The Genius Doctor Who Lives Twice - Chapter 11

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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 11
“The answer is simple. Cleaning.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Pendleton’s eyes widened in bewilderment, as if Edward had just spouted complete nonsense.
“What do you mean by that, sir?”
“Your son’s illness stems from dust mites that live in the dust, you see.”
“……?”
“They’re so small the naked eye can barely perceive them, but they feed on shed skin and dandruff. They favor warm, damp places, which is why they thrive in the dust of fabric—clothing, pillows, cotton bedding, and the like.”
Edward accompanied his explanation with a rather theatrical gesture.
Pendleton stood listening, dumbfounded.
“When these tiny creatures’ droppings find their way into your son’s nose and mouth, they trigger inflammation. If that’s the culprit, then eliminating the pests is the only cure. So you see, cleaning is the only answer.”
The man’s face hardened—he had never heard such a thing in his life.
Until now, every physician had spoken to him in terms of “excessive phlegm” or “excessive inflammation” and other language rooted in Humoral Theory; no one had ever pointed to an invisible insect as the cause.
“But not just any cleaning—thorough cleaning, mind you. Every piece of fabric in the house—bedding, garments, pillows—must be collected, boiled thoroughly, and hung out in good weather to dry. Then scour every corner of the home until not a speck of dust remains. And of course, move the cotton mattress somewhere else.”
As Edward spoke, he glanced at the child, who was rubbing his eyes again.
“Once you’ve done that, your son’s condition will naturally improve.”
Pendleton’s mouth fell open.
He was about to protest that this made no sense whatsoever.
“Master, are you certain? I confess I’ve never heard such a thing in all my years. Insects instead of humoral imbalance?”
The Apprentice voiced the very objection Pendleton had been about to raise.
Edward studied the young man for a moment, then nodded slowly.
“I stand by my judgment entirely.”
It was a solemn pronouncement.
Pendleton had nothing to say to that.
He pressed down gently on the child’s hands as the boy rubbed both eyes and nose, then asked again.
“…Cleaning, you say.”
“Yes. Cleaning.”
“And if we clean, the child will recover?”
“That’s right.”
“…I understand.”
Pendleton exhaled heavily and rose to his feet.
He lifted the child into his arms and posed one final question.
“What of the consultation fee, then…?”
“I’ll take none.”
“……?”
“I prescribed no medicine and performed no procedure. I couldn’t in good conscience charge a fee. When the boy is well again, come back and show your gratitude then.”
Edward nodded curtly.
The consultation was over.
Pendleton left Edward’s Clinic with the child in his arms, shaking his head in disbelief the entire way.
‘Cleaning? Cleaning….’
It sounded like something from a dream, utterly improbable.
Yet Edward was the only physician who had spoken about his son’s affliction with such absolute certainty.
The others had merely pocketed their fees and, when the treatments proved useless, shrugged and claimed ignorance—disclaimed any responsibility whatsoever.
“Father. It itches.”
Hearing the child whimper, Pendleton made a firm resolve.
The moment he reached home, he would do exactly as Edward had instructed.
* * *
The Rusty Anchor.
Bruno, the proprietor, wiped glasses methodically, his muscular frame rippling with each movement.
The tavern was always raucous, yet it maintained an orderly atmosphere nonetheless.
The thickness of a proprietor’s forearms generally correlates with the establishment’s discipline.
Ding. Ding—
The bell above the door chimed.
Bruno set down his glass and turned.
The newcomer walked directly to the bar and leaned against it.
It was Arthur Pendleton, the customs official of Danford, making an appearance after a considerable absence.
“Welcome back, sir. Shall I pour you your usual ale?”
Bruno spoke while studying the man’s face, then tilted his head in puzzlement.
Pendleton’s expression had visibly brightened.
“It’s been ten days. How is the boy? Has he improved at all?”
Bruno asked.
Ten days earlier, he had introduced Edward’s Clinic to him, but having heard nothing since, he’d grown curious.
“Thank you. Bruno, I’m truly grateful.”
“…For what?”
“For introducing me to that place. The boy recovered completely.”
Bruno’s eyes widened.
Truth be told, he hadn’t offered the introduction with any great confidence.
The regulars had simply complained so much that he’d let the suggestion slip out casually.
“Completely recovered?”
“Indeed. He doesn’t cough anymore, and he sleeps soundly. The runny nose and tears have stopped. Watching the boy so at ease, I feel like I’ve been given my life back.”
