. His skin is cold to the touch, which she suspects is mainly because he isn't producing much body heat, due to this being a metabolic process that requires calories. She gets him wrapped up again with every single blanket in the tent, and since the other boy isn't back yet - Merrin is very fast at examining people - she moves on to tidying up the floor so she can move around more easily, stacking all the papers and notebooks in one pile and the clothes in another and shoving the dubious half-eaten bits of food into a corner. 

He returns. "Mistress Foreigner, this unworthy one has built a fire outside, if that's all right?"

He looks terrified at her cleaning, opens his mouth to say something, thinks better of it, and closes it.

"That's fine." 

Merrin notices his look of terror. It's hard not to notice. "I, um, are there things in here I should be careful about touching? I'm just trying to clear enough floor space that I can actually move." 

"Oh, Mistress Foreigner, Zhuren doesn't like it when things move so he can't find them. This slave can put it back when you're done?"

"- I'll apologize to him about it when he's, um, actually conscious enough to care. I think finding his things is not his biggest problem right now." Merrin is slightly mystified at how the level of chaos from before would make it easier to find anything but people have different preferences for personal organization. 

She sits back on her heels. "He's not immediately deteriorating. I'm not going to try to wake him until we have some safe water ready for him to drink. In the meantime, do you think you can keep an eye on the fire and answer some questions I have at the same time? I have - kind of a lot of questions. I'm from somewhere....very different from here, I don't know how I got here except it clearly has something to do with the plane crash. But you shouldn't assume that I know literally anything about what's going on, even if it seems very obvious to you." 

"Yes, Mistress Foreigner, this unworthy one can do his meager best to answer your questions."

"Thank you." 

Merrin reminds herself that this boy is clearly incredibly freaked out and scared for his friend's survival, and she should be gentle and reassuring and NOT immediately dump all of her confusion on top of him. 

"So the first thing is - I am a trained paramedic, but I suspect that the practice of medicine is very different where I'm from. I don't know what a 'cultivator' is or - why that affects whether someone can drink contaminated water without getting sick. Where I'm from, nobody can go without food or sleep, but it sounded like you were saying that people here can, to some extent, which means I am probably missing some things about how.....biology works. I don't have the faintest inkling of an explanation for the, um, corpses standing outside this tent– I assume they're dead? They look very dead. Also it - looks like there's a major violent conflict going on around here? Or something? That seems important to have some background on." 

"If you cultivate-- uh, meditate and study and train martial arts?-- you can control the flow of qi through your body and use it so you don't get sick or need to eat or sleep or age, and if you're particularly good at it you can't die at all. The corpses are because zhuren is the grandmaster of demonic cultivation. He figured out how to control resentful energy so we can control fierce corpses and not just suppress them or lay them to rest."

Right. Magic. Great. 

Well, Merrin doesn't actually need to have a model of how she got here in order to learn some ground facts about here and start trying to make sense of them. Probably. 

"I see. And you were - giving him your qi, before? Does that help when someone is sick?" 

"Yes, Mistress Foreigner. More qi helps along the body's natural healing processes."

Which makes about as much sense as anything else, once MAGIC is on the table. Merrin nods. "And you can see qi and use that to tell how badly off he is? ...I can't. See qi, I mean. I guess probably most doctors here can. I'm just trained to pay attention to lots of other things." 

"You don't know how to sense qi, Mistress Foreigner?"

"....No. I don't know if it's a thing that exists in my world. We don't have cultivators, either. And we do have people who meditate and do martial arts so I think someone would have noticed." 

- could she learn it, now that she's apparently stuck here? Merrin has no idea if that's how things would work, given that this entire situation is already violating her sense of how things work in a dozen different ways. It sounds useful. And intriguing. Also terrifying. 

"- Um, if there's a trick for doing it, you could try to explain it to me and I'll see if I can pick it up?" 

"It requires many weeks of training, Mistress Foreigner."

"...All right. Not something that makes sense to try now, then." The concept of still being here in many weeks feels VERY FAKE. Merrin isn't sure if this is a reasonable way to feel or not. 

She looks down at the unconscious boy, and picks at the edge of her sleeve. "...I think maybe you should tell me the thing that might be relevant to his treatment but that you want to keep a secret. Since I'm, um, now a lot less sure that any of the laws and medical ethics I'm familiar with would even apply, here, I - think I'm more comfortable promising that I won't tell anyone. Although it'd help if you can say why it would be very bad if I told anyone. Please don't assume it's going to be obvious to me. Absolutely nothing about this place is obvious to me yet." 

"--Zhuren doesn't have a golden core, Mistress Foreigner, and you can't cultivate without a golden core."

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah this is confusing worldbuilding. Merrin hates confusing worldbuilding. She was just starting to have enough moving pieces to put them together into predictions and now she's TRYING to make that fit and it DOESN'T and her attempt at building a model of the magic is grinding to a halt. 

"....I think I need you to back up and flesh out more how the cultivator magic thing works. I - thought you said before that he's the master of, um, demonic cultivation. Whatever that is. But if you need a...golden core, whatever that is, to do magic here, then I don't understand what he's doing with the dead people." 

"You need a golden core to produce your own qi from inside of you, Mistress Foreigner," Wen Ning explains, "but demonic cultivation uses resentful energy produced by ghosts and fierce corpses."

"What.....is 'resentful' energy? I think there's a weird translation thing going on there. Who or what is it resentful of. Also what are the problems it causes if you can't produce qi in your body and, um, how does not having a golden core even end up HAPPENING." 

"Resentful energy is the energy of ghosts and fierce corpses and other dead people? It is called that because the more full of hatred and resentment they were in life the more powerful they are after death. Zhuren is as weak as a non-cultivator-- he can't fly and he gets sick from bad water and he'd die if someone ran him through with a sword. Not even a spiritual sword-- uh, a magic sword that non-cultivators can't use-- a regular sword."