The Genius Doctor Who Lives Twice - Chapter 24

—————
This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
—————

Chapter 24
The following night.
William entered through the back door, sack in hand once more.
This time his entire body was caked with dirt—the result of a fierce struggle.
“Damn. The beast was difficult.”
He muttered under his breath, tossing the sack into a corner.
Inside, a stray dog continued to writhe.
‘The pancreas. I’ll verify whether it’s the pancreas using my own method. I won’t resort to explaining hypothesis with hypothesis.’
All of Allen’s various hypotheses, tacked on to explain how the pancreas produces the disease called Diabetes.
William had no intention of accepting or rejecting them outright.
He had chosen his own path.
‘If the pancreas is the cause, then removing the pancreas should eliminate the disease. Simple logic.’
He planned to conduct an experiment removing the dog’s pancreas.
After securing the dog’s four limbs firmly to the corners of the Surgical Table, he immediately raised his blade.
The restrained dog stared at him with terror-stricken eyes, thrashing desperately against its bonds.
Slash.
William’s knife cut ruthlessly through the belly skin and into the body beneath.
In one swift motion he split the peritoneum as well, then hooked a Metal Hook into the incision to pull the belly walls wide on both sides.
The abdominal cavity lay tangled—intestines, stomach, and spleen woven tightly together in the narrow space.
It was a sight he had witnessed hundreds of times before, familiar as routine.
“The pancreas. The pancreas.”
He parted the organs with blood-stained fingers.
The dog’s pancreas, unlike the human version, consisted of two lobes extending lengthwise along the stomach and small intestine.
A pale yellowish tissue, resembling a lump of fat.
All the old texts had viewed it as nothing more than “a pliant buffer supporting the space between stomach and small intestine.”
Truly, an organ without presence.
Yet Allen claimed that this insignificant organ exerted tremendous systemic influence through the bloodstream.
Despite not being connected by the thick vessels like the heart, kidney, or spleen were.
‘Nonsense. How could that be.’
He brought the blade down with a sneer.
He had seen living pancreases dozens of times before, yet had never truly examined one.
He had always dismissed it as a troublesome fatty tissue and moved on.
But today was different.
Allen’s words had, for the first time, aimed his blade at this organ.
Scrape. Scrape.
The knife began delicately scraping away the boundaries between the pancreas and surrounding tissue.
And then, he saw it.
…….
A mesh of blood vessels flooding into the pancreas interior, crossing the narrow gap between stomach, small intestine, and spleen.
The inner flesh was packed with countless lobules, densely interlocked like clusters of grapes.
The surface was blanketed in a wondrous density of capillaries.
William’s mind went blank.
In all the hundreds of times he had dissected it, he had never truly seen this organ.
The reason was simple.
He had dismissed it as insignificant and passed it by.
It was then.
Whimper… whine.
The dog let out a faint cry, then its limbs went limp.
He felt its body temperature plummet rapidly.
William froze, blade in hand.
“No, this can’t—!”
But the dog’s pulse faded in an instant, then ceased entirely.
Overwhelmed by extreme pain, massive hemorrhage, and the shock of abdominal incision, the animal had died.
“Dammit…….”
William let his hand, still gripping the Dissection Knife, fall to his side.
A dead dog was worthless for experimentation.
The core of the experiment was to remove the pancreas while the animal lived, then observe the subsequent changes.
Hollowed by despair, he sank to the floor, stained with blood.
In the darkened room, the vivid image of the pancreas he had just witnessed flashed and faded in his mind like afterimages.
‘I was too slow, damn it. My eye lingered on the pancreas. Suddenly it seemed far too large.’
So far he had dissected two corpses of Wasting Thirst Disease patients.
A child’s body and an old man’s body.
In both, the pancreas was perfectly intact.
Soft and unremarkable, it hung limply in place.
Since he’d never considered it an important organ to begin with, he’d passed over it quickly.
What he’d focused on instead was the kidney.
It was directly connected to the ureter, through which urine flowed.
