An F-Rank Veterinarian Physically Heals an S-Rank Magical Beast - Chapter 62

—————
This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
—————

Chapter 62
The 13th Floor Valley of the Dead stretched endlessly beneath a thick, suffocating mist. Through the absolute darkness where one could not see even an inch ahead, four blazing hooves thundered forward with deafening clamor.
“Uuuugh….”
Hong Ryeon, the Vampire Lord bound tightly with rope in the trunk of the rear cart, could no longer hold back and retched. Her once-pale complexion had turned ashen, and her eyes had lost all focus from the excessive blood extraction. Moreover, Kim Chun-sam, whose lower half belonged to a Nightmare, careened wildly over gravel and mud without discrimination, jolting so violently that even a vampire centuries old was suffering from severe motion sickness.
“Hey, you hunk of scrap metal! Can’t you drive more smoothly?! I feel like my organs are about to fly out!”
“Quiet, boss! If the fare is cheap, you have to sacrifice comfort! Besides, I have no sensation in my hind legs, so I can’t control it! The Nightmare engine output is too high!”
Kim Chun-sam snorted while pawing at the ground with his front hooves. His CPU usage was hitting 99 percent as he struggled to control the explosive magical power and hellfire heat radiating from his new lower half. The Murim Alliance masters piled like cargo on the rear cart also had their faces drained of color from nausea. Even Namgoong Cheon, the patriarch of the Namgoong Family, could only grip the handle of his light sword tightly to endure the motion sickness.
“Everyone, stop complaining. We don’t have time for patients to rest. How much further to our destination, Chun-sam?”
I asked lightly from atop Kim Chun-sam’s back. The only ones unaffected were myself, Yoo Yi-soo, Ma Dong-tak, who was jogging behind the rear cart as exercise and sweating profusely, and Beris, who was flying through the air using levitation magic because of the smell.
“We’re almost there, Master! I’m detecting a massive magical reaction ahead! Structural scan complete!”
As Kim Chun-sam’s cry rang out, the oppressively thick mist miraculously began to clear. And before my party’s eyes, an unbelievably enormous and grotesque structure revealed its full presence.
A sharp spire that soared so high it seemed to pierce the heavens. But the spire was not made of ordinary stone or brick. Enormous bones and spines of demonic beasts were interwoven to form pillars, and the walls were covered with withered, twisted skin and flesh. The malevolent aura and stench of decay emanating from the entire building were far more intense and lethal than anything from the Hwangcheon Inn.
It was the Sanctuary of Despair created from the condensed resentment of the dead—the Cathedral of Sighs.
“Ugh, what a twisted aesthetic. What kind of interior design uses butcher shop waste?”
Ma Dong-tak pinched his nose and grimaced. The moment Beris saw the cathedral, she shuddered and retched.
“Disgusting! Horrifying! That entire building is one massive blob of bacteria! I want to incinerate it right now!”
Beris raised her staff and began chanting a flame spell, but I pressed down on her staff to stop her.
“Hold on, Beris. If you set it on fire, all the loot inside will burn too. Besides, look at the building’s structure. It’s not just a simple tomb or altar.”
My eyes gleamed sharply. My Eye of Oath skill was analyzing the flow of magical power emanating from inside the cathedral. The cathedral’s structure was not a space for prayer or worship. It had an abnormally high number of ventilation shafts, and massive piping systems leading underground were spewing blood-colored liquid.
“That’s a Hospital. A very poor quality illegal biomedical laboratory.”
A chilling voice flowed from between my lips. My professional ethics as a doctor had been provoked. The act of resurrecting the dead or dismembering corpses to transform them into monsters—it was a desecration of medicine and the type of fraudulent medical practice I despised most.
“Ma, Chun-sam. Get the patients down. It’s house call time.”
I leaped down from the rear cart and grabbed my medical bag. The Murim Alliance masters disembarked hastily despite their trembling legs. Hong Ryeon, who had become a blood extraction machine, was dragged down still bound by rope.
