The Savior's Voice
At Donovan's words that he had found him, Victoria's expression hardened.
"Hold on. Are you saying you're going to entrust the surgery to that doctor?"
Her gaze turned toward the shabby old physician in his disheveled clothes.
No matter how desperately she needed a way to save her husband, this was a man the medical community treated as a heretic. A faint air of madness clung to him, plain as day.
"The success rate may be higher, but the method is far too extreme. It would be better to keep him stable as he is now and search for a safer, more proven approach…"
"Is that really true?"
Donovan cut her off short. There was no need for long-winded explanations. He asked her point-blank.
"Why did you agree to my proposal in the first place?"
Victoria's lips pressed shut.
Donovan continued calmly.
"It was your intuition, wasn't it? That ominous feeling that if things continue like this, you'll lose your husband forever. That same intuition is what made you bet on me to choose the surgeon, isn't it?"
The woman who had raised Aero Dynamics to the number-one aviation company in the world. The thing that had carried her through countless crises to reach that seat of power had always been that razor-sharp intuition of hers.
"A safer, more proven method? You heard what New York's top doctor said earlier, loud and clear. A ten-percent chance. That wasn't an offer of surgery—it was an order to give up."
Donovan's gaze settled on David, who sat slumped against the sofa, breathing hard.
"To escape a death already written, you need someone who operates outside common sense. Honestly, just finding him is a stroke of luck in itself."
Donovan's words cooled the fever in Victoria's mind.
"And there's something I need to correct. You seem to think this is a gamble, but it isn't."
He looked her straight in the eyes.
"I told you. I read people's fates. If that doctor performs the surgery, your husband is fated to live."
Talk of fate and destiny held no persuasive power on its own. Yet Donovan had already shown her things. He had spotted her husband's illness at a glance, and though he called it luck, he had even found the doctor.
"Forget everything else. What does your intuition say? Does it truly tell you there's no chance?"
Her eyes returned to her husband.
The man who, unwilling to become a burden, had swallowed his agony alone every time the brutal medication wore off. She could not let him slip away so emptily.
At last her intuition delivered its verdict.
Victoria approached the eccentric old man and spoke.
"Please take care of my husband. Please… save him."
"Tsk. What do you think I came all this way for? Let me see the patient."
The old man clicked his tongue as if he despised empty formalities, then stepped forward to examine David's condition.
The moment she made her decision, Donovan began to move in earnest.
"We'll do it at Memorial Sloan Kettering. Their VVIP operating room will have flawless facilities."
His gaze shifted to Victoria.
The original attending physician they had met in the examination room earlier. There was no wild ferocity in that man's face—nothing that would let him boldly slice open a patient's abdomen while life hung by a thread. Yet the water energy that stubbornly held a collapsing life force in place, maintaining the status quo, was as solid and meticulous as bedrock.
After the surgery, healing the wounds and guiding a stable recovery—that meticulous attending physician would be the perfect choice.
"More than anything, your husband's original doctor is already there. Even if this old man holds the scalpel, leave the recovery to that fussy fellow. He's brilliant at keeping things stable, isn't he? Enough to fool even you."
At those words, the old man who had been pressing firmly around David's abdomen spoke without even turning his head.
"The place doesn't matter. Just pick me some decent assistants."
His cloudy eyes flashed as he added the condition.
"Ones who can keep up with my surgery."
"Don't worry."
Donovan gave a short laugh.
"I'll handpick the best people who can match your rhythm in the operating room and set them up for you."
Of course, he would need help for that.
"You can arrange it, right?"
Instead of answering, she immediately issued orders to her secretary.
"Contact the director of Memorial Sloan Kettering and tell him to come to the mansion at once."
"Yes, Madam Chairman. I'll call him right away."
A short while later, the director of Memorial Sloan Kettering arrived.
"Madam Chairman, the reason you summoned me to the mansion so suddenly…"
Victoria cut straight to the point. She pointed to the eccentric old man seated on the sofa.
"That man will perform my husband's surgery. We'll use your hospital's VVIP operating room."
"…Excuse me? What on earth…"
The director's gaze swung to the old eccentric from Texas. Three seconds later, his eyes flooded with shock. He had recognized at once that famous face—the one the medical society treated as a madman.
