My body felt stiff, my throat parched. An ache radiated through me, as if I’d been thoroughly beaten, leaving me utterly drained of energy. I was trembling all over, a violent shudder that felt like a high fever.
“Ugh… Why am I in so much pain…?”
I moaned, the pained mutter escaping my lips as I surfaced from sleep.
“Did I catch the flu? I should take some antipyretics… Huh?”
I forced my eyes open. There’s an old saying among us: if you listen to your doctor, you’ll live a long life, but if you live like your doctor, you’ll die an early one. The world sees it as a prestigious profession, but the reality is a grind of intense physical labor.
By the time I’d gotten older, there wasn’t a single part of my body that didn’t hurt.
I, Choi Min-jun, a professor of general surgery at a university hospital, groaned as I finally woke up.
“Huh… huh?”
A bewildered sound escaped my lips the moment I opened my eyes.
I saw a tree branch. Above it, a canvas of blue sky. The air that touched my skin was pleasantly warm. I was in a forest, one that looked to be in late spring or early summer.
“…Was there a forest like this near our camp? It should have been all desert, right?”
I frowned, bringing a hand to my forehead. My memories were a confusing jumble. I couldn’t recall what I was doing right before I regained consciousness.
‘Sabbatical year.’
The memory surfaced. I’d gone to Hwaju for medical volunteer work, tagging along with an enthusiastic colleague.
“Did we move camp recently? No… there’s no way a forest this lush was anywhere near the medical volunteer post.”
The country I’d been serving in was trapped in a nightmare of overlapping drought and civil war. I remembered the difficulty of treating endless streams of injured and sick children.
As I pieced together my past, one memory at a time, my vision sharpened.
I still couldn’t remember what I’d done last night, but my mind was definitely clearing.
“Don’t panic.”
I took a deep breath, and strength gradually returned to my limbs. The pain that had been pressing down on my entire body slowly began to subside. I turned my head to look around, but while my upper body responded, my legs refused to move.
“Ha… haha. Is this a dream?”
Sunlight broke through the clouds, illuminating my surroundings. I was still dazed.
Everything in my line of sight was a corpse.
My legs were frozen in place, refusing to obey. I gently pinched my cheek.
It hurt.
“This is not a dream…”
The sting on my cheek was vivid. Relief washed over me as my legs began to respond, ever so slightly. With my wits returning, I finally had the presence of mind to take in the scene.
“This isn’t a movie set… No, with a reek of blood this strong, there’s no way this could be fake.”
As a surgeon, I was intimately familiar with the smell of blood. Even so, my heart hammered against my ribs. No matter how I looked at it, this was a battlefield, the aftermath of a war.
“Judging by their faces, postmortem rigidity hasn’t set in yet. It’s been less than two hours since they died. All the wounds are from sharp weapons… Why isn’t there a single gunshot wound?”
And their clothes were strange. They were dressed in costumes I’d only ever seen described in the martial arts novels I used to read.
As I carefully examined the bodies, I suddenly realized the pain I’d felt all over my own body had vanished.
“For now… this is reality, not a dream. And I am…”
I looked down at my own hand.
“It’s small. Is this a child’s hand?”
My shadow confirmed it. It was the small, slight frame of a child, maybe ten years old.
“If this were a dream about being a child in a martial arts world, I could almost understand it.”
I, Choi Min-jun, bit my lip. As an orphan, I had clawed my way up from nothing, surviving countless hardships on my own. My mental fortitude was the one thing that had never failed me.
There were dozens of corpses scattered around.
Three carriages lay in splintered ruin. Some of the bodies had been severed in half, cleaved by a single, devastating blow.
“What kind of blade can cut through human bone and muscle in one stroke?”
I looked down at my blood-stained hand again. It was so small and delicate.
“It’s like I’ve been dropped into one of those transmigration novels. This must be some kind of possession.”
I brushed myself off, my movements detached. It was easier to be cool-headed when none of this felt real.
“Judging by the clothes I’m wearing, I wasn’t from a wealthy family… Besides the corpses, there’s nothing here worth taking. It looks like an attack by thieves or bandits.”
I sighed deeply at the thought.
“Whatever this is, it’s just like those possession stories. I don’t know if it’s a time slip or what, but this is definitely not Daehan…”
Then, a memory flashed in my mind.
The rebels ripped open the tent flap and opened fire. I remember hastily grabbing a child, pulling him close. I don’t know why I did it. The child screamed.
What happened next?
The world turned red. The child was shouting, “Doctor! Doctor!”
Then, darkness closed in.
