Incurable Chapter 1 Part 1

June settled over Xia City, and the rainy season came with it.

Under a sky pressed dark and heavy, fine rain fell in steady threads, as if an invisible loom were working overtime. In no time at all, the dry ground turned slick and glossy, the whole city rinsed into a damp, muted sheen.

A gurney shot across the wet floor, its wheels skimming fast enough to spray water in a bright scatter. Urgent voices chased after it, families calling names, doctors and nurses snapping instructions as they pushed through the crowd.

Mu Wan stepped into the hospital lobby holding an umbrella and a box of hot congee. Heat bled through the paper container, a small pocket of warmth that cut against the lobby’s clammy chill.

“I’m here. Which floor are you on?” Mu Wan asked into her phone, closed the umbrella, and moved toward the elevators.

Lin Wei rattled off the floor and the room number. Mu Wan answered softly, repeating them back as if anchoring them in place, then looked up at the elevator display.

Twelve.

It had just gone up. Mu Wan would have to wait.

Outside, the rain intensified. Rainy days always meant accidents. More stretchers rolled in, carrying people with torn skin and blood-soaked clothes, the kind of injuries that turned the world loud.

Pain had its own soundtrack here—low moans, broken cries, the clipped cadence of medical orders. Everything collided in the lobby’s open space until the noise became a kind of tragic bustle, life and loss stacked on top of each other without apology.

Lin Wei was still talking, but Mu Wan’s attention drifted. Her gaze followed a patient being rushed into the large, chaotic ward to the side.

The ward was cavernous. Its heavy metal door stood open. People surged in and out, white coats flashing under harsh lights like brief streaks of meteor-white.

Mu Wan watched for a few seconds. The air inside felt oppressive, thick with something she could not name. She started to look away.

Then her eyes caught on a pocket of stillness.

In the middle of the chaos, one corner seemed oddly quiet. A man and a woman, both wrapped in bandages, stood rigidly beside a bed. On the bed lay a boy covered in blood and grime, eyes closed, skin drained into a cold, bluish gray that made Mu Wan’s stomach tighten.

Across from them stood a nurse and a doctor.

They were not treating him.

The nurse’s head was lowered, her eyes red as if she had already cried too much. Beside her, the doctor bent slightly and held the boy’s hand. The small hand was coated with a mix of blood and mud, but the doctor did not flinch.

He was striking in a way that did not feel showy. High-brow bones, clear eyes, a straight nose, and lips pressed into a thin, restrained line. His face had the clean, rain-washed sharpness of bamboo leaves, delicate and defined, as if the world could not quite smudge him. In a room full of panic, he looked like the calm center no one dared disturb.

A couple of dark droplets stained the cuff of his white coat, spreading slowly through the fabric. He did not even glance down. His long fingers wrapped the boy’s hand, steady and quiet, his gaze lowered, expression calm.

Mu Wan blinked, and an old memory surfaced.

Years ago, at a train station, someone had collapsed and died without warning. A monk had knelt beside the body and held the person’s hand, performing rites to send them on their way.

Hospitals were familiar with death, but familiarity never made it gentle. When the doctor finally released the boy’s hand and drew the white sheet up over the boy’s face, the bandaged couple broke apart in grief. Their cries were sharp enough to slice through every other sound.

Mu Wan’s chest cooled.

At the same moment, the doctor seemed to sense her gaze. He lifted his eyes and looked in her direction.

His expression did not change. His eyes were deep and still, and the brief sweep of his glance brushed over Mu Wan like wind through bamboo. Light, quiet, somehow cutting.

Mu Wan paused, then looked away.

The elevator chimed as it arrived at the first floor. Mu Wan glanced at the sign above the ward entrance: Emergency Room.

“Do you have an emergency room upstairs?” she asked Lin Wei.

“What emergency room? Where are you?”

“The building is straight ahead when you walk in.”

“That’s the emergency building,” Lin Wei said. “I’m in the inpatient wing.”

Mu Wan fell silent.

“Okay.”

