The Genius Doctor Who Lives Twice - Chapter 2

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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 2
Historians divide the history of medicine into before and after his name.
Before him, the art of healing remained in the realm of passive observation — recording the signs of death and accepting what could not be changed.
It was only in his era that medicine became a science that could examine the human body empirically, seize illness by the throat, and wrest life back from death’s grasp.
Allen Wright, the name humanity now reveres, was not always glorious.
Before he appeared on history’s stage, he was merely an arrogant Physician who had bought his reputation with money — a man known as Alexander Rosenbaum.
His fall was bitter, yet inevitable.
Only after losing everything did he cast off his borrowed title and return to his true name, born of common blood.
And he chose with his own two feet the path of a Surgeon — the very “knife-wielder” he had once so thoroughly despised.
What had driven him to this reckless transformation?
Where had this fallen physician stolen the spark that humanity had searched for blindly through thousands of years of darkness?
His contemporaries whispered of divine revelation or a pact with the devil.
Yet Allen Wright himself never left a single word about the source of that knowledge.
— From 『Allen Wright: A Biography — The Hand That Split the Darkness』
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“Gashhh!”
Alexander’s eyes snapped open with a cry.
Thump. Thump.
His heart hammered in his chest as though it would shatter his ribs.
He reached out frantically, patting his own body.
Skin slick with sweat, the rough texture of a bandage wound around his head.
“Ugh…”
A violent nausea clawed up his throat. His skull felt as though it would split open.
No — it felt as though his brain had burst from being forced to swallow something unbearable.
He looked around with bloodshot eyes.
Rough log walls, cold night air seeping through the gaps, the acrid smell of smoke rising from a hearth.
Everything was crude, filthy, primitive — utterly at odds with the brilliant world he had inhabited mere moments before.
That place.
A space flooded with light brighter than midday, so immaculate that not a speck of dust was tolerated.
A world where even death could be held at bay with a gesture — a realm of skill that seemed beyond human capability.
Too strange to be waking life, yet too vivid to be mere dream, that land could be called by only one name — one that his aching skull could conjure.
‘…Dreamland.’
A land visited in dreams.
His mind was too small a vessel to hold that boundless world, and yet with his head throbbing as though it might shatter, he could think of no other word for it.
“Ah, finally awake, I see.”
At the raspy voice, Alexander flinched and turned his head.
An Old Woman was crouched before the hearth, using a poker to stir the ashes.
“You’ve slept like the dead for four days and nights straight.”
“Four days…?”
“That’s right. I found you in the forest. If I’d come any later, you’d have been wolf’s meat.”
The Old Woman turned her weathered face toward Alexander.
Then, piece by piece, his fragmented memories began to reassemble.
Courtiers’ vicious slander, dismissal from his academy post, expulsion from the Physician’s register, bandits on the road south……
‘Yes. I was struck on the head by something blunt and lost consciousness.’
It was a horrific memory.
But stronger still was the strange experience that had overtaken him while he lay unconscious.
‘That was… not a forgery.’
For a time, he had seen through the eyes of another being, connected to a world far ahead of his own time.
Not four days — he felt as though he had lived for years in that place.
What he had witnessed there was an overwhelming truth that negated half his life’s work.
Instead of vague hypotheses about the Balance of Humors, he saw the mechanical mechanism that penetrated the human body; not Miasma but an invisible war against Microorganisms; and a precise Blueprint of Human Body verified through rigorous proof.
That vast theory had been tattooed onto his mind, indelible and permanent.
“Uhhhhh…”
Alexander cradled his head and moaned. The world he had known was crumbling like sand.
The moment he lost his grip on the thread of consciousness, his very self threatened to shatter into pieces.
“Your head must be aching terribly. That happens to everyone who gets robbed by bandits. Still, count yourself fortunate that you’re still breathing.”
The Old Woman slowly rose from before the fire.
“It was my great fortune that I happened to be gathering herbs in that direction. A stroke of luck that saved your life.”
The Old Woman opened her toothless mouth and let out a thin smile.
