Republic of Korea, 2030…
Ugh! Castrato Medical Center is peaceful today as well.
“Did you secure the field with suction?”
Even if the operating room is in chaos with alarms blaring about hypotensive shock, isn’t this just everyday life in a hospital OR?
And in a trauma surgery OR, it’s even more routine.
Therefore, one could say the hospital is at peace today as well.
I was humming a tune while putting on surgical gloves when a resident urgently shouted from the operating table.
“Fellow! The patient’s vitals are dropping!”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m working fast too. A baby crying doesn’t make the milk come out any faster.”
Today’s patient is a traffic accident victim run over by a truck.
Having finished my preparations, I looked into the patient’s opened abdomen.
“Fortunately, the spleen is less shattered. But the upper GI tract is completely necrotic. Severe volvulus too. What the hell did they do to twist a person’s insides into a pretzel like this?”
“Apparently there was a slight mishap during rescue after being run over by the truck.”
“How many hours did it take to get to the hospital?”
“About four hours, sir.”
“Can’t save this, no way.”
“Sir?”
At those words, the resident looked at me in alarm.
I realized my slip of the tongue and hastily corrected myself.
“I mean we can’t save the stomach and small intestine. Of course the patient will live. I’ve saved people from worse situations than this.”
Well, I’ve even saved a patient with a bullet in their heart, you know?
And that while the heart was still beating?
Hard to believe?
Even I thought, *Wow, this actually works.*
“Let’s go with a total gastrectomy. Considering we’ll do reconstruction later with Roux-en-Y, leave a little bit. For now, we’re stapling.”
While untwisting the tangled intestines, I stapled and approximated the ends of the esophagus and small intestine.
Finally, I inserted a tube into the small intestine for nutritional supply and created an opening outside the abdomen for waste to exit.
“What did they eat during the day for this stuff to be in their stomach?”
“Won’t they go into sepsis?”
“Eh, infectious disease will handle that. That’s their job.”
Changed gloves contaminated by food matter several times in between.
The surgery ended with suturing the ruptured diaphragm and inserting a chest tube.
“Whew…”
Lowering my mask, I removed my gloves.
“You close up. And—”
I lightly tapped the shoulder of the resident looking at me from the computer.
“Tell Professor Kim in GI. Say I asked him to handle the reconstruction once the patient is stable.”
“Yes, sir!”
“Ah, and don’t forget to take photos of the surgical site and send them along. He needs to know where the feeding tube is so he can avoid it later.”
“Yes, sir!”
“Didn’t I make myself clear? Don’t make us all get chewed out like last time because you forgot.”
“Yes, sir! Understood! Thank you for your hard work, sir!”
“Yeah. And.”
Before leaving the OR, I gave the resident a final warning.
“Admit to GI. If they call, I’ll block them. If there’s a problem, tell another professor. I’m going to sleep through my entire time off.”
The moment I finished in the OR, fatigue crashed over me like a tidal wave.
Checking the clock, 12 hours had passed since I started work.
Hit-and-run, fall, stabbing, and now a truck… all since the morning.
Truly a high-density day.
Ah. Looking again, the date had changed.
Not 12 hours but 36 hours, damn it.
*Fuck. Let me go home now.*
36 hours of continuous surgery.
This isn’t something a human should do.
Then suddenly, I remembered the most important fact I had forgotten.
I immediately went back to the OR.
And called over the medical students blankly observing from the corner of the OR.
“Student doctors.”
“Y-yes, sir!”
“This is a 20 million won surgery.”
“Sir?”
“Trauma surgery fees went up the year before last. When we do one of these, the six of us in this OR split 20 million won. They take out a bit for materials, but we still get a lot, you know?”
“???”
“Plus, if it’s after 6 PM and counts as night surgery, we get almost double. Trauma surgery makes this much money. So? You should do trauma surgery, right?”
At those words, the medical students’ gazes swept over me, the resident, and the nurses in turn.
Heroes soaked in blood and sweat, with dark circles under their eyes.
Isn’t this enough to make you fall in love?
Soon, one of the medical students fidgeted and said,
“I… I’m sorry.”
Ah, why!
*
The moment I got home, I threw myself onto the sofa like a corpse.
I didn’t even have the strength to wash.
“Sigh… I need to sleep quickly…”
But the modern man’s chronic disease had struck.
My body was discharged but my brain refused to rest, screaming for dopamine.
Habitually, I turned on my smartphone.
“Isn’t there any light novel…”
Reality is already a fantasy filled with ghosts, monsters, and patients everywhere.
Thanks to that, trauma patients have been overflowing lately, so trauma surgery has no time to rest.
So I didn’t want to read something gloomy even in novels.
“Something peaceful… and healing…”
Scrolling down, an interesting title in the rankings caught my eye.
