Welcome to Castrato Medical Center
"Mr. Shin Man-ho, you really don't need to keep coming to our outpatient clinic anymore."
"How can you say that, Professor? Who else is going to look after me?"
The Cardiology clinic had reopened. Across the desk from me sat a patient with no arms, shaking his head.
"There's no one alive who understands Entities as well as you do, Professor."
Shin Man-ho. He'd once been admitted to our Orthopedics department—the patient who'd written posts while blind. His arms, severed by the orthopedic doctors at the time, still hadn't come back. It was only after I turned off my e-cigarette and dispersed the fog that this patient, too, had been able to escape this hospital.
Even so, he never left. Well—technically he went home, but he kept faithfully showing up at my clinic. Which left me in an awkward spot.
"I understand, but there's truly nothing our department can do for you."
"I'll keep coming anyway. I can wait a year. Ten years, even. You just keep looking at me, and if a method ever comes to you, tell me."
Those eyes. Those pleading eyes were the problem. Every time I met that gaze so brimming with trust in me, I felt my breath catch in my throat. Why is a man with no arms coming to a place like this? I treat hearts, not limbs. And in modern medicine, the only treatment for severed arms is prosthetics.
And so, today as always, I ended the clinic by asking about the progress of Mr. Shin Man-ho's prosthetic fittings.
"Thank you, Professor."
"Get home safe."
After sending the patient off, I finished the morning session, leaned back in my chair, and rubbed my eyes.
Getting rid of the fog was nice and all…
But when the hospital's fog vanished and I got people out, a certain title attached itself to me: the doctor who understood Echoes better than anyone in South Korea—no, the entire world.
Not a mercenary, not a soldier, not a detective, cop, or lawyer. A doctor. So whenever a problem involving Entities or Echoes cropped up, patients came looking for me from all over the globe.
Too traumatized by an Entity to sleep? Go see Professor Lee Jeong-uk. An Entity scraped up your knee? Just in case, go see Professor Lee Jeong-uk. You got pregnant after doing… things… with a resonated individual—
Why the hell are you coming to me for that?
Something strange was mixed in the middle there, but anyway. The moment anything Echo- or Entity-related happened, people started hunting me down. Which meant the administration office was supposed to filter out the patients even I couldn't help—the problem being that the administration had no idea which cases to send and which to refuse. So the moment so much as the words "Echo" or "Entity" left a patient's mouth, they got routed here, whether the patient wanted it or not.
Ugh, would it kill you to stop forwarding everything just because someone said "Entity"?
Thanks to that, I'd become famous under an unofficial title: not a Professor of Cardiology, but a Professor of Echo Therapy. And did that mean I could just throw all these people out? No. I knew exactly how they felt.
The world was passing through a historic transition. With a brand-new illness called an "Echo" suddenly added—one belonging to neither body nor mind—people clutched at straws and came to me.
It'd be better if the government actually functioned, honestly.
After the Yongsan Great Resonance (that's what people were calling it), the government had effectively stopped working. Not that every politician had died. Just as Shiho had predicted, they'd fled Yongsan faster than anyone and set up shop in Gangnam. South Korea's leadership was running just fine, in other words. They'd simply, for all intents and purposes, washed their hands of everything.
Why does it all land on me?!
I recalled what I'd learned through the gallery right after escaping the fog a few days ago.
To sum it up simply, here's where things stand.
South Korea
1. The incubation period ended and Entities appeared all at once. The politicians who'd been lazily scratching their bellies got picked by the roulette.
2. Yongsan fell. Not just South Korea—the entire world began life alongside Entities. An Echo is now about as common as a head cold.
3. The executive branch fled Yongsan for Gangnam, and the legislature, worried it would get dragged in across the Han River, bolted from Yeouido into inner Yeongdeungpo. Government and assembly alike, scrambling to run away, wasted the golden time all over again.
4. Only after the relocation was done did they finally start mending the barn door—but too late. We're already half-apocalypse. Think of it as the opening chapters of a hunter novel.
5. Meanwhile the Professor was waging his battle inside the hospital and the Winnie app got built, so they tried to piggyback on it—attempting to take it over as a government function rather than a medical one.
6. But since these bastards had already blown the golden time fleeing, the citizens chewed them out and the plan collapsed.
7. South Korea has now officially agreed that doctors will handle Echo-related damage. The government, sulking, tossed Entity response wholesale to "who even knows" civilians and local police stations.
8. IMPORTANT ★★★) The Ministry of Health and Welfare is currently busy "adjusting the scope of Entity-related duties." They've been running this circus for three months now.
9. And then the Professor walked out of the hospital. Carrying an Echo Containment Act, no less!
That is why the state is currently throwing everything at the Professor's feet.
Bonus: every country except South Korea.
Astonishingly, thanks to the Professor, South Korea was actually among the fastest to respond. Which made us the first nation in the world to build a protocol for doctors diagnosing Entities and managing the damage… was.
While the Professor was locked in the hospital, the politicians dug their own graves and everyone else caught up.
Idiots.
To put the conclusion first: an era had begun in which monsters wearing human faces walked the streets. Some of them might be genuine monsters. Some might look perfectly human yet possess the strength to flip a tank over. Depending on what a person chose to do with that power, they could become a villain, a hero, or just another ordinary citizen.
The only difference from a hunter novel was that gates didn't open and monsters didn't pour out in plain sight. Calling it "the opening chapters of a hunter novel" wasn't exactly wrong.
Is this… actually right??
Being neither a sociologist nor a web-novel expert, I had no real authority to judge. So I asked Shiho—
"Hm? Then am I a hero?"
"No, wait—is that actually a yes from you?"
"Well, it's not entirely wrong. You diagnose them, Jeong-uk. If it's a bad one, I crack its skull open. If it's a good one, I enroll it in the military."
