The Surgeon’s Studio

Zheng Ren’s words were captured by the microphone, processed by the audio transmission system, and broadcast through the speakers of the surgical demonstration classroom.

 “Outrageous!” shouted Chief Surgeon Liu when he finally found a flaw in this surgery.

 “Chief Surgeon Liu, why convert your shame into rage? Zheng Ren was just making a joke. Besides, he wasn’t cracking jokes with you, so why are you even mad at him?” replied Chief Physician Pan with a wide grin.

 “As a rigorous and strict surgeon, what will they think of us when such irresponsible jokes are spread publicly?” criticized Chief Surgeon Liu, who was trying to add fuel to the fire.

 Since Chief Physician Pan had won this competition, he was able to cross swords with Chief Surgeon Liu with ease and instantly changed the argument from the woundless appendectomy to the misdiagnosis by the first general surgery department.

 The continuous fire forced Chief Surgeon Liu to flee the battlefield.

 [Finishing an appendectomy with a continuous suture technique with an absorbable suture to achieve minimal scarring effect. Is he demonstrating a perfect surgery—without any flaws at all?]

 Comments continued to overwhelm the chatroom of Xinglin Garden.

 For doctors who watched live streams, the initiation of peritoneal cavity irrigation basically signified the end of a surgery.

 [Of course. It’s extremely difficult to conclude that an appendix is in an ectopic position, but he diagnosed it without hesitation and even turned on a live broadcast of the surgery with confidence. I’m guessing that the surgeon is Lecturer Zhang from Union Medical College Hospital.]

 [Impossible. Lecturer Zhang wouldn’t broadcast his surgery.]

 Most of the viewers typing ‘666¹‘ in their comments were trying to guess the surgeon’s identity as well.

 No matter who they guessed, one thing was for sure—this surgeon had earned their respect. This was a flawless surgery that could become learning material in medical textbooks.

 There was no audio in the livestream, so none of the viewers heard the woundless appendectomy Zheng Ren mentioned.

 The surgery progress bar reached 100 percent as soon as Zheng Ren cut the suture thread. A perfect surgery!

 After Zheng Ren changed into a normal attire and returned to the first general surgery department, Old Chief Physician Pan gave him a huge thumbs-up.

 It was an old-fashioned style of expressing his joy, but that was how Old Chief Physician Pan complimented and approved Zheng Ren from the depths of his heart.

 On the other hand, Zheng Ren’s colleagues in the first general surgery department appeared dispirited and their gazes on him were foreign and adrift.

 “Let’s take a break and eat,” said Old Chief Physician Pan as he tapped Zheng Ren gently on the shoulder and pushed him toward the exit.

 However, food and rest were not Zheng Ren’s main concern at the moment. His sharp eyes noticed that the transparent screen on the upper right corner of his vision seemed to have become clearer after the surgery was completed.

 He needed to confirm something urgently. It was a life-and-death situation.

 Old Chief Physician Pan’s eyelids flickered momentarily as Zheng Ren rejected his kind offer. Left with no choice, he invited Xie Yiren to grab a casual meal.

 Zheng Ren returned to the emergency department, turned on his cell phone, and ordered a set of dumplings with chives and egg fillings.

 Since the food delivery rider would arrive with his food twenty minutes later, Zheng Ren made use of this time to lie on the bed in the male on-duty room, closed his eyes, and entered the mysterious world in the System.

 The scenery remained the same as where he left last time. The only notable difference was the constant alteration in the color of everything in the world.

 When he entered the System and was assigned a mission to complete ten perfect surgeries last time, the mysterious world was etched in gray as if a dust storm had rampaged through it.

 

Now, it seemed that all the color had been restored and this place was starting to brim with life and vitality again.

 There was a huge change in his skill tree as well, from a Graduate rank with 330 skill points to the Expert rank with 1005 skill points.

 Was this the result of the intensive training? Wow, was he that amazing already? It was unbelievable. At the same time, Zheng Ren felt exhilarated.

 “Hello, anyone here?” yelled Zheng Ren.

 No response, as usual…

 What a strange System. Was it programmed not to communicate with the host at all? Well, Zheng Ren came here last time and was told that failure to complete the mission would end up in peril. That suggested the System lacked emotional intelligence entirely.

 1After making some silent complaints and failing to find any clues, he summoned his consciousness back to reality.

 2At least he learned something from this visit. He presumed the System had run out of power and required some sort of method to ‘recharge’ its energy.

 1Perhaps the completion of a perfect surgery was its method, after all.

 That was a wild stretch of his imagination for a surgeon, but Zheng Ren had no other explanation.

 Fortunately, he was off to a good start today. His first surgery was a complicated case of acute phlegmonous appendicitis with an ectopic appendix.

 Most importantly, Zheng Ren’s general surgery skill had reached the Expert rank, which boosted the junior attending surgeon’s confidence tremendously.

 Hopefully, the next few surgical cases were some simple, uncomplicated appendicitis cases. It was better not to take any risks and survival was of utmost importance in this situation.

 His colleagues in the emergency department felt a little conflicted when they saw his arrival.

 Those who were transferred to the emergency department were usually ordinary, unmotivated doctors, who had either been cast aside by their original department or merely wanted to rest for three to five days after being on call for twenty-four hours.

