Doctor Seong sat by the window of her carriage, eyes shut, conscious of nothing but the silent manor door approximately thirty ja thence. The coachman thankfully maintained the silence, at her command. But the blustery breaths of February, damn them, would not heed, and so she concentrated. Anything but open the curtain to look.
Then and there came the scrape of the door's timbers sliding open. Doctor Seong huffed and stepped out onto the swept flagstones leading to the manor door, where a black-robed butler regarded her with wide eyes.
"Madame, I would have…" He paused as she marched unbidden onto the front porch. "...I would gladly escort…"
"I do not need help getting out of my carriage. Show me to Magistrate Yu, and do not take my jacket. I do not intend to take long."
He did as she bade him, suppressing his astonishment and mild indignation at her consecutive breaches of propriety. Happily for the doctor, the magistrate, a portly little sparrow of a man dressed little more colorfully than his butler, was right there in the foyer, leaning on a buffet table.
"Doctor Seong Min-Ji, your lordship." The butler bowed in turn with their guest, while the magistrate returned it only woodenly, always with a leering eye on Doctor Seong. It was, to her, an unremarkable reaction. She had all the porcelain beauty of the petite little ladies the men in her life favored, save that she stood tall enough to look most of those men in the eye, as she did without exception.
"Good afternoon, Doctor Seong. Thank you for answering my humble request. His Majesty is most gracious."
"Good afternoon. I understand you are concerned about some sort of disease outbreak at Gasan."
Magistrate Yu eyed her. "That is correct. I gather that you seek precise detail. According to the village headman, the unwed daughter of a potter… I think her name was Seo-Hi… the girl has rather suddenly grown inordinately fat and gluttonous. It is reported to me that she is now… eugh… too large to re-enter her father's house, and the villagers drove her off into the mountains as she was attempting to devour the contents of a neighbor's granary."
Doctor Seong narrowed her eyes at Yu, tilting her head. "A bizarre case indeed. Did your man suggest this change to be communicable?"
Seeing a chance to lord over the doctor's ignorance, the magistrate tilted his own head with a look of carefully veiled derision. "Clearly it must be, Doctor. The girl has borne no noteworthy qualities whatsoever until this very incident. And if it is communicable, I should like very much for it to be quashed before my province is struck by an epidemic."
She saw no profit in debating the plausibility of such a disease with him and settled for trying to wring out any information she could on the situation. Such droplets were few and far between, filtered through a nigh-impermeable sieve of lordly disinterest. At last, she asked for a map of the province and any documentation on the case available. She received them with the required politeness, promised to do her utmost to settle the matter, and returned to her coach.
By evening, Doctor Seong's coach meandered into the riverside hamlet of Gasan; she reclined with her eyes shut against the burning orange glow of the river and the snow and the jostling thatch rooftops.
"Driver, find a local and stop them for me."
"Yes, ma'am."
He succeeded after but a moment or two, and Doctor Seong opened the curtain just wide enough to peek through. The local, a bent, gaunt man who reeked of fish, bowed as was proper. He stayed low, his eye flitting upward from moment to moment, as she studied him in silence. Some decorum could be sacrificed for the public good. At last, she was satisfied.
"Good evening. I am Seong Min-Ji, physician to His Majesty King Sejo. Where can I find your headman?"
The man exhaled tightly, turning a little pale. "Thank heavens you've come. Headman Gi-Ung's house is on a terrace… the first one on the left, on the road heading up the foothills."
"Thank you. Good journey to you, sir."
He bowed low and Doctor Seong retreated again behind her curtains. After another short ride, the coach stopped.
"This looks to be it, ma'am. The right door's closer."
Per her driver's suggestion, she climbed out of her carriage and started for the house… a nice one, for a commoner. Some fifteen ja high, thirty ja to a side, perhaps a small rain garden in the center. She pulled her jacket tight against a tumbling, goose-bumping mountain wind, soon to be countersigned by the hot aroma of stewing eggs and vegetables as she approached the front door. She cleared her throat.
"Good evening! I am Doctor Seong, come from Seoul per Magistrate Yu's request. Is a Mr. Gi-Ung home?"
