ABFR 13

Chapter 13

It was such a busy hour that I could barely understand what was happening around me. I had to follow Dr. Jeong Sihoon around, doing whatever he told me to do and running around without a moment to breathe. After making one full round of the nearby area and giving emergency treatment to the survivors we found, we finally stayed beside a patient who seemed beyond saving, keeping them company out of respect, before getting into an ambulance together.

“I think this patient is Black.”

A young doctor who had already been inside the ambulance cautiously offered his opinion. Since we were being transported to Seran University Hospital, he should technically have been the one in charge. But he spoke as if seeking Dr. Jeong Sihoon’s agreement, while the older doctor sat there looking exhausted, pressing his fingers against his forehead.

“They’re comfortably Red. The problem is that there’s nothing more we can do for them right now.”

He answered weakly.

“Keep maintaining them as I instructed. I’m going to have to spend all day operating as soon as I get there. Sorry, but I’m going to rest for a while.”

“Ah, yes.”

I was the only one sitting blankly in the corner, unable to understand what kind of treatment Dr. Jeong was performing or what they meant by things like Black and Red.

After taking one more quick look at the patient, Dr. Jeong finally came over and dropped down beside me.

“This is driving me crazy. Seriously.”

“Doctor. Isn’t it impossible for a father and son to work as professors at Seran University Hospital at the same time?”

“It’s impossible.”

Then what was going on…?

While I rubbed my fingertips together and kept thinking about the private information I had accidentally overheard earlier—What is this? What is this?—Dr. Jeong answered before I could say anything else.

“While my father was working there, my older brother was working overseas. By the time I started working, my father had already retired. My brother probably came back after I quit. There’s quite a gap in our ages, and my nephew is around your age, Ajin. He’s an intern too. So technically, our family has been doing this for four generations, starting with my grandfather.”

“You really are from a silver-spoon family.”

“Right? It disgusts me.”

He answered coldly, let out a deep sigh, and then lightly patted my back, making me lower my head. Since I still had more questions, I obediently lowered my head without even knowing why.

“What are Red and Black?”

“Triage.”

“What’s that?”

“Never watch medical dramas for the rest of your life.”

“Ah, I won’t! Anyway, what is it?”

“It means dividing patients according to treatment priority based on their condition. If they’re Black, there’s no chance of resuscitation. …You can’t exactly say that in front of the person themselves. But anyway, that patient isn’t Black yet.”

So that was why he suddenly told me to lower my head.

Dr. Jeong rested his forehead against the space between the ambulance wall and my shoulder and began searching for a comfortable position.

“Hey. What are you doing? My neck hurts, you know.”

“Let’s get some rest.”

“Do you think I’m letting you off because you’re going to be busy the moment we arrive?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“By the way, Doctor, if you were such a successful surgeon, why did you suddenly open an internal medicine clinic?”

“I couldn’t operate anymore.”

Dr. Jeong Sihoon answered without the slightest hesitation, but that only made me more confused.

“What? But you said you were going to operate when you got there.”

“……”

Dr. Jeong stopped answering.

It seemed he wanted to concentrate on resting. Or perhaps he simply didn’t want to answer my question.

Hmm…

When I heard that he could no longer perform surgery, I naturally thought of an injury or something similar. But if he really had been physically incapable of operating, whether because of an injury, a loss of ability, or because his body could no longer handle it, he wouldn’t be willing to take on surgery again even for the sake of a patient.

In other words, perhaps he hadn’t been unable to operate in the past.

Perhaps he had simply chosen not to.

Because it was too difficult. Too painful.

If that was the case, then the conversation he had with the person he called his older brother over the phone began to make a little more sense.

After we finally got into the ambulance, Dr. Jeong quickly gave instructions while the young doctor followed them. I didn’t pay much attention to their conversation because I couldn’t understand most of it anyway. Instead, I played with my phone.

I had searched Dr. Jeong Sihoon’s credentials, just in case.

I wasn’t even sure whether anything would come up.

But surprisingly, there was a ridiculous amount of information.

According to the search results, Dr. Jeong had published nine papers as the lead author before turning thirty, and twenty-one papers in total, including those on which he was a co-author.

