In the white-numbed haze of my mind, the CPR protocol surfaced like a reflex.
First, I placed my fingers beneath his nose.
No breath…
Still, clinging to the faint hope that maybe, just maybe, I pressed my fingertips to the carotid artery at his neck. There was nothing—no faint pulse, no subtle throb of life.
Next step: call the patient’s name to check consciousness…
“Jin? Jin, can you hear me? Jin… please…”
It was pointless. Jin gave no response to my desperate calls. I fought back the tears stinging at the edges of my eyes and began chest compressions.
“Chest compressions, thirty times… two rescue breaths… One, two, three…”
This was the exact arrest scenario I had watched countless times on television—the scenes I had always found the most thrilling, the most gripping. I used to think they were so intense, so full of urgency.
But now…
With an actual lifeless body right in front of me, my mind went completely blank. Why had I ever found any of this entertaining? Why had I sat there thinking it was exciting? Why…?
I felt suddenly ashamed of my past self.
At least I was grateful for the mandatory CPR training session my company forced us to do once a year. Next step was to ask someone nearby to bring an AED—an automated external defibrillator…
‘…Yeah, right. Like this world even has one. Get a grip!’
I had practiced these motions endlessly on the training mannequin Annie, but this was the first time I was doing them on a real person.
“Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine… thirty.”
Then two rescue breaths. I tilted Jin’s head back carefully to open the airway.
I drew in a deep breath, pinched his nose shut, and sealed my mouth over his, blowing steadily. I watched to see if his chest rose.
It didn’t.
It felt as though the air I was forcing in was hitting some kind of blockage and refusing to go down.
Was his airway obstructed? A sensation like the end of the world washed over me.
No—no, I couldn’t stop. Chest compressions were more important than rescue breaths in this situation.
I started pressing on his chest again. One, two, three, four… If the airway really was blocked, then what? Nine, ten, eleven, twelve…
There was only one answer: cricothyrotomy. Slice open the throat and insert a tube into the trachea…
But I didn’t know how to do that. And even if I did, there was no tube in this world to insert. No tube, no intubation. How the hell was I supposed to do anything?
‘You can’t die like this, Jin.’
Was this the moment? In the original story, Jin was supposed to die three months from now. And somehow, almost exactly three months had passed since I arrived in this place.
But he had been getting better… little by little… so why?
Chest compressions were exhausting. My arms were already burning, my breathing coming in ragged gasps. If only there were someone to take over, even for a moment…
If I had known something like this might happen, I would have taught everyone CPR back when I had the chance.
Tears kept threatening to spill as I kept pressing down hard on his chest—then came a wet, choking sound.
At the same moment, a clot of blood burst from Jin’s mouth. It splattered across my face in a hot spray, but I didn’t care. Because his breathing had returned. That clot must have been blocking his airway.
“Jin—Jin!”
Lichesia lunged forward as if to shake him. I blocked his arm and shook my head sharply.
“You can’t shake the patient.”
Had I done the right thing with the emergency care? I vaguely remembered that for foreign-body airway obstruction, the Heimlich maneuver was correct—but when the person was unconscious, CPR was the protocol.
So now what? What came next?
My hands trembling, I pulled the penlight from my outer coat pocket. So the day I actually needed this thing had come.
I lifted Jin’s eyelids and shone the light into those deep sea-blue eyes. Thank God—both pupils reacted. Sluggish, but they reacted.
I pressed the stethoscope to his chest.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
The regular, powerful beat of his heart felt like the most precious sound I had ever heard.
A moment later Jin coughed harshly and opened his eyes. When our gazes met, his eyes widened in shock.
Mental status—check mental status.
“Jin, are you with me? Do you know who I am?”
“As… trid.”
My heart lurched as though time had stopped. Did he just say my name—my real name?
“Ober, Doctor.”
Ah. Of course. The boy who called me “Doctor” and “Teacher” every single day wouldn’t suddenly switch to “Astrid” just because he came back from the dead…
‘Still… he’s saying my name clearly. At least his mental status seems intact.’
All at once the strength drained from my body like air leaving a punctured balloon. Probably from the chest compressions. Yeah. That had to be it.
“Jin!”
Lichesia roared his name. I had been terrified too, but Lichesia looked as though he himself had died and come back—his face hollowed out, gaunt in those few frantic minutes.
“…Stop making such a fuss.”
Jin rasped at him, voice rough and cracked.
What fuss? Did this look like a fuss over nothing to you, Jin? You literally just died and came back.
“Jin, you—!”
Lichesia shouted his name again, sounding almost angry.
Okay, maybe don’t yell at the guy who just had cardiac arrest…
And then—tears the size of chicken droppings began rolling down Lichesia’s sky-blue eyes.
He was… crying? Lichesia was crying?
The “Gray Lion” Lichesia—the third-highest bounty in the entire empire after the Liberator’s leader Jin and the Black Spider’s leader Arachne—was crying?
“Thank you, Doctor. Thank you so much…”
Suddenly Lichesia grabbed my hand and began sobbing out his gratitude.
What… what do I even do in this situation?
I looked around for help, but everyone else was crying too, murmuring tearful thanks in my direction.
Apparently Jin and I were the only ones bewildered by the scene. I shot Jin a pleading look—help me—but the bastard just watched with faint amusement, doing absolutely nothing.
They say coming back from death makes people kinder. Apparently not Jin.
“Lichesia.”
After Lichesia had clung to me sobbing for what felt like forever, Jin finally spoke.