Even in his confusion, Alexander made an effort to maintain courtesy.
“Thank you. Truly.”
“Think nothing of it. You’ve got the look of a young master from a wealthy house—must’ve had a hard time of it.”
The old woman patted her bent back and shuffled toward the kitchen, reaching for something that hung on the wall.
It was a massive Butcher’s Knife, its blade a sickly shade of blue and honed to a wicked edge.
“The shame of it is, you see.”
The old woman dragged her thumb across the blade with a soft scrape.
The knife gleamed with a sinister sheen in the firelight from the hearth.
“Crops have been so poor of late—there’s precious little to put on the table these days.”
Then came a smile that made his skin crawl.
Alexander’s body went rigid.
“Still, it’s only right to treat a guest properly.”
Bang!
The old woman brought the knife down.
The head of a plucked chicken lying on a wooden cutting board came clean off with a wet snap.
“You’re blessed with fortune too. Waking up on the very day I was meant to butcher a bird—couldn’t have timed it better.”
……
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“It’s… nothing.”
Only then did Alexander let out the breath he’d been holding.
As the tension drained away, a wave of dissonance came crashing back—held at bay only moments before.
Against the shabby, worn reality before his eyes, Dreamland loomed so vast and radiant that he felt himself drowning, unable to swallow the enormity of it all.
‘What have I been doing all this time?’
Vertigo seized him. Bile rose in his throat.
The “old knowledge” in his head. The knowledge of Dreamland.
The impossible chasm between them left him reeling.
‘Compared to medicine there, medicine here is… indistinguishable from sorcery.’
Like mistaking a candle flame for the sun.
A scene surfaced unbidden in his mind.
A patient delirious with fever, groaning. His own voice ordering bad blood to be drawn. A bowl overflowing with dark red blood.
He had not doubted himself then. Not for a moment.
Not even watching the patient’s face drain white as death.
“Ungh……”
Bile clawed up his throat again.
The old woman clicked her tongue, seeing him pale and trembling like an aspen leaf.
“Looks like you’re not well yet, lad. Best get some rest.”
The old woman tossed the chunks of chicken into a pot with a splash.
She watched the broth bubble for a moment before lobbing a question his way.
“So then, where do you hail from, young master? North country? South?”
“From the north… from Kaldén.”
Alexander managed to answer.
His voice was brittle as a dried twig, ready to snap.
“What was your trade?”
“I was a physician.”
“Ah.”
The old woman let out a sound of interest.
“Internal medicine or surgery?”
“Internal medicine.”
“Must’ve seen plenty of important folk then.”
“Yes. Many.”
He had been a royal medical advisor, no less.
Even the Emperor himself—supreme above all men—had entrusted his body to Alexander’s care when illness struck.
Arrogant nobles had to book appointments well in advance just to be examined by him.
There was not a single official of rank in Kaldén who did not know his name.
He was more than a mere physician—he was a symbol unto himself.
‘The Prodigy of the Royal Medical Academy.’
That was how the world had judged him.
A man who mastered medicine in youth and revolutionized the field of learning.
A man who could not bear to exist unless he held some record as the youngest.
Youngest to enter the Academy, youngest to graduate, youngest physician, youngest professor.
Every position to which achievement and fortune had clung like fate itself.
His assessment of himself was no different.
He stood at the vanguard of medicine, at least by his own measure, and he harbored no doubt that every treatment administered by his hands was the path to saving his patients.
And yet…
“When recovering from illness, there’s nothing quite like chicken broth.”
The Old Woman had drawn near without his noticing, and now offered him a wooden bowl, steam rising from its surface.
Vegetables and chicken pieces bobbed atop the pale golden broth.
The savory aroma stung his nostrils.
“Eat it as nourishment for your body. It’s not my place to speak of such things before a physician, ignorant as I am.”
The Old Woman slurped from her own bowl and chuckled softly.
But Alexander could not bring himself to pick up the spoon; he merely stared blankly down at the bowl.
“What’s wrong? Is it too hot?”
