The moment Jo Haneul stepped onto the platform, he landed squarely on a coin that had somehow rolled across the floor.
“Waaah!”
With an impressively dramatic yell, he slid across the ground.
For about half a meter, he skidded before crashing down hard on his backside.
“Oops~.”
I walked through the front door Haneul had opened and passed right by him.
Naturally, I didn't forget to throw in a comment as I looked down at him clutching his lower back.
“Why are you doing slapstick comedy from twenty years ago?”
Jo Haneul whipped his head up and glared at me.
I had been about to casually retrieve the coin using Void Grasp (虛空攝物), but seeing his expression, I quietly hid my hand and smiled instead.
“Haneul hyung, are you okay?”
One of his friends hurried over to help him up, but that only made his face redden further.
“O-Of course I'm okay.”
“Who dropped a coin on the floor? You didn't twist your ankle, did you?”
“Forget it. I'm fine. Didn't anyone clean this place during vacation?”
He got up while grumbling angrily, but the more he talked, the more ridiculous he looked.
“Hmm? What's going on here?”
Not long afterward, the professor returned with the class representative. Both were carrying stacks of exam papers.
“Nothing... at all.”
Unable to say anything else, Jo Haneul returned to his seat.
“Put away all your books. Just rely on your usual abilities and take it easy.”
I spun my pen with a grin.
My usual abilities, huh?
I confidently flipped over the first page.
“......”
Less than five minutes later, I was tearing at my hair.
If every one of the dozens or hundreds of patient types described on the exam were brought before me in person, I wouldn't have had any problems.
Accurate diagnosis.
Meticulous treatment.
Detailed advice for long-term care.
I was confident I could handle everything perfectly.
But choosing from five multiple-choice answers?
That was a different story.
The chief complaint is insomnia, so why do the options look like this? Am I supposed to diagnose the pattern from the pulse? Since it's a deficiency syndrome, I can rule out Longdan Xiegan Tang...
Without being able to freely question the patient, the information provided was hopelessly inadequate.
In reality, there's a better treatment.
Herbal medicine isn't even that important for this condition.
Once I started mentally arguing with the questions, there was no end to it.
Only twenty minutes left?!
By the time I finally figured out how they wanted me to solve the problems, most of the allotted time had already vanished.
The only option left was elimination.
Tap. Tap.
I crossed out answers one by one and hurried through the exam.
At least the questions that asked me to choose an herbal prescription based on symptoms were manageable.
But then there were questions like:
Which medicinal herb is obtained by drying the heartwood of Caesalpinia sappan L. and is used to invigorate blood circulation and remove blood stasis?
How am I supposed to know the botanical origin from that? Who writes exam questions like this?!
There was no helping it.
No idea. Number 4!
Toward the end, my best strategy was simply picking whichever number had appeared the least.
“We'll collect the papers now~.”
When it came to practical clinical experience, I might have surpassed not only my classmates but even some professors.
But textbook knowledge was a completely different matter.
Sure, I'd spent years reading medical classics until I was sick of them.
Yet Korea had its own unique style of examinations.
Classical medical texts and test preparation could hardly be considered the same discipline.
“Ugh...”
I barely finished filling in my answer sheet before handing it in.
There weren't even enough questions I'd solved confidently to make up a third of the exam.
My vision swam.
What if I actually had to take a retest after all the bragging I'd done earlier?
I'd never be able to show my face around campus again.
“Honestly, it wasn't that bad, right? It didn't feel all that different from the National Licensing Exam format.”
“I... see.”
Questions like this appear on the licensing exam too?
A knot formed in my stomach.
Surely... I don't actually need to worry about failing, right?
Just swallowing made my stomach burn.
“More importantly, that was absolutely hilarious.”
Completely unaware that I might have bombed the exam, Hwang Seoyoung leaned over and whispered in my ear.
Following her gaze, I turned and saw Jo Haneul.
“Hm.”
Seoyoung seemed thoroughly satisfied, but unfortunately Haneul's spirit remained entirely unbroken.
The professor's arrival had interrupted him earlier, forcing him back to his seat.
Now, as expected, he was once again drawing attention in a corner of the lecture hall.
His closest friend, Hwang Sanghoon—the second-ranked student of the previous semester—dragged over a chair and sat him down before rolling up his pant leg.
“Does it hurt here? Around the anterior talofibular ligament?”
“Y-Yeah. Yeah.”
As Sanghoon pressed firmly against his ankle, Haneul nodded vigorously.
Soon, Sanghoon pulled out an acupuncture needle from somewhere on the desk, causing several classmates to glance over.
“I'll start with Qiuxu (GB40).”
He was performing the most basic ankle treatment imaginable while making an enormous fuss.
He's obviously fine.
I had clearly seen him slide and fall directly onto his backside.
He hadn't twisted his ankle at all.
If anything hurt, it would be his lower back or tailbone.
But he couldn't exactly expose his butt in the middle of the lecture hall, so this was probably the next best thing.
“God, what a clown.”
Seoyoung voiced exactly what I had been thinking.
Just because he hung around with the handsome Sanghoon and two lackeys, did he think they were some kind of F4?
Now that I look at him, he's not even that impressive.
Maybe it was because I'd become accustomed to people like my master, known as the Peerless Beauty of Sichuan, or the Heavenly Demon, once called the Flower-Faced Asura before ascending to leadership.
Compared to faces like theirs, even Hwang Sanghoon—whom I'd once considered rather handsome—looked no better than a squid.
