They were taking stock of the medical supplies again with the help of natural light.
“The U.S. military rations—this one’s an empty box, this one’s empty too, huh. There are some here. One, two……”
“Pile the disinfectants over here. All right, one little, two little……”
Thump. Scratch, scratch.
Each of them counted in their own way and recorded the numbers in a notebook.
In the middle of that, Kim Hyeokgwon spoke first.
“The medical supplies aren’t all that plentiful anymore.”
“We’ve performed a lot of surgeries lately.”
“That’s true. But why hasn’t Doctor Jeong, who went to check the generator fuel, come back yet?”
Kim Hyeokgwon asked a little curtly.
“He’ll test the generator, check the electronics, and come back.”
“If we focused on one thing, at least one job would get done faster.”
“He’ll be here soon.”
Taesu answered at once.
It was because Kim Hyeokgwon was extremely on edge, and he did not want to provoke him.
Then Kim Hyeokgwon called out to Taesu again.
“Doctor Choi, what is this?”
“What is?”
“I’m asking because I don’t know. I just found it myself.”
“Really?”
Swoosh.
Taesu turned around with a puzzled expression.
Right behind him, Kim Hyeokgwon was holding a paper box.
On the outside, antiseptic was plainly written.
If he still did not know, then the contents must be something else.
Taesu immediately peered into the box.
Inside the box was another white paper box.
“Hm?”
Thud.
When he reached in and took it out, various English words were written on the outside.
They were not medical terms, and they were certainly not familiar drug names.
“What is this?”
Taesu held the box up to the sunlight and examined it slowly.
It was then.
Twitch.
Suddenly, Taesu’s eyebrows twitched violently.
Not only that, his expression gradually brightened.
Soon, he smiled so brightly his mouth nearly split open and shouted.
“I-I found ginseng!”
Taesu expressed his surging emotions in a booming voice.
At the utterly out-of-the-blue reaction, Kim Hyeokgwon frowned and grumbled.
“It doesn’t even look like it has roots, so what wild ginseng are you talking about?”
“This, wow. Haha. This is totally—wow.”
“What is it that you can’t even say?”
Kim Hyeokgwon could not understand Taesu’s intense joy.
At that moment, as if perfectly timed, Jeong Minsu entered the tent.
“The generator test is done. We have enough fuel for about two surgeries.”
“You worked hard, but please come suffer a little more over here.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
Jeong Minsu tilted his head just like Kim Hyeokgwon.
At that instant, Taesu quickly held out the white box to Jeong Minsu.
“Look at this.”
“What is it?”
“Just look.”
Thud.
Taesu shoved the white box so close it almost bumped into Jeong Minsu’s face.
Jeong Minsu, puzzled, scanned the English written on the outside.
Soon, his eyes widened just like Taesu’s.
“W-wow. This, is this for real? Wahahaha.”
“I’m telling you, it’s real. Hahaha.”
Taesu and Jeong Minsu even burst into hearty laughter.
Kim Hyeokgwon was only more dumbfounded.
“What on earth, did you doctors only pack your luggage and leave your minds behind? If it’s good news, let me in on it so I can laugh too.”
“Hyeokgwon, this is huge.”
“So what is?”
Kim Hyeokgwon seemed to be getting irritated.
Taesu quickly told him so they could share this joy.
“This is a reagent set.”
“Your pronunciation sounds strange. Don’t you mean a new drug?”
“No. Not new drug, reagent. A reagent.”
Taesu deliberately switched languages to emphasize it.
Even so, Kim Hyeokgwon looked bewildered.
“All right. A reagent set. So what?”
“Taesu explained it too roughly. This is a reagent set for blood tests.”
“Huh?”
Kim Hyeokgwon’s eyes widened as if he understood.
Jeong Minsu quickly nodded and added.
“Yes. The reagent set you use when testing blood samples.”
“The precision is a little lower.”
“But it still gives approximate values.”
“Exactly. Hyeokgwon, now we don’t have to send blood samples to NGO headquarters.”
Taesu’s voice was unusually lively for once.
Jeong Minsu looked around here and there, then raised his voice the same way.
“Looking at this, it’s definitely the work of internal medicine.”
“Right?”
“They’re the type to sneak something like this in. Those wickedly kind people.”
“It might have been Doctor Wallick, or maybe Doctor Gallion.”
“Our respected internal medicine doctors, I love you. I love you so-sausage.”
Flash.
Jeong Minsu turned toward the direction of NGO headquarters and even raised both hands high.
This had been one of their biggest concerns.
Now that it had been solved, expressing such joy was only natural.
While the two of them were drunk on joy like that,
Kim Hyeokgwon had not yet joined in.
Instead, after thinking deeply about something, he asked.
“If you drip that reagent onto blood, do you get the results?”
“What kind of question is that? Originally, when doing a blood test…… Huh?”
Taesu, who had been about to explain smoothly, suddenly clamped his mouth shut.
Jeong Minsu, who had been rejoicing beside him, froze as well.
“Ah, a centrifuge.”
“Damn it, and here I thought we had something good.”
The two men’s expressions changed 180 degrees in an instant, turning into despair.
In order to properly use the reagents, the blood first had to be separated into plasma and blood cells.
The machine that performed that role was a centrifuge.
But they did not have one.
No, it was too early to despair.
Taesu’s eyes suddenly blazed.
There was no way they had included only the reagents.
There had to be a centrifuge hidden somewhere that they had simply failed to find.
“Minsu, search.”
“Uwooo, let’s search.”
