The Genius Doctor Who Lives Twice - Chapter 23

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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 23
Strange afflictions plaguing the child’s own body came spilling from her lips.
Excessive urination had begun—far too frequent, far too copious—and an unrelenting thirst that no amount of water could slake, her mouth growing parched no matter how much she drank.
Beyond that came confessions of a weariness that clung to her through the day, and a recent, steady loss of weight that alarmed her.
After hearing the full account, Allen exhaled deeply.
“Why didn’t you speak of this sooner?”
“I’m so sorry, sir. Truly, I’m so sorry…… I was afraid you’d discover I’m still just an inadequate child who can’t even control her own… I was terrified of that.”
The girl bowed her head as though tears might spill at any moment, rushing to apologize.
Allen felt a weight settle in his chest.
Because he understood better than anyone why she had hidden it so fiercely.
The moment word of a serious illness reached the director’s ears, any chance of apprenticeship under a respectable master would vanish forever.
No craftsman would willingly take on a sickly child as an assistant.
She would be reduced to nothing but a burden.
“I really am healthy, sir! I don’t cough at all, I never catch colds. Please, I’m begging you—don’t tell Father Michael about this. Please……”
Grace clutched at Allen’s sleeve, pleading with him.
As his expression darkened beyond the point of concealment, she grew frightened by her own desperation and clung even tighter.
Nor was she alone in her distress.
William’s face, too, had hardened into stone.
It bore none of his usual detached composure, that serene indifference he typically maintained.
“Then let us make a promise, just one.”
Allen knelt on one knee, bringing himself level with the child’s gaze.
“From now on, you must never eat the rye bread or gruel that comes from the orphanage, nor any of the sweet foods that contain sugar. If hunger truly drives you to eat, you may only taste a very small amount.”
Grace’s eyes widened.
“But…… if I don’t eat those, what am I supposed to eat? All we ever have is gruel.”
“I will speak with the priest myself and ask him to provide you special portions of meat and vegetables instead.”
“Really? He’s going to give me meat?”
Color bloomed suddenly across Grace’s face.
Meat—something she could scarcely ever afford to see, let alone eat.
But then, as though a realization dawned, her expression clouded once more.
“But if you do that, won’t the priest have to know about my condition anyway?”
“I’ll tell him you were born with a very unusual constitution—not that you harbor some grave illness, but that your body thrives only when you consume meat and vegetables. That’s nothing to be ashamed of, is it?”
Grace tilted her head, lost in thought for a moment, then nodded as though reassured.
“Now that you mention it, that does sound right.”
“Yes. For your constitution, this careful attention to diet matters more than any other treatment. Can you make me this promise?”
“Yes, I promise you—I really do!”
“Good girl.”
Allen rose and gently stroked the child’s hair with affection.
“Now go outside and play with your friends.”
Grace reached for the clinic door, but something weighed on her mind, and she turned back to Allen once more.
“But…… meat is terribly expensive, isn’t it? What if the priest scolds me for costing him too much……”
“Don’t worry about money at all. I will bear the full expense myself, so there’s no chance the priest will ever rebuke you for it.”
Allen smiled softly.
Yet it was a strange, twisted smile—something closer to laughter born of tears he could not shed.
Grace gazed at that face for a moment, then nodded brightly.
Her expression was wholly innocent, blind to the fate that awaited her.
The two of them left the room and walked down the corridor.
Once they had put sufficient distance between themselves and the children’s ward, William, following behind, spoke.
“Sir, you know what illness that child is suffering from, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Do you truly intend to hide it from the priest?”
“No. I must tell him the truth.”
Allen’s voice, too, had grown quiet.
Shortly after, the two entered the director’s office at the orphanage, where they found themselves face to face with Michael, the priest in charge.
Upon hearing Allen’s diagnosis, the priest clutched his head and let out a groan.
“An incurable disease, you say?”