"Th-that's impossible! That man is a lunatic! You absolutely cannot entrust this dangerous surgery—where the tumor has completely wrapped around the aorta—to him!"
The director shouted, veins standing out on his neck. Purely medical warnings poured from his mouth. But the Texas old man, lounging crookedly on the sofa and digging at his ear, snorted.
"Who said anything about carefully peeling off just the tumor?"
"…What did you say?"
"You hack out the whole aorta with the tumor still on it and swap the entire thing for an artificial vessel. That's all."
Insane. The director's face went white.
"You've lost your mind! Replace the entire aorta with the tumor still attached? Completely anastomosing the thick upper and lower ends of the aorta within the golden window before blood flow is cut off is impossible!"
"Impossible for greenhouse softies like you, maybe. Your hands shake on the scalpel just thinking the blood might spurt."
The old man's cloudy eyes flashed like a beast's.
"When you lot drove me out of the society, yapping about ethics and regulations, I locked myself in a basement and cut and sewed pig vessels thousands of times."
Research he had pursued with manic intensity.
"And I opened the bellies of hundreds of terminal patients you declared inoperable and threw away."
Clinical experience built on the lives everyone else had abandoned.
"Extreme? That 'crazy' work is the technique that saved lives that would have died long ago without it. Your forty-minute stitching? Ten minutes is plenty for me."
It was a realm reached only after an obsession that bordered on madness.
"Director. Open the operating room. So my husband can have his surgery."
Victoria's cold voice finally drove into the director.
"M-Madam Chairman. Even so, it's impossible. Under hospital regulations, if we open the VVIP operating room to an outsider and a medical accident occurs…"
"I will take full legal responsibility."
"Even if you take responsibility, Madam Chairman, we still need justification to quiet the hospital board and the medical society…"
Victoria sliced through his words with icy precision.
"The second cancer center your hospital is pushing to build. I'll donate three hundred million dollars from my personal fortune."
"…Excuse me?"
"Are you going to claim that three hundred million dollars still isn't enough justification?"
The Texas eccentric had stepped forward to turn the impossible into the possible, and the wife had flung open the operating-room doors with money and power.
"…"
The director swallowed dryly and forced the words out.
"We'll proceed as a ghost surgery that leaves no official record. I'll discreetly stand by an elite assist team with tight lips and real skill."
But Victoria cut him off coldly again.
"No. We'll choose the assistants ourselves. Prepare every personnel file. We'll meet them in person and select them."
It was the moment the world's top hospital's ironclad system completely surrendered before overwhelming capital.
Once the agreement was sealed, the old man rose and casually rolled his stiff neck.
"If it's decided, no point dawdling. We leave for the hospital now."
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
Inside the large conference room of the VVIP ward, a strange tension mixed with an alien atmosphere.
At one end of the table, the eccentric old man from Texas had his nose buried in a mountain of David's 3D abdominal scan data.
"Cut here like this… no, the whole pancreatic tail has to come out first…"
He muttered to himself, obsessively absorbed in surgical simulation alone. Whether someone wiped blood or handed him suture beside him when he held the scalpel seemed completely irrelevant; team selection was the last thing on his mind.
And across from him, six or seven elite specialists—dragged out of bed at dawn by the director's emergency summons—stood in a line, still clueless about why they were there.
Donovan leaned back in his chair at an angle, scanning the faces of the old man and the doctors in turn instead of any paperwork.
The core of today's team selection was not individual skill. It was the work of finding teammates whose chemistry would let that old man operate freely on the table.
"Rejected."
At Donovan's calm single word, the director's mouth fell open.
"Excuse me? B-but that young man graduated top of his class at Harvard, and in our hospital he's known for having the fastest hands…"
Instead of answering, Donovan pointed with his chin at the first doctor.
The man's physiognomy was clear in his eyes. The pupils were cloudy, the space between the brows narrow. Under controlled conditions he might be perfect, but the moment an unexpected variable exploded, his mental fortitude would freeze for at least a full second. That was why his compatibility with the old man was the worst possible.
"Skill's good, but the mental game isn't. The second something unexpected hits, he freezes. Rejected."
