The Physician Gave Up — But the Immortal Had a Brush
That's supposed to be medicine?
"I'm afraid there's nothing I can do. This illness… it's beyond my hands."
The physician shook his head wearily.
He was a healer so renowned that people had brought him all the way from a neighboring town, paid for with what little they'd earned selling the leftover herbs the immortal had given them. And now that very man was gathering up the medicines laid out on the floor of Seokdu's home one by one, sighing all the while.
"I've never seen a plague like it. The burning fever, the spots that break out across the whole body — in thirty years of practicing medicine, I've never once laid eyes on such a thing."
"Th-then what about my mother?"
Seokdu clung to the words like a drowning man.
The physician couldn't bring himself to look at the boy. He turned his eyes away.
"…I've done everything I can. All that's left now… is to leave it to heaven."
"H-how can you say that! If you can't cure her, physician, then who will?"
"I'm sorry, child. Truly… I am sorry."
Leaving only those words behind, the physician fled the room as if running for his life.
Seokdu collapsed onto the floor.
His mother lay in the room. Not so long ago, the wild ginseng had restored her strength — she'd even been well enough to work in the fields again. And now that same mother had been struck down by this wretched plague.
"Mom…."
Seokdu gripped his mother's hand tightly.
Her hand burned like a coal. Her face was flushed crimson, her breathing ragged. Now and then she seemed to surface from her delirium, opening her eyes for a moment — only to drift shut again almost at once.
"Seokdu…."
His mother forced her mouth open at last.
"Mom! You're awake?"
"I'm all right… your mother is all right…. You mustn't catch it… so stay away from me…."
"No! Where would I go, leaving you behind?"
Tears fell from Seokdu's eyes, one after another.
The village had already descended into chaos. The sound of the sick seeped out from every house, and the wailing of mourners never ceased. At first only one or two had taken to their beds; now it was harder to find someone who was well than someone who wasn't.
"At this rate the whole village will…"
"Even the physician's given up on them. What are we supposed to do…"
"Heaven has turned a cold shoulder, that's all. What sin did this mountain village ever commit…"
Beyond the courtyard wall, the despairing voices of the adults drifted over.
Seokdu gritted his teeth.
He couldn't just stand by. He couldn't lose his mother like this. He had to do something. Anything at all.
And then, in that moment, one person flashed through Seokdu's mind.
…The immortal.
Yes — the immortal.
The one who had painted a wild ginseng root and brought his dying mother back from the brink, the one who commanded a tiger. If it was him —
surely he could do something about this sickness too.
"Mom, just hold on a little longer! I'll — I'll find a way to save you, I promise!"
Seokdu sprang to his feet and kicked open the door.
.
.
.
.
.
Seokdu scrambled up the mountain path in a blind hurry.
His breath burned in his throat. His legs trembled beneath him. But he didn't stop. He had to reach the immortal faster — just a little faster, no matter what it took.
"Im-, Immortal—!"
Seokdu shouted as he stumbled into the courtyard.
The immortal was sitting in the yard painting, just as he always did. Still in his dirt-stained hemp clothes, hair sticking up in every direction, that languid face utterly untroubled by the concerns of the world.
But then —
Seokdu froze for a moment.
There was a woman sitting beside the immortal. A stranger, dressed in black. Her cool, sharp eyes gave off something almost frightening. She was a face Seokdu had never seen — not in the village, not even down at the market town.
…Wh-who is that? That scary older lady.
Seokdu stood there bewildered for a beat. Last time, the immortal had been alone. When had this person even—?
But that wasn't what mattered right now.
"Immortal! S-something terrible's happened!"
Seokdu rushed over, gasping for breath, and threw himself down on his knees in front of the immortal.
"There's a plague in the village! People keep collapsing and, and my mom — my mom's sick in bed too! The physician says he can't cure her, that it's up to heaven now! Immortal, please — please, save our village!"
Seokdu's throat closed up and the words wouldn't come. He could only press his forehead to the ground and beg.
The immortal set down his brush and gazed quietly down at the boy.
His expression was as impassive as ever. And yet Seokdu could tell. Those eyes were not brushing off a single word he'd said.
"…A plague, is it."
The immortal murmured, low.
"What kind of illness? Describe the symptoms. Every detail."
"Th-the fever burns them up! Red spots break out all over their bodies! Their throats swell so badly they can't even swallow, and after a few days they can't move at all! The physician says it's the first case he's seen in thirty years!"
Seokdu poured the words out in a frantic rush.
The immortal seemed to fall into thought for a moment.
Red spots. High fever. A swollen throat. That brief silence, while he turned those few words over in his mind, stretched out for Seokdu into something endless.
At last, the immortal put down his brush.
Then he rose slowly to his feet.
"…Let's go."
Seokdu's eyes flew wide open.
"R-really?!"
"Your mother's sick, isn't she? Then we should hurry."
At those words, Seokdu very nearly burst into tears on the spot.
／ ／ ／ ／ ／
I followed Seokdu down the mountain.
The village was exactly as the boy had described. No — it was worse.
The sound of the sick seeped out from house after house, and mourners' wailing rose without pause. In the lanes where no footsteps stirred, only the acrid smell of boiling herbal medicine hung in the air. The healthy had barred their doors and held their breath; the sick moaned inside their rooms.
Now that I was seeing it with my own eyes, I understood what it meant for a plague to be running rampant.
"This way, Immortal!"
Seokdu led the way to his house.
A woman lay in the room — Seokdu's mother. Her face burned red, and a rash of small red bumps had broken out rough across her whole body. Her brow was slick with cold sweat, and her breathing came rough and hard.
I sat down beside her and examined her for a while.
