Chapter 34
I left the consultation room, leaving the patient's mother's thanks behind.
It felt as though every last drop of energy had been drained from my body.
On the way back to the station, I leaned against the hallway wall and closed my eyes for a moment.
My head was spinning.
It felt like my brain was going to burn out from overload.
'Yeah, after causing all this chaos... I should at least check the reward.'
The only reward granted to me in this hellish life.
My only growth metric.
I barely held my battered mind together and opened the blue interface in my head.
I'd gotten quite a bit from the myocardial infarction case, and I'd just succeeded with the intubation too...
So I should have earned a few hundred points at least.
Half hopeful, half resigned, I tapped the shop icon to check my points.
The moment I saw the number on the screen, my brain stopped working.
[Held LP : 5,021]
…
..?
I blinked.
Did I see that wrong?
Was I seeing things because I was tired?
I rubbed my eyes and looked at the screen again.
The number hadn't changed. It was shining clear and bright.
Five thousand twenty-one.
"...I've already hit 5,000?"
I was glad no one was around.
Otherwise I'd have looked like a lunatic muttering to thin air.
No, maybe I already looked crazy enough.
"When did I end up with this much?"
My head was full of confusion.
What did I even do?
The tonsillar-bleeding patient from just now—intubating him right before his airway closed and saving him. That must have been a big one.
And all the little point rewards I'd picked up from the minor stuff just kept piling up...
"Let's go check the shop."
I opened the shop list.
I scrolled all the way to the bottom.
The final destination of all my hardships, radiating an overwhelming aura unlike anything else on the list.
[Possession]
[Price : 5,000 LP]
I pressed the purchase button.
Then a warning window popped up in the center of my vision.
[Would you like to purchase the Possession skill? Price: 5,000 LP. Cancellations are impossible after purchase.]
[ Y / N ]
Y and N.
Y. It had to be Y.
[You have obtained the new skill, Possession!]
[To use the skill, you must designate a target to possess.]
God of Scalpels (Trauma Surgery/Thoracic Surgery / Specialty : Abdomen, chest, blood vessels, trauma)
Cardiology Phantom (Cardiology / Specialty : ECGs, echocardiography, interventional procedures)
Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine (Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine / Specialty : Airway management, pain control, critical care)
Back in My Day (Gastroenterology / Specialty : Endoscopy, gastrointestinal diseases)
Heir of Hippocrates (Infectious Diseases? / Specialty : Unclear. Miscellaneous.)
Bone Nerd 88 (Orthopedics / Specialty : Fractures, bone marrow diseases, sports medicine)
…
"...There we go."
I trembled as I stood alone in the empty hallway, staring at the list spread out before my eyes.
This was my new weapon.
Phantoms from every conceivable specialty.
Now I wouldn't be afraid no matter what patient came in.
If a car accident victim came in with ruptured organs, I could just call on God of Scalpels.
If the worst-case scenario hit and airway access was impossible, I could just let Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine descend into my body.
My hands are trash? My technique is trash?
It doesn't matter.
Because my hands wouldn't be mine anymore!
Muahaha.
I slowly scanned down the list.
I etched each and every name and specialty into my mind.
It was a little unsettling that Heir of Hippocrates's specialty was listed as 'Unclear. Miscellaneous,' but whatever. Probably the wildcard.
I closed the skill window, my heart swelling with excitement.
I was no longer only half a doctor.
I...
'Oh, right. The penalty.'
At that moment, the last line of the skill description came back to me.
'After using the skill, you will fall into severe full-body muscle soreness for 12 hours.'
The excitement that had been boiling just moments ago cooled instantly.
Yeah, there's no such thing as a free lunch.
This wasn't me getting stronger.
I had simply gotten my hands on a powerful weapon.
If I were to compare it to a game, it'd be like a bazooka you can only use once.
I stared into space.
God of Scalpels, Cardiology Phantom, Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine... that legion of crazy ghosts whose names alone were reassuring—no, just thinking about them raised my blood pressure.
'Will I ever actually use this?'
Just thinking about it made me dizzy.
One of those lunatics entering my body?
How horrifying.
But at the same time, I felt a strange sense of security I'd never had before.
It felt like I'd gained a final bastion, a last emergency escape hatch.
...Come to think of it, shouldn't I tell those guys about this?
Of course, it's my skill and I bought it with my own points, so it's only right that I use it however I want.
