The Physician of Traditional Medicine Returns from Murim

A grin spread across my face as I confirmed the auction results.

“I did it!”

And when I saw the second and third place bid amounts, I couldn’t hide the smile that covered my entire face.

“Heh, hehe…”

How did this happen?

Besides me, three more people had bid on the building.

640 million, 650 million, and 678 million won.

Unlike the auction houses in fantasy novels, real estate auctions don’t allow you to keep raising bids after hearing others’ amounts.

It’s a system where the highest written bid wins in one shot, a game of intuition.

If I had bid 640 million as I originally planned, the person who bid 678 million would have become the building’s owner.

How much would I have regretted it if I hadn’t listened to Grandma Heo Soon-nam?

When the minimum price was 800 million, it seemed no one was interested, but it looks like everyone was on edge waiting for the auction price to come down.

“Everyone, we did it! I’m the building owner now!”

I rushed straight to the clinic.

Although it was a day off, I couldn’t contain the sudden surge of joy.

“Wow, did you win the auction?”

Seo In-ae asked in surprise.

“Amazing! Congratulations!”

“So we’re not moving, right?”

Seol Yu-hee and Gong Na-ri came out of the treatment room and made a fuss.

“We’re not moving! I’m going to use the second and third floors for the clinic too, hahaha!”

I couldn’t calm my excitement even after high-fiving the congratulating staff.

Hwang Sang-hoon is seeing patients, and there are patients around, so we should be quiet…

But I’m just too happy!

“Heo Soon-nam-nim, it’s me. Han Yeowon from Seongsu Korean Medicine Clinic. I followed your advice yesterday and won the auction by a 3.5 million won margin. Thank you so, so much!”

I called Grandma Heo Soon-nam and kept expressing my gratitude.

“Oh, really? You bought it so cheaply! Congratulations!”

“It’s all thanks to you, Heo Soon-nam-nim. Thank you so much!”

“What did I do? You bought it with your own money!”

It was joyful but also a bit funny.

How anxious had I been until yesterday?

Although calculations and intuition pointed in the same direction.

I wasn’t 100% certain about participating in the auction or bidding 40 million won higher than the minimum price as Grandma Heo Soon-nam suggested.

When I first heard the news that the building was going to auction, anxiety took the lead, and I was still secretly uneasy until yesterday.

But now that I’ve won the auction, it’s hard to contain my satisfaction at owning a building.

‘Ah… There was a time when I wanted just one officetel room so badly.’

Thinking about my college days when I struggled to save money makes my heart swell.

‘Come to think of it, I never owned a building in Murim either.’

I liked the fact that this was a building I bought with my own money and judgment, not something someone lent me out of charity.

Although the total area might be smaller than the pavilion I stayed in at the Tang family even if you combine all four floors, my heart clenched at the thought of my name being on the property rights certificate. It’s a different level of satisfaction.

“I’m just glad our director is staying right here and not going anywhere!”

Not only Grandma Heo Soon-nam, but I also kept expressing my gratitude to Hwang Sang-hoon and Seo In-ae who had worried with me.

If they hadn’t stopped me at first, I might have paid over 300 million won more.

Although everything turned out well, it was chilling to think about how I had only courage and no knowledge.

“Director, can we tell Song Won-jong on the second floor?”

But Seol Yu-hee called out to me as I was grinning.

Song Won-jong?

Right, there was someone else who had been anxiously awaiting the results of this auction as much as I had.

He was running a restaurant on the second floor and hadn’t been able to eat comfortably for days, worried about not getting his deposit back.

“Yes, go ahead and tell him. Say he doesn’t need to worry about his deposit.”

“I’ll go down and tell him!”

Seol Yu-hee rushed downstairs.

He had been visiting the clinic frequently since this incident occurred, so he’d become quite familiar with the staff.

A moment later.

After about three minutes? Song Won-jong came up to the clinic with Seol Yu-hee who had gone down to deliver the news.

“You bought it for 680 million won? Then… I can get back almost all of my deposit, right?”

I nodded.

Although it’s close, he must know himself that there’s no chance of losing the entire amount now.

He spoke with the most relaxed expression since the auction began.

“Yes. The bakery didn’t get a dividend, and it might be a little short due to auction costs and additional taxes on the unpaid national taxes, but if you’re planning to move out, I’ll make up the difference.”

I’ll just give him the small shortfall separately, no big deal.

“R-really?”

His face brightened even more at my words.

Completely relieved, Song Won-jong looked ready to burst into tears for a different reason now.

It’s common to spend a little extra to evict tenants after winning an auction anyway.

I bought this building partly because the academy and restaurant were both planning to leave, so I could just think of it as paying a hundred or two hundred thousand won more.

“I’ll move out whenever you want. Thank you, landlord!”

I scratched my head.

The title of landlord was embarrassing, and his bowing as if about to prostrate himself was too much.

You could believe it if someone said Song Won-jong had aged ten years in a month, considering how he’d been living like he was dying all this time.

