The Saint of the Southern Front
The Castrato Medical Center in 2030 South Korea... is as peaceful as ever. "Did you clear the field with the suction?" Even though the operating room is in chaos with alerts about the patient going into hypovolemic shock, isn't this just a typical day in a hospital OR? Especially in a trauma surgery room, it's practically a daily routine. Therefore, one could say the hospital is peaceful today as well.
Humming a tune while pulling on my surgical gloves, I heard the resident shout urgently from the operating table. "Fellow! The patient's vitals are dropping!"
"Yeah, yeah. I'm working as fast as I can. Whining won't make the formula come out any faster."
Today's patient was a traffic accident victim who had been crushed by a truck. After finishing the preparations, I peered into the patient's opened abdomen. "Luckily, the spleen isn't shattered too badly. But the upper gastrointestinal tract is completely in Necrosis. The Volvulus is severe, too. What on earth did they do to turn a person's insides into a twisted pretzel?"
"They said there was a bit of a mishap during the rescue after being crushed by the truck."
"How many hours did it take to get to the hospital?"
"It took about four hours."
"We can't save this."
"Pardon?"
At those words, the resident looked at me in horror. Realizing my slip of the tongue, I hurriedly corrected myself. "I meant we can't save the stomach and small intestine. Obviously, the patient will survive. I've saved people in worse situations than this."
I mean, I've even saved a patient with a bullet lodged in their heart, right? And I did it while the heart was still beating? Don't believe me? Even I wondered how that was possible.
"Let's go with a Total Gastrectomy. Leave a little bit considering we'll do a Roux-en-Y reconstruction later. For now, we'll staple it."
While untwisting the intestines, I used a stapler to seal the ends of the esophagus and the small intestine. Finally, I inserted a tube into the small intestine for nutritional supply and created an opening on the outside of the abdomen for waste to exit.
"What did you eat during the day to have this much stuff in your stomach?"
"Won't they get Sepsis?"
"Eh, the Department of Infectious Diseases will handle that. That's their job."
I changed my gloves several times in the middle because they were contaminated with food particles. The surgery ended after suturing the ruptured diaphragm and inserting a chest tube.
"Whew..." I pulled down my mask and took off my gloves. "You finish the final suturing. And-" I tapped the shoulder of the resident who was looking at me from in front of the computer.
"Tell Professor Kim in GI (Gastrointestinal Surgery). Tell him to handle the reconstruction once the condition stabilizes."
"Yes, sir!"
"Oh, and don't forget to take photos of the surgical site and pass them along. You need to know where the feeding tube is placed so they can avoid it later."
"Yes, sir!"
"I made myself clear, right? Don't let the whole team get chewed out for forgetting like last time."
"Yes! Understood! Thank you for your hard work, sir!"
"Yeah. And."
Before leaving the operating room, I gave the resident one last instruction.
"Transfer the admission to GI. If you call me, I'm blocking you. If a problem arises, talk to another professor. I'm going to sleep for the rest of my off-duty time."
As soon as I left the operating room, fatigue washed over me like a tidal wave. Checking my watch, I realized 12 hours had passed since I started my shift. Coming in this morning, there was a hit-and-run, a fall, a stabbing, and just now, the truck accident... It was truly an intense day. Ah. Checking again, the date had changed. It wasn't 12 hours, it was 36 hours, damn it.
'Damn it. Let me go home now.'
36 hours of continuous surgery. This is no work for a human. Then, suddenly, I remembered the most important fact I had forgotten. I immediately returned to the operating room. And I called over the medical students who were blankly observing from the corner of the room.
"Students."
"Ye-yes!"
"This was a 20 million won surgery."
"Pardon?"
"The trauma surgery fee was increased the year before last. If you do this once, the six people in this operating room split 20 million won. We deduct a bit for material costs, but we still get paid a lot, you know?"
"???"
"And if you do night surgery after 6 PM, you get almost double. Trauma surgery pays this well. How about it? You should go into trauma surgery, right?"
At those words, the students' gazes swept across me, the resident, and the nurse in turn. The appearance of heroes drenched in blood, sweat, and dark circles. Isn't this enough to fall in love with?
Soon, a student stammered, "I... I'm sorry."
Ah, why!
***
As soon as I arrived home, I threw my body onto the sofa like a corpse. I didn't even have the strength to wash up. "Haa... I need to sleep quickly..."
But the chronic illness of modern people had struck. My body was discharged, but my brain refused to rest and was clamoring for dopamine. Habitually, I turned on my smartphone.
"Is there a light-hearted novel..."
Reality is a fantasy world full of ghosts, entities, and patients. Thanks to that, trauma patients are overflowing these days, so the trauma surgery department has no time to rest. So, I didn't want to read something gloomy even in a novel.