Heavy footsteps promptly answered her, and the door slid aside to reveal a stocky man with stubs for a few of his fingers, already nodding at her with wide eyes. "You've come! Please, come in! Oh, I've got a lot to tell you."
He stepped aside and in flowed Doctor Seong like water. She took a seat by the glowing firepit and soon enough, her host presented her with a bowl full of hot stew.
"Forgive me, doctor. Earthenware is the nicest I have."
"It'll do. Now, I was told you'd have some information for me about a disease outbreak in town."
"Yes, doctor." He sat. "I described the situation... briefly... in my letter."
"Yes. Some potter's daughter gained a substantial amount of weight suddenly and developed an unsupportable appetite. You said you had cause to believe it was communicable. Why do you think that?"
Gi-Ung's eyes widened and he looked down for a moment, composing himself. "With all due respect, erm... Mr. Yu misquoted me. The girl... Cho-Hi... did not grow in that sense. One morning, it appeared she had gotten taller. As tall as my house, in fact. Um..." Gi-Ung scratched his temple. "The part about her appetite was correct. We chased her into the mountains after she broke into a neighbor's granary."
Doctor Seong's eyelids dropped as she stared in silence. A giant. How whimsical. Suddenly becoming obese overnight wasn't much more plausible, but she supposed it was silly not to expect some fairy tale embellishments from these fish-smelling peasants.
"It’s not strictly that I believe the girl's condition is communicable, either. Rather, I strongly suspect some medical phenomenon is at play."
Her eyebrows rose. "Oh?"
"Cho-Hi often wanders the hinterlands around town and... not to speak ill of the girl, she has a reputation as rather too adventurous an eater."
"She's, er, not quite right, frankly."
Now she had something to think about. Gi-Ung was clearly no physician, but the clarity and foundedness of his reasoning nevertheless surprised her.
"I see. If that's the case, the vector for her... condition must've been something she ingested that she shouldn't have."
"I figure it must've been, yeah."
"And when you drove her out of the village, where do you imagine she might’ve gone?"
He thought for a moment, bobbed his head to and fro. "There's this huge grotto in a narrow valley just east of here. Directly south of a small shrine along the road."
"I see. Do you know of any other symptoms that manifested around the same time as the girl's sudden outburst?"
"I don’t have much occasion to interact with her directly."
"Do you know for sure she had recently visited the hinterlands prior to the onset of the symptoms?"
"Well, no, I couldn't tell you. I saw her helping her father but I wasn’t watching her closely."
Just as the thrill of the puzzle was starting to bubble in the doctor's mind, the headman's repeated "I don't knows" to every question she asked threw cold water on her temperament. Nevertheless resolved at the path forward, she finished her stew, thanked her host, sent her coachman off with a few coins to find an inn to sleep in, and shut herself in Gi-Ung's guest room with her notebook. Somehow, she would find the light that cast the shadows of her witnesses' ignorant testimony. Doctor Seong slept well that night.
The next morning, after reconvening with her driver, she gathered her medical supplies and set off on the road into the foothills. At least the headman's directions were clear and shortly proved accurate– at a small shrine, skirted with snapped-off icicles, she glanced up into the clear morning twilight and saw a valley hardly 400 ja wide. She stared as its peculiarities gradually revealed themselves.
First, just beyond the lumpen packed snow of the road, a single set of enormous footsteps turned off and headed into the deeper powder of the valley. Jaw hanging open, Doctor Seong approached one and sidled around to study it. Its morphology was doubtlessly human. What confounded her was the dimensions; entertaining the whole hullabaloo for a minute, it did appear to her that these would roughly correspond to a woman about fifteen ja tall.
Now this was a puzzle.
Second, her eyes followed the trail of oversized craters in the snow and beheld wisps of white smoke snaking up into the sky, from under one of the tallest hills she could see, just around a bend. The conclusion in her mind was inevitable. Thus she steeled herself to trudge through the snow, thanking the high gods she thought to put on a second pair of trousers.
The valley was quiet. The birdsongs were distant, though of course the thick snow would dampen them anyway. There wasn’t even much crunching under Doctor Seong's boots, as she noted just how hard each giant print had packed the snow.