“What sort of treatment did he use? You said even the most renowned physicians couldn’t help.”
“Cleaning.”
At Pendleton’s unexpected answer, Bruno tilted his head to one side.
He stared, thinking he’d misheard, but his companion only kept smiling that serene smile.
“…Cleaning?”
“Yes, cleaning was the answer! Once we gave the house a thorough cleaning and washed all the bedding and clothes, the boy was right as rain—just like that.”
“That doesn’t make a lick of sense.”
“I thought the same at first. But that physician was dead right. The moment that strange little fellow laid eyes on the patient, he had his answer—as if he were tracking down a criminal!”
Pendleton’s words tumbled out faster in his excitement.
Bruno’s skepticism remained written across his face.
He couldn’t shake the thought that the customs officer before him had been duped by a charlatan.
It defied all reason that an ailment which had resisted so many treatments would vanish from a single cleaning.
“I cannot keep this joy to myself, so today I shall buy every person in this establishment a beer!”
But at this generous declaration, Bruno’s doubts evaporated at once.
Good fortune is good fortune, after all.
“Splendid!”
He struck the counter with a loud bang.
“Hear me, everyone! Here stands Arthur Pendleton, customs officer of Danford, and thanks to Edward’s Clinic, his son has been restored to full health! He’s in such excellent spirits that he’s treating the lot of you to ale!”
The tavern erupted in a roar that seemed to shake the walls.
“Huzzah!”
“Beer! Beer!”
“Edward! Edward!”
Bruno turned back to Pendleton with a broad grin.
“The sir’s drinks are on me.”
“Of course. I have a feeling the beer will taste especially fine tonight.”
Pendleton grinned in return. The worry and anxiety from ten days past had vanished without a trace.
* * *
Edward’s Clinic.
Edward stood amid the pile of goods heaped in the middle of the treatment room, unable to hide his bewilderment.
His gaze fell upon several bolts of fine wool fabric, chunks of well-cured smoked ham, and boxes of premium tea—precious items difficult even to obtain.
Pendleton had arrived just as Edward was closing the clinic, pressing these gifts upon him with repeated bows and profuse thanks.
“The customs officer of Danford, you say? That’s generous. Or perhaps these are confiscated contraband?” Allen murmured, gazing up at the gift boxes.
Edward, however, heard none of it.
“Cleaning. It was cleaning all along. How is such a thing possible!”
He shook his head in disbelief.
Unable to contain his excitement, he exhaled sharply and turned to Allen.
“How did you know? How could you see something invisible to the eye?”
“Edward, the capital possesses many fine instruments. Among them is a device that magnifies things invisible to the naked eye, allowing one to see them enlarged.”
A microscope—layers of lenses that magnified objects to tens, even hundreds of times their natural size.
Yet for now, it remained merely an expensive curiosity of the wealthy. Its resolution was poor.
Compared to the instruments that existed in Allen’s memory from that world, it was crude, primitive.
But it was excuse enough to convince the surgeon before him.
“I was a frog in a well. That such medicine could exist—it’s impossible. I’m a fool…”
“Please, enough self-recrimination.”
Allen spoke warmly.
“You see it now yourself. Using my methods, results this dramatic are rare indeed.”
“And yet… those surgeries where infection ‘doesn’t occur’—when done your way, truly no pus forms at all.”
“Yes. That is why I’ve been making my reputation known.”
“Extraordinary. If every physician in the world were like you, I’d sooner bite my own tongue and die than continue practicing as a surgeon. My pride couldn’t bear it.”

“Edward, most physicians in this world are fools. Arrogant creatures who strut about with their noses in the air, waving ivory-headed canes like children playing at grandeur.”
Edward’s tongue flickered against his teeth at the sight of this man dismantling the “nobility of medicine” without mercy.
“Who exactly are you?”
“A physician who failed in the capital and retreated to the countryside.”
“Someone like you failed in the capital? How is that even possible?”
“Edward, the capital is not a place that listens to what is right.”
…….
“Moreover, I didn’t even speak what was right there. My downfall was inevitable.”
Edward still couldn’t fully grasp it.
But he could gather, in broad strokes, why the physician before him had come this far down.
He had come seeking someone who would listen to him—someone before whom he needn’t hesitate to speak his mind.
“I will hear everything you have to say. Without a shred of doubt.”
“…Is that a wise stance, Edward?”