“…No.”
“Then what?”
“The ignorant one is me.”
Alexander could not continue.
Instead, tears began to fall from his eyes, one drop, then another.
The tears struck the surface of the broth, sending out small ripples.
“I was the ignorant fool.”
His voice grew thick with emotion.
The tears that had begun as single drops soon streamed down his cheeks in an unstoppable flood.
The Old Woman regarded him with puzzlement.
She had thought it strange that a prosperous physician should weep so miserably over a mere robbery, but the depth of his anguish suggested something far more grave.
“It’s alright. Everything will be alright.”
The Old Woman placed a quiet hand upon his shoulder.
“Whatever has happened matters little now. Be grateful simply that you remain alive.”
Alexander bowed his head, shoulders heaving with sobs.
Whether from his shattered pride, or from the betrayal of the learning to which he had devoted his life, or from the faces of those who had entrusted him and sent him forth—
Or perhaps from the exultation of finally casting aside the veil of ignorance.
These mingled emotions, too tangled to separate, poured forth as scalding tears that would not cease.
* * *
The next day. Early morning.
Alexander sat vacant-eyed upon a tree stump before the cottage.
Though he had wrapped a woolen blanket about his shoulders, the cool breeze of late summer cut through his bare skin.
Hair matted and wild, beard grown thick and unkempt, shirt rough and torn.
In his appearance there lingered not a trace of the Royal Medical Academy professor’s former dignity—only the shabby figure of a village farmer.
‘For a time… I glimpsed another world.’
The afterimage of that place, Dreamland, still seemed distant and hazy as heat shimmer.
A world incomparably vaster, more intricate, and brilliantly advanced than this one.
For reasons he could not fathom, during those four days of unconsciousness, his mind had been ‘connected’ to someone living in that world.
Had it been the will of God, or merely chance?
Was that connected being another version of himself? Was that place a distant future, or a world of different dimensions?
He could not know.
The only certainty was that the ‘someone’ had been a physician, or something akin to a physician.
Though the era and space differed, the fundamental nature of the calling—to stand against disease and save lives—remained the same, and so vast knowledge had flowed through that connection.
There was no other way to explain these vivid medical truths branded into his mind like a tattoo.
‘The medicine of that place… was extraordinary.’
They did not merely address the symptoms of illness, but sought out the ’cause’ and struck at it directly.
They rendered patients unconscious and opened the head, chest, and abdomen to cut away the rotted tissue.
They transplanted organs from one person to another, and had even replaced the heart with a machine.
Rather than taking the pulse and making guesses, they peered through mechanical eyes into the body’s organs, blood vessels, and muscles as though seeing through walls, and then formulated their plans.
Even at the height of his capacity to understand, he could not fully grasp the medicine of Dreamland, which lay so far beyond his reach.
It was as if a primitive man who had known only flint tools could not fully comprehend the workings of an iron foundry.
The words and concepts scattered throughout Dreamland’s medicine did not even have an approximation in his world.
Yet remarkably, that knowledge had been intuitively translated and absorbed to match Alexander’s level of comprehension.
Much as a small child grasps the universe in its own language.
Just as a great cathedral is built of bricks, the human body is composed of infinitesimal basic units—cells. The Blueprint of the Human Body is hidden within those cells like bricks in a wall.
It is not the heart or liver that produces blood, but the Bone Marrow within the bones.
Fever does not arise from the overflow of humors, but is the trace of the body’s own struggle to defend itself.
What governs the body’s balance is not the four humors, but a mysterious substance flowing from small springs throughout the body—what they called Hormones.
And, most shocking of all.
‘Epidemics are not caused by miasma.’
They were caused by invisible, microscopic creatures—microorganisms.
They existed everywhere.
In the soil beneath his feet, the clothes on his back, his own skin, even deep within his belly.
To observe the present with such knowledge was like the shock a blind man born sightless must feel when seeing the world for the first time.
Now he understood all too well how profoundly ignorant he had been.
‘What have I been doing all this time?’

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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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