395: Chapter 395 Muzewakuru

"Line up." He said in the Makhuwa language, his voice not loud, but it drowned out the sea breeze and the chatter of the women gathering clams on the mudflats.

No one lined up.

The fishermen stood ten meters away, barefoot, clutching empty fishing nets, watching him.

Their eyes held no hostility—hostility required energy, and their energy had already been drained by hunger and malaria.

It was a dullness that had settled after being repeatedly deceived, like coral stones rounded by the constant washing of seawater.

João took a blister pack of artemisinin combination tablets from his medical kit, tore open the foil packaging, and poured the tablets into his palm.

"This is anti-malarial medication. Twice a day, a three-day course. Fever, chills, joint pain—eat it for three days and you'll be fine. It's free."

The old man with the missing finger standing at the front of the crowd stared at the pills in his palm.

The pills were white, round, and imprinted with the olive branch logo of Dawn Pharmaceutical on the surface.

The old man had seen anti-malarial medication before—three years ago, Doctors Without Borders had set up a temporary clinic in Mueda, and the pills they distributed were also white, but that was a different kind of white, without logos on the surface, and were counterfeit drugs wrapped in thin plastic film.

Those pills were bought by Jial's people from underground drug dealers in Maputo, mixed with half starch; eating them didn't reduce the fever, only made people thirstier.

"No money." The old man repeated these three words, his tone not questioning, but chewing—he was ruminating on the taste of these three words, like chewing a wild fruit he had never tasted before.

João placed the pills in the old man's palm.

"Take the first one now. Take the rest according to the instructions. If you still have a fever after finishing them, come back and get more."

The old man's palms were as rough as old ship planks, with indelible fishing net fibers embedded in his cracked palm lines.

He looked at the pills, silent for a long time, then fished out a chipped plastic bottle cap from his pocket, carefully poured the pills into it, tightened the cap, and stuffed it back into his pocket.

He didn't eat it on the spot—he had to see if others would die after taking it first.

A young woman holding a child squeezed in from the back of the crowd.

The child was convulsing in her arms, lips purple, forehead as hot as a stone just pulled from a fire.

João pulled back the child's eyelids—the eyeballs were rolled up, pupils sluggish to light, typical symptoms of cerebral malaria; waiting another half day would mean death.

"Put him down." He pointed to the sandy ground next to the folding table.

The woman knelt down and placed the child on the sandy ground.

João opened the bottom layer of the medical kit and took out a palm-sized silver device—it was a portable all-in-one diagnostic and treatment machine produced by the System, shaped like a thickened tablet computer, with a retractable scanning probe on the back.

He pressed the probe against the child's temple and pressed the start button.

The probe emitted a very fine blue light, scanning along the contour of the child's head.

A string of Swahili diagnostic results popped up on the screen: Plasmodium falciparum infection, cerebral malaria, parasite density 12%, early signs of renal failure present.

Recommended treatment plan: intravenous artesunate, plus assisted dialysis.

The onlookers, the fishermen, saw the blue light and instinctively took a step back.

The old man with the missing finger's lips trembled, and he muttered something in the Makhuwa language—João heard it clearly; the old man said "witchcraft."

He didn't explain.

The medical pod's built-in algorithm would automatically prepare the intravenous solution based on the diagnostic results.

He took a disposable infusion set and a glass vial pre-filled with artesunate from the medical kit, found the barely visible vein on the child's thin arm, inserted the indwelling needle, secured it with tape, and hung the infusion bottle.

The whole process took less than three minutes.

Then he turned on the medical pod's dialysis assistance module.

After the module unfolded, it was a palm-sized metal disc, which he placed on the child's lower back over the kidney area.

The nano-scale filter membrane inside the disc began to work, absorbing free hemoglobin and creatinine from the blood through the skin—no punctures, no extracorporeal circulation tubes.

The onlookers, the fishermen, didn't understand the principle, and João didn't need them to.

He only needed them to see the results.

Forty minutes later, the child's lips turned from purple to pale pink.

The convulsions stopped, the eyeballs returned to their normal position, and the breathing changed from rapid gasping to even rising and falling.

Then, the child opened his eyes and called out "Mama" in a hoarse voice.

The woman knelt on the sandy ground, her forehead against the child's, her shoulders trembling violently, without making a sound—it was crying, but without tears; her body was already so dehydrated that she couldn't squeeze out any excess moisture.

The old man with the missing finger slowly squatted down, took out the plastic bottle cap from his pocket, poured out a pill, put it in his mouth, and swallowed it dry.

"What is your name?" he asked in the Makhuwa language.

"João Mutale."

"Mutale." The old man repeated the surname, and his tone suddenly gained another layer—not trust, but a touch of extremely distant, dusty memories from decades ago.

He looked up, watching the scar on João's face, "Your mother—was her name Fatima? The one who ran a clinic in the town of Palma?"

João paused.

The memory implanted by the System was triggered externally at this moment, his pupils rapidly contracting and relaxing—that was the physiological reaction of memory matching, simulated by the System to be precise down to the firing sequence of neurons.

"Yes," he said, his voice a little softer than before.

The old man's breathing suddenly became heavy.

He reached out to touch the scar on João's face, but pulled his fingers back before touching the skin.

"Your mother saved my son's life. In 1998, cholera. She was still distributing medicine three days after her clinic in Palma town was burned down—your family, they were all in that fire—"

"They all died," João said.

These three words were squeezed out from between his teeth, short, calm, each syllable pressed flat without intonation.

The old man was silent for a long time.

Then he stood up, turned around, and said a sentence to the more than one hundred fishermen watching behind him.

He said the heaviest word in the Makhuwa language—"Mze wa Kulu," which means something like "Atavistic Prophet," but in the oral tradition of the Makhuwa people, this word specifically refers to those saints who are possessed by ancestral spirits and can both heal and prophesy.

That afternoon, malaria patients from Mueda village and three surrounding fishing villages formed a long line.

João treated them one by one with the medical pod—falciparum malaria, vivax malaria, mixed infections, accompanied by roundworms, hookworms, and schistosomes.

The medical pod's diagnostic speed was so fast it left the patients dumbfounded; the probe would scan, and in three seconds, results would appear, five seconds to prepare the medicine, and ten seconds to complete the injection or oral administration.

By dark, he had treated one hundred and seventy-four people.

He didn't charge a single cent.

After nightfall, Mueda village did not quiet down.

Monotonous drumbeats came from the coconut grove—the elders were sacrificing to their ancestors; the drumbeats traveled from the sacrificial post under the breadfruit tree, through the coconut grove, across the beach, and all the way to the direction of the abandoned lighthouse.

João sat on the stone steps of the lighthouse, listened to the drumbeats for a while, then opened the satellite communicator and reported to Zhang Cheng.

"The medical pod has consumed 40% of its medicine supply. 400 portions of rations have been distributed. The old man's name is Sebastião; his grandfather participated in the 1964 Mozambican War of Independence and fought the Portuguese on the Makonde Plateau. He has prestige in this area—he called me 'Mze wa Kulu' today."