“Is this… the Cathedral where that terrible Plague King resides?”
Namgoong Cheon swallowed hard and looked up at the massive bone door. The tightly closed enormous door opened of its own accord with an unpleasant creaking sound, as if it were a living creature, as my party approached. Beyond the door lay only absolute darkness.
“Don’t be afraid, elders. Ghosts die when you hit them, and corpses are finished when you break them. I’ll lead the way.”
Ma Dong-tak clenched his fists with a crack of bone and stepped forward at the head. His fists still radiated the golden and blue exorcism aura.
The interior of the cathedral was far more horrifying than what we had seen from outside. In the central hall where a chapel should have been, dozens of massive operating tables were lined up, and grotesquely stitched corpses lay scattered across them. Inside glass containers, unidentifiable monster organs floated in greenish fluorescent liquid, and from the ceiling hung pouches filled with dark red blood like a spider’s web, replacing blood transfusion packs.
“What kind of hell is this….”
The Shaolin Monk chanted Amitabha Buddha and squeezed his eyes shut. Even he, who had devoted his entire life to the Buddhist path, found it difficult to maintain composure before this tragic and profane spectacle.
“This bastard has some decent equipment at least. That’s an adamantium scalpel, and that’s a mana-infused bone saw? The tools are first-rate, but the one using them is a third-rate quack.”
Meanwhile, I was absorbed in examining the surgical instruments placed on the operating tables, touching them here and there. My composed demeanor caused my companions to shake their heads in disbelief.
That was when it happened.
“Foolish living beings. How dare you set foot in my sacred laboratory.”
From somewhere high in the cathedral’s ceiling, a grotesque and resonant voice that sounded like multiple people’s voices overlapping poured down. It was a horrifying voice that seemed to scrape directly against the brain rather than the eardrums. The martial artists reflexively covered their ears and collapsed.
Shuuuuu—
A figure slowly descended from the darkness of the ceiling, spewing black mist.
Clad in a pitch-black priestly robe, wearing on his face a grotesque mask with a bird’s beak protruding sharply—the very mask doctors wore during the Black Death in medieval times. In one hand, he gripped a long staff made from human spinal bones, and from the staff’s tip, a sinister blue flame of magical power burned.
The absolute ruler of the Valley of the Dead and the Plague King who spreads death and disease—the Lich King.
“A vampire serving as a guide? Hong Ryeon, you too have become a dog of the living after all.”
The Lich King’s eyes gleamed with an eerie light beyond his bird-beaked mask as he fixed his gaze upon Hong Ryeon. She trembled violently on the ground, gasping as though his stare alone had stolen the breath from her lungs.
“You don’t understand! What these demonic humans do… dying by your hand would be a thousand times better!”
Hong Ryeon shrieked, her voice laden with resentment. The Lich King tilted his head with apparent interest, turning to look at Jin-hyuk.
“Demonic, you say. An amusing assessment. To my eyes, they are merely pitiful organisms hastening toward their own demise.”
The Lich King struck his spinal staff against the ground with a heavy thud. Immediately, the tattered corpses lying upon the surgical tables began to rise in unison, emitting grotesque sounds.
“Welcome to my laboratory. Your fresh bodies will make excellent culture vessels for my new plague.”
At the Lich King’s words, Namgoong Cheon drew his lightsaber and cried out.
“You abomination! Is it not enough that you desecrate the souls of the dead? Do you dare covet our very flesh? The righteous sects of the martial world will never forgive you!”
Yet the Lich King merely laughed at Namgoong Cheon’s outcry, his gaze fixed solely upon Jin-hyuk. As the supreme sorcerer of the undead, the Lich King sensed it—the aura of his own kind emanating from Jin-hyuk before him. It was the scent of one who had set foot upon the path of ‘medicine.’
