TPR 01

Chapter 1

 The Main Character 

My body felt as if it had been completely crushed. My throat was burning dry. My entire body throbbed and lacked even an ounce of strength, as though I had been beaten black and blue. My whole body tingled and trembled violently, just like a severe case of the body-ache flu.

“Ugh…… Why does it hurt so much……?”

Awakening with a groan, I muttered amidst the pain.

“Did I catch the flu or something? I should take some fever medicine…… Huh?”

I forced my eyes open.

There is a saying: If you listen to your doctor, you’ll live long; if you live like a doctor, you’ll die early. While society holds the profession up on a high pedestal, the reality is that it involves heavy physical labor. Rolling around and overworking your body until you grow old leaves no part of you unaching.

Jin Cheon-hee, a professor of general surgery at a university hospital, opened his eyes while groaning.

“Uh, huh……?”

The moment he opened his eyes, a bewildered groan escaped his lips.

He saw tree branches. There was a blue sky above, and the air touching his skin felt quite warm. It was a forest in late spring or early summer.

“……Was there a forest like this near our camp? It should have all been desert.”

He knitted his brows, resting his hand against his forehead. Confusion clouded his memory. What he was doing before coming to his senses remained faint.

Sabbatical year. He remembered going to a remote area for medical volunteer work. His peer had nagged him so relentlessly that he felt practically dragged there.

‘Did they carry me here? No…… there shouldn’t be a forest like this near the medical relief camp.’

The country he visited for volunteer work was suffering from a overlap of drought and civil war. He had struggled immensely treating injured and sick children.

As he recalled his past step by step, his vision felt a bit clearer.

He still couldn’t remember what he did last night, but his mind had grown quite sharp.

‘Let’s not panic.’

Taking a deep breath, strength gradually began to return to his body. The pain pressing down on his whole frame slowly faded as well. Yet, as he turned his head to survey his surroundings, he found himself unable to move his legs despite his returning strength.

“Ha…… Haha. Is this a dream?”

The sunlight broke through the clouds, illuminating the area. He stood entirely dazed.

Because everything visible around him were corpses.

At that sight, his legs froze as if glued to the ground and wouldn’t budge. He gently pinched his cheek.

It hurt.

“It’s not a dream……”

The pain in his cheek was vivid. Still, it was a relief that his legs could move now. Only then did Jin Cheon-hee have the composure to look around.

‘It’s not…… a movie set. Ah, no. With a stench of blood this foul, there’s no way it’s fake.’

Even as a surgeon accustomed to holding a scalpel, he was fairly familiar with the smell of blood. Still, he couldn’t stop his heart from trembling slightly. No matter how he looked at it, the scene before him resembled a battlefield.

‘Looking at their faces, rigor mortis hasn’t set in yet. That means less than two hours have passed since death. All of them are slashed or stabbed wounds from sharp weapons…… but why isn’t there a single gunshot wound?’

Furthermore, their attire was strange. No matter how he looked at it, they wore clothes one would only expect to see in the Wuxia novels he enjoyed reading.

Examining the corpses carefully, he suddenly realized that the pain in his own body had vanished.

‘First of all. This is definitely reality, not a dream. And I……’

He looked down at his own hands.

‘They’re small. Hands of a child?’

His shadow was small as well. It looked like the body of a child around ten years old.

‘If I’m dreaming of becoming a child in a Wuxia world, that would almost make more sense.’

Jin Cheon-hee bit his lip. Having started from scratch without parents and overcome countless slaughterhouses, his strong willpower sustained him.

There were at least several dozen corpses in the vicinity.

Three objects that looked like carriages were broken, and several people had their upper and lower bodies severed in a single stroke.

‘Severing human bones and muscle in a single blow—what kind of blade must one use to accomplish this?’

He looked down at his bloody hands once more. They were small, tender hands.

‘A child’s body. I feel like I’m caught in some Soul Transfer Technique (離魂大法) you only see in novels. Is this what they call possession?’

He brushed off his clothes lightly. With no sense of reality at all, he ironically grew colder and more rational.

‘Judging by the clothes I’m wearing, I don’t seem to be a child of a wealthy family…… and seeing how there’s nothing valuable left besides the corpses, it looks like they were ambushed by bandits or mountain robbers.’

Reaching that thought, he let out a long sigh.

‘As I thought. No matter how I look at it…… this seems like possession inside a novel. Whether it’s a time warp or something else, I don’t know. At any rate, this definitely isn’t Korea……’

Only then did a memory surface.

The rebels had opened the tent and opened fire. He remembered hurriedly wrapping his arms around a young child. Why he shielded the child, he didn’t know. The child screamed.

What came after that?

The world was dyed in red. The child shouted in clumsy language, “Doctor, doctor!”

Darkness rolled in.

‘Ha…… My life really is something…… Clenching my teeth at the orphanage to pass medical school, becoming a doctor, becoming a professor. Just as I got to live comfortably, I die like that while volunteering? Haa, seriously, what am I doing?’

He stared vacantly at the ground for a moment. As a doctor, he encountered corpses fairly often.