#Fantasy #FusionPunk #Misunderstanding #Medical #…etc
“Schnabel? Plague doctor?”
Schnabel.
German for a bird’s beak.
It’s also a word meaning plague doctor.
— [Do not call the Schnabel a saint. It is not a miracle.]
— [Please do not trust the crow doctor. The plague doctor is not the person you think he is.]
I combined the synopsis and the tags.
Misunderstanding and denial… and saint.
Schnabel is the German word for crow.
It’s also commonly used to mean plague doctor.
In other words, the original protagonist was probably a plague doctor who wore a crow mask and went around saving people.
Those around him probably misunderstood him as a saint and revered him.
With my web novel experience.
This much was an easy guess.
*Roughly figured out the original work.*
If the protagonist casually wraps a bandage and prescribes medicine, some Northern Archduchess or Imperial Princess passing by would obsess over him, saying, “You’re the first to treat me like this.”
And the protagonist would be revered as a saint or prophet, and he would find it burdensome and try to escape.
Then get caught again and forced into wealth and glory.
“Living comfortably, this guy.”
While someone here is on the verge of losing his mind sewing up intestines crushed by a thousand-pound truck.
And someone else is the protagonist of a misunderstanding novel who gets praised just for breathing.
I wish I could live like that too.
*Let’s see how this guy lives in another world.*
I immediately opened the prologue.
And before I could even read the novel’s first sentence,
*Crack—!*
Along with that sensation, an excruciating pain as if my chest was being torn open struck me.
A terrible radiating pain, as if a sharp axe were splitting my sternum and piercing through the spine behind my back.
My smartphone slipped from my hand and fell to the floor.
Cold sweat poured down like rain, and my vision flickered white.
*Ugh… damn it… so I was feeling indigestion lately.*
Seeing how I’m going down without even being able to scream… acute myocardial infarction? Or aortic dissection?
I emphasized to those medical students that if a patient complains of indigestion, they should suspect heart disease too.
Yet here I was, thinking it was just a stomachache and looking for antacids.
*Damn… the professorship was right in front of me…*
***
When I opened my eyes, it was another world.
*So I survived.*
I survived in a different sense.
Anyway, I survived.
The name I received at birth was Julian Schnabel.
Seeing the surname Schnabel, I could easily guess that I had possessed the novel I was trying to read.
And as the protagonist, no less.
*I said I was jealous of the protagonist, not that I wanted to become him.*
I was able to directly experience the novel’s settings that I hadn’t been able to check at the time.
This world was a dark fantasy and fusion punk jumbled together.
Humanity, pushed back by demonic beasts and demons, chose to build walls and hide inside them.
Even so, news occasionally arrived that another fortress had been captured.
A gloomy world setting that, if I could choose the priority of possession targets, would definitely be last on my list.
In such a world, the first adult I saw was not my biological parent but a friend of my parents.
Apparently my parents had left me with that person and gone off to the southern front to treat soldiers.
— “Julian. Your parents were truly wonderful people.”
Perhaps because of the kind of world this was.
The parents who went to the southern front never returned.
*Even after reincarnation, why this place of all places.*
This is definitely a reincarnation with many problems in many ways.
But it wasn’t a reincarnation completely full of flaws.
Because if my memory was correct, the work had a “misunderstanding” tag attached to it.
This implied one thing.
*The future is bright, after all.*
I might be a bit unhappy now.
But eventually, the future will be happy.
Even if I only put in a little effort.
So there was no need to be intimidated by temporary misfortune.
*Opportunity will surely come. Until then, I should keep reviewing so I don’t forget.*
I was drawing such a happy future in my mind when suddenly, a chilling assumption flashed through my mind.
Because I remembered where the novel was serialized.
*Wait. If it’s Topvelpia… what gender am I now?*
I immediately looked down.
…Fortunately, it was there.
*Whew… I guess the Crown Prince and the Archduke won’t obsess over me.*
Time passed from then.
One day, while staying in the annex of my godfather’s mansion, constantly reviewing my medical knowledge.
A setting I hadn’t paid attention to crashed into my life.
The bodies of my parents, who had been listed as missing, were discovered.
It was the moment my status as a potential orphan changed to a confirmed orphan.
“Julian. Let’s go meet your parents. At least you should see them off on their final journey, shouldn’t you?”
Upon hearing the news that the bodies had been found, my godfather took me to the southern fortress.
After taking an airship, crossing the demonic realm, and arriving at the southern fortress.
I attended my parents’ funeral there.
I couldn’t see my parents’ bodies directly.
They said it wasn’t a sight for young eyes.
All I could see were two bodies covered in blankets being pulled from a swamp.
Only then did my biological father’s death feel real, and my mood grew slightly melancholic.
Not enough to cry, but enough to need a slight change of mood.
“Julian. If it’s hard, take a walk and come back.”
