Doctor’s Rebirth - Chapter 160

Feng Ha-eun.

His Imperial Highness Eun opened his eyes.

The mask firmly covered his face, and the weight of the blanket felt heavy.

It was the middle of the night.

Outside, instead of rain, the sound of falling snow could be heard.

“Ugh.”

He let out a small groan as he tried to raise his body.

“You shouldn’t get up yet. Later, you’ll have to move even if you don’t want to.”

An irritatingly brazen voice was heard.

It was Little White Dragon, Jin Cheonhee.

This martial artist with almost inhuman beauty was also a disciple of divine medicine.

According to investigations, he was a good person and a kind person.

It was understandable why his master, Zhuge Rin, protected his disciple so much.

While kind, he was intelligent enough not to be easily exploited by others, but it was true that he was affectionate and weak to children.

Based on extensive background checks and personal observation and experience, he didn’t seem like the type to inject poison after anesthetizing a patient, even with a knife to his throat.

“No fever… Checking your pulse… Hmm, the progress is good indeed.”

This handsome young man’s face was filled with satisfaction, saying, “As expected, it’s impressive. That’s me!”

He was clearly an eccentric who felt joy in healing people.

“Depending on your condition, if you continue to be fine, you’ll eat rice porridge with medicinal ingredients and we’ll check your intestinal condition. There probably won’t be any issues, but we still need to check. If you improve further from here, it’s good to move around to prevent intestinal adhesions. But for today, just rest…”

He meticulously wrote down various things.

At that moment, for some reason, feeling overwhelmed, he grabbed Little White Dragon’s wrist.

“Hmm?”

“Do you treat other patients this way too?”

“You told me not to show courtesy, so I acted this way… but?”

Jin Cheonhee seemed to be contemplating for 3 seconds whether he should prostrate himself now and shout “Long live, long live, long live” or, since you’re disguised as a His Imperial Highness, should he shout “Thousand years, thousand years, ten thousand years.”

Sure enough, he awkwardly bent his knees at a 120-degree angle.

Seeing that, for some reason, it felt like his heart was sinking.

“Do you really have no intention of becoming an imperial physician?”

“No… I don’t.”

“Well. You’re a martial artist… You wouldn’t want to enter such a prison, leaving behind the free outside world.”

Jin Cheonhee still seemed to be rolling his eyes, pondering what to do.

The knees bent at 120 degrees now bent further to about 100 degrees.

The next moment would be a full prostration.

“…Don’t.”

“Pardon?”

“I said don’t.”

“Ah, so it’s okay after all. Hahaha.”

He laughed awkwardly and straightened his knees again.

“Ah, and there’s one more thing.”

“What is it?”

“It’s about cancer treatment.”

“Hmm?”

“Uh, so… cancer… I call it cancer, but since it’s stage 2, you still need treatment. Fortunately, there’s no distant metastasis, and the surgery, I mean surgery, went well, but you shouldn’t be too relieved.”

Little White Dragon before him looked with worried eyes.

“You need to be healthy to govern the country, right? I mean, to rule. Anyway, it’s not like you have a fixed term, you have to do it for life.”

Occasionally blurting out rarely used words, he was indeed eccentric.

“So?”

“In the end, to prevent recurrence, you need to undergo cancer treatment. Malignant tumors are that scary. However, given that our current technology is limited…”

Jin Cheonhee continued talking, looking regretful yet also with sparkling eyes.

Despite a considerable time having passed since his ascension to the throne, it was the first time someone had treated him this way.

‘Is this what people from the martial arts world are like…?’

It was different from what he had thought, but certainly free-spirited.

***

His Imperial Highness Eun thus rested at Wangya Ju’s mansion.

Jin Cheonhee watched over His Imperial Highness’s prognosis, adjusting decoctions, performing acupuncture, or prescribing with the few antibiotics he had.

Someone once said:

The real fight with cancer begins after surgery.

Even if the tumor has been removed by surgery, it needs to be managed for a lifetime.

It’s a long-term marathon. Because of this, not only patients but also their families tend to become exhausted.

There are so-called “good cancers” and “bad cancers,” but even a “good cancer” is essentially cancer. It should never be taken lightly.

‘And I’ve watched that pain up close.’

As a doctor, there are words you don’t want to say.

When a cancer mass you thought was dead comes back.

When you have to inform the patient and their family about it.

When you have to firmly hold the hand of the person who came with them, be it parents, children, or spouse, and listen to the story, words don’t come easily.

No matter how nicely you put it, it was hell.

It didn’t matter whether it was a young person relapsing or an older person relapsing.

People break down. And at those times, Jin Cheonhee’s heart would sink too.

When you have to maintain your expression somehow and say that it can be managed, that you can do chemotherapy again.

It felt like a razor blade scraping your throat.

You can’t break down together. Because the patient needs to live.

So Jin Cheonhee would temporarily remove his heart and store it in a corner of his brain.

Even when he thought he was okay, sometimes it would well up unexpectedly.

At those times, not knowing what to do, he would work and study.

Fatigue might not be good for health, but it was good for forgetting things.