"Something calm... and healing..."
As I scrolled down, an interesting title caught my eye in the rankings.
<Schnabel's Notes>
#Fantasy #FusionPunk #Misunderstanding #Medical #...etc
"Schnabel? A plague doctor?"
Schnabel. A German word meaning a bird's beak. It is also a word that refers to a plague doctor.
I combined the introduction and the tags. Misunderstanding and denial... and a saint. Schnabel means crow in German. It's also widely used as a term for a plague doctor. In other words, the protagonist of the original work must have been a plague doctor who went around saving people wearing a crow mask. The content must have been about people around him misunderstanding him as a saint and worshiping him.
How much experience do I have with web novels? This was enough to understand at a glance. 'I can roughly estimate the original work.' If the protagonist just nonchalantly bandages someone or prescribes medicine, people like a Northern Grand Duchess or a Princess passing by would have become obsessed, saying, "You're the first person to treat me like this." Meanwhile, the protagonist would be revered as a saint or a prophet, and he would try to escape, feeling burdened. Then he would be caught again and suffer the fate of wealth and glory.
"He lives comfortably, this friend."
Someone is on the verge of losing their mind while stitching up intestines crushed by a thousand-pound truck. And here is a misunderstanding-trope protagonist who is praised just by breathing. It would be great if I could live like that too.
'Let's see how he lives in this other world.'
I opened the prologue immediately. And before I could even read the first sentence of the novel, with a sound of -rip!, a sharp pain as if the center of my chest was being torn apart struck me. A terrible radiating pain as if a sharp axe was splitting my sternum and piercing through to the spine behind my back. My smartphone slipped from my hand and fell to the floor.
Cold sweat poured down like rain, and my vision flickered white. 'Ugh... Damn it... I felt like my digestion hadn't been good lately.'
Seeing that I'm going without even being able to scream... Acute myocardial infarction? Or aortic dissection? I emphasized to the medical students so much that if a patient says they have indigestion, they should also suspect heart disease. Yet, I thought I had indigestion and was only looking for digestive medicine until now.
'Damn it... The professor position was right in front of me...'
***
When I opened my eyes, I was in another world.
'I survived this.'
It was a survival in a different sense, but anyway, I had survived. The name I was given at birth was Julian Schnabel. As soon as I saw the surname Schnabel, I could easily guess that I had possessed the novel I was about to read. And of all things, as the protagonist.
'I was envious of the protagonist, but I didn't want to become the protagonist.'
I could also personally experience the settings of the novel that I couldn't confirm at the time. This world was a worldview that mixed dark fantasy and fusion punk. Humanity, pushed back by magical beasts and demons, chose to build walls and hide inside them. Even so, news would occasionally arrive that another fortress had been occupied.
It was a gloomy worldview that I would definitely choose as a last resort if I could choose the priority of my possession. In such a worldview, the first adult I saw was not my biological parents, but their friend. I heard that my parents left me with that person and flew off to the Southern Front to treat the soldiers.
— "Julian. Your parents were truly wonderful people."
Maybe it's because of the worldview. My parents who went to the Southern Front never returned. 'Even if I'm reincarnated, why is it such a place?'
It's definitely a reincarnation with many problems. But it wasn't a reincarnation full of only disadvantages. If my memory is correct, the work had a misunderstanding tag attached to it. This implied only one thing.
'But the future is bright, right?'
It might be a little unhappy now. But eventually, the future will be happy. Even if I put in just a little effort. So there's no need to be discouraged by a moment of unhappiness.
'An opportunity will surely come. Until then, I should keep reviewing so I don't forget.'
I was picturing a happy future in my head like that. Suddenly, a chilling assumption flashed through my mind. Because the platform where I was reading the novel came to mind. 'Wait. If it's Topbelpia... what is my gender right now?'
I immediately looked down. ...Fortunately, it was attached.
'Whew... The Crown Prince and the Grand Duke won't be obsessed with me.'
Time passed since then. One day, while I was staying in the annex of my godfather's mansion and constantly reviewing my medical knowledge. A setting I hadn't paid attention to came crashing into my life. The bodies of my parents, who had been treated as missing, were discovered. It was the moment my status as a potential orphan turned into a confirmed orphan.
"Julian. Let's go meet your parents. Shouldn't you at least see them off on their final journey?"
As soon as he heard the news that the bodies had been found, my godfather took me to the Southern Fortress. After taking an airship, crossing the demon territory, and arriving at the Southern Fortress. I attended my parents' funeral there. I didn't see my parents' bodies in person. They said it wasn't a sight for a young child to see. All I could see were two bodies covered in blankets being pulled out of the swamp.
Only then did the death of my biological father feel real, and my mood became slightly gloomy. Not enough to cry, but enough to need a little change of pace.
