The Genius Doctor Who Lives Twice - Chapter 3

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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 3
The countless treatments he’d prescribed with such confidence flashed before him like scenes in a lantern show.
Drawing blood until the patient lost consciousness, draining toxins through enemas until the rectum bled raw. Exposing genital ulcers to mercury vapors, forcing mixtures of heavy metals down patients’ throats under the guise of tonics. Abuse disguised as medicine.
How many patients had died by his own hand?
How many patients had died by his own hand?
“Ugh….”
As nausea surged, Alexander pressed his forehead to the ground and retched.
“Ugh. Ughhhh…”
He heaved until nothing remained, then gasped and lifted his gaze to the sky.
Overhead, an enormous sun burned with indifferent constancy.
As if it cared nothing for human folly.
‘The Age of Enlightenment.’
A phrase the intellectuals never tired of, spoken with habitual pride.
An age of reason: when it was proven that the earth was not the center of the universe, when all motion could be demonstrated through mathematics, when the very substance of matter was revealed through experiments in glass vessels.
Humanity believed it was advancing unmistakably, marching toward the light.
But not medicine. Medicine remained mired in filth—a bog where ancient phantoms, superstitions, and blind faith mixed inseparably.
The light of enlightenment had never reached medicine.
‘What I thought was science was never science at all.’
An endless sense of emptiness.
A bitter taste lingered in his mouth—not merely from the bile.
It was not his burden alone.
Even the professors of the Imperial Medical Academy, called the finest minds in the empire, parroted Humoral Theory from dead sages of millennia past.
Unverified poisons of lethal potency, indiscriminate bloodletting, nameless occult techniques—all rampant in this world.
Both physicians and patients clung neurotically to what they called new treatments, yet never grasped that these very practices were destroying them.
‘How arrogant I was. I was no different from my colleagues—blind among the blind—yet I strutted about as though I alone had opened my eyes, a prophet awakened to truth.’
All the theories he’d taken pride in revolutionizing, all his papers, all his lectures.
Garbage. Every bit of it.
Shame burned so fiercely across his face he could barely endure it.
“I have… built my entire life upon lies.”
He muttered it aloud.
His voice was hollow with despair.
Yet beneath it ran a strange exhilaration.
Breaking free from false shells to finally face truth—the thrill of being the only human who had ever done so.
“Heh….”
A hollow, deflating laugh escaped from the corners of his mouth.
Perhaps this was how a prophet in the wilderness felt receiving divine revelation.
“Heh… heh heh… ha.”
A sound poured from his lips—neither quite laughter nor quite wailing—bizarre and terrible.
Between the tangles of his matted hair, a single tear glistened in his eyes.
From a distance, the Old Woman watched this spectacle and clicked her tongue disapprovingly.
‘Poor soul. He’s gone completely mad too.’
She waited until his convulsive laughter subsided, and when his body went slack, she approached as though she hadn’t seen anything at all.
“Well then, how’s the body feeling?”
The Old Woman carried a basket of medicinal herbs gathered from the forest that early morning.
In that instant, a wry thought flashed across Alexander’s mind.
‘Perhaps this old woman’s crude herbs would have served better than my medical arts.’
He suppressed the self-loathing and bowed respectfully.
“My head does throb a bit, but it’s bearable. I’m truly grateful for your kindness.”
“Think nothing of it. This time of year, it happens often enough. I’ve saved more than six wanderers so far, so don’t give it another thought.”
The Old Woman smiled warmly.
In that moment, Alexander’s gaze locked onto her hands.
They trembled persistently, never quite still.
If he were the man he’d been days ago, he would have offered a confident diagnosis at the sight of that tremor.
‘An excess of bile from age, clearly. The balance of humors has broken down, and as vitality wanes, the tremor results. She requires immediate bloodletting and cupping therapy.’
But now it was different.
The rhythm of the tremor, its amplitude, its worsening when her hands were at rest.
The way she’d struggled yesterday to grip her spoon during meals, the shuffling gait with her torso bent forward, even the slight rigidity in her facial muscles that gave her an oddly expressionless look.
All of it integrated instantly in his mind.
Before conscious thought could form, his brain had drawn its own conclusion.
‘Parkinson’s Disease….’
It was a disease he had never heard of before.
Yet he grasped it with the clarity of his own name.
‘My entire way of thinking has been reconstructed. Like the physicians of Dream Land….’
Of course, there were limits.
He could conjure the diagnosis—Parkinson’s Disease—but the deeper mechanisms remained as obscured as looking through frosted glass.