The look in their eyes changed.
They saw nothing else.
Filled only with the thought that they had to find it, they dove straight into the medicine boxes.
Crash, bang.
The carefully organized boxes were thrown into disarray in an instant.
Kim Hyeokgwon could only watch as the tower of boxes he had painstakingly stacked collapsed.
“These crazy—”
Even he was stunned by what had happened in an instant.
But only for a moment.
Whip, whip.
Kim Hyeokgwon shook his head, came to his senses, and shouted.
“What is wrong with you doctors, seriously?”
“Hyeokgwon, hurry and search too.”
“Stop scattering everything.”
“I don’t know, later.”
Whoosh, whoosh.
Taesu and Jeong Minsu paid him no mind and kept turning the place into a mess.
“Ugh. Those troublemakers.”
At some point, Kim Hyeokgwon was clutching the back of his neck and trembling.
And a short while later.
Taesu and Jeong Minsu were neatly stacking the scattered medicine boxes again.
Their expressions were gloomier than if they had chewed on something foul.
Thump, thump.
The sight of them moving only their hands with faces as if they had lost the whole world was enough to drain the strength from anyone watching.
Just as their disappointment suggested, they had not found a centrifuge.
No, since they had searched every inch, it was more accurate to say there was none.
“It’s not here.”
“It wasn’t there.”
“Who said we wanted an expensive one?”
“There are plenty of cheap models too.”
They grumbled, but the result did not change.
Thump, thump.
As wretched as they felt, their movements in organizing the boxes rapidly slowed.
Kim Hyeokgwon’s icy nagging rained down on the two of them.
“Doctor Choi, aren’t you going to move faster?”
“Doctor Jeong, stack them properly. Don’t just toss them on.”
Flinch.
Taesu and Jeong Minsu hunched their shoulders and quickly busied their hands again.
They could not even look at Kim Hyeokgwon as he shouted.
The gaze they felt from him now could not even be compared to that of a wild beast.
Those eyes were gun barrels.
It felt as though he would shred their entire bodies with machine-gun fire at any moment.
Taesu and Jeong Minsu had caused a huge mess, so they could not make a sound and obediently moved their hands.
They were continuing to stack the boxes when—
Clatter.
“Oops.”
Kim Hyeokgwon’s startled voice rang out.
Whip.
When they quickly turned their heads, the reagent boxes were scattered.
It seemed he had made a mistake while trying to place them on top of a box.
With his face flushed, Kim Hyeokgwon grumbled for no reason.
“I was looking at you people, and, huh? Ahem.”
“We didn’t say anything.”
“You made me do the work twice for no reason, so I…… Hm-hm.”
Kim Hyeokgwon, watching their reactions, placed the scattered reagents into the box.
Then he held up a thick piece of paper.
“What is this?”
“What is it?”
Swoosh.
Taesu approached him and examined it closely.
It was rectangular, with circles drawn on both sides that could be detached.
There was a hole in the center of each of the two circles.
Not only that, there were grooves cut along the radius.
“What on earth is this?”
Looking at it like this, no particular use came to mind.
Swoosh.
Taesu looked at the reagent box.
That reagent box did not normally contain such components.
Then it was reasonable to guess that someone had put them in separately.
As Taesu’s imagination began to spread its wings in his head,
Kim Hyeokgwon held out a plastic bag.
“These were in there too.”
“What are these now, thread, tubes?”
The thread was not suture, and the tubes were far from catheters or artificial blood vessels.
They were ordinary silk thread and silicone tubing.
Even comparing them with the paper, no obvious connection appeared.
“What could they possibly be?”
“There shouldn’t be anything here without a reason.”
While the two of them were pondering,
unexpectedly, Jeong Minsu offered a solution.
“Then we can just try making it.”
“That’s a good idea.”
Taesu laid the components out on top of the box and assembled them by instinct.
Tap, tap-tap.
He fumbled a few times, but soon everything found its proper place.
He overlapped the two pieces of paper, and the silicone tubes fit perfectly into the grooves.
Then he connected the silk thread through the holes in the center.
When he was done, the shape was familiar.
“A string top?”
“What’s that?”
Kim Hyeokgwon looked at him in puzzlement.
Taesu demonstrated it himself.
“If you pull the strings on both sides like this, the circle in the middle spins like a top.”
Whirr, whirr.
After he pulled it a few times, the circular paper in the middle spun fiercely.
A string top had a strange magic to it.
A magic that made you stare endlessly at it as it whirled around.
And that was all.
Seeing it, Kim Hyeokgwon spoke bluntly.
“Is it a toy or what?”
“It is fun to watch.”
“If I keep watching it spin and spin, my eyes are going to spin too.”
At those words, a bell rang in Taesu’s head.
“Rotational force, in other words, centrifugal force……”
“You said it was just a string top in the end.”
Jeong Minsu came over and glanced at it.
At that moment, Taesu suddenly shouted loudly.
“That’s it. Right.”
Jeong Minsu quickly covered his ears and snapped in anger.
“Ah, why all of a sudden?”
“This string top. It’s a paper centrifuge.”
“Huh?”
“Didn’t you see that medical article? The paper centrifuge introduced as appropriate technology. The one some physics professor in America came up with.”
As the excited Taesu rapidly explained, Jeong Minsu thought for a moment, then opened his eyes wide.
“The person who developed that paper microscope—right. They said it could be used as a centrifuge.”
“This is that thing.”
Whiiing. Whiiing.
When Taesu spun it even harder, Jeong Minsu’s eyes grew round.