“Yes. As things stand now, I’m afraid so. Even with the strictest dietary control and the best possible management, that child has perhaps a few months at most—a year if we’re fortunate—before her time runs out.”
“But…… surely it’s only excessive urination. If she simply drinks enough to replace what her body loses, wouldn’t that solve the problem?”
“The true nature of it isn’t merely water loss, Father. The fatal detail is that her urine carries a sweet taste.”
Allen continued his explanation calmly.
“Her body’s internal balance has collapsed entirely. There is no remedy, no medicine that can reverse this. It is a calamity of nature.”
“Mercy… Lord, how can You allow such tribulation….”
The priest, who had been wringing his hands in distress, let out a deep, weary sigh.
“For that child, bread, porridge, and sugar are as poison. She must follow a diet of lean meat and fresh vegetables. Of course, even that is merely a stopgap—it cannot halt what is coming, only delay it. But it may at least grant her a few more months to know the warmth of this world.”
“…….”
“There is not much time left, Father. I ask that you treat the girl as you always have, with gentleness and care. If Grace wishes for anything, grant it without hesitation. It will be, at most, a matter of months.”
“I understand, Allen. I shall see it done.”
The priest bowed his head in sorrow.
As they left the Orphanage, the sky had already begun to burn with the amber light of dusk.
The two men walked toward the Clinic in silence, their footsteps steady but hollow.
“Sir.”
William finally broke the quiet.
“Is there truly no cure for this disease? When adults contract it, they can at least eke out a reasonable span of years—why do children succumb so quickly?”
“You know rather a great deal about it.”
“Yes. Someone I knew in my youth suffered from it. Not long after the excessive urination began, they were dead.”
William’s lips tightened.
Allen gazed toward the distant horizon for a long time, then spoke with visible weight.
“At present, there is none.”
“…You mean to say there could be one?”
“Perhaps. But in this age, it is beyond reach.”
His words were cryptic.
Yet the expression on Allen’s face as he spoke was bitterly resigned—profoundly so.
It was the sort of look that made easy conversation nearly impossible.
“What exactly is the cause? You said earlier that the body’s balance has been disrupted—but which balance, precisely?”
“One might call it the body’s vital essence. But it is clear that a particular organ bears some relation to it.”
“Which organ?”
“The pancreas.”
“……?”
William stopped dead in his tracks.
Allen continued walking as he spoke.
“Tomorrow’s lecture should focus on this matter—on the condition known as Diabetes, or Excessive Urination. A proper inquiry into its nature.”
* * *
The following evening.
The lecture had ended.
William sat staring blankly at his notes.
He could not fathom what he had just heard.
‘The pancreas? The pancreas?’
His notebook held Allen’s words transcribed perfectly, not a syllable out of place.
Yet no matter how many times he read them, he understood nothing.
It was nothing but a succession of baseless hypotheses—absurd theorizing without a shred of logic.
‘This is charlatanry.’
There had been moments during Allen’s lectures when William felt a flicker of doubt.
But no lecture—none—had shaken his faith as thoroughly as this one on Diabetes.
He understood why, too.
This disease was one he had spent half a lifetime studying.
To hear words that contradicted everything he had researched—his resistance was justified.
Snap.
He closed his notebook and went to the parlor.
Edward was sprawled in an armchair, humming tunelessly while smoking a cigarette.
Unlike William, whose mind churned with confusion, Edward appeared perfectly serene.
“Ah, William. Care for a glass of wine?”
He held up a half-empty bottle in invitation.
William shook his head.
Edward’s peculiar calm somehow made the turmoil inside him worse.
“Where has Allen gone?”
“He said he had some business and stepped out. Should be back shortly.”
William sighed and pulled up a chair.
Edward glanced sidelong at his ashen, rigid expression.
“It seems this lecture has not sat well with you?”
Under ordinary circumstances, Edward’s remark would have passed without notice. But today it grated on him.
