LIGHTNOVELONLINE Chapter 256
The Attending Physician Cured the Wicked Woman and Escaped was conceived as part of the 2023 Ultimate Universe Competition.
The author first started writing web novels for the 2022 Masterpiece Competition on Novelpia. Since then, they participated in several events like the 2022 Ultimate Competition and the 2023 Write-It Challenge, but didn’t achieve significant results.
This time, aiming for success, the author thought about combining their best experiences from previous works to create something more developed. The Attending Physician Cured the Wicked Woman wouldn’t have been possible without any of the author’s previous works, such as Fate Alterer, S-EX Rank, Return D Rank, Betrayal Red, and Annoyed Yoon.
The story took elements like the status window and system from Betrayal Red, and adapted the goal of changing the ending from Return D Rank into a new form. S-EX Rank was written for an adult novel competition, making the author somewhat embarrassed since they had no prior expertise in that genre.
The fantasy world established during this time has been consistently developed. Although the timelines are different, they operate within the same continent. The plot of changing relationships due to time distortion has been attempted in various forms starting from Fate Alterer. In this case, the story involved a returnee moving against time and a seer exploring the future.
Thanks to these experiences, The Attending Physician likely came to be.
However, the most important driving force for writing came from the previous work, The Unsold Slaves Became Heroes. There was a character who the author personally liked, who initially appeared as a villain and met a tragic end due to their many misdeeds.
If there are readers who have seen the previous work, thank you very much. The character is named Sandra von Condenburg, the emperor of the Empire and a mad wizard who reached great heights. The ending of Annoyed Yoon, where all characters achieve happiness, weighed heavily on the author.
The thought of writing an extra story about Sandra led to the desire to create a completely new spin-off. The story began from the idea of whether history would have changed if a tyrant, who relied solely on magic without a single trustworthy companion, had just one beloved person.
Therefore, the main characters Acella and Sandra from the current and previous works are the same person. More detailed settings will be elaborated below.
While the premise started that way, a web novel is ultimately about the protagonist’s story. The most challenging aspect in previous works was that the protagonist was passive and had familial relationships with the heroines, making it difficult to create events or romance.
This time, there was a goal to focus more on the protagonist! Having discerned aspects that made previous protagonists unlikable, those issues were intentionally excluded. Lars Gothberg has been crafted as a character infused with a bit of enthusiasm. He is a protagonist the author holds a lot of affection for.
But why “medicine”? Because to connect with the princess and the wicked woman, a protagonist as a knight or guarding knight is the norm, and if the heroine is a saint, then a “holy knight” it would be.
A profession that allows the protagonist to always be by the heroine’s side and protect her. Feeling a bit cliché, the author didn’t want to go that route. Additionally, they had already explored the knight protagonist in previous works.
Since the heroine is a wicked woman, the keyword of rehabilitation comes into play. So, the expression “breaking her” was desired. The thought was that if the wicked woman is “broken,” she might become good.
What job could be always alongside the wicked woman (princess) while breaking her without being caught? After some thought, the keyword of “attending physician” was chosen.
If the attending physician adds a “good medicine” label, she wouldn’t suspect it when ingesting it. With the protagonist’s job established as a doctor, this story will become one of success as a physician.
Yet, the author felt it would be a challenging path as they weren’t very knowledgeable about medicine. Fortunately, there are already many web novels in the medical genre, so the author thought it wouldn’t be a completely barren territory to challenge.
Luckily, the author had a close doctor friend who could provide some verification, but they were too busy to check everything. Moreover, due to the author’s lack of professional knowledge, there were expressions that became incorrect during the writing process.
Still, the author endeavored to be careful, but clearly, sections requiring specialized knowledge proved quite difficult.
The most important thing is making sure readers enjoy the story, so the author is contemplating whether to avoid unfamiliar subjects next time…
Thus, the narrative structure of the protagonist, using the system to change the confirmed ending, cures the wicked woman, rehabilitates her, and succeeds as a physician became the grand outline of this work.
Simultaneously, by incorporating elements the author enjoys from a healer and romance-fantasy tropes, the story gained a peculiar atmosphere, where it seems like the wicked woman was enticed and regretfully entangled.
