The Doctor Cured the Villainess and Ran Away

rob z says:

There were some pretty questionable comments below, so I guess I have to write a full review so folks get an actual sense of the story.

MC is transported into some game / novel fantasy world – heroes, monsters, demon king, etc – where he takes possession over some fallen noble who is a healer. In some senses he is super powerful as a healer, and in other senses, not. Notably, he wanted to become a doctor in the real world, but was in an accident and it screwed up his nerves and he couldn’t afford to get it fixed.

MC becomes part of / associated with the hero party to fight the demon king. However, he is also trapped in a loop of regressions, where the world continually ends and he dies (as I understand it, each regression lasts 30 days). The reason? The 3rd princess who becomes empress. She basically brings about the world’s end in all kinds of ways, over and over again. And MC dies in each one, no matter what he does. By the 101st ending, he basically doesn’t give much of a sh!t – he thinks he could have killed the demon king in that round, but the princess summoned a dragon army to wipe out the empire. (Yes, empress is pretty batsh!t crazy).

As an aside, it seems like the empress wiped out his family and is the reason he is a fallen noble. Its seems he was her fiancee in the past, and apparently did something to piss her off in their first meeting (it had to do with yellow roses, but the details are irrelevant for this review).

So in this regression, he ends up walking from the battlefield (after watching the hero die pathetically) to the castle and meets the empress, where she is gleeful about the world’s end. MC gets some wine from her, and thinks “it’s better to die drunk.” He then starts a regression, but it’s different this time. He gets a message saying that he has cleared all 101 bad endings, and now he can regress much further back. So he goes back 10 years in time, thinking he can fix everything. He gets some new skills (related to medicinal, not magical, healing, which were basically unknown at the time – think creating stuff like aspirin, penicillin, etc). He is told by the system this is his final life. The system also shows him that all 101 of the bad endings have a certain percentage chance of happening (many of which are very high), but he also sees for the first time there are some good endings that can happen (which have less than 1% chance of happening).

So in this new life, he re-does his first meeting with the 3rd princess. And he immediately sees that events that significantly affect the princess’s mindset can increase or decrease the likelihood of particular endings. At one point, he was prepared to kill her (had a dagger in hand), but saw that certain bad endings went up to almost 100%, so he changed his mind – he instead used it to trim the yellow roses the princess was holding of thorns, which reduces several bad endings.

As another aside, the princess has a curse and is continuously suffering (given to her by her mom, the empress, who is a total b!tch and abuses the princess). But the curse was designed to give her significant magically power, at a cost. As a result, though healing magic doesn’t work on her, medicine does. This leads the MC to becoming her personal physician. However, as part of the deal he makes her agree to a magical contract that if he does something really good, she will comply with this request he gave her in a letter that she is not allowed to see – which says she must let him go safely.

The majority of the story from that point deals with the princess fighting with her mom, brothers and sisters for the throne, and MC trying to eliminate the bad ends.

To the extent this novel falls into tropes, it is the “villainess is redeemable because the only reason she became a villainess is because she was abused / mistreated.” And of course this means the MC tries to fix things. MC is not a simp, but maybe a little dense.

In short, it’s an OK story (as of the available chapters) – 6.5/10. Definitely better than some of the awful stuff that has been updated recently. Pacing is generally good, there is a bit of time spent on world building, and there is at least some character development.