Doctor’s Rebirth - Chapter 886

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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 886
050. The Call of the Sea
Under the praise of the Three Scholars, my golden soybean milk honey grows stronger by the day.
In particular, the Golden Blood Hall is selling it exactly as I consume it—steamed milk with gold dust floating on top.
‘Steamed Golden Soybean Milk Honey’.
That is the product’s name.
It’s only possible in large inns, where martial artists personally operate the heat and wind devices to create it… naturally, it’s expensive.
But drawn by its unique, nutty sweetness, quite a few people line up to drink it.
Sama Hyeon sends me 30% of the sales revenue.
‘Next comes soybean milk distribution.’
To sell soybean milk as a product, shelf life is naturally crucial.
Since glass is expensive in this era, I can’t even dream of it, so I’m using specially glazed pottery instead.
Applying the bottling method Napoleon once used, I seal soybean milk in bottles.
Through sterilization and special sealing, it can be preserved quite long at room temperature without ice.
‘Of course, it’s impossible to store it for months like in modern times.’
The Tetrapak needs to be invented.
Plastic coating technology.
Still, soybean milk has a much longer shelf life than milk.
Because it’s made by boiling fresh beans rather than being produced from animal milk.
Still, the moment it’s opened, it contacts air, so it must be consumed quickly.
After that, it’s the same.
Just like collecting glass bottles as a child, martial artists recover the bottles and recycle them.
‘Do kids on Earth not collect glass bottles anymore?’
Back when I was young, you’d get dozens of won for bringing glass bottles to the neighborhood store.
Seems like kids these days don’t do that anymore.
For bottle caps, Earth history used cork stoppers reinforced with paraffin, but fortunately, the Murim world had an alternative wood.
A type of pine tree, called by different names depending on the region.
In Gangso Province, it’s called ‘Gurengi Wood’.
A common tree with strong vitality, its roots are incredibly tough—surrounding trees can’t grow because of it.
It grows so fast that there’s even an idiom: ‘Growing like Gurengi wood in the rain’.
True to its name, it grows twisted like a snake, making it useless as lumber—a real nuisance. I never thought I’d use such a thing as a bottle cap.
The price is….
‘Hmm, it’s not unaffordable, but I can’t say it comes as cheap as on Earth.’
As a welfare measure, I send it free to households with lactose intolerance.
Still, the advantage is its preservation period is incomparably longer than milk.
From a delivery standpoint, it’s convenient.
And if bottles are properly returned, I discount the price, and for households that continuously return them over several months, I send silk bean-shaped dolls.
Sama Hyeon said:
-Not all silk is expensive, hyeong. Among silks, there’s also low-grade silk from poorly woven cloth or low-quality thread. You just buy that fabric. Then the unit cost is saved.
-The bean doll itself isn’t that difficult to design. It’s what you make when first learning to sew, right?
-Embroider eyes and a mouth onto it. Humans find even a broom cute if it has eyes—how much more so a silk bean pouch doll?
-Then it looks expensive and adorable, so the children love it.
-Oh, Hyeong. The ones that come out during holidays have ears. Since it’s golden soybean milk, let’s add fox ears. A fox-eared bean pouch doll.
First clay figurines, now bean pouch dolls.
And the person buying them is an adult—why on earth is he collecting children’s toys?
When I questioned whether silk would wear out quickly and another fabric might be better, Sama Hyeon let out a scoff.
-Why would you say that? Gaga~ The faster they break, the sooner we collect the next doll. Besides, adults like them too. They just can’t admit it for the sake of dignity.
And so it came to pass.
The customers ordering soybean milk overlapped with those ordering Baekrin dumplings.
Pyo Guk, the carpenter, and people who simply enjoyed exotic cuisine.
And now a layer of customers ordering only soybean milk was growing.
‘Hmm, this is a jackpot.’
I began selling various soybean milk beverages through the Golden Blood Hall and Baekrin Uiseon’s inns.
Watching me, Muyue asked.
“Did you perhaps plan all of this from when I first suggested starting a delivery service?”
“Huh? No, not at all. It just grew naturally as I went along. The timing worked out well too.”
“….”
He clearly didn’t believe me.