"Julian. If it's hard, go for a walk."
Receiving my godfather's consideration, I had some time to myself for a while. In the meantime, one scene caught my eye by chance. The red water that the local guide was drinking. That red water looked familiar somewhere. So I asked.
"Mister, what are you drinking?"
"Ah, this? It's water boiled with tree bark, and it makes it bearable when you have a fever here."
It was the drink that the local beastman guides who were helping with the funeral were drinking. They were drinking reddish water instead of water from time to time.
"It's a Tirun tree. Do you want to see it too, young master?"
"Can I try drinking it?"
"Here. But will you be okay?"
"What do you mean?"
"Even so, it's food that the lowly people used to eat..."
"They are the ones watching over my parents' final journey? I haven't learned the etiquette of calling those who are grateful to me like that."
"...Thank you for saying that, young master. Here, drink."
I took a sip of the water the beastman handed me. That red water had a dry and bitter cocktail taste. Like... 'Tonic water?'
It's a taste I can't mistake. This was the taste of tonic water. At that moment, words were assembled in my head. A demon territory where mosquitoes are rampant. A fever like malaria. And tree bark that tastes like tonic water.
'I found it.'
Combining all of these, I concluded that I could make quinine. Quinine. The name of a malaria treatment. Europe, which could not colonize Africa because of malaria in the past, was able to rule Africa after this medicine was discovered. In other words, in a sense, this medicine is also a medicine that changed the world map.
'This water taste is definitely the taste of a tonic water cocktail.'
Tonic water is a drink made from this quinine. Because this dry and bitter taste is subtly addictive, there is a history of it being used as a cocktail after being made into medicine. 'Gin and Tonic', anyone who likes alcohol probably knows it. Not many people know that it originated from quinine, though.
Anyway. It is by no means a coincidence that I thought of quinine as soon as I drank the red sap. Because this drink tasted like that cocktail. 'Calm down, Julian.'
I barely managed to control my trembling hands. I wanted to start researching the medicine right away. But the worldview is different here. Perhaps the disease is different, or perhaps it's just another medicine that happens to taste like tonic water. So, before starting the development of the medicine, I first investigated the fever of the Southern Front. And as a result of synthesizing the symptoms, I could be sure that the fever of the demon territory was malaria.
Symptoms that mainly occur in areas with many mosquitoes, and fever that goes back and forth once every three days. It was a typical malaria symptom. On top of this, the fact that the fever subsided when drinking this red sap. Now there was nothing more to check.
'I'm already a misunderstanding-trope protagonist, but do I even have a miraculous encounter like this?'
I started drinking the kimchi soup I had been holding back. Honestly, I don't know if this is a miraculous encounter for the original protagonist. Maybe it was for another supporting character. But once discovered, there was no option not to touch it.
'I don't know if it's right to develop it at my current age, but so what.'
I immediately started developing a malaria treatment. I referred to the history of my past life for how to make a malaria treatment. Quinine, a malaria treatment, was born while researching the tree bark that the indigenous people of Africa boiled and ate. It was a malaria treatment called quinine that a European who saw this processed the sap of the tree. So I planned to follow the same path in this world.
'Is there no choice but to go through trial and error from the beginning on how to make it?'
Fortunately, quinine is a simple extract that is the easiest among pharmaceuticals. If you refine the sap that is already effective against malaria a little more elegantly, quinine is born. So, it was perfect to be my first work.
So, I spent half a year boiling and drying the tree sap to make the treatment. In the middle, I realized that the tree in this world is slightly different from the tree in the existing world, so I changed my route.
'In my past life, the sap was definitely the raw material...'
The tree in my past life had sap as the main ingredient of the medicine. But in this world, the bark had a stronger therapeutic effect. Thanks to this, I wasted half a year doing shovel work while only researching the wrong sap.
'So what. This is discovering it quickly.'
But I wasn't particularly disappointed. Rather, I was relieved. That I realized my mistake in half a year. From that day on, I immediately started researching the bark instead of the sap. After that, I grilled and fried the tree bark, and occasionally gave pocket money to the soldiers to conduct clinical trials. Eventually, quinine was completed.
There was a minor problem. 'Is it okay to name it quinine?'
At first, I worried whether I should give it a different name since it was made from the Tirun tree. Tinin? Tiro? But if I did that, I would be confused, so I just named it quinine. If someone asks about the etymology, I'll just say my parents gave it to me in a dream.
"Anyway, the medicine is finished..."
It was finished, but there was a problem. There was a limit to supplying and selling this medicine with the body of a ten-year-old child. So, while I was worrying about how to promote this medicine.
- "The Master has collapsed!!"
My godfather, who had returned from a southern inspection, collapsed with symptoms of malaria.