The Genius Doctor Who Lives Twice - Chapter 21

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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 21
Edward gave William an exuberant welcome.
The reason was simple.
He was gaining a free pair of hands.
He even threw a celebration party in honor of it.
“Did you prepare all of this yourself?”
William whistled low as he surveyed the dishes spread across the table.
Roasted lamb with mint sauce, buttered carrots and turnips beside it, a thick barley and vegetable potage—everything was laid out with evident care.
As the crowning touch, steam still rose from a freshly baked loaf of bread.
“Thought I’d show a little skill.”
Alan set down the last plate with quiet matter-of-factness.
William found himself wondering if this man had been a cook before taking up medicine.
“Come now, a toast!”
Edward raised a glass of Sherry Wine from Banido Kingdom and called out heartily.
Once the wine had made its round and the mood had grown warm, Edward turned to William with a casual question.
“So, what are your thoughts after spending this past week with us?”
William glanced back and forth between Edward and Alan for a moment.
Then he spoke carefully.
“It’s different.”
“Different how?”
“Different from any other clinic I’ve seen—so much so that finding anything the same would be harder.”
There was no Bloodletting, no Cupping Therapy—none of the techniques that brought in quick coin.
Even when examining internal medicine patients, his approach diverged entirely from what other physicians employed.
“And if I’m being honest, the two of you don’t seem to have an ordinary master-and-apprentice relationship. To my eye, you’re more like partners.”
Edward burst into hearty laughter at that.
“Sharp eye you’ve got there! You’re right—why hide anything from a new member of the household? Alan and I are partners indeed. He teaches me internal medicine, and I’m passing on my surgical techniques to him.”
“Was Alan originally a healer? Yet his knowledge of the human body seems far beyond what a typical healer would possess…”
“He was an internal medicine physician.”
William’s eyes widened sharply.
At once, Alan’s remarkably thorough knowledge suddenly made perfect sense.
Yet the same moment brought new questions.
Why would a learned physician serve as an apprentice?
And Alan was different from other internal physicians too.
“Even accounting for his experience as an internal medicine physician, Alan, you’re distinctly unusual. Your entire approach to disease is fundamentally different.”
Alan smiled faintly at this observation.
The boy had a sharp eye indeed.
“I am rather unconventional, I’ll grant you. What in particular made you notice?”
“I’ve encountered a few internal medicine physicians before, but none who practice as you do. More than that—I’ve searched through every internal medicine text I could find, and nowhere are the methods you employ documented.”
Alan nodded slowly in acknowledgment.
Unlike Edward, who was essentially blind when it came to internal medicine, William had developed genuine expertise and could spot the differences at once.
“This fellow is different. Truly different. More unusual than any physician I’ve seen in all my years,” Edward said, giving Alan’s shoulder a playful tap.
Alan maintained his gentle smile and continued.
“I conduct lectures each evening in the clinic. If you attend them, you’ll come to understand how my thinking flows.”
William’s eyes lit up immediately.
That was precisely what had convinced him to stay at this peculiar clinic in the first place.
“It would be the greatest honor to listen.”
“Excellent, truly excellent!”
Edward raised his wine glass again, enthusiasm renewed.
“Then let us toast again—to the bright future of our newly joined colleague, William!”
The wine made another round.
Night deepened, and across the worn table, medical questions and answers flowed without pause.
“My, the time has gotten away from us.”
“We have patients to see early tomorrow. We should tidy up,” Alan said gently.
Edward nodded in agreement.
Then, as if struck by sudden remembrance, his expression grew somewhat apologetic.
“Ah, William—about where you’ll be staying… I’m afraid we haven’t a spare room available. You’d have to share quarters with Alan. Would that suit you?”
“No need. I’ll sleep in the Surgery Room.”
Edward’s eyes widened at this unexpected answer.

