Doctor’s Rebirth - Chapter 638

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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 638
The Grace of Heavenly Virtue
“Master, what is this?”
“Hmm? What are you referring to, Hope?”
What Jin Cheon-hee held out was something stained with blood.
“It’s a promissory note, Master. I’ve searched everywhere, but there’s no merchant house listed on it.”
Now that he had taken on the role of Soggakju, this disciple had begun to involve himself in all manner of Jegallim Family affairs.
Because of this, he was constantly bustling about without a moment’s rest.
‘He must want to bring joy to this master of his.’
This young disciple had always been this way.
He wanted to become some form of repayment for kindness received.
Whatever that “something” was, it hardly mattered—he would make it fit.
Whether a grateful swallow, a crow, a magpie, or a cat—any creature that would say, “You saved me, so I shall repay your kindness,” and burn itself away in gratitude.
But that was merely folklore. So why was this person—barely past the threshold of adulthood—actually doing such a thing?
Even when he was first picked up as a young child, this one had been the same.
Jegalling sighed softly and read the promissory note.
“This is… quite old.”
At those words, Jin Cheon-hee immediately grasped his master’s intent.
“Shall I burn it?”
Since it was from the time of the Hyeolrin Gwangssal, destroying the evidence by fire was the implication.
“No, there’s no need for that. This is… an old… piece of evidence of a certain kind.”
“…?”
Jegalling suddenly found himself recalling the past.
* * *
“One, two, three, four, five… You’ve killed quite a lot, haven’t you, boy?”
A young man with silver hair dragged a corpse and laid it down.
Observing this young man was a man with a vacant expression.
Instead of a sword at his waist, he carried bundles of talismans.
“Is this enough?”
“Yes. Sufficient.”
The future Demonic Sect Leader Sulche, the Sorcerer Emperor Gwihonma.
Beneath Gwihonma’s feet lay corpses of those who had once called themselves righteous, hypocrites who had participated in the annihilation of the Jegallim Family.
Gwihonma looked at the still-young Jegalling.
“Are this many corpses sufficient?”
“Indeed. They’ll serve as corpse soldiers. Little one. Keke keke…”
Gwihonma shook the bell hanging from the end of his staff and chanted. The corpses rose to their feet.
“Can you make corpse soldiers right away?”
“No, it’s not like that. This is merely making them follow. Corpse soldiers are far more complex than this.”
The man who had raised the dead with merely a bell and a chant laughed it off as though it were nothing remarkable, despite how extraordinary it truly was.
The man asked again.
“Child. But are you certain? They were defiled while living, and defiled even in death.”
At that stage, he affixed talismans one by one.
Jegalling answered with a cold expression.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Right. They’re doomed anyway, so what does it matter? They’ll throw a grand feast before the King of Hell in the underworld.”
Thus Gwihonma spoke his curses—if they could be called curses—and dragged the corpses away.
And what was pressed into Jegalling’s hands was a promissory note of an astronomical sum.
Enough wealth for three generations to live in idle luxury and still have surplus.
“Cough.”
In that moment, pitch-black blood rose in my throat.
No amount of coughing would cure the illness. It only grew worse.
“Cough, cough!”
The Yin-Yang Meridian Reversal was truly a hellish curse.
Jegalling retreated to a corner and curled up.
The young man retrieved a needle from his pack and pressed an acupoint.
“Cough… ugh….”
The coughing ceased. Yet my chest remained cold and aching.
As if someone were hacking at me with an axe, I had to gasp for breath through the relentless agony.
The young man felt death approaching with each passing moment.
In the sound of coughing, in the blood-stained promissory note.
“I’m alive. Still alive….”
The young man was grateful for the pain.
He had read every ledger and secret letter written in cipher, committing them all to memory. There was no need to employ the Hyeonwon Jeondan Singeong.
The young man was what people called a ‘prodigy,’ after all.
Soon, having memorized everything, the young man took a candle and swept it across the table.
The floor had been pre-oiled, so the flames spread in all directions and burned brilliantly.
Young Jegalling stared at it for a long while, then coughed again and again, and just as he was about to apply acupuncture, realizing it would be futile, he swallowed medicine instead.
The coughing stopped, but in exchange, my mind grew hazy.
-All medicines have side effects, Hyeolrin. Can you truly endure this medicine? If you take it, you’ll need to sleep for a full day. Is that possible while fleeing for your life?
The words of the elder Hyeolsaeng Nogoe came to mind.
The stronger the medicine, the stronger the side effects.
Jegalling murmured softly and moved swiftly using lightness technique.
Behind the young man, flames surged upward.
Crackle, pop—
In the burning flames, there were no screams, no moans, no wails.
Because there were no living souls.
Death is silent.
