Chapter 1
In South Korea, becoming a doctor generally changes more than one person's life.
It changes the family's standing.
Relatives speak more deferentially, and an unfamiliar strength fills their parents' shoulders.
So everyone has no choice but to dream of medical school.
Of course, everyone gives some convincing reason when asked.
Because they want to save people.
Because they want to help patients in pain.
Some bring up childhood experiences, some the desire to have a positive influence, and others words as embarrassing as love for humanity during their university interviews.
But as graduation draws closer, the story gradually changes.
A specialty that opens up bleeding abdomens all night is less popular than one that makes battered faces beautiful.
But who could blame them?
A path that brings money, a life, and the ability to sleep like a human being.
I thought choosing that path was the truly smart choice.
If there really had been that many people who became doctors out of nothing but a sense of duty, no one would have said South Korea was short on surgeons.
I wasn't able to make that smart choice, either.
My parents' deaths in a traffic accident were the reason—or at least, that was the reason.
To be precise, I heard they were still alive immediately after the accident.
They were still breathing in the ambulance, and their hearts were still beating when they arrived at the hospital.
But there was no money.
There was no one to pay for the surgery, and no one to fight on their behalf in the hospital corridor.
A life no one managed to hold on to in time slipped away just like that.
After that day, a strange bitterness took root in my mind.
People without money should be able to live, too.
Even without family, connections, or hospital fees, a human life had to remain a human life.
Someone had to hold on to a blood-soaked person brought in until the very end.
Fueled by that childish anger, I somehow ended up in a major trauma center.
And I soon learned something.
A sense of duty doesn't put food on the table.
A sense of justice doesn't let you sleep, and a patient's words of gratitude can't erase the pile of on-call shifts waiting for me.
Under the operating room lights, a day melted away in the blink of an eye.
The night disappeared amid the emergency room call tones.
I got by on cold triangle kimbap and stole sleep on the doctors' lounge sofa.
Some days, I slept for an hour.
Some days, I couldn't even get that much.
And still, patients kept coming in.
Falls.
Traffic accidents.
Crush injuries.
Abdominal stab wounds.
Multiple fractures.
People with ruptured livers, torn spleens, and aortas shuddering on the verge of giving way.
Someone had to open them up and close them again.
Someone had to put their hands inside abdomens filled with blood.
Someone had to clutch the heart of a dying person and insist that it wasn't over yet.
And that someone was usually me.
'What a truly stupid life it was.'
While other people changed their lives with their medical licenses, I used mine to whittle away my own lifespan.
And then one day.
After finishing a surgery, I tried to close my eyes for exactly ten minutes before the next call came in.
Really, just ten minutes.
So I leaned back against the sofa in the on-call room and closed my eyes for a moment.
And that was the end.
Looking back, I don't know whether it was cardiac arrest from overwork, an arrhythmia, or my body issuing its final strike notice.
Still, one thing was certain.
I died holding out to save people, unable to save even my own body.
In the most common, and most idiotic, way in South Korea's medical field.
“Still, if there’s one good thing, it’s that this life is modern-day Korea too.”
If I had opened my eyes to find myself in a medieval fantasy, I would have shuddered just imagining it.
“I’ll pass on the Middle Ages even if it kills me⋯.”
I wasn't exactly someone who never read web novels or comics, either.
During the middle of an on-call shift, when it was too awkward to sleep but there were no patients about to enter the operating room, I would scroll through a few chapters on my phone.
So I knew the clichés well.
Stories where someone is suddenly hit by a truck, caught in a bus accident, or dies from overwork, meets a god, receives a cheat ability, and is reincarnated in another world.
The comments made it seem like everyone dreamed of a life like that, but I saw things a little differently.
I don't know whether it was because I lacked a romantic streak or because of my professional conditioning, but whenever I heard the word medieval, 'sanitation' came to mind before adventure.
With no proper refrigeration, meat had to be salted or dried, and water was probably a buffet of parasites and bacteria unless it was boiled.
Sewage systems were hard to come by, rats and fleas were part of daily life, and an inn bed would have been closer to a culture dish for infectious disease than a stage for romance.
And medicine?
What more is there to say?
The medieval medicine I learned about in medical history was less a collection of techniques for saving patients than a record of the horrors people of that era desperately tried to understand somehow.
It was an age when people bled patients to drain bad blood, suspected evil spirits when someone acted strangely, and drilled holes in skulls to let something out.
Of course, that doesn't mean every era was nothing but ignorant.
They had their own knowledge and experience, and by the standards of the time, it was the best they could do.
But from the perspective of someone who had held on to patients with ruptured livers and torn aortas in a twenty-first-century major trauma center, that world was simply 'hell' itself.
“No antibiotics, no concept of blood transfusions, and hardly any proper anesthesia.”
There would be no CT scans, ultrasounds, blood tests, or intensive care units.
