Chapter 5
I had just finished my internship and become a resident.
Back then, I was doing quite well.
In the operating room, people called me a man with godlike hands, and whenever the professors saw me, they would say, “That guy needs to go into surgery!”
My hands really were fast, and so was my judgment.
I was in my late twenties, and my body could still endure operating all night.
After several surgeries in a row went well, my pride swelled.
I was intoxicated by praise and thirsted for fame.
I believed that if I opened someone up, I could save them.
I mistakenly thought that once I tied, sutured, and closed everything, it was over.
That was why I had been a stupid bastard.
“Doctor, about the child in Bed 7⋯.”
“Oh, the kid who came in after the bicycle accident?”
I flipped through the chart carelessly and said,
“I stopped the intra-abdominal bleeding and dealt with the torn spleen. I put in a drain, and the vital signs are stable, so just observe the child until the guardian arrives.”
“But since the patient is a child, we should be a little more—”
“It’s fine. The surgery went smoothly. You know the new nurse? Have her check the vitals frequently for the experience.”
The patient brought in that day was an eight-year-old child.
They said the child had collided with a truck while riding a bicycle.
The small body was covered in bruises, and blood had pooled inside the abdomen.
I opened the child’s abdomen, tied off the ruptured blood vessel, cleaned up the torn tissue, and closed it again.
A truly perfect surgery.
Of course, I thought there would still be pain immediately after surgery, but that the aftereffects would be minor.
I thought that after a few days, the child would be whining in bed and able to leave the hospital again while holding the guardian’s hand.
I happened to be hungry, but although I was on call, the surgery was over and the patient was stable.
It would take twenty minutes at most to go to the Chinese restaurant in front of the hospital and come back.
Besides, hardly anyone at the university hospital would dare mess with me anymore.
So I thought.
It would only take a moment.
I’d just eat a bowl of jjajangmyeon and come back.
And in that brief interval, the child I had believed I’d saved perfectly died.
“No⋯ noooo!”
“What’s wrong with our child? You said the child was fine! The doctor said the child was fine!”
When I returned to the ward, I heard the guardian’s cries first.
I stood there blankly.
“⋯Huh?”
The reason was simple.
The surgery had gone well.
But finishing the surgery did not mean the treatment was over.
Children were different.
I realized too late that even a small amount of bleeding an adult could endure could be fatal to a child.
The smaller the body, the less blood it contained, and the faster its condition could collapse.
The child had looked fine at first, but at some point the blood pressure had dropped, the pulse had begun racing wildly, and the child had simply collapsed.
There had been a small rebleed after surgery.
It was truly tiny.
Small enough that it could have been stopped easily if it had been discovered in time.
If someone had noticed the child’s face turning pale sooner, there would have been plenty that could be done.
But no one did.
I hadn’t been in the hospital at the time.
The new nurse I had left in charge was inexperienced and failed to notice the signs in time. As a result, the child died.
Because of my complacency.
But what was even more disgusting came afterward.
No one properly blamed me.
At the time, I was a medical wunderkind whose name had appeared in the news several times.
The hospital didn’t want to make the matter bigger, and since it was the middle of the night, there weren’t many witnesses.
The nurses kept their mouths shut.
The parents didn’t seem to have the money to file a medical malpractice suit or the strength to fight the hospital.
Instead, they bowed their heads to me through their tears.
“Doctor⋯ thank you for doing your best until the very end.”
“We know you did everything you could to save our child.”
The moment I heard those words, my insides twisted.
Gratitude?
For me?
I could have saved your child.
But the hospital stayed quiet, the records were tidied up, and people continued to see me as a capable young surgeon.
That made it even harder to bear.
Thud!
My fist slammed into the wall.
Thud, bam!
“You stupid bastard⋯.”
Blood ran down the back of my hand.
“What the hell did you do⋯!”
I learned one thing after that day.
Being a doctor isn’t a job that ends with performing surgery well.
Sometimes, watching to make sure a patient keeps living afterward is more important than the moment you open and close them.
And above all, a doctor who turns away when there is a patient right in front of them who can be saved is more despicable than a doctor who lacks skill.
Maybe that was why I tried to run away.
In my previous life, guilt over that had driven me into overwork, buried me under on-call shifts, and eventually killed me.
Since I didn’t want to return to that hell in this life, I thought I had atoned enough.
In place of failing to save that one child, I had saved other people again and again until the day I died.
I had made patients brought in covered in blood breathe again.
So I thought I could stop now.
In this life, I could take a quiet, safe path, whether plastic surgery or dermatology.
I wanted to believe that.
But then.
“Ah⋯ ah⋯.”
A cold sensation touched my fingertips.
It was the hand of a blood-soaked Hunter.
Their breathing was fading so badly that they could barely speak.
Their lips had turned blue, and their eyes were unfocused.
The Hunter was in a condition where it wouldn’t have been strange for them to die at any moment.
But I could make out what their lips were forming.
After working as a doctor for a long time, there are words you learn to recognize even without hearing them.
‘Please save me.’
That one phrase.
I closed my eyes and opened them again.
I wanted to run away.
Truly⋯ one trip through that hell had been enough.
I wanted to give the patient only a rough account of their condition and leave.
I wanted to dump the rest on the doctors of this world and let them handle it themselves.
I never wanted to place another person’s life at my fingertips.
But.
Finding a way to save a patient who is asking to be saved.
That was the kind of doctor I had wanted to become.
[The awakening conditions for the unique profession ‘Hunter Specialist Surgeon’ have been met.]
[Would you like to change professions?]