He was basically insane.

I hadn’t known because I had never been interested in such things, but apparently, he had collected every possible “youngest ever” title: youngest doctor, youngest specialist, youngest full professor, youngest department head, and so on.

Beneath an old photograph of him as a child, where a little of his current appearance was still recognizable, there was even an article with a headline like:

“Thirteen-Year-Old Genius Boy Jeong Sihoon Returns to the Arms of His Homeland.”

Looking at it, I suddenly began to understand what he had meant earlier.

What was he, Mozart?

From the perspective of an extremely ordinary person like me, his life seemed almost cruel.

He had lived through an unbelievably brutal career, apparently using every possible trick his family could think of to move through life twice as fast as everyone else.

It wasn’t even on a yearly scale.

His positions and qualifications seemed to change every few months.

I guessed that when he said he had become disgusted with his family and thrown away his silver spoon, this was probably what he had been talking about.

By the time he became the head of the Special ER at a university hospital at thirty-one, he had already accumulated a full ten years of experience as a doctor.

The Special ER itself had apparently been established specifically so that a genius surgeon could fully demonstrate his potential. It had even appeared in the news several times.

I hadn’t watched the news, so I had never known.

Now that I thought about it, it explained why customers kept coming to the clinic of a young doctor who wasn’t even a specialist anymore, saying things like, “I feel like I can trust this doctor with my treatment…”

And if that was the case, didn’t it mean the Special ER had originally been created with the intention of eventually putting Dr. Jeong Sihoon in charge?

The things he had said about his predecessor resigning and recommending him, and how he had simply gotten lucky as a parachute appointment, were probably rather modest descriptions.

In reality, when we arrived at the hospital, the people from Seran University Hospital practically came running out to greet him.

They had barely let Dr. Jeong Sihoon sleep for a short while before urgently dragging him toward the operating room.

As a result, I, who had been completely forgotten about, was left standing alone in the lobby after hurriedly answering a few questions from hospital staff who asked whether I was a nurse currently working with Dr. Jeong.

“I’m just an ordinary citizen who happened to help with emergency treatment.”

Only after giving that rushed answer was I finally left alone in the lobby.

Only then did I have enough room to think.

No matter how incredible Dr. Jeong Sihoon was, that was ultimately unrelated to me.

I staggered around the crowded lobby.

And somehow…

Somehow, I suddenly felt terrified.

My palms were still covered in blood.

I was wandering around the lobby blankly when enough time must have passed, because I ran into Dr. Jeong Sihoon again.

He was rushing from one end of the hallway to the other.

The moment he saw me, he pointed directly at me and ordered,

“Kim Ajin. Sit down and get some sugar into your system right now. Wipe your hands and face.”

“Ah, yes, sir.”

I was just thinking that there wasn’t even anywhere to sit when several office workers who had apparently heard his order grabbed me and suddenly took me behind the front desk.

They sat me down in a comfortable chair.

Perhaps they had decided to take care of my comfort first just to keep Dr. Jeong Sihoon happy.

Before I knew it, someone had placed a cup of vending-machine cocoa in my hand, along with wet tissues and a towel to clean my hands.

Under normal circumstances, this was somewhere I would never have been allowed to sit.

Looking out at the lobby from behind the front desk made reality feel even more distant.

I absentmindedly sipped my cocoa while watching the countless people rushing around.

I felt like I was about to cry.

Then I belatedly remembered my phone.

Dr. Jeong Sihoon’s phone was in one pocket.

My own phone was in the other.

I pulled out my phone and started carefully typing a message to Railey, wanting to tell him that I was at Seran University Hospital.

“Huh…? The message won’t send.”

I said it without thinking.

A passing nurse who was hurrying around answered casually.

“All the nearby networks are down right now. It would be better to contact whoever you need to contact later.”

“Ah, yes. Thank you.”

Once there was nothing left to focus on, reality seemed to start drifting away again.

I immediately slapped myself across the cheek.

A passing nurse was so startled that I had to quickly wave my hand while holding my cheek and telling her I was fine.

I had to think.

There was no reason to expect mobile data to work properly in a situation like this.