Donovan's gaze moved straight to the next doctor.
A face whose cheekbones were packed tight with unsuppressible ambition. Far too strong an ego to serve as support—complete opposite.
"That one too. Rejected. We're not picking people who want to be the star."
When more than half the doctors had been pushed aside, Donovan's eyes settled on a large, taciturn-looking physician standing silently in the corner.
His features were not flashy, nor did his energy shoot out sharply. Yet like a deep lake whose bottom could not be seen, a calm, heavy water energy wrapped his entire face as solidly as rock.
The perfect breakwater that would quietly swallow and endure a runaway blaze. His compatibility with the old man was perfect.
"That one. He's the main assist."
At Donovan's designation the director pushed up his glasses in fluster.
"That fellow is diligent, but… his snap judgment and surgical speed lag a little behind the other elites. For a main role…"
"We're not looking for the fastest person right now, are we?"
It was a lineup assembled not by surgical skill but by thorough energy affinity and chemistry. The director could raise no further objection.
Donovan checked the clear, stable Color Reading of the doctor at the end of the line and tossed out the next choice.
"Anesthesiologist is the one at the far end. Best condition today."
His gaze soon shifted to the nurses waiting tensely behind the doctors.
A veteran nurse he scanned through his sunglasses. Her lower face was as heavy as stone, and there was not a flicker of wavering in her eyes.
"Scrub nurse is that head nurse over there."
Donovan pointed with his chin and added calmly.
"She's got the steel to match his rhythm without batting an eye even if that old man is spraying blood and cursing up a storm on the table. Set the circulating nurses as people she picks herself."
Under the lead of a suspicious broker in sunglasses and a mask, a strange yet perfect dream team no one could have imagined was assembled in an instant.
All that remained was for this insane dream team to open the tightly shut doors of the VVIP operating room.
While Donovan was building the dream team, relentless precision tests continued under the secret control of the VVIP ward.
David moved back and forth between cold medical machines and IV needles, barely able to suppress the anger that surged up again and again.
The arrow of resentment pointed at Donovan.
If only that strange man hadn't suddenly appeared and turned everything upside down.
If he had never been found out, he would have quietly settled his affairs and closed his eyes with the secret kept from his wife to the very end. Victoria would never have had to tremble in blood-draining fear and shed tears the way she did now.
But the end of that thought always returned to the cold reality.
Even so, I would still die, and Victoria would be left alone.
That was the unchanging, predetermined end. There was nothing to be angry about.
If this mad gamble succeeded and he lived—if he could stay by her side even one more day—then Donovan was not someone to resent. He was no different from a savior who had pulled him out of despair.
Just before he lay down on the gurney headed for the operating room, Donovan approached David's side.
Honestly, David was terrified out of his mind. The terror that if he closed his eyes now he might never open them again. The crushing despair that he might never see his beloved wife's face once more.
Looking down at David's face, drained of all color, Donovan spoke in a calm voice.
"Don't worry. You are not fated to die. And you are not fated to part from your wife."
Talk of fate and destiny—empty words that would normally have earned a snort. Yet somehow that indifferent, solid single sentence quietly settled the turmoil in his heart.
Was it because the man was trusted completely by a woman whose intuition was extraordinary? Or simply because of his own desperate need to cling to anything? He could not know the exact reason, but as if by a lie, his breathing eased.
Then, inside the tightly sealed operating room, he felt the cold sensation of anesthetic entering his veins.
David forced his heavy eyelids open.
I don't want to sleep.
If he closed his eyes now, he felt he would sink into eternal darkness. But he could not defeat the sleep that surged over him like a tide.
His consciousness sank helplessly into the deep abyss.
Perfect blackout.
……
…
How much time had passed?
"D-darling?!"
The first thing he heard was his wife's trembling, tear-choked voice.
When he laboriously lifted his heavy eyelids, a familiar silhouette came into view first through the blurry haze.
The man in sunglasses and a mask. Donovan.
"Relax. Your fate has changed."
From behind the mask came again that same calm voice he had heard just before the surgery.
"You're fated to live long and healthy."
It was, beyond any doubt, the perfect voice of a savior.