Doctor’s Rebirth - Chapter 500

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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 500
After bickering back and forth, instead of the most delicious inn in Hangzhou, we entered the nostalgic inn of Hangzhou and ate Dongpo pork.
“This is where I met you, right?”
“Yeah. I was so shocked back then. How could a kid like you be so skilled at coin divination?”
“Back then, you put in a silver coin generously. That’s how our connection started~”
Sama Hyeon hummed and reflected on the past.
Why was it?
I had a feeling that if I let him go like this, I would never see him again.
I didn’t know the reason.
Actually, I think I did know.
The fact that he came to me for help at the very last moment meant he was that cornered.
‘Damn bastard.’
I was reflecting on my own humanity.
Whether to discard it or keep it, I was wrestling with embracing all of it.
[Just trust me.]
“Hm?”
[Wait. Don’t rush in with that impatient nature of yours.]
Let me hold onto him first. Before this bastard causes trouble.
Should I let him return to his original history?
Then the Peking Opera began.
The same one Sama Hyeon had performed before, but now a mixture of child and adult actors.
Jin Cheon-hee spoke.
“Baekrin Medical Guild is protecting it.”
“I heard you cleaned up the streets of Hangzhou~”
“Yeah.”
The Hegemon King Bids Farewell to His Concubine begins.
Sama-hye forgot to eat her Dongpo pork, her eyes shining as she watched the opera.
“Oppa, it reminds me of the old days.”
“….”
The love story of Xiang Yu and Woo Mi-in.
Why was it so? Some stories transcend eras and are connected word by word, yet their light never fades.
Within stories everyone knows, within narratives that repeat and continue, humans become absorbed.
Even knowing this ending.
[Hyeon-a. What you hold in your hands cannot be replaced by anything else. You mustn’t let go of that hand for the sake of gaining something different.]
[Chopsticks holding Dongpo pork?]
[Yes. Those chopsticks. Hye-a gave them to you.]
[….]
Anguish flickers across his noble profile.
The temptation that perhaps if I ascend to the throne of the Golden King, I could end this struggle crosses my eyes.
Could I not set it down for just a moment?
The moment I set her down, I could quickly handle this and take hold of Hye-a’s hand again, couldn’t I?
If I ascend to that position, if I possess that power….
In the Peking Opera, Xiang Yu displayed movements that were both graceful and precise.
His fingertips traced a gentle arc before stopping with a thud in time with the melody.
Then Sama Hyeon spoke.
[I can see an easy path. In truth, if you just walk a little to the side, everything would become so much easier. All of it.]
-My strength can uproot mountains and my might covers the world
[I know what I possess, Hyeong. I only need to release the fire burning within me to the outside. Then I would become the Golden King. Perhaps everything would become easier.]
-Yet my steed will not advance—what can I do?
[If things continue like this, I might lose everything. The next Golden King would never let me live, and such is the law of the Black Path.]
In the Peking Opera, Sama Hyeon’s transmission resonates.
Though his expression remained composed, I felt the fire burning within him.
The reader knows what kind of fire this is.
It is fire that would burn the world, fire that would engulf mountains and rivers once released.
[Are you afraid of losing Hye-a?]
[I’m used to being hated. It’s fine. But Hye-a must live. If I can only save Hye-a, then I….]
-Yu, oh Yu—what shall I do with you?
[Hyeon-a. It’s alright. It’s alright. Everything will be fine. Because I’m here. I will protect you.]
[I’m not….]
[I know. That you have pride stronger than anyone. That your Oseng is so formidable, your intellect so keen, your appearance so exceptional. I know well the you whose self-worth is hollow despite all this.]
[So you’ve been watching me just as I’ve been watching you, Hyeong.]
[That’s right. Which is why I’m telling you this. If you let go once, you’ll let go again.]
Then I sent my transmission.
[Fortunately… I believe I’ve found a way.]
[Hmm?]
[The answer lay in the Drunken Beauty of the Hegemon King.]
I said this while gazing at Sama Hyeon.
I regarded my younger brother’s contorted face with the same elegant and aloof expression as always.
As if adversity meant nothing whatsoever.
I spoke.
[Thank you for confiding your troubles in me, Hyeon-a.]
I wondered if the day would ever come when that face would crack.
For a warrior, my older brother was small in stature, yet he smiled with leisure and brilliance in his eyes.
[It may be somewhat difficult, but yes. Let’s accomplish this together, Hyeon-a.]
A path where I didn’t have to let go of what I held in my hands.
How had my older brother found such a path?
I became curious.
Then Hye-a spoke.
“It seems like Peking Opera is what oppa does best after all.”
Saying so, she grasped the hands of both Jin Cheon-hee and me, one in each hand.
“Hehehehe. I’m so happy the three of you came to visit.”
“….”
It was fortunate he hadn’t let go.
Thus, Sama Hyeon made yet another choice.
Because of the two hands that held him fast.
He merely hoped the ending wouldn’t unfold like the Hegemon-King’s Favorite before his eyes.
* * *
The next day.
Jin Cheon-hee busied himself ordering materials as he moved about.
‘Yoo Ho… Yoo Ho isn’t here.’
There was no help for it. Without my all-purpose MacGyver blade, I’d have to do this alone.
“Hyeong, what exactly are you doing?”
A temporary structure in the open space behind the Medical Guild.
It was part of the land granted by His Majesty, but we hadn’t developed it in earnest yet and were using it as a warehouse.
Here, Jin Cheon-hee was touching a pile of sand.
