Incurable Chapter 2 Part 2

Chapter 2 (2/2)

Mu Wan set down the cup and answered with the toothbrush still between her teeth.

“Do you have work today?” Lin Wei asked.

“No.”

“Then bring me congee from Xu Ji and come see me!”

“Yes, ma’am.”

In truth, Mu Wan had gotten up early for exactly that reason. Lin Wei was from Jingcheng, and her parents and younger brother were all back there, which meant no one was around to look after her in the hospital. Mu Wan had no parents either. When she was the one who was sick and hospitalized, Lin Wei was the one taking care of her.

After hanging up, Mu Wan heard the cats downstairs again.

She got up and walked to the living room window, lifted the curtain, and looked down. Several cats were tangled together below, batting and tumoring over one another. Mu Wan smiled.

“What are you grinning about?” Lin Wei asked over the phone. “You sound way too pleased with yourself.”

Letting the curtain fall, Mu Wan turned back toward the living room.

“When I left last night, I ran into Taoist Liu at the hospital.”

Then she told Lin Wei what had happened.

“Huh? And then? Then what?” Lin Wei asked at once, brimming with interest.

“I asked him if he liked cats. He said yes. So I meowed at him,” Mu Wan replied lightly.

“Ahhh!” Lin Wei shrieked.

By the time she calmed down, she said, “Brilliant, Miss Mu. You really don’t do things the normal way. The Taoist Liu who has half the women in the city folding for him—and you got him with one little meow?”

“Not at all,” Mu Wan said. “I was just joking around. I’m perfectly healthy. I’m not going to the ER, and the two of us might never even see each other again.”

She tipped her head back as she spoke, toothpaste in her mouth making her words blur.

“All right, I’m hanging up. I need to rinse. I’ll clean up and bring you your congee.”

Mu Wan ended the call in a hurry.

The sink was in the bathroom. While brushing her teeth, Mu Wan hurried toward the glass she had left on the living room table.

The moment she stepped inside—

Bang.

The heavy thud of a body hitting the floor and the sharp crash of breaking glass shattered the morning quiet at the same time.

A few seconds later, a low groan came from inside.

Twenty minutes after saying she was perfectly healthy and would never end up in the ER, Mu Wan ended up there.

When she entered the bathroom, her foot slipped on the wet floor, and she went down hard. Instinctively, she had thrown out her hands to catch herself, but the glass in her left hand shattered. She fell straight onto the broken shards and cut herself on the left side of her chest.

She called Lin Wei immediately. Lin Wei called an ambulance, then rushed over and came with it to Mu Wan’s apartment.

The moment Lin Wei reached the bathroom and saw the blood on the floor, thinned and spread by water, she stood in the doorway stamping her foot and crying at the same time.

“Oh my God—are you going to die?”

Mu Wan, half-lifted by the medical staff and hurting badly enough that her whole face had twisted, almost laughed out loud.

She was taken straight to the ER.

The early-morning emergency room carried that same wet, sterile chill. As people moved hurriedly around her, the pain in Mu Wan’s body sharpened into full awareness. Her head buzzed. Through the ringing in her ears, she heard Lin Wei say urgently to the doctor beside them,

“Dr. Liu, please look at my friend—she stabbed herself right near the heart!”

So fate really was impossible to fend off.

Mu Wan looked up and met Liu Qianxiu’s dark, unfathomable eyes.

“Meow,” she said with a smile.

Her lips had gone pale from biting them against the pain, but when she smiled, she was still bright enough to catch the eye.

The young nurse beside them looked up at her in confusion, clearly having no idea what was going on. Lin Wei, on the other hand, sounded torn between anger and laughter.

“You still have the energy to joke around?”

Liu Qianxiu remained perfectly calm. His gaze dropped and fixed on her wound.

“Move your hand,” he said lightly.

Mu Wan did.

There was no major bleeding. It likely hadn’t reached the heart, and though Mu Wan’s breathing was fast and shallow, there were no obvious signs of a collapsed lung. For the moment, it looked like an external injury.

After her shower that morning, Mu Wan had changed into a cream-colored camisole. Now the fabric over her chest was soaked through with blood.

Liu Qianxiu moved the strap aside and pulled the neckline down slightly to examine the wound.

The injury, raw and exposed, met the air. As Liu Qianxiu leaned closer, a cool breath carrying the faint scent of disinfectant brushed over her skin, and the pain made her suck in a sharp breath.

At the sight of it, Lin Wei clapped a hand over her mouth.

“Oh my God.”

The wound on Mu Wan’s chest could only be described as a mess of blood and torn skin. Tiny cuts overlapped one another, and there were still glittering slivers of glass embedded in them. Fortunately, because the glass had shattered so thoroughly, none of the cuts appeared very deep.

While Mu Wan and Lin Wei were focused on the wound itself, Liu Qianxiu’s gaze stopped on something just below it.

A slash of red.

A red bamboo leaf, brighter even than the wound, half-hidden beneath the blood, vivid in a way that almost seemed wet and alive.

There was more than one.

Besides the visible leaf, the edge of another showed through. Liu Qianxiu’s expression did not change. His hand kept hold of the camisole strap, drawing it down just slightly farther—

before another hand caught his wrist.

“That’s not the wound,” Mu Wan said.

Liu Qianxiu lifted his eyes.

“A birthmark?”

The location of her injury was awkward enough already. If Liu Qianxiu pulled any farther, her entire left breast would be exposed. He seemed completely unconcerned with the possibility of seeing too much. Instead, what had caught his attention was the mark.

Mu Wan was in too much pain to explain properly, so Lin Wei answered for her.

“It’s a birthmark, Dr. Liu. Does it affect the injury?”

“No,” Liu Qianxiu said.

His gaze rested for one beat longer on that half-hidden bamboo leaf. His black eyes remained as unreadable as ever.

“I just thought it was beautiful.”

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