Doctor’s Rebirth - Chapter 582

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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 582
‘A coffin? A jiangshi corpse?’
The large rectangular coffin lying on its side was indeed an object used in jiangshi cultivation techniques.
I entered through the roof, driven by curiosity.
When I opened the wooden coffin, I found a person inside, and an unknown liquid was bubbling within.
“What is this?”
Gongseon Yeong and Prince Han-bing’s faces had turned deathly pale with shock.
I calmly brought my hand to my nose to check.
I felt breath.
‘They’re alive?’
I wrapped my hand with a waterproof cloth I’d brought beforehand and pulled the person inside out.
Placing my fingers on their neck, I took their pulse and felt it beating.
‘No, why…?’
After checking the pulse for a long while, I finally let out a bitter laugh.
“This doesn’t appear to be for therapeutic purposes.”
“What?”
I didn’t answer.
I simply entered the neighboring house and all the other houses to verify.
Coffins of the same form.
But the liquids filling them were different.
There were mechanisms at the base of the coffins, but determining their purpose was difficult with only Chilma-geum’s yin techniques.
Even knowing the structure, one couldn’t understand it without expertise in sorcery.
Still, I could discern that something sinister was certainly involved.
“What were these made for? Why are people lying inside them?”
“Humans of various ages. What on earth is this?”
“…”
Splash.
I overturned the coffin containing the child.
The unknown liquid spilled out. The liquid reeked of blood.
I checked the pulse and realized they were alive.
“Ugh, ughhhh.”
The child groaned like someone suffering from sleep paralysis.
They seemed trapped in a terrible nightmare.
I woke the child from their nightmarish torment.
The child’s eyes slowly opened. A faint glimmer of light danced in their vacant gaze.
Yet it was not the light of an ordinary person’s eyes.
Soon the child opened their mouth.
Surprisingly, it was a voice of remarkable clarity.
A strange prophecy, as if spoken by someone else entirely.
“…Hyeolseon shall guide you to paradise.”
“Aga.”
“Hyeolseon shall guide you to paradise. Hyeolseon descends to guide you to paradise. Breaking free from the wheel of rebirth, true Hyeolhyang Paradise shall unfold. The living shall worship. The dead shall rejoice. When winter ends and the blood moon rises, the long yearning shall finally cease….”
In that moment, the child began coughing violently.
His body started contorting grotesquely.
Scales sprouted from his arms.
I rushed to strike his pressure points to render him unconscious, but soon the child spat blood from his throat and expired.
I immediately attempted cardiopulmonary resuscitation. I pressed and stimulated the vital points, pouring my inner energy into him. But there was no response.
A life lost in an instant could never return.
Gongseon Yeong grabbed my shoulder with a devastated expression.
“Stop. We must stop. The child is already….”
Crash!
In that moment, I couldn’t hold back and struck the wall with my fist.
“….”
Gongseon Yeong barely caught my shoulder as it trembled, my tears long since dried.
“Are you alright? Hey. Get a hold of yourself.”
“Sister…. This place seems to be a laboratory.”
“What?”
The realization continued to spread through the despair.
“One person per dwelling, and the coffins are all the same size—there are clear signs of deliberate effort. And the drugs. These drugs have different scents in each coffin, which suggests….”
Prince Han-bing asked.
“Is this a massive Hyeolseonggyo laboratory?”
I nodded and pulled the transformed child into my arms.
But to Prince Han-bing’s eyes, ‘that’ could no longer be called human.
His arms were covered in scales, and his teeth resembled those of a lion or beast rather than a human’s.
It was as if one of the legendary demons or rakshasas from old tales had taken this form.
My lips trembled.
“I’m sorry. Aga. I shouldn’t have awakened you. I’m sorry.”
This child had been groaning through terrible nightmares.
At the same time, this child had been deeply brainwashed.
Before consciousness could fully return and distinguish friend from foe, he could only recite the doctrine.
“I’m sorry.”
With trembling hands, I lowered the child onto the bed.
A bed no human had ever slept in before.
A village with people, yet without people.
I drew in a deep breath.
Even through the heavy self-recrimination, my blue eyes were still driven forward.
“Can the people being experimented on be restored to their original state?”
I scraped together passages that had appeared in the Jicheon Cheonma.
I struggled to grasp even the smallest line mentioning Hyeolseonggyo.
“…For now… they’ve lost their consciousness and intellect. And there’s a high probability they’ve also lost their souls. So what remains in the child’s body is merely the hun.”
In typical martial arts fiction, the human soul is said to be divided into hun (魂) and po (魄).
When a person dies, the hun ascends to heaven while the po remains on earth.
In a sense, since it’s based on yin-yang and the five elements, the hun and po of humans represent the harmony of yin and yang.
That’s why the principle of saenggangsi sorcery works by using the po that remains in the corpse to animate the body.
Because of this, I roughly know from the novel’s passages how Hyeolseon disciples without self-awareness in Jicheon Cheonma end up.
“They consume the hun and leave the po behind. So the possibility exists that repeating the same verses over and over means the hun has vanished and only the po remains, repeating memories.”
Of course, it could be otherwise.
What Jicheon Cheonma showed wasn’t everything.
These creatures wouldn’t use just one method to control people.
To begin with, separating the hun and po of a living person is an extremely advanced and labor-intensive form of sorcery.
Separating and brainwashing the hun and po of a living person would be wasteful beyond measure.