“If a child listens to an adult speak and thinks to himself, ‘All adults do is spout nonsense, so I’ll think as I please’—what remains of value? No. I will trust and follow what you say first. Only that way can I judge for myself whether it is true or false.”
Edward spoke the words with conviction, his fist clenched before him.
A faint smile lingered at the corner of Allen’s mouth.
“You didn’t believe me until now?”
“…To be honest, I harbored some doubts. Especially when you told me to clean—I thought, what in blazes is this about?”
Edward scratched his temple with a sheepish air.
“But not anymore. Professor, I will be your mouth and your hands.”
“I have no wish to see you become my puppet.”
Allen continued, his voice low.
“You learn knowledge from me, and I learn manual skill from you. I seek an equal exchange.”
Edward’s face flushed with color at once.
He placed a firm hand on Allen’s shoulder.
“Of course! I will teach you as much as need be, until you become me and I become you.”
* * *
That night.
Allen sat at an old table with a candle lit before him, quill in hand.
A scratching sound filled the room.
It was a letter to his property manager in the capital, Kalden.
‘I entrusted urgent matters to the steward before coming down, but the loose ends weren’t tied cleanly.’
The moment of dismissal—the gilded system became a vast prison.
Another hour there and he felt he might have stopped breathing altogether.
Allen set down his pen and cast his gaze out the window.
Unlike the golden sphere of Kalden, where gas lamps turned night into day, Danford’s evening streets were different.
Danford’s night streets lay submerged in damp darkness, with only scattered lanterns blinking like the eyes of beasts.
“…Compared to Kalden, this place is provincial.”
He murmured the words softly to himself.
All at once, the splendor of his years in the system appeared like a mirage.
Those days when he had bought fine mansions and collected paintings and antiquities, strutting about as Baron Rosenbaum.
One house call to a nobleman’s bedroom alone put gold coins in his hand that easily surpassed Edward’s yearly income.
The title of royal physician justified any arrogance whatsoever.
If asked whether he missed those days, he would admit, honestly, that sometimes he did.
The glow of the gas lamps in the golden sphere, the weight of the gold coins he held in his palm as he left a nobleman’s chamber, the reverent gazes that followed the royal physician—
To say he didn’t miss those things would have been a lie.
Which made it all the more repulsive.
That he, even now, yearned for such things.
‘I was too busy doing harm with countless fraudulent prescriptions. I couldn’t even distinguish between good medicine and expensive poison.’
It was a truly cruel paradox.
At the pinnacle of medicine, he had lived as a blind physician, buried beneath hollow authority and fossilized knowledge.
Yet now, having lost everything and fled to this attic, only now did he possess in his mind the true knowledge that could overturn the world.
But he could not return to Kalden.
He was barred from practice, stripped of his license as a physician, and besides—there was a man who would follow him to the very depths of hell to torment him.
“Archibold Halloway.”
The moment he gnawed on that name, a thick drop of ink fell onto the paper.
The rival who had driven him to ruin.
The florid, fat-necked face of Archibold Halloway—Chair of the Royal Medical Academy and head of the Physicians Association—rose before his eyes.
If that man had cast Allen out from the kingdom of physicians, then there was only one path forward.
‘Become a surgeon.’
In the world of medicine, a butcher stained with blood, a surgeon treated as a second-class subject.
From that mire at the bottom—the very place that noble Archibold Halloway would never deign to glance at—he would sharpen his blade.
In truth, choosing Danford as a foothold for his resurrection was not born of calculation alone.
While it might serve as a refuge, a small town offered limited clinical cases—a grave deficiency for a surgeon.
Yet the reason he treaded this land again lay partly in it being his homeland, but more crucially, it was a size sufficient to establish a ‘beachhead’.
‘Merely becoming a surgeon will not suffice. I shall make this place a beachhead for a new medicine.’
Edward is ignorant. No pretense, no theory.
But precisely because of that, he was a perfect blank slate—one capable of absorbing new knowledge without resistance.
While learning surgical technique from Edward, I will transform him and cultivate him into a true physician.
I shall build a fortress of new medicine here in Danford—one that will not waver before any storm the world brings.
One day, I must return to Kalden.
If I do not excise the heart of that arrogant city, the world will not change.
But by then, Allen will no longer be the powerless baron of old.
“Wait for me, Halloway.”
In the candlelight, Allen’s eyes gleamed cold.

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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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