Only the living feel pain and cry out.
The young man felt an impulse to leap into this inferno and become quiet alongside it.
Yet he knew it was not so simple.
I had to tear my gaze from the flames and move my body once more.
Deep within the mountains, some distance away.
The young man moved with lightness of step, leaving no trace, until he found the place he had secretly marked and began digging the earth with his bare hands.
As I infused my inner energy into the digging, the soil parted like tofu.
How long did I dig?
An earthen burrow large enough for a bear to enter and rest revealed itself.
The young man stepped inside.
Then I sealed the burrow shut once more.
Infusing inner energy, I filled the entrance with earth again—it was seamless.
-The assassins live worse than dogs. Is that living like a person? That’s living like a beast.
When I first learned this method, Jegalling had no particular thoughts about it.
After all, wasn’t this a life unfit for living as a human?
My consciousness grew hazy once more.
No blood came from my throat. There was still no coughing.
But I was drowsy. So drowsy….
Were the side effects of the medicine beginning? If I fell asleep like this, could I wake again?
I had no certainty.
Jegalling fell asleep, clutching his blade.
* * *
I dreamed.
It was a dream where the atrocities committed by the Jegallim Family unfolded before my eyes one by one.
Jegalling knew this was a dream. Dimly, I felt the cold sensation of the earthen burrow and the stench of rotted blood.
Though my mouth felt parched, I knew the medicine’s effects continued to course through me.
Like being pinned by sleep paralysis, there was no way to resist.
The dream seized me and whispered the stories of the Jegallim Family’s victims one by one.
-The Jegalling clan artificially creates geniuses. They now believe they can artificially achieve Hyeongyeong there.
-Do they believe enlightenment comes from intelligence?
-They believe that even enlightenment itself is controlled by the brain. So I heard they conduct secret experiments.
-Is that true?
-There’s no evidence. But there was a small family connected to the Jegallim Family that disappeared without a trace in a single day.
-They say the Gaju even conducts experiments on his own son. Is that true?
-That too is unknowable.
Faceless shadows whispered one by one.
-The Gaju has gone mad. We must act before it grows larger.
-We cannot leave a single source of trouble. Who will help us?
-Both the righteous and heterodox factions wish to help. Yet they fear stepping forward directly.
-But someone must bell the cat, mustn’t they?
-Let it be the one with the greatest grievance against the Jegallim Family.
-Who is that?
At that moment, countless shadows gathered and whispered as one.
—How shall I kill them?
—I wish to make them die in the most excruciating agony.
—I wish to settle the grudges we have accumulated against the Jegallim Family.
—The Jegallim Family deceived heaven, deceived mankind, and even attempted to deceive the martial arts world itself.
With each voice, the accumulated debts and enmities of the Jegallim Family passed through my mind.
I had killed people. I had participated in blood massacres. As a member of the Righteous Faction, I had orchestrated the complete annihilation of Heterodox Faction members through schemes.
In turn, this time I had concealed my identity, joined the Heterodox Faction, and exterminated the Demonic Sect.
Among these, there were those whose corpses were never found, and no one knew what had become of them.
So what had Father been doing all this time?
Young Jegalling wandered, searching for those traces.
The process of repaying the grudges born from the Jegallim Family’s annihilation.
Yet that process was simultaneously a journey of learning all the debts and enmities the Jegallim Family had accumulated over the years.
“Hah…!”
The young man finally awakened from his dream.
“…”
After breathing heavily for a long while, I forcibly circulated my inner energy through my cold body to warm it.
Normally, a dangerous grand circulation that risked falling into demonic possession.
The young man performed it without hesitation.
A body I would discard soon anyway.
Having abandoned all hope of living long, I was performing a grand circulation bordering on demonic cultivation.
I chewed the grain-substitute pill with a crunching sound.
The taste hardly mattered.
Ever since Mother, my brothers, my retainers, and even my few close friends were all slaughtered, I had forgotten the taste of food.
There was no salvation in this hell.
And amid it all, this regret that arose—
‘If only the research had progressed faster, would the Jegallim Family have survived?’
The research Father had conducted using my own body.
If I was to die soon anyway, and if that research allowing artificial entry into Hyeongyeong had been completed, could we not have avoided the family’s annihilation?
The young man drank water from a bucket amid this strange guilt and swallowed the grain-substitute pill.
Soon after, the young man opened the earthen chamber and stepped outside.
“Is there salvation on this path?”
There would not be.
“Will the day come when I taste food again?”
That too would not come.
“Will the day arrive when I learn the answer to why the Jegallim Family fell to this state?”
At that moment, a crow cried out.
At the sound, as if a desperate wail, Jegalling’s face contorted into a smile.
The young man clutched a crumpled banknote.
