After the call, Mu Wan undressed and took a shower. The weather was cool and damp, and the moisture on her skin felt uncomfortable. After showering, she grabbed a glass and her toothbrush and started brushing her teeth.
Lin Wei called just as she was starting.
Mu Wan set the cup down and answered with the toothbrush still between her teeth.
“Do you have any work today?”
“No.”
“Then bring me congee from Xu’s Congee Shop and come see me.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She got up early because she wanted to bring Lin Wei breakfast. Lin Wei was from Jingcheng, and her parents and younger brother still lived there, so with her in the hospital, no one was around to help. Mu Wan had no parents herself. If she were the one in the hospital, Lin Wei would be looking after her, too.
After that, Mu Wan heard cats meowing downstairs again. She got up, went to the living room window, and lifted the curtain to look outside. Several cats were tangled together, play-fighting in a heap, and she laughed.
“What are you smiling at? Why do you sound so... suggestive?” Lin Wei asked over the phone.
Letting the curtain fall, Mu Wan turned back toward the living room and said, “When I was leaving last night, I ran into Daoist Liu at the hospital.”
She told Lin Wei what had happened.
“What? And then? Then what?” Lin Wei sounded instantly electrified.
“I asked him if he liked cats. He said yes. So I meowed at him,” Mu Wan said, airy and offhand.
“Aaah!” Lin Wei shrieked.
Once she had calmed down, she said, “Brilliant, Miss Mu. Truly unconventional. Daoist Liu, the man who makes women everywhere fold at the knees, and you took him down with one single meow.”
“I didn’t take him down at all. I was just teasing him. I’m perfectly healthy. I’m never going to end up in the ER, and we might never even meet again.” Toothpaste foamed in her mouth as she spoke, making her words come out bubbly. “Anyway, I need to rinse. I’ll get ready and bring you your congee.”
Mu Wan hung up in a hurry.
The sink was in the bathroom, so she grabbed the glass from the living room table and hurried over.
The instant she stepped inside, there was a loud bang.
The thud of a body hitting the floor mixed with the sound of breaking glass. After a moment, a woman’s low groan came from inside.
Twenty minutes after confidently declaring that she was perfectly healthy and would never end up in the emergency room, Mu Wan was admitted to the ER.
When she rushed into the bathroom, her foot slipped on the wet floor, and she lost her balance. As she fell, she tried to catch herself with both hands. The glass in her left hand broke, and she landed hard on the shards, one of them cutting into the left side of her chest.
She had called Lin Wei immediately. Lin Wei, in turn, had called an ambulance, then rushed over and followed it all the way back to Mu Wan’s apartment.
As soon as Lin Wei stepped into the bathroom and saw the blood on the floor, thinned by water, she stood in the doorway crying and stomping her foot.
“Holy shit—you’re not going to die, are you?!”
As the medical staff lifted her up, Mu Wan was in so much pain that she bared her teeth. Still, she almost laughed.
She was rushed into the ER.
The emergency room that morning felt damp and chilly. As people rushed around her, the pain in her body became sharper. Her head buzzed. Through the haze, she heard Lin Wei say to a doctor, “Dr. Liu, please take a look at my friend—she stabbed herself in the heart!”
When fate wanted something, there was no stopping it.
Mu Wan lifted her head and found herself looking straight into Liu Qianxiu’s dark, fathomless eyes.
“Meow~”
She smiled.
She had bitten her lips pale from the pain, but even like this, her face was still brilliantly vivid. The young nurse beside them looked up at her in bafflement, while Lin Wei, half exasperated and half amused, snapped, “You still have the energy to joke around?”
Liu Qianxiu remained calm. His lashes lowered, and his gaze settled on her wound.
“Move your hand for a moment,” he said evenly.
Mu Wan moved it aside.
There wasn’t a lot of bleeding, so it probably hadn’t reached her heart. Her breathing was quick and shallow, but there were no signs of a collapsed lung. For now, it seemed to be just a flesh wound.
After her shower that morning, Mu Wan had changed into an ivory camisole. Now the built-in bra cup had already been soaked through with blood. Liu Qianxiu drew the strap aside, tugged the neckline down, and began examining the wound.
The raw, exposed injury met the open air.
As he bent slightly, the clean scent of antiseptic drifted toward her like a cool gust of wind, making her suck in a sharp breath from the pain. Beside her, Lin Wei caught sight of the wound and clapped a hand over her mouth.
“Oh, my god.”
Mu Wan’s injury was a bloody mess. Tiny cuts covered her skin, with bits of broken glass still stuck in the wound. In a way, it was lucky the glass had shattered so much—none of the cuts were deep.
While Mu Wan and Lin Wei were focused on the injury, Liu Qianxiu’s gaze lingered on something just beneath it.
A slash of red.
A red “bamboo leaf,” even brighter than the blood itself, hidden half beneath the smeared wound, vivid with a kind of wet, dangerous beauty.
And there was more than one.
Besides the first, half of another red “leaf” showed through.
Liu Qianxiu’s expression stayed as calm as ever. His fingers still eased the camisole down, and just as he started to lower it a bit more—before the second “leaf” had fully come into view—another hand caught his wrist.
“That’s not the wound,” Mu Wan said.
Liu Qianxiu lifted his eyes. “A birthmark?”
The place she had hurt herself was awkward enough already. If Liu Qianxiu had pulled the fabric down any further, her entire left breast would have been exposed.
He didn’t seem particularly concerned about accidentally seeing more of her than he should have.
He did, however, seem genuinely interested in the birthmark.
Mu Wan was in too much pain to explain properly. Lin Wei answered for her.
“It’s a birthmark, Dr. Liu. Does it affect the wound at all?”
“No.”
Liu Qianxiu looked at that half-revealed bamboo leaf, his dark eyes as unreadable as ever, and said in the same calm tone,
“I just thought it was gorgeous.”
