Five Seconds of Silence
The main operating theater on the third floor of the main building, Room 4. Beyond the heavy automatic doors lay a space as meticulously controlled as outer space itself. The only sounds that governed this domain were the cool whisper of the air conditioning system filtering out microscopic particles and the steady electronic beeps emanating from the anesthesia monitor at regular intervals.
It was Baek Ijun’s first entry into an operating room as a first-year general surgery resident. He was not assigned a core role like first or second assistant, where one would retract tissue and secure the visual field at the main surgical site. Instead, his position was at the very edge of the operating table, beside the scrub nurse’s back table—the third observer’s spot, where he prepared sterile saline and intermittently organized the suction lines.
Yet even that peripheral position pressed down on him with suffocating pressure. The source was the surgeon dominating the center of the table in his sterile gown: Choi Dusik, Chief of General Surgery.
Today’s case was a right hepatectomy. The liver possessed the most extensive and intricate vascular network in the human body. The slightest deviation in trajectory could unleash uncontrollable hemorrhage that would swallow the entire field. Choi Dusik’s scalpel and electrocautery carved between tissues with zero waste. His movements contained neither emotion nor unnecessary hesitation.
Even the fellow serving as first assistant was breathing hard, strung tight with tension just to keep up with the chief’s overwhelming pace. Ijun gripped the suction line lightly, silently absorbing that flawless trajectory.
The system was cruising without a single error. Vital signs remained calm, and blood loss was being controlled at a record-low level.
That was when it happened—right as Choi Dusik’s cautery advanced into the most dangerous zone where the right hepatic artery and bile duct intersected. Ijun’s vision suddenly rippled in a strange distortion.
T-00 Leonardo da Vinci — Automatic Activation
Regardless of Ijun’s will, his visual cortex was forcibly opened. The Archive—which had previously shut down after revealing a fatal blind spot in Room 410—now erupted with data as if it had been conserving power precisely for this moment.
A translucent three-dimensional visualization layer cascaded like a waterfall over the patient’s open abdomen. The complex directions of blood flow surrounding the liver, the tension limits of the entangled connective tissues—all of it converted into a map of red and blue, slamming into his retinas.
Within the tidal wave of information, Ijun consciously attempted to filter. He erased unnecessary noise and narrowed his focus with extreme precision solely onto the target area where Chief Choi Dusik’s cautery was headed.
At that instant, a chill warning sliced through his mind.
Deep behind the right hepatic artery that the chief was about to dissect, beyond connective tissue invisible to the naked eye, a dark red wave flickered dangerously. It was not simple inflammation or tissue tension. The rhythmic, pulsating expansion of that red signal was unmistakably arterial.
Anatomical variation. A malformed branch of the right hepatic artery has deviated completely from the standard path and is hiding back there.
Choi Dusik’s cautery, unaware of this fact and judging the anatomy as normal, was a mere second away from fully transecting the connective tissue. If the trajectory advanced even one more second, the hidden arterial branch would rupture from the heat of the cautery.
His breath froze solid. Time inside the operating room slowed to an unnatural crawl. Five seconds flowed between the monitor alarms—five seconds that felt both fleeting and eternal. In that silence, Ijun’s brain began a brutal calculation that separated survival from ruin.
Should I speak, or must I stay silent?
This was the absolute domain under the control of General Surgery Chief Choi Dusik. For a first-year resident to challenge the lead surgeon’s judgment was an act of insubordination that undermined the very foundation of the system. What if the visual data from the Archive was wrong? What if it was a temporary machine error, or if he had misinterpreted the information?
The price for interrupting the chief’s flawless surgical flow would not end with simple reprimand. Baek Ijun’s surgical life would be permanently discarded inside this operating room. No attending would ever allow him near the main field again.
But if he kept his mouth shut and remained silent—if he cowardly hid even though his prediction was correct—then in mere seconds the patient’s abdomen would be completely flooded with uncontrollable crimson blood. Blood pressure would plummet, and the system would face irreversible collapse. It would be trading the patient’s life for his own safety.
“The arbitrary action of someone without authority is violence.”