“You are of my kind. I detect the stench of one who pierces the shell of life and probes its structure. Yet your technique is shallow beyond measure. Healing the living is merely constructing sandcastles destined to crumble. True eternity and perfection exist only beyond ‘death.’ It is an aesthetic your charlatan physician’s mind could never comprehend.”
As the Lich King finished his arrogant monologue, Jin-hyuk chuckled softly and withdrew latex gloves from his medical bag, pulling them on.
“Smooth words, but you’re just an unlicensed quack running your mouth.”
At Jin-hyuk’s provocation, the Lich King’s bird-beaked mask trembled slightly.
“Life as a sandcastle? That’s rich coming from you. You’re just a necrophiliac with no real skill in treating the living, so you play with corpses instead. Where do you get off posing as some great scholar? It’s people like you who give us doctors a bad name.”
Jin-hyuk pointed his gloved finger at the Lich King, unleashing a barrage of cutting insults. The Lich King found himself momentarily speechless, his logical and primal humiliation striking deep. He had been revered as a philosopher of death, yet this human before him treated him as nothing more than a ‘skillless corpse-loving charlatan.’
“You dare… insult me, the Lord of Death…?”
The blue flames burning at the tip of the Lich King’s staff suddenly surged violently, transforming into a venomous emerald green.
“Very well. I shall make you the first subject of my grand Achievement, until that arrogant tongue of yours rots away.”
The Lich King withdrew a single black sphere from his robes. Within it, dense emerald smoke churned endlessly. The moment the sphere appeared, Beris’s face drained of all color and he leaped backward in horror.
“No! Jin-hyuk! That’s not ordinary poison! It’s the concentrated essence of the ‘Undead Virus’—death’s curse condensed! The moment it’s exposed to air, it’s over!”
Before Beris’s urgent warning had even finished echoing, the Lich King hurled the black sphere to the ground.
Crash—!
With the sound of shattering glass, the emerald toxic gas trapped within the sphere exploded outward, spreading throughout the cathedral interior. It was no mere poison gas. Where it touched the stone floor, the very ground decayed; the air itself seemed to putrefy—a lethal veil of plague.
“Everyone, hold your breath! Activate your barriers!”
Jin-hyuk shouted, swiftly donning a gas mask. Beris cried out as well, hastily erecting layers of purification barriers around himself, Jin-hyuk, Luna, and Ma Dong-tak. Each time the emerald gas touched the barriers, a sizzling sound erupted as the poison devoured the magical power at a terrifying rate.
“Ugh! The toxin is too potent! Even my purification magic won’t hold for long!”
Beris screamed, cold sweat pouring down his face. Jin-hyuk’s party had avoided directly inhaling the gas thanks to Beris’s swift response, but the real problem lay with the Murim Alliance experts positioned behind them.
“Cough! Hack!”
The Beggar Sect Master and several Huashan Sect Elders, caught without time to deploy their defenses, were exposed to the toxic gas and began convulsing on the ground, coughing up blood.
“Elder! Regain yourself! Circulate your inner energy to expel the poison!”
Namgoong Cheon rushed toward the fallen elder, his voice desperate. But the moment his hand grasped the elder’s shoulder, something horrific occurred.
“Aaaahhhhh…!”
The fallen elder’s skin instantly turned ashen gray, and the veins across his face and neck bulged grotesquely in black and emerald. The whites of his eyes vanished, leaving only the murky, bestial gaze of a creature. This was no ordinary poison that inner energy could dispel. The Lich King’s virus forcibly shut down the life force of the living, infecting the brain and nervous system with dark magic, transforming them into the undead—a horrific plague.
“M-Master… my body… it’s so cold….”
The elder reached toward Namgoong Cheon, but his hand was already blackening with decay, his fingernails lengthening into sharp claws.
“Elder! No! Don’t lose consciousness!”
Namgoong Cheon cried out in anguish, but the elder’s sense of self had already been consumed entirely by the virus.
“Gaaaahhhhh—!”