‘A small region deep in the brain, the part that governs movement, is damaged. The body stiffens and trembles.’
That was all.
He could not grasp the defects in dopamine pathways or microscopic pathological features—such knowledge lay beyond his reach.
The ultra-advanced knowledge his brain could not contain simply dissolved, as though sifted away, leaving only intuitive concepts he could comprehend.
‘Half-knowledge at best. Yet…’
It was enough.
More than enough. With just this fractured understanding, he could overturn the entire history of medicine—of that he was certain.
The euphoria of that overwhelming possibility nearly sent him laughing like a madman again.
The Old Woman stared at him in silence for a long moment, watching his mouth twitch faintly, before speaking with evident concern.
“Are you truly well? As a physician, you must know your own condition, yet I confess I’m troubled.”
“Ah, forgive me. My mind wandered just then.”
“If you wish, rest here longer. Treat this as your own home, recuperate for as many days as you need.”
“No, I’ve already imposed upon you far too much.”
“That’s just it, you see….”
The Old Woman’s voice dropped suddenly.
“I’ve seen six people emerge alive from that forest, and not a single one returned with their mind intact.”
A wind from the forest swept across their hair.
“One spoke to invisible spirits in empty air. Another, a man past thirty, became a child of five searching for his mother. And one other….”
The Old Woman swallowed hard.
“…clawed out his own eyes, screaming that he had seen what he must not, and took his own life.”
A heavy silence settled between them.
“Those who know speak of it as the Forest of Madness. Any who return from the threshold of death have inevitably glimpsed something beyond bearing, and lost their minds because of it.”
The Old Woman’s deeply lined eyes fixed upon Alexander with an unwavering gaze.
As though searching his face for the scent of madness.
“What did you see in that forest?”
Alexander fell silent for a moment.
What had they seen?
Had they beheld the same visions of the future as he?
Or had they, unlike him, shattered under the weight of that vast deluge of knowledge?
Either way, it mattered not.
What mattered was that he had survived.
“…I saw the path I must walk.”
The Old Woman’s eyes flickered briefly.
She smiled inscrutably and nodded.
“You endured it, then.”
A cryptic smile played across the Old Woman’s weathered face. She asked nothing more.
“Well, I’m relieved you’re unharmed.”
“In truth, I suspect I’m slightly mad.”
“The fact that you jest proves you’re perfectly sane. Now, what will you do? There’s a village nearby—shall I help you send word to someone?”
Alexander fell into thought at her question.
First, he needed to send a letter to the capital. He would have to contact an acquaintance to arrange funds for repaying the Old Woman’s kindness.
But that was merely the beginning.
‘Where should I go?’
His original plan had been to reach one of the great cities in the south.
There, he had intended to trade on the titles of ‘former royal physician and professor’ to cultivate connections among the nobility and rebuild his life.
Surely there existed some great regional lord who would employ him as a private physician.
Yet thinking it through now, as before, the plan was riddled with flaws.
The provincial cities were intensely territorial, each with their own academies, each harboring contempt for anyone from Kalden.
Even if he succeeded in making such connections, he would have to abandon any hope of returning to the professorship.
At best, he would endure jealousy and obstruction, aging alone in obscurity.
But now he no longer needed to cower before such obstacles.
There was no reason to live begging for anyone’s favor.
‘True medicine now dwells within my mind.’
He held the key to unlock the world’s secrets.
He no longer needed the titles of imperial physician or academy professor.
What mattered was how to use this knowledge, and where to begin.
Then a place surfaced in his mind.
The antithesis of Kalden, that resplendent capital where glory and ruin intersected.
A place he remembered as holding nothing but poverty, shame, and despair.
His roots—which he had spent a lifetime trying to erase from memory, yet could never truly escape.
“I think I’ll return home.”
At Alexander’s words, the Old Woman smiled faintly.
“Of course. There’s no place quite like home when seeking solace in hard times.”
* * *
Beyond the ashen river that curved like a crescent around the city, faded red roofs clustered together like great moss.
Danford.
A provincial city of twenty thousand souls—a small backwater that couldn’t even reach the shadow of Kalden, the center of the empire.
On a hill overlooking that city, a young man sat motionless.
Hair tousled and wild, a beard grown thick and unkempt, a coarse linen shirt and rough trousers.
To any observer, he appeared merely a wanderer who had lost his way.
Yet this shabby youth was none other than the former professor of the Imperial Medical Academy, the late imperial physician who had attended to the ruler of all men, Alexander Rosenbaum.
But in the memory of this city, no such grand and noble name existed.
When he had left this city, he bore an entirely different name—not Alexander Rosenbaum at all.
“Eighteen years.”
Alexander parted his parched lips and spoke softly to himself.
“Nothing here has changed.”
From the city’s appearance to the salt-tinged wind and the barges crossing the river.
Compared to eighteen years before, his homeland had simply frozen in that time, that place.
He had turned his back on this city at the age of ten.
Lifted into a marquis’s carriage, never looking behind even once.
On that day, the child had made a vow.
Never to return to this wretched mud-hole again—a severance from his past and from poverty itself.
The name of that orphaned child riding in the carriage was not Alexander Rosenbaum, but Allan Wright.
Time had transformed that parentless common boy into a baron, raised him to become the empire’s greatest physician, and ultimately stripped everything from him once more.
All he possessed now was the clothes on his back and a few coins to his name.
Empty-handed as when he had departed, he was returning empty-handed still.
Yet it was strange.
Though he had lost all he had built, the young man who faced the city stood straight-backed, his eyes betraying not a shred of wavering.
In place of despair or dejection, a nameless, burning heat roiled from deep within his heart.
It was the knowledge of that brilliant civilization seared into his soul during four days of unconsciousness—the knowledge of Dream Land.
“Then, let’s go.”
Alexander rose to his feet.
He adjusted the rough blanket draped across his shoulders and began walking slowly toward Danford, visible in the distance.

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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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