Oh Jae-hyeong’s cold declaration echoed in his ears like an auditory hallucination. Yet Ijun’s calculations reached a clear trajectory correction at that point. If he lacked the authority to take responsibility, he would simply stake his own neck and prove it.
He had not come here to remain a passive component of a system that would stand by and watch an obvious error unfold.
The five seconds of silence ended.
Ijun’s firm, unshakable voice cut through the cold air of the operating room.
Every sound in the operating room froze as if sucked into a vacuum. The scrub nurse’s hands stiffened in midair. The anesthesiologist’s gaze left the monitor and turned toward Ijun. Shock and fury rose simultaneously above the mask of the fellow acting as first assistant.
“Have you lost your mind? A first-year daring to open his mouth—!”
Just as the fellow’s suppressed roar was about to explode, Choi Dusik’s cautery halted a hair’s breadth from the tissue, frozen motionless in the air.
Silence. Only the chief’s heavy, icy presence dominated and pressed down on the entire operating room.
He offered no reply, no rebuke to Ijun’s report. He did not even turn to check the first-year’s face—an unnecessary movement. Instead, the tip of Choi Dusik’s hand, which had stopped, twisted its trajectory by the tiniest margin. He withdrew the cautery and accepted a blunt dissector.
Choi Dusik began to push aside—extremely carefully, without tearing or cutting—the connective tissue posterior to the right hepatic artery that Ijun had pointed out.
Everyone in the room held their breath and stared at the field. Ijun, too, was precisely comparing the point indicated by the Archive’s red layer with the spot where the chief’s dissector made contact.
The moment the tissue was gently retracted, a suppressed gasp escaped the fellow’s lips.
Directly beneath the thick connective tissue, in a space that should have been empty, a malformed arterial branch as thick as an adult man’s little finger was pulsing tautly. Had the cautery followed the previous trajectory, it would have sliced straight through without filtering, triggering massive hemorrhage—a fatal trap.
Choi Dusik’s movements remained utterly calm. Without the slightest sign of agitation, he perfectly clipped both ends of the discovered variant branch and only then safely separated the cut surface.
The crisis was erased so smoothly and perfectly that it never even occurred.
The remainder of the surgery flowed like water. Having handled the variation, the chief’s scalpel cleanly resected the right hepatic lobe, and blood loss remained astonishingly minimal. After the final sutures were completed, the anesthesia monitor confirmed that the patient’s vitals had entered a state of perfect stability.
“Thank you for your hard work.”
The customary closing remark filled the operating room. Choi Dusik, having untied the strings of his sterile gown, stepped away from the table. Amid the bustle of scrub nurses clearing equipment and the fellow preparing the final dressing, Ijun stood silently in his assigned place.
Choi Dusik began walking toward the automatic doors of the operating room. His path had to pass directly in front of the auxiliary table where Ijun stood.
Ijun’s breathing sank slightly. Tens of thousands of calculations spun through his mind once more.
Would a devastating scolding for his presumptuous intervention come? Or would he receive even a brief acknowledgment for preventing catastrophic bleeding?
Choi Dusik’s steps brushed past Ijun’s side. The automatic doors opened, and until the chief had completely disappeared outside, not a single word was spoken. No praise, no anger, no warning.
As if Baek Ijun, the first-year resident, had never existed in this space to begin with, only a perfect and heavy silence remained.
The opened automatic doors closed again with a heavy frictional sound. Ijun quietly stared at the empty doorway.
Rather than relief at having saved the patient’s life using the Archive’s data, a strange sensation washed over him—as if he had collided with an unknowable, dense barrier.
That absolute silence from Choi Dusik. Was it a tacit affirmation that his judgment had been correct? Or was it a cold warning that a mere cog in the system should never dare intervene in the variables of the main field?
Ijun set the suction line back in its place and swallowed a deep, heavy breath.
The Archive only visualized medical truth and the location of errors. It never calculated the massive ripples that the real-world system would generate immediately after that truth was spoken, nor the emotions of the people involved.
How to interpret Choi Dusik’s silence, and how to prove his own trajectory within this uncontrollable pressure moving forward—
A merciless equation without an answer now stood freshly in the path of first-year resident Baek Ijun.
The cold air of the operating room offered him no solution whatsoever.