“Ha… my life is a real piece of work. I studied my ass off at the orphanage, got through medical school, became a doctor, then a professor. I finally managed to make a decent life for myself, and I die like this while doing volunteer work? Ha, what the hell?”
I stared at the ground for a long moment. Being a doctor meant I was used to dealing with the dead.
That was probably why I wasn’t as terrified as a normal person would be, standing in a field of corpses.
Or perhaps the raw shock of just now realizing how I died had crowded out any other feeling.
After a few moments of trying to organize my thoughts, I let out a deep sigh.
It was a sigh far too world-weary for a ten-year-old child.
“Right. I have to keep my wits about me. I don’t know what happened or how, but I can’t just stand here and do nothing…”
It was at that moment.
“Kkh… gurgle… Who… Someone… please…”
Was someone still alive? I scrambled toward the sound and found a middle-aged man with a bushy beard, his whole body trembling.
His eyes found me.
“Hey… kid, take this to my… my wife… If I die, I die, but my wife… she’s still…”
He tried to hand me a blood-stained pouch.
I didn’t take it. Instead, I reached out and pressed my hand against the man’s wound. He looked up at me, his eyes wide with surprise.
The man’s hand went slack, and the pouch fell to the ground with the clink of coins.
Ignoring the gold, I applied pressure to the wound, just as I had done dozens, hundreds, thousands of times before.
“I’ll stop the bleeding.”
The man screamed in agony. I took it as a good sign that he still had the strength to scream.
‘Is this lucky or unlucky? The laceration is long, but it looks like his internal organs are undamaged. Still, the wound is massive, and he’s lost a lot of blood. If I don’t suture it quickly…’
His abdomen was split open vertically, a wound so grievous his organs were visible. But, miraculously, they appeared intact.
‘There has to be a way…’
My eyes darted around, searching. There was nothing, no way to suture the wound. Desperate, I reached for the pouch the man had dropped.
‘Something, anything, please.’
Inside were a pair of newborn baby shoes and a small silk cloth, the kind common in ancient Chinese dramas.
And a rather pretty hairpin. It looked more luxurious than a simple pin, but right now, anything would do.
‘I found a needle. But there’s no thread… Then…’
I grabbed a lock of the man’s own hair and pulled. It was long, just like in the period dramas. That was fortunate. I quickly threaded the strand of hair through the eye of the hairpin.
“This will hurt, but you have to endure it if you want to live.”
There was no response. The middle-aged man was slipping into unconsciousness. It was a sign he was dying.
“Is there no other way?”
Finally, I steeled myself and put my hands to work.
The hairpin pierced his flesh. The man groaned, barely conscious.
But my hands moved with a calm, practiced certainty.
‘I’d heard you could suture with hair in an emergency, but I never thought I’d be doing it myself. I can’t even disinfect anything, so an infection is almost guaranteed. But right now, this is the only choice.’
The wound was stitched closed in an instant. The bleeding slowed, and the man’s gasps for breath evened out slightly. For now, the emergency treatment was done.
I wanted to do more, but the conditions were impossible.
I looked for a clean cloth, but there was nothing. In the end, I took a scrap of fabric from a nearby bundle and bandaged the wound as best I could.
The man muttered something. He was barely conscious, his words unclear, but they sounded like thanks.
I picked up his coin pouch and placed it in his hand.
“You can give this to her yourself when you walk out of here alive.”
I didn’t believe in heaven. No amount of prayer ever saved my dying patients.
But I did believe in the power of human will. I understood a husband’s desperate desire to return to his pregnant wife, and I offered him that hope.
After finishing the treatment, I sighed and sat down hard on the ground.
I still couldn’t believe this situation, and saving someone in the middle of it all had left me dizzy.
Then a thought struck me.
‘There might be more survivors.’
I got back to my feet. Scanning the carnage more closely, I could see the faint rise and fall of a few chests.
Not many, but some were still breathing.
‘I can give them first aid, but can I actually save them? Even if I patch them up now, if no one comes to help, they’ll eventually…’
I considered this, then gritted my teeth.
‘Think about that later. Right now, I have to save who I can.’
I urged the child’s body to move, working diligently.
I had to triage, to distinguish between those I could help and those who were beyond it.
‘This person… has already lost too much blood. I can’t save him.’
The first person I checked had his leg half-severed. The artery was cut, and the blood loss was catastrophic.
If I could stitch it and give him a transfusion, he might have a chance, but that was impossible here.
I turned away, my heart heavy. With the proper medical equipment, this would have been a simple save. Now, there was nothing I could do.
The reality of my helplessness was a crushing weight. But a doctor has to remain calm.
There were other patients waiting, and I couldn’t afford to waste a single second.