A third thing drew the doctor's eye as she rounded the corner. Hardly knowing it, Min-Ji slowed her steps and her breath alike nearly to a stop. A nude young woman was curled up, asleep, beneath a cavity in the smoking hill. The tips of her fat, squashed breasts were tinged a faint orange from a dying fire and she lay with her arms wrapped around her middle. But she certainly wasn't fifteen ja tall.
No, as the frozen Min-Ji took in an extended foot that was more than twice as long as the good doctor was tall, she realized the sleeping woman had to stand at least eighty.
She looked closer, for that was all she could do, and saw a small pile of shorn young trees lying in front of her slowly pulsing stomach. Skewered on those branches were the roasted and half-eaten remains of six deer and two tigers.
Breathe, Min-Ji commanded herself as she shook like a shitting dog. Breathe. One. Two. Three. Breathe. I am calm. Breathe. I am relaxed. I will use my powers of reason to defeat this conundrum. One. Two. Three.
She shivered still. Everything she thought she knew crumpled at the mere sight of the nude colossess, and all that remained was the sensation of a strange mix of divinity and monstrosity. Did this being have a beating heart and entrails and all the beautiful latticework of human life? Or had Min-Ji been condemned to die in the cold wilds on a lie?
Suddenly the giantess shivered and Min-Ji yelped as she staggered not to fall.
The floodgates of those dreadful eyelids came unstuck. Blood cold as February hammered Min-Ji's eardrums. A dreamily silent scream scraped her throat.
She fully fell as her patient hoisted herself up on her elbow and stared blearily at her, lips parted. Min-Ji tried to claw herself backwards through the snow with numb fingers. The giantess got on her knees now, shaking the ground too much for her to move at all, and then she rose, and rose, and rose into the sky, snow-flecked hair tumbling past the crest of the hill.
Min-Ji had never seen anything so large that was not a land feature. She stopped trying to get away– at least she'd take her dignity with her.
The titanic girl stared sleepily and unbroken down at her... two more thunderclaps through the snow as she approached.
"Are you... a doctor?" Min-Ji winced at every syllable. Birds scattered in the distance. "You've got an apothecary case. And a nice dress."
Seizing at a moment to assert her footing, Min-Ji gave a brisk nod as she searched for words.
"I am..."
"Um, my name's Cho-Hi. Oh, sorry. Am I talking too loud?"
When the light throbbing in her temples cleared, Min-Ji took a deep breath and slowly clambered upright. She brushed off her outer skirt and cleared her throat.
"Good morning, Cho-Hi. I am Doctor Seong, physician to his majesty King Sejo. I've come to..." She squeezed her hands together behind her to stop the shaking. "I've come to cure you."
Suddenly Cho-Hi's eyes widened with a manic spark. "Yes!" She ignored Min-Ji's gritting teeth. "Cure me, I beg you, your ladyship! I've been terrified for days that I'd never see my dad or grandma or grandpa again!"
"Wel-"
"And it's freezing out here, and the worst part is I'm starving, all the time! I ate half a herd of deer yesterday and still, my stomach just hurts so-"
"CHO-HI!"
Despite her life briefly flashing before her eyes, the quivering doctor looked up to see the overgrown girl covering her mouth, eyes wide.
Unsure herself just what the hell she was doing, she shouted up at the woman in all her apocalyptic might one more time. "Kneel down! I need to talk to you!"
Cho-Hi nodded and obeyed, though Min-Ji couldn't help but be aware how much closer those massive hands now were.
"Now list- liste-" She breathed deep. "Listen. If you want to be... back to normal, you have to do as I instruct you. First, when I ask you a question, d-do not respond with words unless absolutely necessary. If you must speak... keep it at a whisper. Nod if you understand."
Cho-Hi lowered her hands to reveal pursed lips, and she nodded vigorously. Min-Ji tried not to notice the pounding, landslide dance of her chest as she did. The gods had bestowed Cho-Hi exceptionally generously in that regard, and if the injustice wasn't obscene enough, each fat teardrop, prickly and pointed in the cold, was bigger than the carriage Min-Ji rode into Gasan with. Nevertheless she began to regain her ground, adjusted her posture and formulated a plan.
"Good. Here is how it will be done: I will ask you some questions to help identify the root of this condition. You will answer them fully and honestly with all relevant information you possess. Understood?"
