Chapter 59: The Moon Goddess!
"ENOUGH!!"
Natasha’s voice cut through the noise like a blade.
Instant silence. Every whisper, every muttered complaint, every dramatic gasp... all of it died imdiately. The rank three doctors who had been inching forward to voice their opinions stepped back.
The patients who had been loudly complaining went completely quiet. Even the snow leopard, still frozen with three golden needles in its skull, seed to hold its breath.
Natasha swept her gaze across the crowd with an expression of a Peak Master.
"This is my tower. I am its master. Don’t teach
how to behave" Her voice resonated as her gaze swept over everyone.
The crowd took a few steps back with their heads down.
Natasha turned back to Tony. Her expression didn’t soften even slightly.
"Tony Clark," she said. "I cannot give you a personal treatnt room simply because you morised a basic healing canon. That is not how this works. Not here. Not anywhere."
"Peak Master, I can..." Tony began.
"I am not finished." She barked directly.
"You will not be allotted a room based on words alone," she said firmly. "Bring
proof of your ability. Until then, the answer is no."
Tony was quiet for a mont. Then he smiled... not the evil grin, sothing more careful.
"Peak Master, the truth is I didn’t start from zero," he said. "My family prohibited
from pursuing healing. But I studied it regardless... quietly, privately, for years. I know more than what’s in that canon." He paused. "I’m not asking you to trust my reputation. I’m asking for a chance to prove it."
Tony directly said all nonsense without any hint of doubt or fear. Creating unbelievable instant lies... that is the speciality of Tony!
Natasha stared at him.
’Was it nonsense?’ Probably. Almost certainly. The Clark family was a martial family... The idea of Tony secretly studying healing arts while everyone labelled him a talentless troublemaker was difficult to believe.
But the herbs had been perfect. The canon had been returned with annotations she hadn’t expected. And he was standing here asking for a treatnt room instead of asking to go ho.
She still had no proof he was lying. And she had no proof he was telling the truth.
’Fine...! Let’s see your actual plan, Tony Clark."
she decided.
She turned her head slightly and called out a na. "Hikaru."
A young woman stepped forward from the back of the long crowd.
Everyone’s heads turned as they all saw a beautiful woman who covered her face with a transparent silk mask.
Hikaru was Natasha’s personal disciple and carried the status of a rank 6 doctor. She was from a Japanese family that had produced healers for generations.
She was popularly known as ’the Moon Goddess’ because of her family lineage. Her reputation inside the Healing Tower was second only to Natasha herself.
She looked at Tony with the asured expression of soone being handed an assignnt they hadn’t asked for and were too professional to complain about directly.
"Hikaru," Natasha said. "Take charge of Tony Clark. Test him, use him, observe what he can actually do. Report to ." She paused. "Don’t go easy on him."
Hikaru bowed once. "As you command, Master."
The spectators exchanged glances. Several of them looked at Hikaru with open sympathy.
"Poor Moon Goddess," soone muttered near the back. "She did nothing wrong and now she has to babysit this disaster?!"
"Honestly this is worse than a punishnt," another whispered back. "At least a punishnt ends. Tony Clark doesn’t end."
Natasha gave a little-cough to silence everyone.
"Tony Clark. Listen carefully." She held up one finger. "One complaint. That is all it takes... one single complaint from a patient, a staff mber, anyone in this tower... and I will personally escort you out of this academy. Not the healing tower. The academy." Another pause. "Do you understand ?"
"Perfectly, Peak Master," Tony said, nodding with an expression of complete sincerity.
Natasha held his gaze for one more second, then turned to leave.
Tony walked calmly toward the snow leopard, reached up, and pulled the three golden needles out of its skull— clean, precise, one after another, in exactly the right sequence.
The leopard roared back to life with a sound that rattled the windows on the ground floor.
Natasha spun around so fast her robes whipped behind her. She stared in shock.
Tony was standing there holding all three needles in his fingers, completely uninjured, and the snow leopard was very much alive and moving and furious but not bleeding from a single point.
Those three needles used a specific sealing technique that Natasha had developed herself over decades of practice. Removing them required knowing exactly which sequence to pull them in, exactly what angle, exactly how much pressure. Pull them wrong and the beast’s blood pressure would spike and internal bleeding would follow within seconds. In so cases it had killed animals twice the leopard’s size.
Tony had done it casually. Bare-handed. Without hesitation. Like pulling pins from a notice board.
’A fluke...’ Natasha told herself firmly... ’He got lucky with the sequence. That’s all.’
She turned back around and walked away without another word, her expression giving nothing away.
Tony tied the snow leopard to a sturdy pine tree near the tower wall. The leopard imdiately tried to bite through it and failed. Tony patted it once on the head, and followed Hikaru inside.
The crowd watched all of this in complete-silence.
"Did he just —"
"He pulled the Master’s needles out by hand?!"
"That should have killed the leopard instantly...?!"
***
By evening, the story had covered every corner of the academy.
And it grew with every gathering of the crowd.
The servants of First Prince Mark Smith were already working hard to use this story. They are spending money in the right places and creating new lies.
By the ti the story reached the outer disciples on Rising Sun Peak, Tony Clark hadn’t just ridden a snow leopard through the academy gates. He had hunted the leopard using junior Clark family mbers as bait, forced them to run ahead of it to tire it out, then jumped on its back while it was distracted. The patient who had been scratched at the gate? Now he had lost the use of both legs. Permanently.
"I heard he demanded a personal treatnt room so he could practice on patients without anyone supervising him!!" a servant near the task board told a group of wide-eyed outer disciples. "The Peak Master refused but he threatened her too!!"
"He threatened Peak Master Natasha?!" soone repeated, horrified.
"That’s what I heard!! And she was so scared she handed him over to the Moon Goddess Hikaru!! Poor Hikaru— she’s basically his prisoner now!!"
"That’s not..." one of the Healing Tower disciples started. But nobody is ready to hear the actual truth.
"I also heard," a third servant cut in, warming to the story, "that he’s planning to use patients in the Healing Tower for experints!! That’s why he wanted the room!!"
"Yes, Tony said himself he’d kill a hundred people a day!!"
"A HUNDRED?!"
"A DAY?!"
The story kept moving with more added drama. Floor by floor, peak by peak, until it reached Sword Peak well after dark.
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