I felt my body stiffen. My throat was parched. My whole body was sore as if I had been beaten, and I had no energy. My entire body was trembling as if I had a bad cold and a fever.
“Ugh… Why am I in so much pain…?”
Moaning, I woke up from my sleep and muttered in pain.
“Did I catch the flu or something? I should take some antipyretics… Huh?”
I forced my eyes open. There is a saying that if you listen to doctors, you will live longer, but if you live like a doctor, you will die early. Although it is considered a prestigious profession in the world, the reality is that it involves a lot of physical labor.
By the time I got older, there was no place on my body that didn’t hurt.
Jin Cheon-hee, a professor of general surgery at a university hospital, groaned as he woke up.
“Huh, huh…?”
He let out a bewildered groan as soon as he opened his eyes.
He saw a tree branch. There was a blue sky, and the air touching his skin was quite warm. It was a forest in late spring or early summer.
“… Was there such a forest near our camp? It would have been all desert, right?”
He frowned as he brought his hand to his forehead. He was confused about his memories. He couldn’t remember what he was doing before he regained consciousness.
‘Sabbatical year.’
He remembered going to Ohji for medical volunteer work. He went along with his colleague who was quite enthusiastic about it.
“Did we move here recently? No… there couldn’t have been such a forest near the medical volunteer camp, right?”
The country he visited for service was in a situation where drought and civil war overlapped. He had a hard time treating injured and sick children.
As he recalled his past one by one, his vision became clearer.
Although he still couldn’t remember what he did last night, he felt his mind becoming clearer.
“Don’t panic.”
As he took a deep breath, his body gradually regained strength. The pain that had been pressing all over his body slowly subsided. Then he turned his head to look around, but even though his strength had returned, he couldn’t move his legs.
“Ha…ha ha. Is this a dream?”
The sunlight broke through the clouds and illuminated the surroundings. He was still dazed.
Everything he could see around him were corpses.
His legs wouldn’t move as if they were frozen. He gently pinched his cheek.
It hurt.
“This is not a dream….”
The pain on his cheek was vivid. He was relieved as his legs began to respond ever so slightly. Jin Cheon-hee finally had the leisure to look around.
“This is not a movie set… No, there’s no way this could be fake when the smell of blood is so strong.”
He was quite familiar with the smell of blood as a surgical knife holder. However, his heart couldn’t stop beating. The site he was standing in looked like a place where a war had taken place, no matter how he looked at it.
“Judging from their faces, postmortem rigidity hasn’t started yet. It hasn’t been two hours since they died. All the wounds are from sharp weapons… Why isn’t there a single gunshot wound?”
In addition, the clothes were strange. It was a costume that he would see in a martial arts novel he used to read.
As he carefully examined the corpses, he suddenly realized that the pain he had been feeling in his body had disappeared.
“For now… this is not a dream but reality. And I am…”
He looked down at his own hand.
“It’s small. Is it a child’s hand?”
His shadow was also small. It was like the body of a child around ten years old.
“If i’m dreaming of being a child in a martial arts world, I would understand that.”
Jin Cheon-hee bit his lip. He was the one who started with nothing but his bare hands and crossed countless mayhem, being without parents as he was. His strong mental strength had sustained him.
There were at least dozens of corpses around him.
Three carriages laid broken, and some people were severed in half with one blow.
“What kind of sword do you need to cut human bones and muscles in one stroke?”
He looked down at his blood-stained hand again. It was a bracken hand.
“It’s like being caught up in a divorce lawsuit in a novel or something. This must be some kind of possession.”
He lightly brushed his body. It was better to be cool-headed since he didn’t have a sense of reality.
“Judging by the clothes I’m wearing, I don’t think I’m from a wealthy family… There’s nothing worth stealing except for the corpses, so it seems like I was attacked by thieves or bandits.”
He sighed deeply at the thought.
“Anyway, this is definitely… like the possession in novels. I don’t know if it’s a time warp or something, but this is definitely not Korea….”
Then some memories came to mind.
The rebels opened the tent and shot. I remember hastily holding a child. I don’t know why I held him. The child screamed.
What next?
The world was dyed red. The child shouted, “Doctor, Doctor!”
Darkness crept in.
“Ha… my life is really… I studied hard at the orphanage, passed through medical school, became a doctor, and a professor. I barely managed to make a living for myself and came out to volunteer, and then I died like this? Ha, what the hell is this?”
He stared at the ground for a moment. Because he was a doctor, he was used to dealing with corpses.