Cho-Hi nodded. On the ground, Min-Ji felt a slight breeze.
"Next, I will conduct an examination of your person based on the information you can confirm to me. I will then formulate and administer a remedy."
Lips pressing tight together, Cho-Hi nodded one more time.
"Good girl. Now, the questions."
Min-Ji by now expected next to nothing, but to her surprise Cho-Hi corroborated everything the headman had claimed. Walking through the forest bordering the river, she had been foraging for food and ate only some wild berries and some sort of low-growing flower.
"Do you often eat raw wildflowers?"
"Sometimes. It’s one of the few foods that don't make a fuss when I eat it." Her voice dropped lower and huskier from what was, for her, a whisper. Each word nevertheless brushed hot wind over the doctor's stony countenance.
"Do you have any history of digestive issues?"
"Not really, no. But I've got this spiritual trait. A priest told me it's very rare."
Doctor Seong suppressed an eyeroll. "Which is?"
"With most foods, when I eat them, I can hear them in my head begging me not to."
"Pardon?"
"Or crying, or screaming sometimes."
Min-Ji looked away. "That... must be a hard way to live."
Cho-Hi scrunched her lips. "I had to get used to it or I'd starve."
The February wind was her only reply for a long moment or two.
"I see. Now that we understand each other, please lie face up on the ground and I'll begin the exam."
She winced. "In the snow?"
"If you'd prefer to be indoors, I'm afraid his majesty's palace would not admit you at this point. Perhaps you should've waited until spring to do this to yourself."
The gargantuan girlish face above her morphed into a furrowed scowl that sent a shiver through the doctor; she silently prayed it was too small to notice. But then Cho-Hi looked away, her expression morphing into baleful resignation, and she eased herself down onto her side and then onto her back.
With one long exhale, Min-Ji grimly surveyed the task before her. Her apartment in the palace did not cover half this much real estate. She noted how the girl's chest rose and fell over a full ja as she contemplated climbing on her to examine her heartbeat. Despite herself, her eyes stuck on Cho-Hi's fully monstrous teats as they sagged to either side.
How am I to conduct a proper exam? I can't even stretch my arms that wide! I can only afford to take the most rudimentary measurements. This will require-
She jolted out of her mental fortress at the sound of cannonballs spilling upon a mountainside. Min-Ji looked to see that beyond an open mouth the size of a doorway, rows of snaggled, yellowish teeth whirred and smashed together with perilous vigor. Then came the sound of whipping wind as Cho-Hi feverishly rubbed her upper arms.
"I'm sorry Doctor, but could you please make this quick? I'd like to make another campfire."
"I will try."
She would fail.
As easy as it was to read Cho-Hi's drumbeat pulse when the doctor finally found purchase on her supine body, the finding of it worked Min-Ji harder than she perhaps ever had been in her life. The girl's constant shivering preempted most attempts as the tremors made a task of so much as standing near her. It was ironic, then, how the substantial heat rolling off her body... at hour two Min-Ji laid her jacket on a rock off to the side... rapidly melted the snow under and around her, turning a consequential slice of the valley floor into a grassy soup. Min-Ji tried to ignore the heavy gaze on her as she left muddy prints on the girl's skin.
Though Cho-Hi mostly had the slim, concave figure to be expected of an unwed peasant girl, her neck was almost as thick as Min-Ji was tall, adding to every attempted climb the throbbing of the doctor's own neck and the futile flailing of her shoes. One or two shivers just as she finally mounted her gargantuan patient sent her right back down into the mud. Min-Ji took to muttering her father's old quotes of the Lotus Sutra to herself to choke down the scream that threatened to burst through her clenched teeth instead. Despite the cold, she began to sweat lightly. Somehow, even through a curtain of lukewarm mud, the doctor was increasingly working through the enveloping aroma of peanuts and stewed beef... also to be expected of an unwed peasant girl. In all, it took everything she had not to retch and pass out from exhaustion. Morning melted into late afternoon.
And then came the growling.
"Excuse me, Doctor."
She sighed, declining to meet Cho-Hi's gaze. "Yes?"
"Are you... almost done?"
"Yes. I just need to collect some fluid samples."
"Okay."