And they would drop me into a place like that and say, “Survive with your cheat ability!”
If that happened, I would probably spend the rest of my life culturing mold in an attempt to make something resembling penicillin.
Then a sterilization failure would cause an epidemic, or I would offend the wrong noble and be branded a heretic; even if I survived by luck, it would be the ending where I died of overwork for the second time.
So being reborn in modern Korea was practically salvation to me.
And all the more so because it was twenty-first-century South Korea, not a wasteland just after a war or a developing country from decades ago!
Because of that, I still vividly remember crying at the top of my lungs the moment I was born.
“Waaaaah!”
“Oh my, our baby. How can our baby cry so loudly?”
“Waaaaaah!”
I already knew how to get ahead in South Korea.
Prosecutor. Judge. Doctor.
The professions whose titles, attached to the end of a name in the Korean success story, could replace the sign over an entire family.
In my previous life, I had graduated from medical school at the top of my class and received one of the highest scores on the national licensing exam.
I had lived holed up in the operating room since my internship, and during my residency, professors would half-jokingly—or half-insultingly—say, “That guy's hands are insane.”
My hands were fast.
My judgment was fast.
I wasn't afraid.
The compliments a surgeon needed usually came in that form.
It was even more so after I entered the major trauma center.
Ruptured abdominal aortas, liver injuries, penetrating chest wounds, crushed pelvises, and multiple organ injuries.
Patients whose charts made everyone else sigh before they even turned the page—I brought them back from the brink again and again on the operating table.
I wrote papers and gave presentations at conferences right up until I died.
My name was called at every hospital evaluation, and it appeared on government commendation lists more than once.
I had merely been stuck in the field that paid the least, stole the most sleep, and ground people down more than any other in South Korea.
My body had become that of a newborn, but the knowledge in my head would remain intact.
A path I'd already walked once.
This time, I just had to avoid foolishly going straight into a major trauma center again.
This time, I could live as my professors had advised.
I would throw away things like a sense of duty and make the reasonably smart choice: a clean clinic instead of a blood-spattered operating room.
An outpatient department run by appointments instead of emergency calls exploding all night.
Instead of opening the abdomen of someone dying, I would make the face of someone perfectly healthy a little prettier.
‘It's all just fixing faces anyway. I've even saved people with depressed skulls, so it should be roughly similar.’
Of course, actual plastic surgeons would have grabbed me by the collar for saying that, but patients' guardians had already been grabbing me by the collar whenever they got bored in my previous life.
And so, before I had even been alive for ten minutes, I came up with the perfect life plan.
I was certain the rest of my life would be rosy.
At least.
“Everyone, a very special friend has joined our class today~.”
That was true—until I started kindergarten.
The homeroom teacher said it while clapping.
“He’s a boy, of all things. Everyone has to get along. Got it?”
“Yeeeees!”
In an instant, all the girls in the classroom turned to look at me.
And then.
A rush of footsteps.
They came swarming over.
“Are you really a boy?”
“Can I touch your hair?”
“Your voice is strange! Cute!”
“Teacher! Can I sit next to the boy?”
Sitting on my tiny chair, I blinked blankly.
No⋯ I'm not even a future medical-school valedictorian or a promising specialist yet, am I?
I'm just an ordinary boy, aren't I?
But the girls surrounded me in a ring as if they had seen some rare animal at the zoo.
Their eyes sparkled, their fingers fidgeted, and they tried to say even one more word to me by any means possible.
At first, I wondered if I looked somewhat unusual.
But that wasn't it.
It was much the same when I entered elementary school.
“They say there's a boy in our class!”
“Really?”
“Which class?”
It didn't change when I became a middle school student.
Eyes followed me through the hallways.
During physical education, the teacher checked on me several times.
The girls couldn't openly approach me, but they whispered among themselves from a distance.
By the time I became a high school student, I had no choice but to admit it.
This was the South Korea I knew.
The roads were the same, the subway was the same, smartphones were the same, and university admissions were the same.
But there was one thing.
The most important number was different.
The ratio of men to women.
It was completely screwed up.
There were easily a hundred women for every man.
I remembered staring blankly at the screen for quite a while when I first checked the statistics.
“⋯Huh?”
Only then did it click.
No, honestly, I'd known for a long time. Maybe I just hadn't wanted to understand.
But I had to concede.
With the world this messed up, what good was covering my eyes when I was the only one doing it?
Why I had been treated as a rare species in kindergarten, and why the teachers had been unusually careful around me.
Why an absurd number of eyes gathered around me at every school event.
And why terms like male protection policies, the Ministry of Male Welfare, and male safe zones casually flowed through the news in this world as if they were perfectly ordinary.
It was true that I had been reincarnated in modern Korea.
But this was a gender-reversed world where the gender ratio was completely screwed up.
And I was an extraordinarily rare man born into it.