The comrade who had fought alongside him until moments before, now spewing black blood and emerald foam from his mouth, lunged at Namgoong Cheon’s throat with bared fangs.
“Damn it! The elder has transformed into a Corpse Fiend!”
“Fall back! Physical contact means infection!”
In an instant, the interior of the Cathedral of Sighs transformed into a hellscape. Murim practitioners infected by the virus and transformed into zombies began hurling themselves at the survivors with grotesque sounds of snapping joints. Namgoong Cheon and the other survivors could not bring themselves to cut down those who had been their comrades just yesterday, so they retreated while maintaining a defensive stance.
“Kahahaha! Behold, you charlatan doctor! This is my magnificent cure! A sacred process of rebirth into an eternal legion of the dead, freed from the weakness of flesh and the disease called emotion!”
The Lich King hung suspended from the cathedral ceiling, erupting in grotesque laughter. Watching Kang Jin-hyuk’s party tear into one another and destroy themselves was the greatest entertainment for him.
“Kyaaaah! These filthy zombies are coming this way! Kang Jin-hyuk! Should I burn them all to ash? If we leave them alone, they’ll destroy our barrier too!”
Beris trembled as she gripped her staff and cried out. For her, whose obsession with cleanliness bordered on pathological, a horde of zombies oozing putrid discharge was the most horrifying terror imaginable. The urge to simply summon a meteor and reduce them all to ash, allies or not, was paralyzing her reason.
“No! If we burn them, these people will really die! What happens if we incinerate the ones who’ll pay us?”
Kang Jin-hyuk firmly stopped Beris. He frantically searched through his medical bag while scanning the surrounding chaos with hawk-like eyes. The infection rate was devastatingly rapid. If they delayed even a few more minutes, the entire Murim Alliance would devolve into the Lich King’s obedient zombie legion.
This was not a simple battle.
A catastrophic medical disaster—an uncontrollable plague spreading without restraint.
Behind the gas mask Kang Jin-hyuk wore, a sharp gleam flashed in his eyes. He drew a deep breath, then shouted with a voice that shook the cathedral itself.
“All personnel, attention! Effective immediately, I am declaring ‘Code Black’! Initiating infected containment and emergency decontamination protocol!”
At Kang Jin-hyuk’s command, Ma Dong-tak and Kim Chun-sam reflexively straightened their postures.
“Code Black? Master, what is that! Do you have a vaccine or something?”
Kim Chun-sam bounced on his front paws as he asked. Kang Jin-hyuk pulled a heavy iron crowbar from his medical bag and tossed it to Ma Dong-tak with a wicked grin.
“A vaccine? Of course I do. Director Ma. You see those rampaging zombie elders over there?”
“Ah yes, I see them. Absolutely brimming with vitality, I must say.”
Ma Dong-tak caught the iron crowbar Kang Jin-hyuk threw with one hand and loosened his shoulders.
“From now on, strike the back of their heads—precisely the brainstem area—to knock them unconscious. I’m not telling you to crack their skulls; I’m telling you to flip the switch. If you forcibly halt their brain wave activity through physical concussion, the virus’s reproduction speed should stop as well. That’s our ‘physical vaccine.'”
At Kang Jin-hyuk’s outlandish and crude prescription, even the vampire lord Hong Ryeon’s jaw dropped. Stopping a zombie virus with a crowbar? By the standards of a master of dark magic, it was an incomprehensibly insane act.
But for Ma Dong-tak, it was a far clearer prescription than any medical explanation could ever be.
“Hahaha! You should have said it that way from the start. Administering physical vaccine treatment—commencing now!”
Ma Dong-tak’s eyes gleamed with madness. He gripped the iron crowbar firmly and burst forward like a missile through the green toxic gas toward the zombie horde.
The true director’s seat of Floor 13 was now the stage for a mad quarantine battle between an unlicensed dark sorcerer and a physical therapist.

—————
This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
—————