After a second or two, Cho-Hi began thrumming her pine-trunk fingers on the ground. The muscular vibrations forced Min-Ji to pause.
"Please stop."
"Sorry..."
Another moment, another growl. It was as though one of the tigers she'd eaten were somehow still alive in there.
"By any chance did you bring anything for me to eat?"
"You can live for several days without food. Once you've started to recover you shall be well-fed."
Cho-Hi pouted up into the sky. "What I was able to gather yesterday didn't fill me up much, even when I was smaller."
Min-Ji didn't reply.
"I'm starving all the time... I worry about what I'll do for food if I can't be cured soon."
"Cho-Hi, hold still for a moment. I'm going to get my razor and collect a small blood sample."
"Yes, Doctor."
So doing... and it was some doing, trying to saw through Cho-Hi's epidermis as they both winced lightly... Min-Ji wrapped a couple rolls of linen around the fingertip.
She excused herself to jot down notes from her examination, and granted Cho-Hi's petition to go look for more deer.
Min-Ji spent the rest of the daylight recording observations atop a nearby rock, scribbling theories to herself and refuting them one by one. She frowned at the realization that the dialogue had also spent nearly all of her ink. A brutal drumbeat in the earth at sunset announced Cho-Hi's return, a stack of ripped, stripped tree trunks under her arm and a lump of slain fauna in her cupped hands. The giantess regarded the latter with vacant eyes and her mouth shut tight.
Cho-Hi's dinner passed in silence. All the while, Min-Ji continued to fight within her mind, pride and reason alone against the howling massed hordes of animal instinct telling her to flee to the warmth and safety of civilization. She studied the giantess from a distance adequate only to the purposes of observation. She blinked as Cho-Hi began to rip apart the roast venison kebabs. Beyond the curtain of falling droplets of drool and gristle, nestled just below the archway of her ribs, something cast the faintest shadow against the firelight. A couple small, brief bumps... small on her, anyway... just out of step with the rhythm of her breathing and swallowing. Min-Ji watched rapt, her analytical centers a-roaring... but the movement did not surface again, and soon Cho-Hi finished her meal.
Cho-Hi settled the doctor's internal debate when, in a lower whisper than before, she intimated her fear of sleeping alone.
The battle was reborn anew when Min-Ji contemplated where exactly to sleep. The obvious choice by the fire was in fact two choices: either so close so as to roast in her sleep, or soaking in a pool of meltwater on a whistling winter night. In an attempt at some mental alchemy, Min-Ji deigned to relate her conflict to her patient. After a short conversation, Cho-Hi laid down on her side, laid a palm into the side of her enormous bust, and suggested that if the doctor were willing to put aside decorum for a time, it would probably be plenty warm betwixt her bosom. Min-Ji, in the end, arrived at the same conclusion, biting her lips all the while.
Pressed right up against Cho-Hi's chest proved to be the only spot in her cleavage where Min-Ji could lie down without the weight of her patient's plush flesh crushing the air out of her lungs. But sleep would not come easily even there, as the doctor ironically began to sweat lightly from the sweltering, peanuts-and-beef body heat enveloping her, and Cho-Hi's pounding heartbeat and rasping breaths filled her ears all night. No matter. What she gained was time to think in silence, and think she did. By the time she slipped the veil, the pieces of a plan lay before her.
Min-Ji awoke not to the sunrise, but a rumbling, incoherent mumble from somewhere above.
"Nrk... myhead..."
It sounded a little pained. The doctor just had time to become aware of the increased spaciousness of her sleeping pocket, when her stomach lurched from a sudden and rapid ascent.
"CHO-HI!" She clawed like a drowning cat at the bouncing sides of Cho-Hi's breasts as she shifted into standing position. She nevertheless tumbled out of the bottom and landed, thank the gods, atop a plush thigh. Then came a hand down to scoop her up in her battered, sleep-crusted stupor.
Another lurch as she was lifted up to Cho-Hi's anxious face. She apologized in an unmodified voice, setting Min-Ji's stinging ears to ringing as she tried not to hurl. Cho-Hi's lips kept working feverishly, a little quieter now, despite the doctor's inability to understand a single word. She peered out of her bubble of discombobulation and fixed her view on Cho-Hi's nose to try and center herself. With it, however, came the realization that said nose was now just about as long as she was tall, almost half again what it was the prior evening. Further realizations dawned on her. It took everything for Min-Ji not to hurl as the tight-throated grip of despair filled up her belly. All of Joseon needed Cho-Hi to be cured today.