The same went for the other Medical Assistants.
“Surely you don’t think I’m conducting business by reading the heavens and observing the stars in the night sky using some mystical power of the Jegallim Family?”
“…Isn’t that what you’re doing?”
Were they seriously believing that?!
It was their side who orchestrated the whole thing in the first place!
No matter how much I explained otherwise, they all seemed unconvinced.
‘This might actually birth a religion.’
Wait, didn’t something similar already exist?
And so the misunderstandings about the Jegallim Family deepened.
* * *
Time flows indifferently.
The Great Righteous-Heterodox War ended inconclusively like incomplete combustion, and the massive bloodshed had ceased, with the world gradually returning to its former state.
The Heterodox and Righteous Factions still snarled at each other in small skirmishes, but nothing large enough to be called war erupted.
The Greenwood Bandits quietly grew in numbers again, establishing mountain strongholds here and there to collect tolls.
The Heterodox sects engaged in human trafficking joined hands with corrupt officials, divided profits with the Righteous Faction, and fought by drawing blades one moment and sheathing them the next.
People were born, and just as quickly, they died.
The population showed no signs of increasing, yet it wasn’t decreasing either—a peculiar state of affairs.
Some called this the arrival of peace in Gangho.
The meaning being that with fewer deaths, things were going well enough.
In the past, people might have said, “That’s right. Peace has finally come!” and the fallen warriors of prestigious sects would have been treated as heroes and become tales to tell.
But.
Gangso Province alone displayed a peculiar path of its own.
A saying circulated throughout the Gangho.
-If you wish to become a Kang Ho-in, climb the Five Sacred Mountains.
-If you wish to live as a commoner, go to Gangso Province.
It was what everyone said in unison.
The Five Sacred Mountains—in the Gangho, this referred to five holy peaks.
Mount Tai, Mount Hua, Mount Heng, Mount Hang, and Mount Song.
These were where the renowned righteous factions established themselves, taking in exceptional children and raising them as Kang Ho-in.
But what of Gangso Province?
While the Gangho descended into chaos.
Baekrin County saw thousands of households established, completing its agricultural zones.
Numerous villages sprang up anew, and roads connecting the farms were maintained.
Water and sewage systems became fully established, and as word spread of their convenience, migrants began arriving from other provinces.
The population increased, and deaths from disease declined significantly.
With more mouths to feed, consumption of goods surged dramatically.
“Money’s been circulating these days—business is good.”
“Indeed. And it’s been quite some time since I’ve seen the Heterodox Faction openly prowling about.”
“But the Righteous Faction can’t exactly strut about either. After all, the power of the Righteous Faction comes from the blade, and without battles to fight, they naturally grow quiet. Of course, it’s not just the Heterodox Faction, but still.”
“Even so, the Heterodox Faction won’t disappear entirely. Isn’t it said that the Heterodox Faction is like a shadow?”
“True enough, but we don’t see commoners being killed on the roads like in the old days.”
“That’s because the guards come chasing with their cudgels, isn’t it?”
“Fair point.”
Baekrin County alone was developing differently from the current state of the Gangho.
Because of this, Kang Ho-in began to view Gangso Province with suspicion.
“Let’s just treat Gangso Province as if it doesn’t exist. You could end up dead if you carelessly distribute opium there.”
“Is that so?”
Baekrin Uiseon was the sort that would issue a treatment order regardless of whether one belonged to the Righteous or Heterodox Faction.
Everyone knew that a doctor obsessed with saving lives would come chasing with a cudgel.
If you resisted, he would draw his blade and not discuss it further.
“They say he fires nets.”
“Nets? What nets are you talking about?”
“They wrap chain nets around arrows and fire them. No matter how skilled a swordsman is, they’re helpless against it. The guards gather together and do this.”
Because of this, people began to increasingly avoid Gangso Province where Baekrin Uiseon was located.
“If you wish to become a Kang Ho-in, climb Mount Hua; if you wish to live as a commoner, go to Gangso Province—it’s turning out exactly as the saying goes.”
“That’s about right.”
As this new maxim took root in the Gangho.
The source and culprit of this saying.
I was spending my days in constant busyness.
