Doctor’s Rebirth - Chapter 294

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 294
“What other purpose?”
I placed a soft-boiled egg into my mouth.
Despite being cooked perfectly, I found myself unable to taste anything, which was troubling.
Still, I pretended to eat it with relish.
The person who made it had put in the effort, after all.
“You boiled the egg well.”
“Haha, I’m glad, brother. Ah, right. This is just speculation among the Pyoguk messengers, but I suspect they were after the Pyoguk’s shipment itself rather than anything else. All the messengers who crossed blades felt the same way.”
“….”
Since they hadn’t witnessed it directly but felt it through their exchange of blades, I thought they were likely correct.
It was akin to a messenger’s instinct. And if the actual circumstances aligned with that feeling….
‘From treating them, I definitely noticed the messengers sustained an unusually high number of fatal wounds.’
The villagers were also quite injured.
Among them, trampling wounds from horses were the most common.
Of course, they were terrible wounds.
After all, they were inflicted upon commoners who had learned martial arts.
But the messengers bore scars that showed they had fought desperately for their lives, not merely played with.
From the bandits’ perspective, engaging messengers trained in martial arts would have been far more burdensome than dealing with ordinary commoners.
Yet they engaged them nonetheless, which meant they must have had a compelling reason.
“So the purpose lies in the shipment itself… which means it’s likely someone commissioned this rather than it being purely for money. Did the messengers mention anything else?”
“Hmm, if we could guess the name, it would have come up, but no one knows.”
“What was the contents of the shipment?”
“I heard it was classified. But… it’s hard to consider it a precious item either, because if it were truly valuable, they would have hired more skilled messengers.”
“Then the bandits’ leader knew what it was.”
“Yes, he fled quite swiftly.”
“That’s exactly it….”
I stopped speaking there and picked up my chopsticks a few more times.
Normally I would have finished an entire bowl, but I found it difficult to continue eating.
Cheonwoo glanced at me once, then at my rice bowl that was only half-empty, and continued speaking as if he hadn’t noticed.
“It does seem suspicious, doesn’t it, brother?”
“Yes. This doesn’t seem like a normal situation.”
Waho Chae, who received the commission and robbed the shipment while destroying the village.
The Magistrate and Patrol Guards who rushed to stop them.
And even the action of immediately attempting to confiscate the shipment.
‘And on top of that, even the messengers don’t know the shipment’s contents.’
I wiped the corners of my eyes with a weary expression and spoke.
“It’s too perfectly aligned to be mere coincidence. Yet without clear evidence of wrongdoing, I can’t act on mere ‘circumstances’ alone.”
The golden dragon bestowed by His Majesty was coiled around my wrist, but it was like a credit card—if I used it carelessly, His Majesty might come collecting interest instead of payment.
‘Still, I should at least pay back the horse rental from the relay station.’
That was when Cheonwoo’s eyes suddenly brightened.
“Still, if you’re my brother, wouldn’t you devise some incredible scheme to land a blow on those bastards?”
“No, I won’t be doing that.”
At those words, Cheonwoo looked at me with surprise in his eyes.
‘Hmm… it’s the same look I saw in Master’s eyes.’
The Jegal Family always believed I would devise some mysterious strategy and resolve everything without anyone knowing.
Of course, there were ways to accomplish things through strategy.
But was it really necessary to expend that much time and effort?
‘I still need to go to Beijing and scout the imperial palace…’
If I kept using such elaborate and ingenious strategies every time, I’d grow old and die.
“I’ll just sneak over at night and eavesdrop. Simple as that.”
“…I… see. That would certainly be the easiest way.”
“Right. What’s the point of learning martial arts otherwise?”
Was this how Alexander felt cutting the Gordian Knot?
Ignoring the easy path in favor of some convoluted wisdom—nonsense.
Cheonwoo furrowed one eyebrow.
“Brother, I’ve never learned concealment techniques…”
“I know how to do it, so don’t worry. Besides, you’ll guard the escort guards and the cargo. Understood?”
Someone had to protect the cargo—the opponent’s objective.
And for that role, Cheonwoo, with his face as both a Mudang sect member and a heterodox practitioner, was perfect.
Cheonwoo fell silent in thought, then grinned.
“Brother, I have a condition.”
“What is it?”
“You need to eat more.”
“What?”
At this unexpected demand, one of my eyebrows rose.
Cheonwoo added another word.
“You really need to eat more. It seems nothing suits your palate, so I’ll prepare chicken for you.”
“That hen?”
“I’ll purchase it properly. With legitimate payment. In a situation like this, having a bit more money to spend will help them too.”
“You’ve become quite talkative.”
“Brother, you’ll collapse if you keep this up.”
With that, Cheonwoo rose to his feet.
Then he went to prepare a new meal for me.
Cooking wasn’t his hobby, and since he ate anything without being particular about taste, he wasn’t especially skilled at it. Still, having served as Mudang Gwon-je’s disciple, he had always handled meal preparations.
He knew how to manage the basics.
‘Chicken broth porridge would be good.’
My complexion had grown even paler than before.
Though my vitality was clearly better than before, Cheonwoo couldn’t understand what this worsening complexion meant.
But he knew it wasn’t good. And he knew I needed to eat something.
He was worried about me.