High fever. A rash of red bumps spread like millet seeds across her skin. A voice cracked and rasping from the swollen throat. And this contagion, spreading through the entire village in a matter of days.
I took a quick look at her tongue as well. Swollen, bumpy, and red as a strawberry.
……Ah. That.
I knew what this was.
Scarlet fever.
In my past life, antibiotics had made it a trivial illness — but in its own right, it was a plague with a fearsome reputation. Especially in an era like this, in a remote mountain village like this. With no medicine and no immunity, an outbreak like this sweeping through could wipe out an entire village, and no one would find it strange. In the old days, untold numbers of children had died of this very disease.
To explain it in modern terms, it was an illness caused by bacteria.
It spread through the throat, brought a burning fever and a red rash across the body, swelled the tongue like a strawberry — and if it wasn't caught in time, it could damage the heart or the kidneys and turn fatal. The reason the people of this village were dying was, eight times out of ten, simply that the sickness had been allowed to progress that far.
Of course.
If I started ranting about 'bacteria' and 'kidneys' here in the Murim, not a single soul would have the faintest idea what I was talking about.
What mattered was that I knew what this was. And I knew what worked against an illness like it.
For a disease caused by bacteria, there was one ready-made answer.
The medicine of this world couldn't cure it. It was only natural the physician had given up — no such medicine existed in this era. The very concept of bacteria wouldn't exist yet.
But I had a brush.
"…Seokdu."
"Y-yes! Immortal!"
"Fetch me a bowl of water. Clean water."
Seokdu darted off and came back with the water in a flash.
I spread out a sheet of paper and lifted my brush.
What should I draw?
I dug through the memories of my past life.
Antibiotics weren't all the same. There were many kinds, each with its own ingredients. For scarlet fever — a streptococcus infection — there was a specific one that worked. Probably… amoxicillin, was it? That medicine I used to pick up from the clinic whenever I caught a bad sore throat.
The problem was my ability.
The better I drew it, the better the result. Which meant, put the other way, that a sloppy drawing would produce a sloppy product. With food, a rough sketch of rice or meat was fine — once you ate it, who cared. But medicine was different. People's lives were on the line. If the ingredients came out half-formed, or if something entirely wrong got mixed in, it wouldn't just fail to cure them — it could make things catastrophically worse.
So it had to be precise.
The medicine I remembered, reproduced as exactly as I could. Without a hair's breadth of error.
I closed my eyes and pictured the medicine.
The white paper bag from the pharmacy. The foil blister packs inside. The capsules bulging out in their little domes. A translucent yellow body with a deep pink cap, and the tiny letters and numbers printed across them.
The clearer the memory became, the more naturally the brush tip moved.
First, the packaging.
I drew each dome of the foil where a capsule sat, one by one — even the thin plastic film on the back that you pressed the pills out through. In the corner of the packaging, I wrote out the ingredient and dosage in small lettering. Amoxicillin 250 milligrams. Exactly as I remembered it.
And then, capsule by capsule.
The yellow body, the pink cap. The smooth surface. Even the letters printed on them, I carved in as clearly as I could, wringing every last drop from those hazy memories. I tried to capture, down to the brush tip, even the feel of the fine white granules inside.
How many would we need?
For scarlet fever… three times a day, for roughly ten days. About thirty pills per adult. I didn't know how many people lived in the village, so I'd be generous.
I drew out sheet after sheet of the blister packs. One sheet, two sheets, three sheets… the medicine piled up steadily on the paper.
Nearly done.
One last thing — I wrote the instructions on the packaging. Three times a day, thirty minutes after meals. For ten days, without skipping a single dose. Finish every pill even if you feel completely better. Antibiotics must never be stopped halfway through.
I lifted the brush away.
/ / / / /
She had been watching the whole scene from a short distance away.
Truthfully, at first she couldn't have cared less.
Whether a plague swept through the village at the foot of the mountain or not was no affair of hers. Raised in the Demonic Cult, she attached no weight whatsoever to the lives of nameless peasants. People lived and died over lesser things every day, and she had witnessed far worse, countless times.
And yet this man —
At a single word about a plague, he had come down the mountain. At the sobbing of one child, without a word of argument.
And now he sat beside the stricken woman, peering into her sickness. The bearer of a divine brush that could overturn the world — and he meant to save some nameless peasant woman he'd never met before.
…I don't understand him.
She furrowed her brow.
With that power, he could do anything. Found a sect, seize the Murim, reign above the world itself. And yet this man was spending that power on this. On saving the lives of a handful of mountain villagers — an act that gained him nothing at all.
Then, in the midst of it all, the man drew something out.
A gleaming silver sheet. Studded with little colorful beads. It was a thing she had never seen before. Even that dark, sharp-tasting water had been a first — but this was a different order of strangeness altogether.
"…That's supposed to be medicine?"
The question slipped out of her before she could stop it.
"Yep. Medicine."
The man replied as he sorted the heap of pills.
"This sickness — they'll recover if they take these. We're lucky it's still at a stage where something can be done."
She stared at the colorful beads with misgiving. That was medicine? Nothing like it existed anywhere in the Murim, nor in the Demonic Cult. Neither a decoction nor a pill pellet, but tiny grains of pretty color — and that was supposed to save a person's life?
…As I thought.
She nodded quietly to herself.
As she'd thought — this man was, without question, a dokkaebi. A goblin of legend.
He conjured food that didn't exist in this world, diagnosed an illness at a glance, and now invented medicine that didn't exist either. A being beyond the bounds of human sense, lacking for nothing.
But here was the strange thing.
For a terrifying dokkaebi, this man — everything he actually did — was, well… remarkably kind.