Doctor’s Rebirth - Chapter 31

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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 31
I answered.
“I can only give the same answer as you, Master. I’ll make sure he doesn’t die easily.”
I loosened my hands out of habit.
Behind me, only my father’s bestial roars echoed.
A hospital is not beautiful. A hospital is not peaceful.
There is only fighting and more fighting.
* * *
“Hehehehe, here I am… performing surgery in the Martial Arts World.”
I laughed as if I’d lost my mind.
Outside, the operating room was being prepared in full swing. The entire operating room was being washed with strong alcohol, and water was being boiled.
Tedious, but unavoidable.
There were small blades for surgery here too, and while not quite a scalpel, they seemed usable in a pinch.
I had to do this without the help of basic medical equipment from Earth, including the common suction apparatus found in any hospital.
And that felt like a major problem.
Still, I had to manage it.
Even with such poor conditions, it wasn’t hopeless.
“I’ll use sword energy instead of a scalpel. Hehehehe… at least our patient still has vital signs, thank goodness…”
There was a reason I muttered so dejectedly.
The patient had a liver laceration—what they call a ruptured liver.
The liver had been crushed like tofu by the renowned Nae-gi technique, and a perforation had developed in the large intestine.
A perforation means a hole in an internal organ, and left untreated, death is inevitable.
Because food would leak out of the intestines, causing peritonitis, and blood would accumulate in the peritoneal cavity, leading to hemoperitoneum.
The peculiar thing about the Nae-gi technique is that the ribs remain completely intact. Truly strange.
In truth, this patient should have died long ago.
That he survived fifteen days in this condition seemed grotesque to me as a physician.
‘How is he even alive? Is it because of his inner energy and spiritual medicine? But inner energy and spiritual medicine can’t fix a torn liver, can they?’
I sighed and washed my face with my hands.
Then I thought about the laws that govern this world.
Qi.
‘Qi is absolutely omnipotent, omnipotent. It seems to work as an antibiotic, maintains life too. He should be in a state of low blood pressure from internal bleeding, yet without ventricular tachycardia, it somehow manages that too. If modern medicine had qi cultivation therapy, we could save cancer patients too. Remarkable. Truly remarkable.’
The martial artists of this world run across water and ignite fire with their fingers. Their skin becomes hard as steel.
Finally, upon reaching the ultimate level of the sword, aging stops and one becomes young in an instant, they say.
Here, they call it Banro Hwandong.
‘I’ll have to perform surgery with qi in mind, but there are more than one or two other things I need. There’s too much lacking.’
First, securing blood.
Without a blood type kit in this place, I used a primitive method.
I extracted a small amount of blood from the father and daughter and examined their antibody reactions.
Fortunately, both were compatible without antibody reactions.
‘Transfusions between relatives are rarely done in modern medicine, but…’
It was graft versus host disease, or GVHD.
The parent’s white blood cells survive within the child’s body and begin dividing on their own. Then, these newly divided white blood cells recognize the child’s body as an enemy and begin attacking it.
Because of this, it’s only used in unavoidable circumstances—for example, when someone requiring a blood transfusion has a rare blood type. Only in such dire situations is it employed.
In such cases, one must first undergo a process to kill off the lymphocytes.
‘But radiation treatment is impossible in this era. And the probability of reaching that point is usually low.’
I sank into thought.
‘However, if I don’t perform the transfusion, the child will die with absolute certainty.’
There was no choice.
When I said blood was needed, Gungwi told me to draw as much as necessary, even if it meant nearly killing him.
He didn’t even ask why it was needed or where it would be used. Normally, someone would cry out that this was sorcery! Yet he only begged me to save his daughter.
So I had to immediately devise a means to extract his blood and supply it to his daughter.
‘What in the world is Yoo Ho doing?’
Yoo Ho’s inexplicable abilities.
Trusting in them, I asked him to create an IV line for the transfusion, and he brought it back in less than half a shichen.
That was actually more remarkable, but this wasn’t the time to dwell on it.
The patient was right in front of me.
Using it, I connected Gungwi’s body to his daughter’s body. Blood would flow directly from Gungwi’s body into his daughter’s.
This was primitive, certainly, but now was not the time to quibble over such details.
I took a quiet, deep breath.
‘The incision is half the battle.’
Surgery begins with securing visibility and ends with securing visibility.
If I could secure the field of view, I was already halfway there.
‘I’ll perform a posterolateral thoracotomy with the patient turned to the side.’
I’ll raise the arm and fix it, then cut the muscles along the scapula.
‘By cutting through the intercostal spaces, I can secure the visibility I need.’
But the question was what to cut with.
To make clean incisions without modern instruments….
‘Since I’m already in the Martial Arts World, why not use a living blade to make the incision and then suture it closed? Perhaps this way would be far cleaner and have better outcomes than modern medicine.’
I wanted to use everything available to me now that I was in the Martial Arts World.
‘A living blade isn’t called a living blade for nothing.’
My smile faded quickly, and my expression darkened once more.