“The doctor still has my blood all over her face… and she hasn’t even wiped it off yet.”
If you were going to help, you could have helped from the beginning. I glared at him. He averted his eyes.
“Ah… right. Sorry, Doctor. Go wash up.”
Come to think of it, Jin had coughed a whole mouthful of blood straight onto my face earlier. I was a little afraid to know what I looked like…
“I’m… a bit anxious leaving Jin’s side right now. If someone could bring me some water, I’ll clean up here.”
I was terrified to step even a meter away from him. What if something happened to him again while I was gone?
Lichesia nodded as though he completely understood and sent the boy standing nearby to fetch a basin of warm water.
My reflection in the bottom of the washbasin was horrifying. My hair and one whole side of my face were splattered and clotted with Jin’s blood. I sighed and began wiping it away.
“Doctor Ober… you really are an angel, aren’t you? How did you bring our leader back from the dead?”
Pin’s brown eyes sparkled with awe as he spoke.
An angel…? Heat rushed to my face. If someone cracked an egg on my cheek right now, it would probably fry.
“Exactly, Doctor! You truly are a divine physician sent by the gods!”
The other executives were all staring at me with the same reverent gazes.
A divine physician? An angel? No—no, I just happened to have some modern medical training…
Wait. Even in my original world, reviving someone with CPR in the middle of cardiac arrest is considered miraculous enough to make the news. People get citizen awards for it. I used to watch those stories and think, Wow, that’s incredible.
So to the people of this world… how must I look?
Like an angel. Or a miracle-working doctor. Oh god, I can feel steam coming out of my ears.
“No, everyone, please. It’s not that I’m special… It’s just a skill anyone can learn. And if you learn it, you might be able to save someone teetering between life and death.”
In the end I could only smile modestly and laugh it off. What I said wasn’t wrong, after all.
I hadn’t meant to act humble—but somehow, in the space of a single moment, I had turned into the humble, smiling angel who had brought a dead man back to life.
“If you hadn’t been here with us, Doctor…” Lichesia’s voice cracked again, as though he might start crying once more. “Just thinking about it terrifies me.”
Lichesia… you really care about Jin, don’t you? For some reason the back of my neck felt hot.
★
Jin had never been particularly afraid of dying.
He had accepted long ago that his death was close. It had become simple fact.
He had been sickly since childhood—more often ill than not, and when illness came, it lingered far longer in his body than in anyone else’s.
He had assumed he would die young. Yet human life turned out to be more stubborn than expected. He reached adulthood. Then another year passed, and another. Fine, he thought. This is already long enough.
This time, surely, it was the end.
He only hoped that even after he was gone, Lichesia would keep fighting here in the underground.
But the one friend he trusted completely—Lichesia—could not accept that Jin’s death was near. Day by day he watched Jin waste away and simply refused to face it, always running from the truth.
In the end, unable to give up, Lichesia had dragged in every famous physician he could find. They all said the same thing: incurable. Then they fled.
Any treatment only made him weaker. There was never any sign of improvement.
A year passed like that.
Jin had not refused treatment. He figured that if they tried everything and still failed, Lichesia might finally let go.
But then… the new doctor, Astrid Ober, was different.
She was the only woman among all his physicians. In the Legnumia Empire women were not permitted to become doctors. Naturally she was unlicensed.
Yet she was the only one who had managed to bring him even this small measure of recovery.
She was an interesting person.
All the other doctors had declared that Jin would die soon—and so they ran. Probably terrified of what retribution would come for them after their patient died under their care.
But Astrid knew he was dying soon too—and she never ran.
Every time their eyes met, she looked disappointed in his condition. Yet every time, a thin thread of hope would make her eyes sparkle again.
Gradually, he found himself watching her more and more. He didn’t even understand why.
But whenever he came back to himself, his gaze was always on her.
And then—
“Jin! Jin!”
Air refused to come. His body screamed for oxygen, but no matter how desperately he tried to breathe, it felt as though nothing reached his lungs. His vision blurred. Tears of pain gathered in his eyes.
Lichesia’s shouts, the ashen faces of everyone around him—they all grew distant.
And then Astrid appeared before him.
This was the limit. In the fraying thread of his consciousness, for the first time in his life, Jin thought:
I don’t want to die.
I want to live.
I want to live so desperately.
He didn’t fully understand the emotion, but in this world where Astrid existed—in the world that held her—he wanted to stay.
He didn’t want to leave behind this unsolved mystery, this lingering attachment called Astrid.
And as though some god had actually heard that prayer, when his eyes opened again, she was there—looking down at him with tear-filled eyes, covered in his blood.
No. It wasn’t some god he had never truly believed in.
It was Astrid.
“Jin, are you with me? Do you know who I am?”
She asked if he knew who she was.
Of course he knew. Perfectly.
“As…trid.”
Astrid. The one person who made him want to keep living, even just a little.
His foggy mind cleared. And in that instant he understood why she had lodged so stubbornly in his heart.
He wanted her.
The name “Astrid” had slipped from his lips for the first time—and her eyes trembled.
Yes… of course.
He was a man who had always kept death close, like a friend.
He shouldn’t want her. He shouldn’t dare.
A woman who shone as brightly as she did should never be coveted by someone already standing at death’s door. He had neither the right to keep her close nor the strength to chase after her.
“Ober, Doctor.”
He added the correction belatedly.
Astrid. Ober. Doctor.
Only then did the puzzled look leave her face.
Jin gave a hollow smile.
Yes. This was right. He had to keep pushing her away.
He had to keep doing it.