With my current financial sense after cheerfully spending 680 million won, 50 million doesn’t seem like a life-or-death amount… but I too once had a past where I would take the subway from Incheon to Yangju to earn a few hundred thousand won more in tutoring fees.

I just quietly patted Song Won-jong’s back.

“Sniff, I’m so relieved. Thank… urgh! Thank you.”

“Oh no, do you feel like throwing up again?”

“Ugh! Cough, cough!”

Was the emotional excitement too much?

Just like when his stress had peaked recently, Song Won-jong complained of nausea.

“The men’s restroom is empty!”

Seol Yu-hee quickly guided him to the restroom.

“Keck! Keheck! Kuck!”

Song Won-jong rushed straight to our clinic’s restroom, but that wasn’t enough to calm him down.

He suffered for quite a while, his sounds echoing even outside.

“Are you okay? Did you throw up?”

Just moments ago I had been grinning about becoming a building owner, but as Song Won-jong came out beating his chest, my doctor self quietly raised its head.

“I’m sorry. I caused a disturbance with unpleasant sounds.”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s natural when you’re not feeling well.”

“Ugh… I feel like I’m going to throw up, but I didn’t. This has been happening a lot lately, haha. But now that the deposit issue is resolved, I think I’ll be fine soon.”

Song Won-jong said this while continuously beating his chest.

Not ‘I’m fine’ but ‘I think I’ll be fine soon.’

Moreover, his pained expression suggested the pain was not insignificant.

“Is your chest feeling tight?”

I asked as I led him to the consultation room.

“Ah, no. The news of the successful auction has lifted a huge weight off my mind.”

Yet Song Won-jong followed me obediently.

We couldn’t keep talking in front of the desk, and we had reached a consensus that he needed treatment anyway.

“If it were purely a mental issue, it might get better like that… but the mind and body interact. Please sit over here for a moment.”

I sat at the desk to examine him properly.

Although it was a day off, I couldn’t just hand over someone I knew and whose situation I understood to Hwang Sang-hoon for treatment.

“Do you feel a burning pain in your chest?”

“Ah, yes. I do.”

Song Won-jong answered, lowering his eyes. Why is he looking at me like that?

“And I’ve been feeling like something’s coming up from my stomach to my esophagus for the past few days.”

“I see.”

“You’ve been coughing a bit since last time, but you don’t have any cold symptoms, right?”

“No. I think it’s just because I feel stuffy. No runny nose or fever.”

Combining the symptoms I’ve observed so far and what he just reported.

One condition came to mind.

“You didn’t vomit this time, but you did a little at first, right?”

“…At first, whatever I ate came right back up. I couldn’t swallow food at all.”

I knew that to some extent.

From the first time I met with the people from the first, second, and third floors, Song Won-jong had been complaining of nausea.

I brought him to the clinic right away that day to give him acupuncture, and I also advised him to take medicine if it persisted.

As expected, his condition wasn’t good afterward, so he frequently left work to his part-timer and came for acupuncture, but he didn’t take herbal medicine.

He thought that since the money issue was the cause, no treatment would work until the deposit problem was resolved anyway.

Since the external factor was so clear, it wasn’t entirely wrong, so I didn’t insist.

It was a problem that would be solved if I just won the auction for the building at an appropriate price.

But it seemed that repeated vomiting during that time had secondarily caused a condition.

“From what I see, the burning in your chest and the dry cough all seem to be symptoms of gastroesophageal reflux disease. When you kept vomiting, stomach acid refluxed and caused inflammation in your esophagus.”

“Ah?”

Song Won-jong’s eyes widened.

He agreed up to the point that a mental issue had caused some physical illness. But the condition was beyond what he had imagined.

“I thought it was hwa-byung or something like that.”

“It’s not typical hwa-byung symptoms. Of course, there’s tension accompanying the emotional cause as you said, but that will improve now that the root cause has been resolved.”

People often casually call chest tightness hwa-byung, but there are proper diagnostic criteria for it too.

At one point, it was even introduced in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) as a culture-bound syndrome of Korea.

Currently, the focus of Song Won-jong’s treatment was more on his esophagus than that.

“I thought you got acid reflux from lying down right after eating… but thinking about it, vomiting like this must be worse.”

Song Won-jong clutched his chest tightly.

“How do you treat that? Should I take medicine?”

That depends on the case.

If the body is too weak and digestive function itself has declined, or if hwa-byung is the issue as Song Won-jong mentioned, taking medicine is almost essential.

“It would be good to take it, of course.”

Taking medicine would certainly help both in treating inflammation and preventing reflux.

But is it absolutely necessary?

“Then…”

“Take anti-inflammatory medicine for a few days. I’ll try to control the reflux with acupuncture. Since the habitual vomiting has already improved, we can expect natural recovery of the lower esophageal sphincter.”

Not necessarily.

I can reverse the habitual reflux flow with just acupuncture treatment.

There are two goals in treating gastroesophageal reflux disease.

Healing the esophageal wall damaged by the refluxed stomach acid so far.

And normalizing digestive function to prevent further reflux.

If he just trusts and follows me, we can succeed without a doubt.