Thanks to my godfather’s consideration, I took some time alone.
During that time, I happened to witness a scene.
The red water the local guide was drinking.
That red water looked somehow familiar.
So I asked.
“Mister, what are you drinking?”
“Ah, this? It’s tree bark boiled water. When you get a fever here, drinking this makes it bearable.”
It was the drink the local beastman guides helping with the funeral were drinking.
They were frequently drinking this reddish water instead of water.
“It’s a Tyrun tree. Would the young master like to see?”
“May I try some?”
“Here. But will you be alright?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s food that lowly people were eating….”
“These are the people watching over my parents’ final path? I wasn’t taught etiquette that calls grateful people such things.”
“…Thank you for saying that, young master. Here, please drink.”
I took a sip of the water the beastman handed me.
A dry and bitter cocktail taste came from the red water.
Almost like…
*Tonic water?*
A taste I couldn’t mistake.
This was the taste of tonic water.
At that moment, words assembled in my head.
The Demonic Realm swarming with mosquitoes.
A malaria-like fever.
And tree bark that tastes like tonic water.
*Jackpot.*
Combining them all, I concluded that quinine could be made.
Quinine.
The name of the malaria treatment drug.
Europe, which had been unable to colonize Africa due to malaria, was able to dominate Africa after this drug was discovered.
In other words, in a sense, this was a drug that changed the world map.
*This water taste is definitely tonic water.*
Tonic water is a drink made from this quinine.
This dry and bitter taste is subtly addictive, and after making it as medicine, it was eventually used as a cocktail.
*Gin and tonic—* alcohol lovers would probably know it.
Though not many people know that it originated from quinine.
Anyway.
It was no coincidence that I immediately thought of quinine the moment I drank the red sap.
Because this drink tasted like that cocktail.
‘Calm down, Yulian.’
I barely managed to steady my trembling hands.
If I had my way, I would have begun researching the medicine at once.
But this world had a different setting.
Perhaps the disease itself was different, or perhaps it was merely another medicine that happened to taste like tonic water.
So before setting out to develop the medicine, I first investigated the fever on the southern front.
And after compiling the symptoms, I was certain that the Demon Realm’s fever was malaria.
It mainly occurred in regions with many mosquitoes, and the fever rose and fell once every three days.
They were classic malaria symptoms.
On top of that, drinking this red sap made the fever subside.
There was nothing left to confirm.
‘As if being the protagonist of a misunderstanding story weren’t enough, now I get a fortuitous encounter like this too?’
I began indulging in the hopes I had been holding back.
Honestly, I didn’t know whether this was an opportunity meant for the original protagonist.
It might even have been meant for some other supporting character.
But now that I had discovered it, leaving it untouched was not an option.
‘I don’t know if developing it at my age is the right thing to do, but so what?’
I immediately set about developing a malaria treatment.
For the method of making it, I referred to the history of my previous life.
Quinine, the malaria treatment, was born from research into tree bark that African natives used to boil and drink.
.
A European who saw this processed the sap of that tree, creating quinine, the malaria treatment.
So I planned to do the exact same thing in this world.
‘I suppose I have no choice but to figure out the method through trial and error from the start.’
Fortunately, quinine was a simple extract, one of the easiest among pharmaceuticals to make.
If I refined the sap that was already effective against malaria a little more elegantly, quinine would be born.
So it was perfect as my first creation.
Thus, I spent half a year boiling and drying the tree sap to make the treatment.
In the middle of it, I realized that the trees in this world were slightly different from those in my old world and changed course.
‘In my previous life, the raw material was definitely the sap….’
In my previous life, the tree’s sap had been the main medicinal ingredient.
But in this world, the bark had a stronger therapeutic effect.
Thanks to that, I had wasted half a year barking up the wrong tree, researching the wrong sap.
‘So what? Discovering it this quickly is good enough.’
But I wasn’t particularly disheartened.
If anything, I was relieved.
Relieved that I had realized my mistake in only half a year.
From that day on, I immediately began researching the bark instead of the sap.
After that, I boiled and roasted the bark, and from time to time slipped the soldiers some pocket money to run clinical trials.
In the end, quinine was completed.
There was one minor problem.
‘Can I really name it quinine?’
At first, since it was made from the Tirun tree, I wondered whether I should give it another name.
Tinin? Tiro?
But if I did that, I felt like I would be the one to get confused, so I just called it quinine.
If anyone asked about the etymology, I could just say my parents bestowed it upon me in a dream.
“For now, the medicine is complete…”
It was complete, but there was a problem.
With the body of a ten-year-old child, there was a limit to how much I could supply and sell this medicine.
So I was worrying over how to promote it.
— “The family head has collapsed!!”
My godfather, who had returned from an inspection of the south, collapsed with symptoms of malaria.