“Hyeon-a. You want to live a normal life, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Of course, now that you’ve walked the path of the dark blade, you’ll live with blood on your hands, but you still don’t want to abandon your humanity, right?”
“….”
Sama Hyeon simply gazed at his older brother, who was shorter than himself, instead of answering.
Sometimes sincerity is conveyed precisely because certain things go unspoken.
This was one of those moments.
I felt an affirmation stronger than any ‘Yes’ could ever be.
“Good. For now, let’s keep this a secret between us until it’s complete. You don’t want Hye-a to know about your affairs anyway.”
“Yes.”
He didn’t want to show even a handful of filth to his younger sister.
I understood.
For Hyeon, Hye-a was like gravity—something that kept him tethered to his humanity.
He wouldn’t want her to see even a trace of his darkness.
So then….
“But does this sand play of yours have something to do with it?”
“Yes. Well… this may look like mere sand, but it’s a mixture of silicon dioxide, sodium carbonate, and lime. I’ll be using glass powder here too.”
Saying so, he scooped the sand into a peculiarly shaped kiln, then kindled a fire with black stones and began drawing his inner energy into it.
Jin Cheon-hee’s hair rose gently. A tremendous heat force began melting the sand.
Glug glug glug—
‘Glass windows themselves were even discovered in the Pompeii ruins from 79 AD.’
Though the origins trace back to Egypt.
I suspect the discovery itself came from observing residual glass left by volcanic activity.
Either way, glass is an important material to humanity.
I melted it, flattened it, and slowly cooled it with my inner energy.
Sama Hyeon rested his chin on his hand, crouching as he watched with fascination what his older brother was doing.
It seemed like he was using inner energy in the middle of the process, but I couldn’t quite understand the details even watching.
How much time had passed like that?
A fairly convincing glass mirror had been completed.
“Now I’ll melt silver on the back surface of the glass here….”
After finishing that, Jin Cheon-hee himself seemed exhausted and collapsed onto the ground.
“Ugh… making just one of these is more tiring than unleashing martial energy. Huff… puff….”
Sama Hyeon walked toward what his older brother had created.
There, a flawless, crystal-clear mirror revealed itself.
“I have quite a variety of mirrors myself, but this is the first time I’ve seen one this perfectly clean. Brother.”
That was true.
A mirror so clear that even light reflected perfectly from it—and a large one at that—stood there.
“I suppose I’m rather handsome after all. Gaga~?”
How often would I get a chance to see my face this clearly? Ignoring Sama Hyeon’s question, Jin Cheon-hee spoke.
“Doesn’t this seem like it could make money? It seems like people would buy it no matter how much gold it costs?”
“Of course. I’ve never seen anything of this quality before, and even Emperor Geum-wang would want to have it. But to run a business, you’d need mass production. If we produce it the way you do, squandering inner energy like that, the unit cost won’t work~”
“Right. You’re correct. This was just a sample to show you, and there’s a separate method for mass production.”
Even so, it would be difficult to match Yoo Ho’s craftsmanship.
Jin Cheon-hee swallowed the rest of his words.
“So people who haven’t learned martial arts can make it too~ Gaga?”
“Of course.”
‘How does my brother know such things?’
Sama Hyeon fell into thought.
It was as if my brother pulled out knowledge that didn’t exist in this world whenever he needed it.
Because of that, I had guessed he might be from the Western Continent, but sometimes he would pull out knowledge that didn’t even exist there.
“What are you thinking about?”
“I’m calculating the commercial value~”
And I know this kind older brother would never teach me.
He was a person full of secrets, though he didn’t seem like it.
At first, I thought it was because he was from the Jegallim Family, but who knows.
“What’s the commercial value?”
“Assuming what you say is true, and assuming the manufacturing process is sound, I’d say we could pocket about twenty times the cost?”
“Right. That should be about it.”
Glass mirrors began appearing in earnest around the 12th century in human history.
So naturally, glass mirrors exist in this martial arts world as well.
‘Say, you there, what are you trying to make from sand! What is this shiny, transparent thing?’
‘Ah, you don’t know? This is called glass. We make mirrors from it,’ such a clichéd otherworldly scenario was impossible.
If I tried that, they would just look at me with pitying eyes.
Because they already knew how to make glass mirrors well and lived with them.
Of course, they were absurdly expensive, and only slightly better than copper mirrors without glass coating, so they weren’t commonly used in general.
The reason lay in the technique.
In this world, the ability to craft glass that was flat and even depended entirely on the artisan’s manual skill.
Moreover, the glass mirrors produced in this world were made by thinly coating one side of the glass with an alloy of tin and mercury.
The reflective rate of tin and mercury alloy was poor to begin with, and because it was handcrafted, the surface was uneven, so images didn’t reflect properly.
This was why most glass mirrors in this world had severe distortions and couldn’t properly reflect one’s true appearance.
However.
Look.
What Jin Cheon-hee had created now reflected with remarkable clarity.
‘On Earth, mirrors required a reflectivity of over 80%, and only aluminum and silver could achieve that, if I remember correctly.’
Jin Cheon-hee recalled a documentary he’d seen in his past life.
By coating one side of transparent glass with silver or aluminum, it finally became a mirror.
The crucial part was achieving this coating with perfect uniformity.
Of course, among those who had reached Hwagyeong, only someone like Jin Cheon-hee—who could manipulate void-grasping techniques with precision and possessed abundant inner energy—could achieve perfect alignment and fusion. For others, it would be impossible.
As Jin Cheon-hee was thinking briefly about this, a voice of continued bewilderment reached his ears.
“Can this really be mass-produced~?”

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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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