When the chime in her head subsided... Cho-Hi had stopped talking for a minute... Min-Ji got on her hands and knees, and then forced herself into a proper seated position atop the slightly-tensed muscles in Cho-Hi's monumental palm. She thought she could see as she looked in her patient's eyes, like watching a figure pass into a distant doorway in the night, the ghost of an amused smirk on Cho-Hi's face before resuming her grave mien.
No matter.
Min-Ji related the first step of her plan: first, that Cho-Hi would let her down gently to the ground, so that she could retrieve some herbs in her bag to help induce lactation. As she did this, Cho-Hi was to find the nearest stream or river and dig up a good amount of raw clay from the bank, scraping a thin layer down with her fingers. She was to wash her hands after accomplishing this. The giantess obeyed with a bow, and one more tremulous apology.
Min-Ji promptly gathered the herbs and sat staring at them in her hand in the giantess' brief absence. It challenged her concept of the very word 'absence', though, for Cho-Hi's deep, rock-crunching footsteps to still lap deep and throbbing against Min-Ji's abused ears.
In the midst of preparations, she grabbed her razor.
When she returned, at the doctor's direction Cho-Hi deposited the hog-sized lump of glistening, ruddy clay about ten ja away from the dying fire. Then came the next part of the plan: Min-Ji had her gently lift her up to her face again, and open her mouth so she could toss in her entire stock of bundled galactagogues. Proportionally, they amounted to about half a crumb. It was up to the gods now. Min-Ji had her lower her down again once the herbs were chewed and swallowed, and instructed Cho-Hi on how to manually stimulate lactation. She received the instruction with a quite unsubtle blush, but promptly began massaging herself according to the techniques dictated. Soon, the pinched smile on Cho-Hi's face spoke to her enjoyment as she rhythmically pressed into her yielding tits with her fingers and pulled them until they ached. Her breath, and so the soundscape of the entire valley, wobbled.
For her part, Min-Ji tried to ignore the not-so-soft panting and dripping sounds while the began smearing thick gobs of the wet, frigid clay over every inch of exposed skin. She also formed four small nubs to plug her nose and ears. It was a start, but proved hard to work, and it would need to be mixed with more alkaline materials if the coating was to resist a bath in stomach acid.
This is where Cho-Hi came in– once she was producing, the doctor ordered her to sidle up close and drench her in fresh milk.
"Are you... sure, Doctor?"
"Yes."
"I have to think there's some other-"
"If you do not wish to be dead of starvation within a year, you will do as I instruct you and you will not delay. Is that understood?"
Briefly regarding Min-Ji with consternation and the barest hint of indignance, she nevertheless cupped her hand and went back to working her engorged breast until she began to spray thick cream-colored streams out of her ja-long nipple into her hand.
"That's good. Now... now, gently, very gently, pour it over me."
Cho-Hi nodded. Her hand was not quite full, but nevertheless contained gallons. Min-Ji braced herself.
Crash! Min-Ji winced. She couldn't tell if Cho-Hi could have done it any more gently, now that she was on track to outsize the royal palace in Seoul, but the question didn’t help the new sting on her shoulders. But then, with her traveling clothes already soaked in mud and sweat, what difference did some milk really make? At least it was warm. She began mixing it with the clay, coating her skin with a pale orange paste that would, heaven willing, buy Min-Ji a precious handful of seconds for the final leg of the plan.
"Mmngk... oh... okay. Thank you. Now... lie on your stomach in front of me."
The giantess did so, if clearly puzzled about it. Min-Ji gave herself a second for her faint dizziness to clear after bracing for the accompanying tremors, and then addressed her patient.
"The last thing I need you to do is to place me on your tongue, and then swallow me."
Cho-Hi frowned and stammered wordlessly for a moment. "You want me to eat you? What's been the point of all this?"