“Edward, how is it that you accept everything Allen says without a shred of doubt?”
In the end, the words he’d been holding back came pouring out unbidden.
Edward, who had been bringing the wine glass to his lips, paused and tilted his head.
“Hmm? What do you mean by that?”
Edward asked, pressing for clarification.
William exhaled sharply, his words tumbling out with irritation.
“It’s all conjecture. Unprovable. I feel as though there are holes punched clean through everything—gaps everywhere. So how can you simply accept it all without question?”
……
“Haven’t you ever considered that it might be blind faith?”
At William’s words, Edward’s face hardened briefly.
But then the corner of his mouth lifted in a thin smile.
He had wrestled with that same doubt himself, after all.
“You think I swallowed it whole from the start? Of course not. I had the same doubts you’re having now. ‘Does this really make sense?’ I asked myself the same thing.”
……
“But in the end, everything Allen said turned out to be true. More precisely—when I began examining patients through his methods, the world suddenly became clear to me. Didn’t you feel something like that, even if dimly?”
“I did. There were parts I could genuinely sympathize with. But… not this time.”
Allen’s hypothesis about diabetes.
He’d explained it at length in elaborate medical terminology, but stripped down to its essence, it compressed into a single line:
‘The pancreas produces a small quantity of special fluid that regulates the sweet components in the blood. If this function fails, sugar accumulates in the blood, the kidneys filter it out and expel it through urine, and because sugar forcibly draws water along with it, urination increases, thirst develops, and the body wastes away.’
Not a single part of it wasn’t conjecture.
It wasn’t even something one could intuitively grasp.
“When Allen said the human body is composed of tiny cells, I could understand that—even a great cathedral is built of bricks, after all. I could accept that when you wash your hands and disinfect with strong spirits, the ‘seeds of corruption’ are destroyed. Spirits can certainly act as lethal poison to such microscopic seeds.”
“Mm.”
“But this is entirely different. Why the pancreas specifically? That insignificant organ producing fluid and regulating the sweet components in the blood—there’s no way to intuitively understand it.”
Edward listened to William’s outpouring in silence.
Then he responded in a measured tone.
“Then what do you think is causing the disease?”
“The kidneys, probably. Of course, it might not be the kidneys either. But at the very least, it’s absolutely not the pancreas.”
“Why are you so certain it’s not the pancreas?”
“That’s because……”
William bit down on his lower lip.
The words rose to the back of his throat—’Because I’ve personally dissected and thoroughly examined bodies of those who died of diabetes’—but he barely managed to swallow them down.
“William, I suspect you and I—and Allen—fundamentally differ in how we accept knowledge.”
Edward drew deeply on his pipe and exhaled a plume of white smoke.
“I’m of the school that says ‘if it helps the patient, I’ll believe it first and ask questions later.’ In fact, when you follow Allen’s methods, patients actually recover. So what does it matter to me whether the cause is the pancreas or the kidneys? Believe first, apply the theory we’ve been taught, save lives—that’s my philosophy.”
……
“But you, like a proper scholar of medicine, pursue more fundamental questions. As an intellectual, that’s arguably the more correct approach. I genuinely admire that inquisitiveness of yours.”
Having said this, Edward chuckled softly and raised his claret glass to his lips once more.
William had nothing left to say.
Laying bare his doubts to Edward changed nothing.
He was accepting Allen in his own way.
‘Then what about me?’
Should I reject every hypothesis that can’t be verified with my own eyes?
Or should I close my eyes and believe blindly, like Edward?
Or should I simply suspend judgment?
The other knowledge, though strange, had presented no great obstacle to acceptance.
None of it had stirred such violent resistance in his chest.
But this illness—this disease where the urine turns sweet—he simply couldn’t let it pass.
And he already knew far too well why he was so furious about it.
‘Mary.’
The face of his younger sister flashed across William’s vision.
Suddenly gripped by a surge of feeling, he clenched his fists tight.

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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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