But if I kept quiet and then suddenly went, 'Hi, you're possessed now,' and forcibly summoned a ghost enjoying itself in the afterlife back into the mortal world, how absurd would that be?
At the very least, courtesy—no, at least a heads-up—was clearly the duty of the leader of this crazy study group.
This is manners. It's absolutely not because I'm curious about their reaction or because I want to brag that I got this broken skill.
Of course.
And so I kept rationalizing it to myself and opened the familiar blue interface.
Title : Hi, anyone want to check out the mortal world?
Author : Hell Joseon Slave 1
There was a skill called Possession, so I bought it. If I suddenly get possessed and you freak out, that wouldn't be good, right? So I'm here to warn you in advance.
A moment of silence.
And then the gallery exploded far more violently than I'd expected.
ㅇㅇ (210.94) : ?? What the hell is this bullshit?
The first comment was short and to the point.
Back in My Day : ????? Possession? Are you kidding me? Are you saying you've become a shaman or something?
Operating Room Phantom 3 : This bastard finally snapped, ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ Overwork destroys a person's brain like this, everyone ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
Bone Nerd 88 : Possession? Me? Possible? For real? No, but what are you talking about?
Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine : If you're tired, just go to sleep. Stop spouting nonsense.
I sighed and posted an explanatory reply.
ㄴ Hell Joseon Slave 1 : No, I mean there's a shop only I can see, not you guys. It's a system where I earn points called LP and buy skills with them. So I'm telling you in advance not to freak out if you suddenly open your eyes and end up inside my body, you guys.
My detailed explanation began to subtly change the gallery's mood.
ㄴ Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine : What's this shop you're talking about? Do you mean that thing from last time, when you asked if you could see a shop?
ㄴ Hell Joseon Slave 1 : ㅇㅇ, that's it. I'm telling you, the shop really does show up for me.
ㄴ Back in My Day : ? So there really was such a thing? You weren't joking?
The mockery and sneering faded, and intellectual curiosity and confusion took their place.
Heir of Hippocrates : A system of trials and rewards granted only to the living, you say! LP? So that's the value of quantified medical achievements? Most interesting!
God of Scalpels : Hold on. Let's sort this out. Every time you save a patient or pull off a difficult diagnosis, you get something called LP and use it to buy items from the shop. And you're saying we're included in that shop's item list?
As expected of God of Scalpels.
That guy was amazingly quick at reading the situation.
ㅇㅇ (118.235) : Holy shit. Then are we, like, items?
Hematoma Is Hell : Quit bullshitting. Why would I be an item? Am I your card or something?
Cardiology Phantom : I see. The privilege of the living.
The ghosts put their heads together and began discussing the nature of this bizarre system.
Back in My Day : After dying, to wind up as nothing more than a name on the skill list of some greenhorn who's only been on the job a year. What a shitty world.
Operating Room Phantom 3 : But isn't this kind of awesome? It means we could go into that guy's body ourselves and perform surgery! Could we hold a scalpel again? Endoscopy? Laparoscopy? I'm kind of excited right now.
ㄴ Hell Joseon Slave 1 : If you say you're going to do laparoscopy with my body, a disciplinary committee will be called right away, you know?
Bone Nerd 88 : How much is my possession worth? How many points does it take to use me? Someone as competent as me has to be expensive. Right?
I watched the ghosts' debate as if I were snacking on popcorn.
A complainer, an excited one, even one curious about his own price.
The reactions were all different, but they were converging on a single conclusion.
The ghosts accepted the situation.
Heir of Hippocrates : Everything has become clear. O living one, you are the only stand-in who can bring the knowledge and experience of us, the dead, into the mortal world. And possession is, in a sense, the ultimate form of that stand-in role. Very well. I accept.
God of Scalpels : I was about ready to let my eyes rot out from looking at that idiotic hand of yours, so this is better.
And so the ghosts, convinced that this was the privilege of the living, finally accepted the fact that they had become my skills.
One bastard complained, but most of them actually seemed to be enjoying it.
Seeing the noisy debate come to an end, I quietly closed the gallery window.
My thoughts were complicated. I felt like I'd gained dependable allies, and also like I'd strapped myself to a heap of time bombs that could go off at any moment.
I looked at the ceiling and muttered softly.
“Still, I probably won't have much reason to use the Possession skill.”
This was a last resort.
How many times in my career as a doctor would I ever need such a last resort like this?