"I do not want you to eat me," Min-Ji snapped with a little more quiver than she liked in herself, "I want you to convey me into your digestive tract alive by swallowing me whole." She took a deep breath, squeezing her hands tight together. "You may feel compelled to bite down or... chew me. Resist that instinct, Cho-Hi, or your treatment will fail. Likewise, I probably will taste very... very bad. If at all possible, please suppress the urge to vomit. Even at this height, I may not survive the fall from your mouth."
Cho-Hi nodded along, though by her expression she was not much eased. "Do you understand?"
The trees creaked. Sunrays pierced the clouds.
"Good luck, Doctor Seong."
Without another word, the morose titan scooped Min-Ji into her palm and slid her like a single meager grain of rice onto her extended tongue. It retracted into the wet, copper-stinking cavern. Min-Ji's heart leapt; suddenly the red-ribbed roof rushed closer. A groan of disgust boomed from the throat. The lips curled, then shut. Her ears rang in the black nothing. A moment of silence. Min-Ji snapped herself flat. Everything shuddered. The walls grabbed her, soaking her, wrenched her down.
She slid down and down the mucosal tunnel. She leaned away from the trachea. She must not make any sudden movements. *Plip*. The stench of liquefactive death was unbearable, even through plugs. Her clothes hissed the second she landed. Sweat poured off her. Min-Ji scrambled to remember which way to the intestinal passage. She hugged the left wall, kicking half-melted bones. She hissed. A drop burned on her skin. She touched a hole. She thrust her hands through, pulled. Her muscles burned, fingers to stomach. Screaming from the strain– it opened. She tumbled through.
The hissing quieted– now everything wriggled, walls, floor, ceiling. The small intestine. She was just at the bottom of the ribcage. Hellish noise pawed at her earplugs, squeals, rumbles, surging blood. Her blind eyes watered. She marched on. Every step felt like hours. The villi writhed, grasped around her. How long could she survive the dark?
Suddenly the floor sloped up. Tightened. Inflammation. She crouched down, ran her fingers through the flesh carpet. Slimy skin. A tiny tooth. Min-Ji gasped– the skin wriggled at her touch. She breathed in and out. And she unsheathed her razor. Slow, guided incisions in the dark. Hot blood flowed, not hers. Viscous viscera coated her hands. The slimy mass jerked and moved no more. More cuts to part the mouth from the intestinal wall. She grabbed the thing where she could– it was heavy, pressing sweat from her skin she didn't know was still there. Fueled by nothing her vast medical knowledge could account for, she trudged and dragged the creature back up through the small intestine.
Min-Ji squeezed her eyes shut as she commando-crawled back onto the toad-bumped tongue and the lips opened once more. She summoned just enough strength to roll over the ridge of oversized teeth, and then flopped hard back down into the sweet mud of the mortal world. She heard a yelp, felt it in her guts in fact, followed by a light earthquake as Cho-Hi crawled backwards away. She must have seen whatever thing Min-Ji had excised from her intestinal wall.
The doctor lifted her creaking neck to take a look herself. It was a pinkish, round worm, about the size of a dog, with a distended middle and a translucent nodule half-full of greenish liquid near its mouth.
She then looked up to Cho-Hi, and smiled. "Thank you for your cooperation. The procedure was a complete success."
Feeling herself quite unequal to trudging through the snow again at the moment, Min-Ji decided to stay put and observe her patient for a while, taking pains to retain the details of the case in her mind. The colossal peasant girl, too, found herself inexplicably exhausted, curling up as close as she could manage to the embers of yesterday's tree-fire and falling fast asleep.
As the sun rose over the mottled, half-melted valley, Min-Ji observed the giantess' skin shiny with a cascading sheet of slightly cloudy sweat. Feeling better, but not enough to forgo the caution the case had until then demanded, Min-Ji eventually tiptoed up against the steamy exhalations of Cho-Hi's sleeping face. Her eyes locked on the nose. It was around half a ja shorter than it had been early this morning.
And then Doctor Seong sat, smiling to herself, the strength in the expression restored. Reason always prevailed. She would wait until her patient awoke again, she decided, and then dismiss herself back to Gasan to recuperate before returning to report back to Seoul.
Some recuperation was not only necessary, but well deserved. Her good work had left her battered, burned, utterly depleted, and most of all, absolutely famished.