Now Jin Cheonhee has to run a marathon in this martial arts world.

He recalled everything he could do as a physician one by one.

‘The digestive system still being weak is a problem.’

His Imperial Highness Eun had been eating elixirs like rice to maintain his physique with such a digestive system, but that’s not okay for cancer.

Spirit medicines basically help the patient’s recovery and boost their energy.

The problem is that if you do that, the cancer will also recover and gain energy, growing more and eroding the body further.

Because of this principle, cancer in young people is the scariest.

If cancer comes in old age, its growth is somewhat predictable, but when young, blood circulation is good and energy is high, so cancer growth and spread are faster.

‘We need to reduce elixirs… but if we do that, digestive function will be a problem, causing immediate physical issues.’

Improving digestive function is the priority.

Another is vitamin D.

One of the elements patients need to take care of like their life depends on it.

However, since there are no supplements in this era, it needs to be obtained through diet.

‘It’s also good to do some outdoor activities for skin synthesis.’

That would be the most common way of absorbing vitamin D in this era.

‘In the end, for diet to work, we need to improve the stomach and intestines.’

This brings us back to the initial problem.

This too would become a long marathon.

‘And then there’s cancer treatment…’

No antibiotics, no radiation.

It looked okay based on the feeling from qi pulse diagnosis using water-nature qi, but since animal experiments hadn’t been done, he couldn’t be certain.

In any case, if a cancer mass as small as a pencil dot floats through the blood vessels and attaches to the lungs or brain, it’s over.

The intestines can be resected, but if you resect the lungs or brain, the patient dies.

‘I have several ideas in mind.’

First, there’s the elixir concocted through the imperial physicians.

Looking at the ingredients, it was a type of medicine that inhibits the body’s growth and regeneration.

It contained ingredients that were hard to obtain even at White Dragon Medical Pavilion. This was possible because he was the Emperor.

Since the ingredients are close to poison, long-term use would be bad for the body, but it’s better than dying from cancer.

It means that the imperial physicians of this era, though not as much as modern times, roughly understand the principles of cancer growth.

However, they didn’t know about the benign and malignant nature of tumors, the principles of metastasis, and how to deal with them.

‘For now, we’ll have to keep using this elixir. But to use this, the stomach needs to be okay, right?’

It came back to the stomach again.

‘The next is… Energy Purification Technique?’

It’s a process of cleansing the body before martial artists learn martial arts.

It burns impurities to open all the body’s meridians and allows qi to move freely.

However, this good thing is only effective when young, and no matter how many times you do it, internal energy doesn’t increase.

But what Jin Cheonhee focused on was the method of burning impurities.

‘The medicinal ingredients and labor required for it are enormous. But I have this armor, and although I don’t know Master’s exact internal energy level, he’s one of the top masters in the world, so we can do it safely by force.’

Adults are different from children.

Since we need to use medicinal ingredients together, the cost will be enormous.

‘He’s the Emperor, so he’ll manage it.’

It needs to be done at least twice a year, once every six months.

It can be called cancer treatment that only the Emperor can do.

‘But it will be extremely painful, can he endure… I’m sure he can?’

When Jin Cheonhee first received Energy Purification Technique^[1] from Zhuge Rin, it was painfully excruciating enough to have nightmares.

It was like that even for a child’s body with few impurities.

‘This is not about the stomach… No, after Energy Purification Technique, you need to eat a lot, so it’s about the stomach too.’

In the end, if the stomach issues aren’t resolved, there’s no answer.

‘We’ll have to go the martial arts way for this.’

There’s one crude but sure method.

***

“So you’re saying you’ll place your hand on my body and forcibly insert and circulate qi?”

“Yes. It’s a method martial artists use in emergencies.”

It’s like in martial arts novels when a master places their hand on the back of a dying disciple and transfers internal energy to save them.

Usually, after using this method, the master, with a face that looks 30 years older, says, “As long as you lived, it’s fine. It’s fine,” and passes away with a sigh.

The protagonist hugs such a master, wails, and vows revenge.

‘Master, because I was weak… because of this unworthy disciple…!’

Of course, nowadays, if that development comes up, comments like [I’m dropping this because of the sweet potato] would become the best comments.

It could be called a very old-school martial arts novel style.

Anyway, Jin Cheonhee has this armor. The His Imperial Highness is just uncomfortable in his stomach, not in a life-threatening crisis.

In a situation where we’re boosting regenerative power to balance the stomach, if cancer cells grow along with it, we can detect it immediately and take action, so it’s killing two birds with one stone.

‘The possibility of it going that far is extremely low, though.’

In any case, the Zhuge family has systematized this crude method a bit more.

Five Elements True Qi can be used to help patient recovery using the mutual generation of the Five Elements.

Without using Origin True Qi, it can efficiently balance the body.

However, being efficient doesn’t mean it doesn’t use internal energy.

It requires at least one gapja (60 years), and to avoid long-term side effects, two gapja (120 years).

You need to be at least at the level of an elder in a decent sect.

Moreover, since you need to recuperate for several days after using it, you can’t do it for just anyone.