By the time she reached Lin Wei’s room, she set the umbrella aside and found Lin Wei already propped up with a small meal table open, ready to eat. Two days earlier, Lin Wei had had her appendix removed and could only manage liquids. While Mu Wan had been away filming, Lin Wei had complained endlessly that the hospital porridge tasted like punishment. Mu Wan had returned to Xia City, dropped off her luggage, and headed straight to Xu Ji Porridge Shop before coming here.

“How do you feel? Still hurting?” Mu Wan asked as she arranged the bowl and spoon.

She had just come back from Wen City, where it was hot and dry. She wore a black T-shirt and white shorts, nothing fussy. When she sat, she crossed her legs, posture loose and unhurried, like she had not been rushed by the rain at all.

Mu Wan was a small-time actress, the kind of person people rarely noticed, but her beauty was hard to overlook up close. Delicate oval face, a high bridge of the nose, red lips, and a neat chin. Her eyes were large and dark, clear enough to look innocent until she smiled. Tall, long-legged, slim at the waist, curving in all the right places. She carried a glamorous edge that felt modern but faintly nostalgic, like an old poster from a brighter era.

“As long as I don’t tug the incision, I’m fine,” Lin Wei said, blowing on a mouthful of congee that was still too hot.

She glanced at Mu Wan and noticed her staring toward the window, distracted.

“What are you thinking about?” Lin Wei waved her spoon in front of her face.

Outside, the rain had eased. Fat drops gathered along the sill and rolled down the glass, leaving winding trails like the routes doctors wore into the floor.

“When I was waiting for the elevator,” Mu Wan said, “I saw a doctor. It looked like he was performing deliverance rites for a little boy who’d died.”

She described the quiet corner in the chaos, the hand held like a final kindness, the sheet drawn up like a closing curtain.

A doctor was supposed to fight for the living. Rites were for the dead. It should have felt wrong.

Lin Wei’s eyes brightened with immediate interest. “Was he handsome?”

Mu Wan blinked, then smiled despite herself. “Yes. Very.”

“Then it’s him,” Lin Wei said, satisfied. “Doctor Liu.”

“You know him?”

“Surgeon Liu Qianxiu,” Lin Wei said, as if she were introducing a celebrity. “Nickname: Daoist Liu. He is the emotional support of basically every woman in Tang’er Hospital.”

Lin Wei had come through the emergency in agony, sent in by a coworker, and Liu Qianxiu had been the one to examine her. She had been in so much pain she thought she might pass out, but she still remembered the moment she looked up and saw him.

After surgery, she had grabbed a nurse and interrogated her until she had every detail.

“Daoist Liu?” Mu Wan leaned back. “Why do they call him that?”

“He practices Daoism,” Lin Wei said, lowering her voice. “I heard he takes four days off every month to go to a temple for retreat. If someone in an emergency doesn’t make it, he performs rites for them. But he’s cold, really detached. He barely talks to anyone. Like he has no emotions, no desires. Like, he is not quite human.”

That fit too well with what Mu Wan had seen—no wonder he had felt so distant, so clean, like he belonged to a different world.

“Daoists are supposed to be like that,” Mu Wan said quietly. “Clear the heart, cut off desire, cultivate until you transcend.”

She stopped there. Talking about someone behind their back felt impolite. Besides, her impression of Liu Qianxiu was not unpleasant. If anything, it was strangely calming. As a doctor, he tried to save people. As a cultivator, he offered comfort when saving was no longer possible. Whether it worked or not, it gave the living something to hold onto.

Then a thought tugged at her. “The name Liu Qianxiu sounds familiar.”

Lin Wei snorted. “The head of the Liu family, one of Xia City’s so-called Four Young Masters, has the same name.”

Mu Wan raised an eyebrow.

“But it’s probably just a coincidence,” Lin Wei added. “That kind of person lives in meetings. Why would he be a doctor? Doctors don’t even make that much.”

“Maybe he doesn’t need money,” Mu Wan said lightly. “Maybe he is here to save people. Maybe he is here to save himself.”

Lin Wei rolled her eyes in dramatic disbelief. Mu Wan laughed and let it go.

Edited by Little Kitty on 19/09/20

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