‘Even the rain falls without concern.’
If I could at least drape a blanket over his shoulders, his body wouldn’t lose heat so quickly.
I found myself wishing he would come down with a serious illness.
Then at least he could rest.
‘My brother is… strong. Upright. That’s what makes me uneasy.’
I realized he probably didn’t know how much his strength worried those around him.
* * *
Budohyeon.
That was the name of this region.
In the world of Supreme Heavenly Demon, the Hua Empire employed a somewhat peculiar administrative system—provinces, prefectures, and counties.
The prefecture of a certain province, the county of a certain prefecture.
That sort of structure.
To use a Korean analogy, it was like Dongsong Township in Cheolwon County, Gangwon Province.
In other words, it’s easier to understand it this way.
Magistrate = Township Chief.
Though it sounds diminutive when phrased that way, a single county typically housed between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand people.
The authority wielded by such a position was staggering enough to make even birds fall from the sky.
I learned this through my education as the Patriarch of Baekrin Uigak.
‘Because the Supreme Heavenly Demon never explicitly documented such things.’
What would the Cheonma care about administrative matters?
She was too busy crushing the hypocritical orthodox sects and filthy heterodox sects right before her eyes to concern herself with bureaucratic minutiae.
Yet I, Jin Cheon-hee of the true Central Plains world, had to pay taxes faithfully each year as the price of entering the Supreme Heavenly Demon’s world.
‘Does the Cheonma pay taxes?’
The supreme, ancient-style martial arts Cheonma naturally never depicted scenes of her paying taxes, true to old-fashioned wuxia convention.
But no matter how I thought about it, even with all the gold and jewels glittering across the Ten Thousand Great Mountains, could the magistrate’s office really extract taxes from her?
‘Is our Cheonma a tax evader?’
However, the merchant guilds operating covertly beneath the Demonic Sect probably did pay taxes.
After all, even that gold vein shop paid them.
Of course, since it only sold things that were ‘officially’ ‘legal,’ its ledgers must have been double, triple, even quadruple-layered, but taxes had to be paid regardless.
So Baekrin Uigak had to pay taxes too.
How to pay them and how to minimize tax burden was one of the Patriarch’s most crucial lessons.
Through such education, I learned that the total population of the Hua Empire was approximately eighty million.
Of course, that figure represented only those officially registered with the government, and there were certainly countless unregistered people as well.
‘Roughly speaking, Earth’s ancient populations were similar, so it might actually align with the era.’
With each province—Shaanxi, Sichuan, and so forth—housing at least several million people, it made perfect sense that a single county would have between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand residents.
Though, of course, this only counted officially registered populations.
Furthermore.
The position of Magistrate held both judicial and administrative authority.
This was an era without separation of powers.
This is precisely why Pocheoncheon could conduct tax duties by day and command the guillotine by night without anyone finding it strange.
‘At least the imperial palace still handles legislation.’
Still, because the Magistrate’s vague concept of “decree” exists as law, it’s difficult to say they’re completely separate.
He’s essentially an extralegal authority figure—one could call him a petty king without exaggeration.
‘A typical prefecture has two Patrol Guard commanders, with about a thousand Patrol Guards under them. Three hundred of those are cavalry tasked with countering bandits and brigands—they’re the real elite—and the remaining seven hundred are distributed across villages and small cities with significant populations throughout the prefecture to maintain order.’
This is how administration typically functions in this region.
Guards and Patrol Guards—if I had to describe them, they’re remarkably similar to American sheriffs.
They’re armed forces themselves, and they readily draw and wield their weapons decisively to maintain order.
Weaker than military units, perhaps, but still a force of considerable numbers and martial strength.
Jin Cheon-hee silently called out “system” in his mind.
‘….’
Nothing happens, as expected.
Similarly, if I were a transmigrated web novel reader, I might have tried calling out “proficiency,” “experience points,” “skill window,” “inventory”—but nothing occurred.
I even tried calling out “constellation window” in case the genre was different.
…Nothing at all.
‘If someone dropped me in a place like this, wouldn’t they have a conscience? Shouldn’t they at least display an experience window?’
Normally, once you learn something once, it registers as a skill, and if you repeatedly use it by clicking, your proficiency rises, and when proficiency increases, the skill evolves into a godly skill.
And when those skills accumulate, you’re supposed to advance into a hidden class.
‘I’m dropped in a martial arts world and pay taxes just like on Earth, so why the hell is there no system window?’
I realized this was all because the novel I happened to read was “The Supreme Heavenly Demon.”
The author aimed for a classical martial arts feel, so it turned out this way. If it had been “SSS-Rank Supreme Heavenly Demon” or “The Supreme Heavenly Demon Becomes a Hunter,” things would be different.
There’s no clickable stealth skill with automatic activation, but I do have one footwork technique I’ve trained roughly a million times.
I’ll call upon it today as well.
Jin Cheon-hee’s modified concealment technique.
Samjae Footwork!
On top of that, I have the basic concealment method Ilkana taught me.
Of course, without a system window, it’s not registered as a skill.
I only have hopeless grinding and the Hyeonwon Jeondan Singeong.
‘I wish I could heal people with a healing skill and resurrect the dead with a resurrection skill.’
My mind is so exhausted that absurd jokes keep spilling out.

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