Afterwards, crafting the story flowed smoothly. A highlight was established in the scene where Lars escapes after healing Acella, leading to the creation of the setting “Inner Palace” for Lars to grow and prepare.
The Imperial Family was naturally depicted as well. The author wanted to give Acella a goal, believing that since Acella’s character was nearly set due to Sandra from the previous work, she would definitely do anything to aim for the emperor.
Thus, settings involving the royal palace and succession conflicts were devised. This tale is, at its heart, a love story between Lars and Acella, where their escape and reunion and the conclusion of their relationship unfold in an expected sequence.
However, the author realized they can’t write pure love stories, which meant needing a lot of subheroines and planning for two significant secondary heroines. Initially, Gishta was conceived as Gishta, but one was originally meant to be a Great Demon (with Jinzou’s setup attached) instead of Lishe.
By about the 100th chapter, the plot was remembered to have changed. In the initial phases of the work, up until around chapter 30, it bore the harem tag, as there were too many subheroines appearing with the protagonist.
Now for a confession, this was purely the author’s mistake. On Novelpia, the harem tag can imply that there are many heroines, but also that there will be an ending involving all those heroines.
However, in this work, the ending entails Lars linking primarily with Acella, while relationships with other heroines are intended to be resolved in extras. It wasn’t a typical ending for a harem tag.
The author realized this mistake later and removed the tag, leading to deliberation over suitable tags. Yet, this work simply wasn’t suitable for the pure love tag. For a pure love tag, there shouldn’t be any other heroines at all.
Ultimately, the added tag later became “romance.” In the initial plan, Lars would escape more quickly (around chapters 80) and then meet Gishta and the Great Demon heroine in succession, but it was evident that as the serialization progressed, things didn’t flow as originally imagined.
About the Characters
– Lars Gothberg
Lars is perhaps the character the author has put the most effort into among all their serialized works. After contemplating how to create a cool and sexy protagonist, they threw in every element they thought was cool.
Initially designed as a brash, roguish secondary male character in the romance-fantasy genre, since Lars is a doctor, he cherishes life and possesses strong professional morals. The repetitive nature of his regressions and their psychological portrayal were omitted intentionally, as they might appear too bleak.
However, this led to many readers struggling to empathize with Lars’s mindset. The reality is that Lars possesses a superhuman mentality, making empathy a bit difficult.
Even the hero Charles, who was chosen, has had their mind shatter after a fewer number of regressions than Lars; however, Lars learned ways to maintain his peace of mind amidst the infinite regressions.
This indicates that Lars may have developed selective numbness to a few emotions. Infinite regressions are quite taxing on the person experiencing them.
While he is exceptionally versatile and complete, Lars’s progress comes from mental growth through infinite regressions, as well as a natural elite ability. However, his family before entering the game was poor, leading him to study diligently and enter medical school.
Personally, the author finds it easier and more enjoyable to write fully developed protagonists like Lars or Jeong Hee-seok from Betrayal Red as opposed to growth-type protagonists like Wicker from Annoyed Yoon.
Before entering the game, Lars was a medical student on the verge of being expelled, as he had almost complete usage of his hands until an accident made it impossible to perform even simple blood sampling.
This was less about choosing to give up the path of a doctor but more due to being half-driven out by political scheming and jealousy at the medical school.
Eventually, in the story, he ends up performing surgical procedures, but he believes he isn’t capable of performing them, considering himself a quack.
In the early planning stages, there was a backstory about considering physical enhancement through medicine instead of alchemy (…) The author felt quite fortunate that it ended up being alchemy instead.
As someone who studied before, he doesn’t have much experience with dating, which explains why he struggles with understanding women’s hearts. Even after entering the game, his time-understanding hasn’t aged him.
Lars had almost no information about the game he was in. He played a very hard game where good endings were hard to come by, and unbelievably ended up seeing the good end as a healer character by luck.
The good ending Lars witnessed was set up differently from the three routes provided to him. The author thinks they could have explained Lars’s detailed background further.
Initially, the protagonist’s post-reincarnation information matters more than their pre-reincarnation info, and it seemed less significant to focus on that; however, writing this piece changed that perspective a bit.
Aside from later being too cold towards Acella and Charles in the later chapters, Lars was an extremely satisfying character for the author. They hope to write another protagonist like Lars in their next work.