Though to be fair, Sanghoon frequently appeared in online posts titled things like:
“Does Hanyang Korean Medicine School's Hwang Sanghoon have a girlfriend?”
“Wow, you're really good at that~.”
Regardless of my personal opinion, the class representative's voice rose noticeably as she watched.
And honestly, they were popular.
Jo Haneul was the son of the owner of a famous nationwide Korean medicine clinic chain.
Hwang Sanghoon's grandfather ran a major traditional medicine hospital.
The two alternated between first and second place in the rankings.
With backgrounds like that, it wasn't surprising.
Jo Haneul, Hwang Sanghoon, and the two students who always followed them around.
Among our classmates, only Seoyoung and I openly disliked them.
“Let's leave the circus behind and go eat.”
“Sure. What do you want?”
We left campus as though we'd witnessed something unpleasant.
“Kimchi stew.”
“How many days in a row has it been now?”
“I missed it like crazy while I was in China.”
“Even if you couldn't eat it for two months, you've had it five times this week already!”
Scratching my head sheepishly, I took the lead.
Seoyoung grumbled but followed.
“It's weird not having afternoon classes. Last semester we didn't finish until nearly six.”
“Yeah.”
The food arrived quickly.
“Ahh, that's refreshing!”
“You sound like an old man.”
Without thinking, I'd let out a sigh of satisfaction exactly like the Heavenly Demon used to.
Only afterward did I realize my mistake.
Truthfully, my actual age was probably much closer to the middle-aged men drinking daytime alcohol at the next table than it was to Seoyoung's.
“Want to go to a café?”
Seoyoung asked as soon as we finished eating.
Normally that would've been the obvious next step.
“Ah, I'm heading to the library. Maybe next time.”
Today, however, I declined.
Forget graduating at the top of the class.
At this rate, I might become the one student responsible for dropping Korea University's national exam pass rate from 100% to 99%.
There was no way I could allow that humiliation after finally returning to Korea.
“The library?”
“Yep.”
“On the first day of the semester? You're seriously going to study?”
She blinked at me in disbelief.
“Completely serious.”
I nodded.
I wasn't exaggerating.
I genuinely needed to study sixteen hours a day.
“Hey, graduation exams are still more than two months away!”
That's what I would've thought too.
If I hadn't just realized that, unlike my classmates who only needed to review what they'd learned, I essentially had six years of coursework to relearn from scratch.
Leaving behind a horrified Seoyoung, I headed to the Central Library.
As expected, there weren't many students studying at two in the afternoon on the first day of classes.
“Nice and quiet. Not a single classmate in sight.”
Not just classmates—even students from other departments were scarce.
Only a handful of people preparing for certification exams or civil-service tests occupied the reading rooms.
“As if there would be.”
Though speaking quietly, Seoyoung had still followed me all the way here.
She could've gone home.
Maybe she secretly wanted to study too.
The moment I sat down in a corner seat, I began searching through the university website and group chats.
I'd declared that I was going to study, but first I needed to figure out what subjects even existed.
A notification popped up.
[These are all the exams.]
Seoyoung had sent me a file summarizing every exam and assignment for the second semester of fourth year.
After checking it, I discovered that our schedule was dramatically lighter than before.
By the first semester of fourth year, all coursework and hospital rotations were essentially complete.
The final semester existed largely to give students ample time to prepare for the National Licensing Examination in January.
There were still courses like Medical Law and Clinical Special Lectures.
The former was mostly memorization.
The latter was little more than professors from various departments sharing stories from their clinical experience.
And of course, the only professors giving actual exams in Clinical Special Lectures are the Herbal Medicine and Acupuncture professors—the very ones who tested us today.
Just my luck.
Among all graded evaluations, the graduation examination carried by far the greatest weight.
Hmm.
The graduation exam was essentially a full mock licensing exam.
Same subjects.
Same number of questions.
Only slightly harder.
Its true purpose was obvious:
To weed out students likely to fail the licensing exam before they could damage the school's precious 100% pass-rate statistics.
Unfortunately, I might actually qualify as one of those students.
Then I'll start with the first subject.
After thanking Seoyoung for the file, I was about to begin studying.
[Thanks.]
[Wait.]
Seoyoung stopped me.
[The acupuncture practical in Clinical Special Lectures is supposedly tricky if you don't have the past exam records.]
[?]
I sent a question mark and looked at the file again.
The exam format seemed ridiculously simple.
Acupuncture Examination (Professor Kim Seong-cheol)
Draw a slip containing four random acupuncture points and perform needling.
Wasn't that it?
Just insert the needles.
Maybe they checked the location down to the nearest millimeter?
[Only certain points ever appear.]
[??]
I sent two question marks.
So the "random" selection wasn't actually random.
The same points appeared every year.
[Then every upperclassman who took the test already knows them?]
[Yep. But it's been over six months since they graduated, so most won't remember. That club keeps detailed records and passes them down.]
[Ah...]
The ancient academic tradition—some might call it corruption—of recording exam questions and passing them to juniors.
Hwang Sanghoon, president of that club, undoubtedly had the records.
And naturally, he'd share them with his best friend, Jo Haneul.
The memory of being disadvantaged by that kind of exam before resurfaced unpleasantly.
[Not a huge problem.]
If this were a Western medicine course, that would be another matter.
Professors could ask absurdly obscure questions from thousands of pages of slides.
In subjects like that, having past exams made a tremendous difference.
But for an acupuncture practical like this?
[There are only 365 points on the regular meridians. If someone can't memorize them all, why are they even making cheat sheets?]
Wasn't that simply something every Korean medicine doctor should know?
