A World Where Men Are One in a Hundred
Reborn into modern Earth! …Huh?
Becoming a doctor in South Korea usually doesn’t just change one person’s life. It rewrites the family’s status. Relatives start speaking more politely, and parents suddenly carry themselves with newfound pride. That’s why everyone dreamed of medical school. Of course, they all had polished reasons ready on their tongues. They wanted to save lives. They wanted to help suffering patients. Some brought up childhood experiences, others spoke of positive influence, and a few even trotted out words like “humanity” during university interviews. But as graduation drew closer, the stories began to shift. Specialties that let you sleep at night and fix broken faces were far more popular than ones where you spent nights opening bleeding abdomens. Not that anyone could blame them. The path that paid well, offered a decent life, and let you sleep like a human being was obviously the smarter choice. If there had truly been that many people becoming doctors out of pure sense of duty, South Korea wouldn’t have been short on surgeons in the first place.
I never got to make that smart choice. When I was young, my parents died in a traffic accident. Or rather, they were still alive right after the crash. They were breathing in the ambulance and their hearts were still beating when they reached the hospital. But there was no money. No one to pay for surgery, no one to fight for them in the hospital corridors. The life that slipped through our fingers was gone just like that.
After that day, a strange, stubborn anger took root in my head. Even people without money should be able to live. Even without family, without connections, without hospital fees, a human life should still be a human life. Someone had to keep holding on to the blood-soaked patients until the very end. With nothing but that childish rage, I ended up in a major trauma center. And I quickly learned that a sense of duty doesn’t put food on the table. Justice doesn’t let you sleep, and patients’ gratitude doesn’t tear up the overdue on-call schedule. Days melted away under the operating room lights in an instant. Nights vanished amid the constant ring of emergency calls. Meals were cold triangle kimbap, and sleep was stolen on the residents’ sofa. Some days I got an hour. Some days I got nothing at all.
Yet the patients kept coming. Falls. Car accidents. Crush injuries. Abdominal stab wounds. Multiple fractures. People with ruptured livers, torn spleens, and damaged aortas. Someone had to open them up and close them again. Someone had to reach into blood-filled abdomens. Someone had to hold a dying patient’s heart and insist it wasn’t over yet. And more often than not, that someone was me.
“What a stupid way to live.”
Other people used their medical license to change their lives. I used mine to shave years off my own lifespan. Then one day, after finishing an operation, I tried to close my eyes for just ten minutes before the next call. Only ten minutes. I leaned back on the on-call room sofa and shut my eyes. That was the end.
Later I wondered whether it had been cardiac arrest from overwork, an arrhythmia, or simply my body’s final strike notice. But one thing was certain: I had tried so hard to save others that I failed to save myself, dying in the most common and most foolish way possible in South Korea’s medical field.
“At least this life is still modern Korea. That’s something.”
If I had opened my eyes to a medieval fantasy world instead, just imagining it would have sent chills down my spine.
“Medieval times are a hard pass, even if I’m dead.”
I wasn’t completely ignorant of web novels and comics. During night shifts, when sleep felt impossible and no patient was waiting to be rushed into surgery, I would flip through a few chapters on my phone. So I knew the clichés well. The stories where someone gets hit by a truck, dies from overwork, meets a god, receives cheat abilities, and reincarnates into another world. The comment sections were full of people dreaming of that kind of life, but my thoughts were different. Maybe I lacked romance, or maybe it was my occupational disease, but the word “medieval” always made me think of hygiene conditions first.
No proper refrigeration meant meat had to be salted or dried. Water, if not boiled, was probably a buffet for parasites and bacteria. Sewage systems were nonexistent, rats and fleas were everyday life, and inn beds were less stages for romance and more petri dishes for infectious diseases. And medicine? There was nothing to say. Medieval medicine, as I’d studied in medical history, was less about saving patients and more a record of how people of that era tried to make sense of their fears. They practiced bloodletting to remove “bad blood,” suspected demonic possession for mental illness, and drilled holes in skulls to let something out. Of course, not every era was that ignorant. They had their own knowledge and experience, and it was probably the best they could do at the time. But from the perspective of someone who had held patients with ruptured livers and torn aortas in a twenty-first-century trauma center, that world was simply hell itself.