"The way you put it, you sound far more like a villain than a hero."
"Which part?"
"The military enrollment."
Anyway, in conclusion: what BababaKick said wasn't completely wrong. It just wasn't a hundred-point answer either—precisely because this was a transition period, nobody knew how things would settle. Depending on how people reacted, the outcome could split down to the extremes.
"Hah… why am I even agonizing over this."
Grumbling, I turned off the monitor. I had no afternoon clinic today. It was Friday—I deserved a rest too. I was seeing over two hundred patients a day, department chair included. They could give me Fridays off.
With the morning clinic finished, I stepped out of the examination room. The moment the door opened, the Chief was standing there waiting for me, a repulsively wide grin plastered across his entire face, with two residents wearing death-row expressions flanking him on either side.
"Our pretty little runt. All done?"
The Chief called to me in a voice so syrupy it made my skin crawl. I made a face of pure disgust, and the residents on either side of him looked even more disgusted.
"I've told you not to call me that inside the hospital."
"Aigoo. What's the matter with our pretty boy who keeps this whole department fed?"
The reason the Chief reacted this way was simple: my existence was the only means by which this hospital could stay alive. The fog was gone, but the other resonated departments hadn't disappeared. No sane person would set foot in a hospital crawling with those monsters. And yet several of our departments were still drawing patients at their old levels—and that was entirely my doing.
For South Koreans who lived and died by famous doctors, the greater their fear of Entities, the more inevitably they gravitated toward me—the one man who understood Entities. So most patients in this hospital now came to me with Entity-related conditions and then got transferred out to safe departments. Or they went straight to the safe departments and professors I personally vouched for.
Things had gotten to the point where my nickname changed from "Castrato Mad Dog" to "Castrato's Rome." All roads through Castrato Medical Center's clinics, as they say, lead through me.
"Jeong-uk, listen. If you walk out, we all become the unemployed. And if you go, this hospital gets demolished as a training facility—meaning those two would have to start over from intern year."
At the Chief's words, the residents nodded along. I gave a wry smile.
The truth was, the government had planned to demolish our hospital. The patients were already out, and the Winnie database said most hospital-type Entities could be dealt with by brute force, so a proposal had come up to simply level the place. What stopped it was me.
"The Echoes will simply find another hospital."
The government wanted solutions. They desperately wanted to blow up a building that was effectively a den of monsters. But with that approach, things would stay quiet for maybe a year—then the Echoes would find another hospital to resonate with.
That was exactly why the entire Management Bureau, upon discovering Entities, chose suppression and incapacitation followed by quarantine over outright killing. Destroy them and they came back anyway, so unless there was truly no other answer, the policy was to "manage" them. Because I had passionately preached this logic at the National Assembly audit, our hospital had escaped the wrecking ball. As long as I was alive and working here, the government agreed to leave the hospital alone.
In exchange, they were dumping every suspected resonance case onto us.
And that's why my own neck is still attached, too.
Incidentally, this was also why the Orthopedics department and a few others tolerated me openly calling them Entities to their faces. I was the one keeping their hospital running, so they gritted their teeth and endured it.
Wow. Even the Entities have office politics.
Come to think of it, wasn't the most powerful Echo of all the invisible class system and money itself—the ones that had walked beside all of human history? Well, whatever. Such was my position in the hospital: the corridor every patient passed through. The reason the hospital existed. And…
"Our million-dollar man. Anything you want to eat?"
The Chief's ancient joke made both me and the residents recoil. Though, in fairness, it wasn't entirely wrong. "Resonance counseling" had no fixed price yet, so I could essentially name my rate. Other doctors billed fifty thousand won a minute; in my case…
A price that would get me cursed out if word ever got around.
Which was how, despite being a cardiologist, I now saw heart patients only one day a week. What could I do when the hospital insisted I work like that? Hence that blushing, face-burning nickname of mine.
"Compared to what you bring in, you can ask for anything. Anything but hiring the Blue House chef."
"You know I'm an anything-goes guy."
"Right, and knowing that, I already picked today's lunch. Tsk. Ordering interns' food used to be their job, but thanks to our Jeong-uk here, I had to choose it myself."
Beaming, the Chief showed me today's lunch menu. It was the most famous and most expensive eel restaurant in the neighborhood.
"Don't hold back—eat as much as you want. The director gave me a separate card just for you. If you collapse, we're all dead."
The Chief slung an arm around my shoulder and hauled me toward the clinic exit. Of course he was this excited—it was a feast on someone else's money. The residents, on the other hand, looked ready to die of discomfort, because even on someone else's money, a meal with the professor was still a faculty dinner to them.
I quietly texted Song-woo, who was being dragged off to yet another dinner today too.
At the clinic exit, I spotted Shiho standing guard at the makeshift checkpoint. It was a first line of screening, in case anything dangerous tried to come in through my examination room.
"Shiho. Let's go eat."
"Oh! Is it lunch time!"
"Yep. Today it's eel."
At the word eel, Shiho's ponytail spun like a propeller. It didn't literally spin—it just felt that way. Watching her light up like that made me feel proud of myself too. (Though it wasn't my money.)
"Today I will absolutely break the seven-digit mark!"
"No amount of eel gets you there."
A seven-figure won lunch was a tall order. She had once cracked the eight-hundred-thousand mark all by herself, granted.
…Come to think of it, if only for the sake of Shiho's food budget, I might not be able to leave this hospital after all.
With Shiho joining, the family was complete. The family headed for the parking garage. And just as we split up to pile into our respective cars—
Code Blue. Code Blue. Building 1, 6th Floor, Room 614. Building 1, 6th Floor, Room 614.
A Code Blue had sounded—on the sixth floor, our floor.