The morning was quiet, and I was sipping my warm tea by the window when I noticed a gathering of people at the castle gates. They weren’t the usual bustling servants or tradespeople; no, these were villagers. Crowds of them, and they didn’t look good. There was coughing, a few people clutching their stomachs, some who looked pale and shivery. Curiosity tugged at me, but a deep unease crept in as well.

What exactly was going on in the duchy?

My mind flickered back to my days as a chemical engineer. The world I came from had its fair share of health issues, but we had ways of containing them. If people were showing up en masse at the castle for medical help, something had to be off. The itch to investigate was too strong to ignore, so I decided to go check things out myself.

The smell hit me first when I entered the infirmary. It was a thick, sour odor that clung to the walls, mixed with a layer of sweat, dirt, and something distinctly… infected. The room was dim, barely lit by a few candles that cast long, ominous shadows across the faces of the ill villagers. They lay or sat on makeshift beds, wrapped in tattered blankets, coughing and wheezing, while others looked blankly at the floor.

“Lady Liana, are you unwell?” one of the servants asked as I entered.

“Oh, no, just...observing,” I replied quickly, hoping to mask my shock. The physician, an elderly man with a stooped back and a wispy beard, shuffled from patient to patient, muttering incantations and dabbing a damp cloth on people’s heads.

I clenched my fists, noticing the lack of clean supplies. He didn’t wash his hands as he moved between patients, using the same cloth, which he dipped into a bucket of murky water between each use. The sight made my skin crawl. This wasn’t medicine—he's making it worse than it usually is.

The physician didn’t seem to mind my presence, so I watched him work. He was diagnosing a young man with what he claimed was “bad air in the blood” and prescribed him a mixture that smelled like stale herbs and, to be honest, didn’t look effective at all.

“How long has he been sick?” I asked one of the nurses nearby, a girl no older than fourteen.

“Oh, not long, Lady Liana,” she said. “Just a few days since his fever began.”

“Just a few days?” I muttered, horrified as the physician handled the boy’s wound—without gloves, of course. He didn’t sanitize it, and worse, he didn’t clean his tools afterward. The only protection he used was a strip of cloth, which was neither clean nor fresh.

When I could stand it no longer, I finally asked, “Don’t you find it... helpful to clean between patients? It might lessen the spread of illness.”

The physician glanced up, chuckling. “Lady Liana, you speak like the doctors from strange lands. Here, we know the causes of disease—it’s the air, the imbalance of humors.” He turned back to his work, leaving me to silently catalog every unsanitary move he made.

“Bad air,” I muttered under my breath. If he had any clue about germ theory, he might see the reason these people were getting sicker by the day. Instead, he was spreading germs with every touch, practically dragging the sickness from one person to another. Frustration simmered in me. I’d learned restraint since coming here, but seeing this felt almost criminal.

Then, a young girl, perhaps eight or nine years old, was brought in, wincing as she held her bandaged hand. Her mother was explaining to the physician how the wound had started small but had turned red and swollen over time.

“It began on her hand, and now it’s traveling up her arm, sir,” the mother said, her voice trembling.

The physician looked at the wound and frowned, then muttered something about balancing the body’s elements. He went to dab it with that same dirty cloth, and I couldn’t help myself.

“Wait!” I interrupted, stepping forward, trying to maintain my composure. “Perhaps it might help to rinse her wound with fresh water before applying anything.”

The mother’s eyes lit up, as if she’d finally heard something sensible. But the physician only grumbled, saying, “Water does nothing for the humors, Lady Liana.”

The little girl looked up at me, her eyes hopeful, and I felt a pang in my chest. In my world, this could’ve been treated in minutes with antiseptic. Here, it was turning into a life-threatening infection. The people didn’t know any better, and neither did their so-called medical expert. But I knew, and that made it hard to stay silent.

I overheard the girl’s mother explaining how her husband had first fallen ill, then her older son, and now the girl had this infection. This poor family was battling a spread of infection that could’ve been prevented with just a hint of proper hygiene. Every instinct told me to step in and do more than stand by.

As I left the infirmary, my mind was racing. I couldn’t unsee the filth, the lack of awareness, the way the physician didn’t even understand the basics of hygiene. There was a method to this madness, and it was spreading like wildfire.

I clenched my fists as I walked back to my quarters, replaying everything I’d seen in my head. The infection on that girl’s hand, the “bad air” diagnosis—how many of these illnesses could be prevented by simple handwashing and basic sanitation practices?

In my previous life, I had been a chemical engineer, driven by the desire to improve hygiene standards. Here, I was Lady Liana Valen, daughter of a Duke, and perhaps in a position to make even bigger changes than I’d ever dreamed. What if I could help prevent some of these sicknesses before they began?

As I lay in bed that night, my mind drifted back to the villagers I’d seen that day. They were my people now, the people of this duchy. And whether they knew it or not, they needed help. Real help.

The castle physician might scoff at my methods, but if I could make just a few changes, I knew I could make a difference. Maybe I wasn’t just here by chance. Perhaps there was a purpose to my reincarnation in this world.