‘Once I open the body, there’s no turning back.’
My Master had said that the moment a blade touches flesh, the inner force maintaining the body would drop sharply.
Right now, I was barely holding on with the elixir, my inner force, and my father’s vital energy, but once the chest opens, the vital signs would plummet significantly.
It would be Jegalling’s role to buy me time using formation techniques however possible.
But since I couldn’t know how long he could hold out, it was crucial to settle this within that window, he had said.
I closed my eyes and slowly moved my fingers.
In my mind’s eye, the liver and spleen, the arterial and venous trunks that my Master had drawn for me appeared naturally.
I missed the CT scanner from Earth.
Those days when I’d rotate it this way and that before surgery….
‘I miss diagnostic imaging.’
Just as my Master Jegalling does, someday I too will be able to master human diagnostic imaging.
Even so, I am still a novice.
Even though the Five Elements Heart Method activates my brain, that fact remained unchanged.
After grumbling for a moment, I began training my visualization, constantly recalling the patient’s internal anatomy.
I had to be fast. And I had to be precise. And in that regard, I had confidence.
In the past, I had earned considerable recognition for my surgical skills.
The experiences I gained from volunteering in remote areas had also elevated my surgical abilities.
And now I had learned martial arts. My five senses had risen to a level incomparable to the past.
‘I can do this.’
My eyes gleamed.
* * *
Finally, all preparations were complete.
I wrapped myself from head to toe in cloth so that not a single hair showed.
My Master, Yoo Ho, and all the Medical Assistants wore the same garments.
Dressed in white like masked bandits, I let out a small laugh.
“Hee.”
“Yes, Master.”
“I’ve been watching you for a while now. When you’re under pressure, you deliberately laugh.”
I felt caught, as if my true feelings had been exposed.
I spoke.
“But our attire does look rather amusing.”
A senior colleague from the past had said that to patients, there is only the doctor.
If the doctor looks like death, the patient truly has nowhere to turn.
That senior had eventually left the university hospital, unable to endure the politics any longer. But those words alone remained with me.
He said a slight audacity was just right.
‘That doctor is a bit annoying,’ one might think, yet ‘with such confidence, he must be skilled,’ and they could trust him.
Yoo Ho spoke.
“It’s just because we’re in a hurry right now. Next time, I’ll prepare it properly.”
“I look forward to it.”
I did some light stretching.
My Master spoke.
“The operating room is constructed to be maintained by formation techniques. At the entrance, the fire technique is in effect, so wrap yourself in water qi.”
My Master enters inside.
A small blue flame swept across my Master’s body.
It was surprising, but what came to mind instead was ‘an automatic sterilizer is convenient.’
Those childhood days (?) of struggling to put on gloves flashed before me like a lantern show.
I wrapped water qi around my body. Then I followed my Master inside.
Fire qi swept across my body.
The operating room was not what I had imagined.
The floor was decorated with formation patterns drawn using formation techniques, and the surgical robes worn by the Medical Assistants were also from the Martial Arts World.
However, the patient lying down was exactly like someone from Earth, so I couldn’t help but smile wryly.
‘When I feel pressure, I force myself to smile,’ he had said.
By now it had become a habit, and there was nothing I could do about it.
“I’ve already explained the surgical plan you devised to the Medical Assistants. I made them memorize it all, but ultimately you’re the one who has to execute it.”
Anxiety flickered in the Medical Assistants’ eyes.
Small stature, small frame.
A child.
Yet they didn’t utter a single complaint or word tinged with concern.
This spoke volumes about the organizational control of Jegalling, my Master.
I answered.
“Well, it’s not that difficult…”
A surgeon taking on the role of leader should be somewhat audacious.
I continued.
“Let’s finish this quickly. And then we eat something delicious.”
With that, I picked up the surgical scalpel.
“Opening the chest.”
A red line was drawn above the patient’s sternum.
There was no turning back now.
* * *
‘This is a treatment method that involves cutting open the body. The patient must remain alive until this treatment—what we call surgery—is complete. However, the doctors of this Medical Hall are not skilled enough for that. Therefore, we need you. Are you prepared to endure anything to save your daughter?’
To Baekrin Uiseon’s words, Gungwi answered that he would do anything. And Gungwi was here now.
The Operating Room.
In this bizarre place he had never seen before in his life, Gungwi steadied his trembling body and gripped his daughter’s wrist firmly.
To sustain his daughter’s life, he was pouring his inner qi into her.
Transfusing blood while simultaneously infusing inner qi was no ordinary task, but he was managing it through extreme concentration.
The function of qi is tremendous.
It can even keep a dying person breathing for a time.
Baekrin Uiseon had explained to Gungwi that this was why all the doctors of Baekrin Uigak had learned the Five Elements qi technique.
To use acupuncture most effectively required inner qi, and the Five Elements qi technique was one of the fundamental methods that allowed doctors to treat patients more effectively.
It was also the reason Baekrin Uigak was counted among the three greatest Medical Halls under heaven.

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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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