So busy that months flew by, and I was still working even as winter drew near!
During those hectic days.
Sama Hyeon went to the Hao-mun for a month or two and returned, and Cheonwoo also went to the Mudang Faction before coming back.
There was a particular reason why he had returned after leaving.
It seemed both the Mudang Faction and Hao-mun Sect found it effective for their disciples to train with me, so they granted permission for another period of external cultivation.
“We’re actually pretty lenient about it. Only Daoists who cause major incidents outside are forbidden from leaving and get punished.”
I suspected this permissiveness was undoubtedly due to Gwon Je’s influence.
In any case, after receiving formal approval, Cheonwoo threw himself back into his training.
Several months passed, and winter drew near.
That’s when I was up to my next bout of madness.
“Hyeong, is that actually right?”
“Hmm~ probably. It should work.”
Crackle crackle!
Lightning overflowed from my clasped hands.
When I separated my hands, electric light writhed and danced between them.
It was like implementing a Tesla coil with my bare hands.
Having brought something straight out of the movies into reality, I stretched both hands forward.
Boom!
Lightning burst from my hands and struck the ground.
“This is nitrogen fixation. There’s nitrogen in the air we breathe, and when you use lightning or fire like this, it becomes fixed in the soil.”
Nitrogen fixation.
A German scientist named Fritz Haber developed this method, earning renown for discovering and devising a way to fix atmospheric nitrogen into the soil.
He won the Nobel Prize for it, but during World War I, out of his love (?) for his homeland Germany, he created poison gas—a weapon of mass destruction.
A figure of both light and shadow simultaneously.
The fertility of agricultural land and how well crops grow is actually determined by the amount of nitrogen present.
So if we need to obtain this nitrogen from somewhere, agricultural production won’t increase otherwise, right?
This Fritz Haber discovered nitrogen fixation and created nitrogen fertilizer, and it’s no exaggeration to say that food production skyrocketed because of it.
In fact.
Some argue that due to his discovery, humanity’s population, which was only about 1.6 billion in the early 1900s, increased to nearly 8 billion by the 2020s.
There’s a claim that such growth would have been impossible without stable food production.
However.
What I’m using now isn’t actually Fritz Haber’s nitrogen fixation method.
‘His nitrogen production process uses iron catalysts. But do I really need to follow that exactly?’
Instead, I’m using a more primitive and natural approach.
‘The Gangho has lightning strikes!’
Electrical discharge.
When atmospheric nitrogen is exposed to electricity, it becomes fixed through high-temperature energy.
In other words, just applying this electrical treatment increases the nitrogen content in the soil!
Add plenty of compost and increase nitrogen with this electrical treatment, and voilà!
Fertile farmland!
It’s not quite as good as modern nitrogen fertilizer… but there’s no helping it.
‘If I’d known this, I should have watched videos about nitrogen fixation mass production processes.’
Though I enjoyed watching various documentaries, I regretted not diving deeper into chemical engineering videos.
In the end, I was mimicking natural principles to artificially elevate the soil fertility of the farmland.
“Krahahahaha! Fields! Feast upon this lightning!”
“Hyeong, that manner of speech sounds exactly like some Heterodox Faction demon lord coming out to commit a blood massacre….”
Cheonwoo couldn’t bring himself to continue and averted his gaze.
The passing commoners who heard my wild laughter tried their best to avoid making eye contact with Ilgwang.
“Oh, the weather is nice today.”
“Y-yes, yes. The air is quite clear.”
“The scenery over there looks lovely, shall we take that path instead?”
Some people even took a wide detour.
The commoners were different from the Medical Assistants.
The Medical Assistants thought ‘Our Patriarch is in good health today’ even at my considerable bouts of madness and simply continued their work.
Meanwhile, the commoners couldn’t comprehend my eccentric behavior.
“Why is he wasting precious lightning on the fields?”
“Shh! Keep quiet. Don’t make eye contact either.”
Leaving them behind, I vigorously scattered the lightning.
“Krahahahaha! Krahaha! In this moment, I am lightning itself! Fields, feast upon nitrogen fixation! Lightning! Lightning!”
Crackle-crackle-crackle–!

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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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