“Besides, there are no antibiotics, no concept of blood transfusions, and anesthesia is primitive at best.”
No CT, no ultrasound, no blood tests, no intensive care units. Dropping me into a place like that and telling me to “survive with cheat abilities” would have meant spending my life trying to culture something like penicillin from mold. Then either an infection from failed sterilization, being branded a heretic after offending the wrong noble, or, if I was lucky enough to survive, dying from overwork all over again. So being reborn in modern Korea felt like salvation. And not just postwar ruins or a developing nation, but twenty-first-century South Korea at that!
Thanks to that, the memory of crying loudly the moment I was born was still vivid.
“Waaah! Waaah!”
“Oh my, our baby. How can you cry so loudly?”
“Waaah! Waaah!”
I already knew how to succeed in Korea. Prosecutor. Judge. Doctor. The kinds of titles that could change a family’s standing in the Korean success narrative. In my previous life, I had graduated at the top of my medical school class and scored among the highest on the national exam. From my intern days I lived in the operating room, and during residency the professors would half-jokingly say, “That guy’s hands are insane.” Fast hands. Quick judgment. No fear. Those were the usual compliments for a surgeon. After entering the major trauma center, it only got worse. Ruptured abdominal aortas, liver injuries, penetrating chest wounds, pelvic crush injuries, multiple organ damage. Patients other doctors sighed over and passed along, I pulled back from the brink on the operating table again and again. Before I died I wrote papers, gave presentations at conferences, was called out during hospital evaluations, and even made it onto government award lists a few times. I had simply been buried in the field that paid the least, offered the least sleep, and ground people down the most.
My body was once again that of a newborn, but the knowledge in my head remained intact. It was a path I had already walked once. As long as I didn’t stubbornly head straight for the trauma center like before, I would be fine. This time I would do as the professors said. Throw away any sense of duty and choose the clean consultation room over the blood-splattered operating room. Scheduled outpatient care instead of endless emergency calls. Touching up the faces of perfectly healthy people instead of opening the abdomens of the dying.
“It’s just fixing faces anyway. I’ve saved people with depressed skull fractures, so how different can it be?”
Of course, actual plastic surgeons would have grabbed me by the collar for saying that, but I had already had my collar grabbed plenty by patients’ guardians in my previous life. So before I was even ten minutes old, I had already drawn up a perfect life plan. I was certain my future would be rosy. At least, until—
“Everyone, today we have a very special friend joining our class~”
Until I entered kindergarten. The homeroom teacher clapped as she spoke.
“He’s a boy! You all have to get along nicely, okay?”
“Yeeees!”
In that instant, every girl in the classroom turned to look at me. Then they rushed over all at once.
“Is he really a boy?”
“Can I touch his hair?”
“His voice is weird! It’s cute!”
“Teacher! Can I sit next to the boy?”
I sat in the small chair, blinking blankly. I wasn’t even a top medical school graduate yet, nor a promising specialist. I was just an ordinary little boy. But the girls surrounded me like they were looking at a rare animal at the zoo, eyes sparkling and hands fidgeting as they tried to get even one more word out of me.
At first I thought maybe I looked strange. But that wasn’t it. The same thing happened in elementary school.
“I heard there’s a boy in our class!”
“Really?”
“Which class?”
It didn’t change in middle school either. Eyes followed me in the hallways. During gym class the teacher checked on me multiple times. The girls didn’t approach openly, but they whispered from a distance. By the time I reached high school, I had no choice but to accept it. This was the South Korea I knew. The roads were the same, the subways were the same, the smartphones were the same, and the college entrance exams were the same. But there was one crucial difference. The most important number of all had completely collapsed. The male-to-female ratio. There was easily one man for every hundred women. When I first saw the statistic, I remember staring at the screen in a daze for a long while.
“…Huh?”
Only then did I understand. Why I had been treated like a rare species in kindergarten. Why the teachers had been unusually careful with me. Why there were always so many eyes on me during school events. And why the news in this world casually mentioned male protection policies, a Ministry of Male Welfare, and male safety zones as if they were perfectly normal.
I had indeed been reincarnated into modern Korea. Just not the one I remembered. This was a reversed world where the gender ratio had been utterly destroyed. And I was an excessively precious male born into that world.