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Tonight’s story takes you to the edges of medieval Europe, where survival meant offering your own body to the swamp. As a leech collector, you strip down and wade into stagnant water, letting the worms feed on you so physicians and barbers can peddle their so-called cures. The buzzing of flies, the burning of bites, the weight of buckets writhing with your own blood — this is work no one wanted, yet someone had to do. Necessary for others, despised in life, and erased in death, the leech collector’s fate is a forgotten chapter in the history of misery.

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