“There? The place reeks of blood, and the draft is fierce—it’ll be bitterly cold. Once night falls, it turns downright eerie.”
“I don’t mind. A surgeon who trembles at the operating table has no business holding a scalpel. I intend to sleep beside it and discipline myself without cease.”
Edward’s eyes wavered as he considered whether the man truly meant such solemn words.
“You’re a remarkable fellow, I must say—your mind is genuinely sound and steadfast!”
Yet Alan, standing beside them, merely smiled with an enigmatic curve to his lips.
“Do you dislike sharing quarters with me so much? Has some rumor spread that my sleep habits are troublesome?”
At this, William’s face flushed and he waved both hands in sharp denial.
“No, no, that isn’t it at all, sir! It’s only that I tend to study late into the night, and I worried I might disturb your rest.”
Alan nodded in acknowledgment.
It had been a light jest, but the true nature of William’s nocturnal “studies” was obvious enough.
‘The boy means to dissect.’
Why else would he ask for the Surgery Room?
It was a place where blood-scent clung to everything, where bloodstains on the floor would raise no eyebrows.
The perfect location to conduct illicit dissections without being discovered in the dead of night.
But Alan chose to let the matter pass unspoken.
A physician’s curiosity deserved encouragement, not reproach.
“Fine then. If that’s the case, I’ll let you have the Surgery Room as your quarters.”
Edward clapped his hands together with cheerful finality.
He glanced sideways at Alan, meeting his eye.
A strange understanding passed between them in that silent exchange, and both their gazes turned simultaneously toward William.
“Ah, and before we begin in earnest, there’s one more thing I should tell you, William.”
“What might that be?”
“Our clinic maintains no servants.”
“…?”
“Which is to say, all the menial work—washing dishes, scrubbing the clinic floors, and every other tedious chore—falls to our newest member.”
“…!”
That night, William found himself grumbling through the fog of wine and exhaustion as he single-handedly washed mountain upon mountain of dishes.
* * *
Edward Clinic.
As always, once the afternoon clinic hours ended, the doors were locked and heavy curtains drawn.
Within the candlelit consultation room, transformed into something like a secret society’s gathering hall, Alan took up his teaching role.
“Since a new student has joined us, I wish to clarify one point before we proceed with the lectures.”
Alan spoke, his gaze moving between William and Edward, who sat side by side.
“Please regard my lectures only as ‘plausible hypotheses.’ Much of what I discuss cannot yet be proven with our current techniques and experience.”
For Edward, this caveat meant little.
He had already placed complete faith in Alan.
But William’s disappointment was plainly written across his face the moment he heard those words.
‘What? So he’s just going to peddle baseless theory like the old Humoralism after all?’
William had never believed in the Four Humors Theory.
He regarded it as a pretty fiction—reality twisted to fit the theory rather than theory grounded in reality.
He believed in one thing alone: experience.
The experience of taking a blade to a corpse with his own hands, of laying bare every secret within—that alone he held as absolute truth.
And yet the man was already hedging before he’d even begun, calling everything unproven hypothesis.
The wind went out of his sails.
“Very well then. Today’s lecture concerns…”
But the moment the lesson started, William was utterly captivated.
More than captivated—his entire understanding underwent a violent restructuring.
Alan’s lectures were extraordinary.
His delivery was compelling, his cadence flowing as water; but more than that, the content itself methodically demolished every commonplace assumption William had carried his entire life.
‘Just as a great cathedral is built from countless small bricks, so too is the human body composed of infinitesimal basic units called cells.’
‘Pathogens—seeds of decay—lurk everywhere. When they cling to wounds, they cause infection and rot the dead flesh. Thus, infection and decay are fundamentally the same phenomenon.’
‘Disease is not born from innate constitution or an imbalance of humors. It is merely the damage or malfunction of specific bodily structures, and inflammation is the body’s defensive response against such harm.’
Each statement directly contradicted orthodox medicine. Not a single appeal to authority appeared anywhere. He explained the human body with crystalline clarity, grounded solely in structure and function.
In the first days after the lectures began, William could not sleep properly at night.
He endlessly recited the day’s lessons to himself, poring over his densely filled notebook, lost in torment.
The world Alan presented was overwhelmingly complex, impossibly tangled.
‘At least Humoralism offers one coherent language to explain the body. It has its own completeness, doesn’t it? But this… each fact stands alone. Nothing unifies under a single principle.’
It was hypothesis.
Not the sort of “systematic theory” concocted at a desk, but rather “accumulated observations.”
Knowledge that began with phenomena, not theory that was forced to fit phenomena.
William felt an alien sensation wash over him.
It was a peculiar thrill he’d never experienced before in his life.
‘This man is looking in the same direction I am.’
While his mentor quoted the knowledge of the ancients and played the role of a physician, William believed only in what his eyes had witnessed.
To him, the human body was a vast machine—not a microcosm infused with the flow of the universe.
Yet this man, too, gazed upon the world with that identical perspective.
Even disease was nothing but a mechanical response to him.
And yet, at the same time, it unsettled him.
‘What this man knows…… far surpasses the depths I’ve pursued for half my lifetime.’
Everything William had sought since he became a surgical apprentice at twelve, the lifetime of inquiry he’d devoted to understanding the body—no, the fundamental questions about human anatomy he’d harbored even before that.
This man grasped it all, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world.
Even as he spoke of matters he could not yet experience or prove.
‘I’m jealous.’
Alongside the joy of finding a kindred spirit on the same path, a strange humiliation rose from deep within his chest.
William resolved to dispel that dark emotion in his own way.
The way he knew best.
On a night when darkness lay thick and heavy.
William slipped silently through the back entrance of the Edward Clinic, a Burlap Sack slung across his shoulder.
He set the sack down in the Surgery Room with practiced ease, then crept into the parlor to survey the situation in all directions.
Both the first and second floors—Edward’s room and Alan’s—were wrapped in nothing but silence.
He returned quietly to the Surgery Room, locked the door, and lit a candle.
Then he loosened the knotted opening of the sack.
Whine. Whine….
A stray dog, its limbs and snout bound, looked up at him with pitiable eyes.
“I’m sorry, but there’s no help for it.”
William muttered in a low, toneless voice.
He bound the dog’s limbs firmly to the surgical table, then without hesitation raised the Dissection Knife high.
Slice.
With a fluid motion he’d clearly performed hundreds of times before, the blade cut cleanly into the animal’s abdomen.
The beast thrashed in convulsions and blood spattered everywhere, yet his hands remained unmoved.
In the candlelight, William’s pupils gleamed with a peculiar, manic brilliance.
As though nothing else existed in this space save himself and the subject.
‘He said it’s a hypothesis difficult to prove at once. But you can only know by trying it yourself.’
Those strange hypotheses with which Alan explained the world—he intended to verify them with his own hands.
Whether they proved true or false, or whether they were truly impossible to confirm, he could not believe anything until he saw it with his own eyes.
Until dawn, a thin red glow from the candlelight seeped through the cracks in the Surgery Room’s window.
For Dunford’s dogs and cats, it amounted to nothing less than a death sentence.

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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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