But in the child’s corpse the kidney was sound, while in the old man’s it had shriveled.
Since the organs’ condition varied with the patient’s age, there wasn’t nearly enough evidence to prove a causal link to Wasting Thirst Disease.
That was why he’d placed the kidney hypothesis on temporary hold.
‘What if I dissected a fresh corpse immediately after death… would something be different? Would I see something I haven’t before?’
Before it lost that characteristic color and structure.
Could he spot traces of malfunction in the pancreas of someone who’d died from Wasting Thirst Disease.
But William shook his head at once.
‘Damn it. I’m fixating on the pancreas again. That’s the same as being stuck on the kidney. It could be a problem with some other organ entirely.’
The words Allen had planted were still circling in his mind.
It was a bad sign.
He gripped his blood-stained hair in both fists.
At that moment, the distinctive smell of rotting fruit drifted to his nostrils.
The very scent that had come from his dying sister’s mouth.
“I haven’t given up yet.”
He muttered to himself.
“I swear to you—I’ll find out what took you from me.”
Whoosh.
The candlelight flickered in the wind.
William sat in silence beside the stray dog’s cooling corpse, the scalpel hanging slack in his hand.
* * *
Monster Child.
That was what they called William in his Hometown.
He hadn’t been born with the Demon’s Mark from the start.
On the contrary, his parents had seen him as the family’s pillar—he excelled at Church School.
Back then, his nickname had not been “Monster Child” but “Our William,” “Our little genius.”
Yet William’s curiosity never turned toward the heavens or things beyond sight.
He was utterly, obsessively drawn to what he could see.
At seven years old, he found his first dead sparrow.
He spread its wings open.
He discovered the bones were hollow inside.
He wondered why.
The question wouldn’t leave him; he lay awake all night.
By nine, he’d claimed one corner of the Barn as his own.
His father was busy with the farm, and his mother was occupied caring for his youngest sister, Mary.
No one paid attention to the barn’s corners.
There, he began to gather things.
One old wooden board.
One of his father’s work knives.
A dead mole found at the village edge, a hedgehog, a rabbit.
He opened them.
At first, his hands trembled.
The second time, less so.
By the tenth, his hands didn’t shake at all—only his eyes grew brighter.
What lay inside always astonished him.
Things entirely invisible from the outside were packed densely within.
It was exquisite.
Nothing was wasted.
He loved that.
The village children didn’t suit him.
An odd smell sometimes came from his hands.
William didn’t mind.
They had nothing to talk about anyway.
Then came the autumn of his eleventh year.
A village child followed him one day.
More precisely, the boy had seen him enter the Barn and trailed behind.
The child screamed.
In one corner of the Barn lay a fox, mid-dissection.
Its belly split open, entrails spilling across the straw.
Beside it lay a crow, abandoned mid-preservation; a rabbit stripped to bone; glass jars holding organs of no name, arranged in a line.
The rumor spread through the entire village by that evening.
His father said nothing.
He simply reached for his belt.
His mother wept, making the sign of the cross.
The Priest summoned him and lectured him for an hour.
To repent.
That divine punishment comes to those who handle life carelessly.
That he was acting worse than a beast.
William kept his head bowed.
He did not repent.
He merely thought he would need to move his workshop deeper, somewhere far more hidden.
It was around then that the whispers began—”Monster Child.”
First the other children said it, then the adults, and eventually he heard the neighbor woman tell his mother the same.
“There’s something wrong with that boy. If he does such things while young, he could do the same to people later.”
Hearing those words, William thought seriously about it for the first time.
Whether he could do the same to people.
Yes, it seemed he could.
And if he did, he felt certain he would understand far more than he did now.
He did not voice this thought aloud.
He merely folded it quietly away in his heart.
At twelve years old.
His father took his hand and went to the nearby City.
The entire journey, he spoke not a single word.
Father and son arrived at a Surgeon’s Surgery Clinic.
There, without a moment’s consent, he was forced to become the Surgeon’s apprentice.