And I couldn’t exactly pull out an electronic device and wander around looking for Wi-Fi in a place that was already overwhelmed with medical emergencies.

For now, I sat there blankly, gathering a few breaking news reports from the TV in the lobby, which was still broadcasting relatively smoothly.

Slowly, my thoughts began to come together.

Yesterday, I had handed the person in charge the setting for my new novel.

A gate opens in the middle of Seoul, monsters begin pouring out, and heroes who suddenly awaken supernatural abilities start solving the problem…

A painfully ordinary raid-team story.

A hot-tempered female freshman wearing a red school jacket would be Red.

Her rival, a boy of the same age from a rival school, wearing a blue jacket and possessing a sharp personality, would be Blue.

Ah…

I fiddled with my fingertips and remembered the video I had been watching earlier.

I thought about how, after discovering their abilities, they had suddenly been given responsibility by netizens and started being criticized.

How they had been pushed into certain situations without warning.

And how their personal information and life histories had been exposed almost instantly.

I had to think about this.

Was it just a coincidence?

A ridiculously convenient coincidence?

It sounded like complete bullshit.

I was already someone who had entered my own book and come back out.

The fact that the world I had imagined for my novel wasn’t merely fiction but an actual existing other world had already been proven by Railey Craha’s existence.

There had been a time when I thought all of it was nothing more than simple settings that had come to me before I started writing the novel.

But then Railey Craha really appeared.

Just like the male lead of a romance novel, he had crossed the boundary between worlds and come after the heroine from inside the novel.

I definitely had to think about this.

Could this have started because of my novel too?

No.

Maybe my novel wasn’t the cause.

Maybe this was going to happen anyway, and that was why I had come up with those ideas in the first place.

I had already experienced taking information from an actually existing world and using it as the setting for a new novel, only to discover the truth about that world afterward.

But there was no guarantee that this situation was necessarily the same.

I…

I just…

I clasped my hands together and tilted my head for a moment.

Then, suddenly, the sense of reality disappeared again beneath the noisy sounds surrounding me.

I knew what this problem was.

In fact, I had been feeling this way for the past four years.

It was the feeling of no longer being able to tell where the novel ended and reality began.

Something other people might simply consider a kind of mental slump that creators often experienced.

Something I had therefore been forced to explain as just another symptom.

Something I had never properly explained the reason for to anyone, not even my counselor.

Something like that…

Railey Craha had really appeared in my life.

How was I supposed to think about that now?

That was when it happened.

One side of the hallway suddenly became noisy.

It was the direction Dr. Jeong Sihoon had run toward earlier.

I was so startled that I instinctively half-stood from my chair.

As I stared blankly at the people in white coats rushing toward that direction, something suddenly came back to me amid that completely unreal commotion.

The setting I had finally completed that very morning.

The final, complete piece of the novel’s setting that had only been finished just before all of this happened.

A silver-spoon elite who, when his ability first awakened, saved people while wearing a white doctor’s coat.

White.

After losing his fiancée to a tragic death, he withdrew from the world and lived in seclusion…

“Ah.”

After gaining a magnificent ability powerful enough to save countless people at once, he became consumed by despair over all the people from his past whom he had been unable to save.

“White and Black.”

One day.

A man from a novel suddenly appeared before my eyes.

Maybe it was from the novel I had written.

Or perhaps from the novel I was about to write.

And maybe the world I lived in was nothing more than a novel too.

In this world, the protagonist was probably that girl who had unleashed brilliant red flames—Lee Jeong-ah.

It wasn’t as if I was upset about not being the protagonist.

I didn’t have the abilities or personality to be protagonist material anyway.

But if I wasn’t the protagonist, then what exactly was I?

What was I?

Then what was I?

Was I the creator of the novel, trapped inside that very novel?

And if that was true, then what was the meaning of my existence?

I instinctively grabbed the armrest and stood up, knocking the chair over.

But no one paid any attention to me.

The medical staff behind the front desk had all been shocked by something they had heard from someone else.

Leaving me behind, they all began running in the same direction.

As I watched that strange scene, I could only feel an eerie, distant sense of alienation.

It felt as though the fast-paced story of this world was rushing forward at full speed, leaving me alone behind.