“Will the day come when I spend this money?”
I did not know.
Jegalling could not be certain that a day would come when he would spend such an enormous sum.
The fact that such a day might come was, conversely, proof that a future worthy of it existed.
Jegalling drew a sharp breath.
‘Suppressing the heart demon is not easy.’
If life was nothing but a mayfly’s brief span anyway, there was nothing to do but attempt everything possible.
But….
Jegalling suddenly withdrew the half-eaten Bigyokdan pill from his possession.
If this was already hell, he could not know whether a worse hell existed in the afterlife.
A quiet death beckoned to him.
Sweet, and eternal quietude.
I suppress the impulse to surrender to it at this very moment.
Instead, I merely pull my hair back so tightly that my scalp aches.
“Where shall I go to annihilate today?”
Clues were gathering.
Sordid tales of the filthy Jegallga and the filthy Jeongsa.
My next move was already determined.
“They mentioned a fox, didn’t they?”
It would be a symbolic cipher, but I decided to investigate.
* * *
“Master?”
“…Master…?”
My disciple’s voice pulled me from my reverie.
Jegalling returned from the past to the present in an instant.
Before my eyes stood my disciple.
If one were to shape a person from spring itself, they might look like this—and warmth always surrounded him.
“Um…. Then what should we do about the promissory note?”
My disciple asked, his eyes rolling about nervously.
He seemed greatly worried that he had touched the wound from when I bore the Hyeolrin Gwangssal.
This one was always like this.
Even after remaining here for so long, he feared being cast out at any moment.
Did he have an experience of being expelled during childhood?
Jegalling thought briefly.
What I could surmise about my disciple was merely that he came from a very distant place.
And that place was like an immortal realm—he could produce all manner of techniques that did not exist even in the Western Continent.
And that even there, he had no family.
‘Was he abandoned twice, or perhaps three times?’
That was something Jegalling had never spoken aloud to Jin Cheon-hee, nor did he often reveal such thoughts.
“Take this to Sulche, and he will exchange it for real currency. Perhaps he will add three times the value in gold?”
“Really?”
“Haha. Quite a miraculous tale, is it not?”
Jegalling said this with a deceiving tone, claiming it was a magical promissory note, and I grasped his meaning instantly.
“Master, this promissory note… could it be something like Sulche’s weakness?”
“Indeed, you grasped it quickly, Hope.”
Gulp—
My Master savored with delight as my disciple’s expression shifted from pale to ashen to crimson.
“I, I found Master Sulche’s weakness… no… what… what…!?”
A man who grasped the concept of weakness so quickly was equally unfamiliar with such schemes and intrigues.
‘His true nature remains that of a doctor.’
Soon, having made a decision, he squeezed his eyes shut.
“Understood. I will definitely obtain the money!”
“If you desire something else, you may write more. I shall provide it.”
My disciple answered to my suggestion to dare seize Sulche’s weakness and extort him.
“Ah, understood. This is also the teaching of the Soggakju! Seizing weaknesses and extorting!”
In truth, it was not so grand.
It was something I did occasionally when I was in a foul mood and wished to cause trouble.
Of course, this was the first time I had taught it to my disciple.
“What do you desire? Money? Or perhaps some sorcery? Even secrets of the Sadoren, if not too significant, could be obtained.”
Soon, having made a decision, he spoke with a trembling voice.
“…Could I take medicinal herbs in large quantities?”
“Hmm?”
“The medicinal herbs at the Sadoren’s main headquarters cannot be harvested by herb gatherers. Large quantities, many! Packed full in a large basket!”
“…”
At those words, I could only cover my face with my fan and suppress my laughter.
“Truly? That would suffice?”
“This cannot be purchased with money, Master!”
“Very well. Then write that down.”
Answering thus, I reflected.
Indeed, in the Gangho, only the bond between master and disciple was real.
In this place where children and parents stabbed each other, where brothers engaged in fratricidal slaughter.
All things besides the master-disciple bond were merely illusions.
In that sense, I had grasped reality at the edge of hell.
And that reality spoke.
“…If I ask for one more basket, would Master Sulche comply?”
The strangest and warmest thing in the world.
For that reason, it was the sole treasure that never tired me.
“Ah, Master. And… it is a new creation. Please taste it and tell me honestly.”
What was set down was a pastry imprinted with a checkered pattern.
“A waffle… no… square-patterned honey cake with strawberry cream…!”
Again, he gave it a peculiar name.
‘He does not even hide the word “cream,” does he, Hope.’
What a ridiculous fellow. Perhaps that’s why.
This mad disciple of mine never fails to surprise me each time I see him.
A sweet and pleasant fragrance wafted from the pastries my disciple had baked.
It was the scent of spring.

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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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