[YES / NO]
I glared at the status window that had appeared in the corner of my vision.
When had it started?
This damned window had continued shoving the same choice in front of me.
Hunter Specialist Surgeon.
A devil’s whisper, telling me to make the hell I had wanted so desperately to escape in my previous life my profession in this one.
Cheat abilities or whatever aside, the fact that it was pushing me toward the one thing I least wanted to do made me sick.
Even so, I had no choice but to ask.
“Hey. If I change professions here, can I save that person?”
The status window flickered in the frozen time.
[Of course.]
[Changing professions to Hunter Specialist Surgeon will unlock a dedicated technique required for the current situation.]
“⋯You could talk?”
[The patient’s chance of survival can be increased.]
[Changing professions is recommended.]
How considerate.
Just like a con artist stopping someone on the street to ask if they know the way.
It was clearly saying that I wouldn’t regret it.
That this opportunity would never come again.
That it was the choice I absolutely needed to make.
“As if.”
A laugh escaped me.
I had thought I’d fully atoned in my previous life.
I had lived that way until I died, so I wanted to believe it was enough, but apparently that damned resolve still wasn’t finished.
“Whew⋯ all right. I mean, considering my memories are intact, it doesn’t seem like I properly died, anyway.”
The patient’s hand was still cold.
But it hadn’t gone completely cold yet.
“Fine, then. Might as well atone one more time.”
[The awakening conditions for the unique profession ‘Hunter Specialist Surgeon’ have been met.]
[Would you like to change professions?]
[YES / NO]
I answered the status window.
“Yes.”
At that moment, something burst deep inside my body.
A sensation too cold to be light and too vivid to be blood spread through my veins.
My fingertips grew hot.
White messages appeared one after another before my eyes, as stark as operating room lights.
[Congratulations!]
[You have changed professions to the hidden profession ‘Hunter Specialist Surgeon’.]
[The profession-change bonus has been applied.]
[You have acquired Hunter Anatomy Understanding Lv. 1.]
[You have acquired Hunter-Only Scalpel Lv. 1.]
[You have acquired Hunter-Only Forceps Lv. 1.]
[You have acquired Hunter-Only Hemostatic Clamp Lv. 1.]
[You have acquired Hunter-Only Suture Needle Lv. 1.]
...
...
...
On top of the surgical knowledge I already possessed, an unfamiliar sensation was overlaid.
Skin.
Fascia.
Ribs.
Pleura.
Lungs.
All those structures overlapped with the patient before my eyes.
But this was not an ordinary person’s body.
There were mana-hardened layers of skin, muscles that resisted the incision, and even layers of condensed mana packed between the ribs as if blocking them shut.
It was as if the laws of the dungeon had been painted over an anatomy textbook.
That was when it happened.
“Cough!”
The Hunter on the stretcher coughed up blood.
“Blood, blood is coming up!”
“The airway’s blocked!”
“Prepare suction!”
The lobby began moving again.
It was as if the world that had stopped only moments ago had all regained its voice at once.
Dark-red blood flowed from the corner of the patient’s mouth.
The chest that had been rising and falling shallowly was now barely moving at all.
Breathing escaped in broken spurts through the patient’s blue lips.
Na Hayoung’s face stiffened.
“Oxygen saturation is dropping further!”
“At this rate, the airway will be blocked!”
“Damn it⋯ at least make them comfortable—!”
No.
That wasn’t what mattered right now.
We had to secure the airway.
But the cause wasn’t just the blood in the patient’s mouth.
Air trapped inside the chest.
It was pressing on the lungs, pushing against the heart, and stealing the patient’s breath.
‘I have to get it out first.’
Before I had finished thinking, my hand moved.
“Skill used—Hunter-Only Scalpel.”
[Implementing profession equipment ‘Hunter-Only Scalpel Lv. 1’.]
[Analyzing the mana layer of the incision target.]
[Incision-depth assistance applied.]
[First-procedure bonus applied.]
[Proficiency increased.]
Light gathered at my fingertips.
It looked like an ordinary scalpel, but it wasn’t made of metal.
It was a thin, sharp blade made of mana. Yet strangely, the moment I held it, I knew.
How far I needed to go.
At what angle I needed to push.
How shallow and how quickly I needed to open the patient.
Rather than below the patient’s clavicle, I felt around between the ribs.
The standard decompression site.
The Hunter’s build.
The mana-hardened rib cage.
The position of the compressed lung.
The calculation was complete in my head.
“Wait, Student Jihoo!”
“What are you doing?!”
“Stop!”
I heard Na Hayoung’s voice.
But I couldn’t stop.
The patient was still dying.
“Don’t move.”
I said it briefly.
“If I don’t get it out now, you’ll die.”
And then.
Thuck!
The Hunter-Only Scalpel pierced the skin.
“Eek?!”
“Ji, Jihoo!”
“No, before that⋯.”
Someone sucked in a breath.
“A B-rank Hunter’s body⋯ was pierced?”
The mana layer pushed the blade away.
But the blade did not forcibly tear through the skin and muscle.
Following the grain of the mana, it dug in as if prying open the thinnest gap between the ribs.
At that moment.
Fwoooosh!
The air trapped inside the chest burst out with a wet, bloody hiss.
The patient’s body heaved violently.
As if a blocked passage for breath had opened, one deep breath entered the lungs after the shallow, broken breathing.
“Gasp⋯!”
The patient inhaled.
The entire lobby fell silent.
I clenched my teeth as I looked at the blood on my fingertips.
Because this was only the beginning.