‘So it could be some experimental process unique to Hyeolseon that I don’t know about. If they were brainwashing to the extreme with drugs and modifying human bodies for that reason.’
It could be an experiment of Hyeolseon alone that I could never know.
Something not mentioned even once in Jicheon Cheonma.
If the hun and po weren’t touched, there would be a way to restore them to their original state….
But if not… if it were otherwise….
If they used that great method briefly mentioned in Jicheon Cheonma here, these people will never return to their original selves.
“It’s similar to creating saenggangsi.”
“…It’s far more vicious than that.”
My hands trembled uncontrollably.
Could I save these people?
I don’t know.
In the first place, Yeo Ha-ryun killed every single one of them without exception to grant them peace.
That is the peace of the Demonic Cult.
This world belongs to the strong, and evil flourishes until the Black Maitreya descends.
When the time draws near, those who cannot open their eyes—death is their only freedom.
I don’t know what the Black Maitreya means.
Only that good and evil are equally important, and I walk between them. A seeker of the dharma in the age of decline that will come someday.
From a modern person’s perspective, this too is ultimately a heresy.
On the other hand, Hyeolseon is.
‘Hyeolseon shall guide us to paradise.’
A teaching from Jicheon Cheonma.
They desire destruction.
That doesn’t simply mean the world falling into chaos.
Throughout human history, humans have never ceased killing humans, never been free from war and plague.
Even now, this is considered a relatively peaceful era.
Then what of times of chaos?
Weren’t stories common of starving parents trading children with neighbors to eat them?
So if that’s their goal, Hyeolseon has already achieved it long ago.
‘What are the conditions for destruction?’
And what exactly is this “Bloodscent Paradise”?
Yeo Ha-ryun had clearly fought Hyeolseon and emerged victorious.
It meant he had prevented them from reaching this “Paradise.”
“When winter ends and the blood moon rises, the long yearning finally ceases…?”
Yearning meant longing for one’s homeland.
Homesickness.
“Is it merely a pseudo-religious incantation mixed with fanaticism? Or….”
My mind grew turbulent.
More than that, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the child’s corpse.
My chest tightened, and sorrow settled within me.
I carefully arranged the child’s body with dignity.
Then suddenly, I discovered a red mark above the wrist, and another mark on the inner elbow.
“Hm? These are needle marks.”
“Hmm?”
“Ah….”
When I removed the child’s clothing, I found multiple injection marks on parts not yet decomposed.
“Ordinary doctors rarely use needles. Does Hyeolseon use them like you do?”
At Gongseon Yeong’s words, I started to shake my head but closed my mouth instead.
“…I don’t know.”
The master of Jicheon Cheonma simply cut down everything before his eyes.
Showing mercy to enemies was mere luxury.
Listening to an enemy’s circumstances was also a waste of time.
That distant, solitary path of blood.
I only knew how to kill my opponent; what I knew about how Hyeolseon specifically cultivated their “believers” was merely the tip of an iceberg.
“Needle marks, you say.”
These were things I had never seen on the corpses of Hyeolseon remnants until now.
This place, reached by a different path than Yeo Ha-ryun’s.
Now these people were no longer characters from a novel.
I carefully dressed the child again.
“I don’t even understand what kind of organization Hyeolseon truly is.”
Were they not simply flat villains from a martial arts novel?
“Yearning”—what was it?
Then let me reverse the question.
“Where did they come from?”
For now, the homeland of Yo Cheon-gun, one of the Sip Cheon-gun, was where Oh Dok-mun was located.
He would not yearn for Oh Dok-mun.
“…Hope. Cheon Hee…. Hey, Jin Cheon-hee!”
“Ah, yes. Yes! Sister!”
“You’re bleeding.”
It seemed I had unconsciously gripped my right wrist tightly with my left hand. Blood had seeped through.
I withdrew my hand and pondered the question.
Longing for home—what did that mean?
Why did it feel like this term held a clue far more crucial than “Blood Paradise,” which they had emphasized from the beginning?
‘What exactly are you all yearning for?’
It certainly wasn’t because of the miso soup my parents used to make when I was young.
* * *
After that, I searched through the house with a pallid complexion.
Every dwelling devoid of human habitation contained these devices, and each held a coffin as well.
“There must be at least thousands of them. Cheon Hee.”
“How did they gather so many people without anyone noticing? I don’t understand…”
Prince Han-bing muttered in a daze as well.
I responded.
“It appears… the Northern Palace Lord has joined hands with Hyeolseonggyo. This is my failure to notice.”
I had relied too heavily on the original work, and the original work itself had become a trap.
Gongseon Yeong smacked my back with a sharp crack, utterly exasperated.
“Look, if you could deduce that someone is a Hyeolseonggyo cultist just by looking at them, and that they’re conducting human experiments on thousands in a mine, you’d either be a celestial immortal or insane.”
“Sister, I—”
“No! Stop blaming yourself! No matter how skilled a doctor you are, no matter how brilliant your mind, some things simply cannot be known. You are not a god. You don’t bear responsibility for every death. This catastrophe happened because the North Sea Ice Palace Master has gone mad! Do you understand?”
“But—”
Crack!
“Ow! Sister!”
“…If you self-blame even once more, I’m truly going to lose my temper.”
Gongseon Yeong’s chest grew tight with frustration.
‘Does this fool actually think he’s a god?’
No, it was Hyeolseonggyo and the North Sea Ice Palace Master who were digging tunnels and conducting experiments on humans—so why was he the one drowning in guilt?

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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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