That’s why he wasn’t as afraid as a normal person standing among corpses.
Or maybe he couldn’t think of anything else because he just realized how he died.
After a while of organizing his thoughts, he let out a deep sigh.
It was a sigh that couldn’t be thought to come out of a ten-year-old child.
“Yeah. 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.
“Kku, kkuryuk… Who… Who… Please….”
Was there someone alive? When he rushed to the voice, he found a middle-aged man with a bushy beard trembling all over.
The man turned his eyes and found Jin Cheon-hee.
“Hey… hey, give this to my… my wife… Even if I die, it’s okay, but my wife… she’s still…”
He handed over a blood-stained pouch.
Jin Cheon-hee didn’t take the pouch. Instead, he reached out his hand and touched the middle-aged man’s wound. The man looked at Jin Cheon-hee with surprised eyes.
The man, who had lost strength in his hand, dropped the pouch on the ground. The sound of gold echoed.
Instead of taking the gold, he pressed down on the man’s wound, like he had done dozens, hundreds, thousands of times before.
“I’ll stop the bleeding.”
The man screamed in agony. Jin Cheon-hee thought it was fortunate that he had the strength to scream.
‘Is this something I should consider lucky or unfortunate? Although the laceration was so long, fortunately, there was no damage to the internal organs. But the wound is too big, and he has lost a lot of blood. If it’s not sutured quickly…’
His abdomen was split longitudinally. It was a wound that was so severe, the internal organs were visible, but fortunately, there was no damage to the internal organs.
‘There must be a way…’
He looked around quickly. However, there seemed to be no way to suture the wound. So he reached out to the pouch the middle-aged man was trying to hand him.
‘Something, anything, come on.’
Inside the pouch were newborn baby shoes and a small silk cloth that were commonly used in ancient China.
And there was a pretty hairpin. It didn’t look like a regular hairpin, and it seemed luxurious, but anything would do.
‘I found a needle. But there’s no thread… Then…’
He pulled out the man’s hair. It was a long hair, like in the martial arts era. It was fortunate. He quickly tied the hair to the eye of the needle.
“It’ll hurt, but you have to endure it to live.”
There was no response. The middle-aged man was slowly losing consciousness. It was a sign of death.
“Is there no way…?”
Finally, he boldly used his hands.
SFX: POKE.
The needle pierced the flesh. The middle-aged man groaned in a faint state of consciousness.
However, Jin Cheon-hee moved his hand calmly.
‘I had heard that in an emergency, you can suture with your hair, but I didn’t know I would have to do it myself. I don’t even have the conditions to disinfect, so I don’t know if there will be an infection. I had no choice but to do it now.’
The wound was sewn up in an instant. The man gasped for breath as the blood stopped. To Jin Cheon-hee, it seemed like emergency treatment was done.
In fact, he wanted to do more, but conditions were not available.
He wanted to find clean cloth, but nothing like that seemed to be around. So, he brought a rolling cloth and bandaged the wound for now.
The man muttered something. It wasn’t clear what he was saying in his faint consciousness, but it seemed like a thank you.
Jin Cheon-hee handed him his coin pouch.
“Please hand it over yourself when u leave this place alive.”
He didn’t believe in heaven. No matter how much you prayed, dying patients would die.
But he believed in human will. He comforted the man because he was not ignorant of the husband’s heart, who wanted to go back to his pregnant wife.
After finishing the treatment, Jin Cheon-hee sighed and sat down.
He couldn’t believe the current situation, and saving someone even in this situation made him dizzy.
Then he suddenly thought.
‘There may be more survivors.’
He got up from his seat. And as he looked around closely, there were indeed some people still breathing.
It wasn’t a large number, but some were still alive.
‘I can do emergency treatment, but can I save them? Even if I touch them now, if no one comes help, eventually…’
He thought about it and gritted his teeth.
‘Think about it later. I need to save them right now.’
He moved the child’s body diligently.
He had to distinguish between those who could be saved right away and those who could not.
‘This person…has already lost too much blood. I can’t save him.’
The first person he saw had half of his leg cut off. The problem was that the artery was cut, and he lost too much blood.
If he could stitch it up quickly and give a blood transfusion, there might be a chance, but it was impossible under the current circumstances.
He turned his head with a heavy heart. If there had been proper medical equipment, the patient seemed to be someone who could have been saved easily, but now there was nothing he could do.
His heart became heavy at that fact. But the doctor had to remain calm.
There were other emergency patients, so he couldn’t afford to delay even for a moment.