Perhaps because of that, standing among corpses didn’t terrify him as much as it would an average person. Or perhaps he couldn’t think of anything else because he had just realized how he had died.

After organizing his thoughts for a long while, he let out a deep sigh.

It was a sigh one could hardly imagine coming from a ten-year-old child.

‘Right. I need to pull myself together. I don’t know what happened, but for now, I shouldn’t be idling here. If those bandit types return while I’m here, I could die.’

It was right at that moment.

“Gg-ggeug…… S-Someone…… please……”

Was there a survivor?

Running toward the voice, he found a heavily bearded middle-aged man trembling in convulsions.

The man turned his eyes and spotted Jin Cheon-hee.

“C-Child…… My w-wife…… Give this to my…… wife. It’s fine if I die…… but my wife…… still……”

He handed over a blood-stained pouch.

Jin Cheon-hee did not take the pouch. Instead, he reached out and placed his hand over the middle-aged man’s wound. Seeing this, the man stared at Jin Cheon-hee with wide, surprised eyes.

Losing strength in his hand, the man dropped the pouch onto the ground. The sound of money rang out.

Clack.

In the body of a child roughly ten years old, he pressed down on the man’s wound instead of taking the money.

“I will stop the bleeding.”

With skill that seemed practiced dozens, hundreds, thousands of times, he compressed the vein in a single move.

“Krggh!”

The man screamed from the excruciating pain. Jin Cheon-hee thought it was quite fortunate that the man still had the strength to scream.

‘Should I call this good luck or bad luck? Even though there’s such a long laceration, fortunately, no internal organs were damaged. But the wound is too long and he lost a lot of blood. If I don’t stitch it up quickly……’

The front of the abdomen was split long. It was a wound deep enough to glimpse the organs inside, but fortunately, the internal organs themselves remained undamaged.

‘A way…… there must be a way.’

He quickly scanned the surroundings. However, there seemed to be no way to sew the wound shut. Thus, he reached for the pouch the middle-aged man had tried to hand him.

‘Let there be something. Anything.’

Opening the pouch, he found copper coins that looked like they belonged in ancient China and silk shoes smaller than a middle finger.

They were newborn baby shoes. He could feel the warmth, showing how precious the man had kept them close to his chest.

And there was also a pretty sewing kit. It looked luxurious, unlike an ordinary sewing kit, but none of that mattered right now.

‘Found a needle. But thread…… there’s no thread. If so……’

He pulled out a strand of the man’s hair. Fitting for a Wuxia era, it was long hair. That was a relief. He quickly threaded the hair through the needle eye and tied it.

“It will hurt, but you must endure it to live.”

There was no answer. The middle-aged man was slowly losing consciousness. A sign of impending death.

‘……Is there no other choice?’

In the end, he took decisive action.

Puk.

The needle pierced through the flesh. The middle-aged man groaned from deep within his faint consciousness.

However, Jin Cheon-hee moved his hands with a calm expression.

‘I’ve heard stories that you can stitch with human hair in emergencies, but I never thought I’d do it myself. Without proper conditions to sanitize, an infection might occur. It can’t be helped. Right now, this is all I can do.’

In an instant, the wound was sutured shut. As the bleeding stopped, the man panted heavily for breath. In Jin Cheon-hee’s view, this amount of first aid seemed sufficient for now.

In truth, even if he wanted to do more, conditions wouldn’t allow it.

He wanted to find a clean cloth, but nothing like that was visible around them. So he grabbed a rolling piece of cloth nearby and bound the wound for now.

The man muttered something. Spoken from a fading consciousness, the words weren’t clear, but he seemed to be expressing his gratitude.

Jin Cheon-hee placed the coin pouch back into his hand.

‘Survive and deliver it yourself.’

He didn’t believe in heaven. No matter how much one prayed, a dying patient died.

However, he believed in human willpower. Not being ignorant of a breadwinner’s heart leaving a pregnant wife behind at home, Jin Cheon-hee comforted him.

Only after finishing the treatment did Jin Cheon-hee sigh and sit down.

He couldn’t believe his current situation, and saving a person even in this state had drained all his energy.

Then, a sudden thought struck him.

‘There might be more survivors.’

He sprang up from his spot. Examining the surroundings closely, sure enough, there were a few people who still had breath left in them.

It wasn’t a large number, but a few were still alive.

‘I can perform emergency treatment, but can I save them? Even if I attend to them now, without someone else’s help, in the end……’

Reaching that point in his thoughts, he bit his lip tightly.

‘Think later. Right now, I have to save them first.’

He busily moved his child’s body.

He had to distinguish between those he could save immediately and those he couldn’t.

‘This person…… has already lost too much blood. I can’t save them.’

The first person he checked had a leg half-severed. The issue was a cut artery; he had bled out far too much.

If he quickly sutured it and transfused blood, he might live, but under current circumstances, it was impossible.

With a heavy heart, he turned his head away. This was a patient who looked completely savable if proper medical equipment were available, yet currently, nothing could be done.

His heart grew heavy at that reality. But a doctor had to remain cold-headed.

Because there were other critical patients, and he couldn’t delay for even a moment.