 If an emergency operating theater was successfully established in the emergency department, did it mean that everyone would have an increased workload with greater responsibility?

 Most doctors in the emergency department were in their forties. If they were willing to live their life as useless and indolent sloths, nobody could persuade them otherwise, not even the aggressive senior military doctor, Chief Physician Pan.

 Well, none of them were Zheng Ren’s business. All he needed to do right now was to wait patiently for the arrival of the next appendicitis case.

 The emergency department increased in activity as the sun sank lower in the sky.

 Various emergency cases—motor vehicle accidents, drunken brawls, acute gastroenteritis due to binge-eating, alcoholic intracerebral hemorrhaging, and myocardial infarctions—arrived at the emergency department, but not a single appendicitis case appeared.

 Zheng Ren felt slightly helpless and dispirited, but it seemed inappropriate to pray for more appendicitis cases in Sea City solely for his own survival.

 Before Xie Yiren returned home, she gave her phone number and WeChat ID to Zheng Ren so that he could call her if there was any emergency surgery.

 1Meanwhile, Zheng Ren assisted Yuan Li with wound closure of a few minor trauma cases and rinsed the surgical tray after treatment. After exiting the procedure room, a physician on duty pulled Zheng Ren aside and said, “Chief Zheng, please take a look at this patient.”

 

“Speak slowly. What happened?”

 “A sixty-two-year-old female came in with intermittent tinnitus and headache for twenty-two years. I ordered a cranial CT scan for her but the results came back normal. I suspected she was having a tension headache and wanted to refer her to the neurology department, but she started crying in my room afterward.”

 From the history given by the female physician who was in her forties, Zheng Ren realized that she diagnosed the patient with hysteria, where symptoms were felt as a result of imagination.

 The physician was merely being indirect in her explanation.

 The messy and confusing cases in the emergency department made Zheng Ren feel helpless, too. Left with no choice, he followed the physician to the internal medicine division.

 

A pale-faced woman with an expensive-looking outfit was sitting on the floor when they entered the consultation room.

 The person beside her was behaving decently, which indicated that they were not here to deliberately cause trouble. Perhaps the woman had lost confidence in life and was having a mental breakdown in the consultation room.

 Staring at the female patient on the floor, Zheng Ren was dumbfounded when he noticed the hovering words on the upper right corner of his vision.

 “Auntie, can you please stand up?” asked Zheng Ren kindly and politely.

 Absent-minded and dejected, the weeping patient ignored him and continued to lean against the wall.

 Her family member, who was a man in his forties, apologized sincerely, “I’m sorry, doctor. I’ve no idea what happened to my mother. I brought her to various hospitals in Imperial Capital and Sorcery Capital previously but they couldn’t provide a definitive diagnosis nor treatment.”

 “Oh… To be honest, the diagnosis is obvious and the treatment plan is easy. Let us discuss this outside,” replied Zheng Ren, wearing a warm and gentle smile to establish trust more easily.

 After softly persuading the patient for a while, the middle-aged man managed to pull her up and brought her to a plastic bench outside the consultation room.

 The emergency department was a madhouse right now with many patients waiting in line for consultation.

 The patient’s despairing sobs saddened a few people. When Zheng Ren mentioned that he knew what was going on with the patient, a few busybodies in the crowd quickly took out their cell phones and started video recording.

 “Doctor, I’m really sorry. We’ll leave after resting for a while,” apologized the middle-aged man while hugging and comforting the patient, who was presumably his mother.

 Despite feeling anguish, he still plucked up his courage and attempted to console his mother.

 “Did auntie undergo a dental implant recently?” asked Zheng Ren seriously.

 “Yes, half a year ago.” The middle-aged man failed to understand the purpose behind Zheng Ren’s question. More importantly, how did Zheng Ren know about his mother’s dental implant when they did not know each other at all?

 

Zheng Ren smiled in response. “That’s it. The dizziness and buzzing in the ears happened after the dental implant, right?”

 The middle-aged man gave it some thought, but was uncertain about the answer.

 That dental implant was a success and no one had related it with the vertigo and tinnitus experienced by his mother.

 “Perhaps an after-effect of the dental implant?”

 “Impossible. She would have consulted the oral medicine department a long time ago if there was an issue with the implant. Honestly, I think that doctor is talking nonsense.”

 “A complicated disease which the Imperial Capital and Sorcery Capital failed to treat but expecting a cure in Sea City? That must be a joke.”

 Onlookers started quietly exchanging views on this matter.

 “Let’s put it this way. There should be some dental prosthesis or dentures polished with metallic substance in your mother’s mouth, yes?” asked Zheng Ren confidently.

 “…” Was this doctor a fortune-teller, too? The middle-aged man was confused as to why Zheng Ren insisted on relating his mother’s tinnitus and headache to the dental issue.

 Was it possible that he was actually some private medical sales representative who wore a white coat and pretended to be a doctor in the Sea City General Hospital?

 Upon realizing the possibility, he became frustrated.

 “A primary cell can be formed by putting two metals with different reactivities into a solution. A lesson learned in high school, I believe,” explained Zheng Ren without shame. In fact, he had absolutely no idea what a primary cell was.

 Metal reactivity? That was all Greek to him.

 However, he was forced to explain it after noticing the change in the middle-aged man’s expression.

 “So?”