“If you’re going to hold a knife, hold one that saves lives instead.”
His father said that and left.
William was left alone in a City where he knew no one.
Yet he adapted in an instant.
The Surgeon did not rebuke him for practicing Dissection.
He did not curse him as mad for studying Anatomy.
His curiosity became “passion,” and the Monster Child became the “Gifted Apprentice.”
Everything was satisfying.
Whether intentional or not, his father had given his son one final gift.
As time passed, he began to visit his childhood home more often.
His mother still ignored him, but his father regarded him with a conflicted expression.
Yet he did not treat him warmly as he once had. A clear wall now stood between him and his family.
Only his younger sister, Mary, was different.
Five years his junior, she had been the only one to call him “brother” when he was pointed at as a Monster Child, and the only one to welcome him home into that barren house.
She would listen with her chin in her hand, fascinated, as he told her stories of the human body and animals.
Then one day, when William turned fourteen, a Letter arrived in haste.
“Mary has fallen ill with a strange sickness.”
She poured out urine like diarrhea, and it reeked of something sickly-sweet, while her body wasted away day by day.
Xiaoke, the Wasting Thirst Disease.
William tore through the medical texts like a man possessed.
He pressed his teacher, went begging to nearby physicians—all to uncover what the illness truly was.
Yet he found no answers.
“It is a Kidney disorder.”
“It is a matter of constitution.”
Only vague guesses.
William threw tantrums, saying “If you don’t let me go, I’ll run away,” until they sent him home.
And he tended to Mary with utmost devotion as she withered day by day.
But one day, Mary never rose from her bed again.
As if simply sleeping peacefully, she ceased to breathe.
On the day they buried her, William made a vow.
He would uncover the true nature of the disease that had driven his sister to her grave.
That same night, he dug up Mary’s coffin.
He carried his sister’s shrouded body to a nearby hut and began the dissection.
His hands trembled as he held the knife.
Hands that had never shaken once, not since he was nine years old, standing before the belly of a beast.
Yet he did not stop.
He examined every organ in the abdominal cavity with meticulous care—the gallbladder, liver, kidneys, heart, stomach, bladder.
But no answers emerged.
Drowning in an endless emptiness and despair, he set down the knife and writhed in self-loathing.
By the time dawn broke the next morning, he had returned his sister’s body to the coffin and taken to the road.
His hands had turned to blood and his entire body was spent from hauling that heavy casket alone as merely a boy, yet he had gained nothing.
And at fifteen years old.
He encountered another patient.
A person whose symptoms were strikingly similar to Mary’s.
The difference was that he was an old man, and unlike Mary—who had died just weeks after the symptoms appeared—he endured considerably longer.
William tracked him in secret.
Three years later, on the night of the old man’s funeral, he stole into the grave and performed the dissection at once.
Again, he found no evidence whatsoever.
Between Mary and the old man, there were no visible commonalities.
For a long time, the disease remained shrouded in mystery.
From the age of fourteen, William spent five years pursuing the identity of that illness, yet found neither evidence nor clue—and in the end, not even hope itself.
‘It’s a problem of the pancreas.’
But a single person’s words shattered his entire world.
The culprit was an organ he had never once suspected—something utterly unexpected.
That night, upon returning after disposing of a feral dog’s carcass, William collapsed into sleep and fell into a dream.
He stood again beneath the roof of the Stone Farmhouse in his southern hometown.
Mary lay before him, unconscious.
As Mary’s breathing ceased, William opened his sister’s belly without his parents knowing.
And there, he saw what lay within: a pancreas, shriveled and twisted.
……
Toward William, frozen in shock, the sister he thought dead slowly opened her eyes.
In the moment his gaze met hers—eyes filled with reproach.
“Gasp!”
William cried out and lurched upright.
Beyond the window, the dawn sun was rising, and a chill hung over the operating room.
He drew the blanket around himself, desperately wiping away the tears that streamed down his cheeks.
“Mary……”

—————
This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
—————