Chapter 1 (1/2)
In June, the rainy season arrived in Xia City.
Under the dark, heavy sky, the rain fell in a fine, steady curtain, like a giant loom weaving the city into dampness. Before long, the dry ground had been soaked through.
Across the wet pavement, stretcher wheels rushed past, splashing up strings of water, accompanied by the anxious shouts of doctors and patients’ families.
Mu Wan stood beneath her umbrella, carrying a box of hot congee. Warm steam drifted out through the paper container, softening some of the gloomy chill in the busy hospital lobby.
“I’m here. What floor are you on?” Mu Wan closed her umbrella and walked through the crowd toward the elevators.
On the phone, Lin Wei told her the floor and room number. Mu Wan repeated them one by one, then looked up. The elevator had just gone up to the twelfth floor; it would still take a while before coming back down.
The rain outside was getting heavier. Rainy days often meant traffic accidents. On the newly wheeled-in stretchers were quite a few patients with visible injuries, their bodies streaked with blood.
The patients’ groans of pain, the cries of their families, and the urgent voices of doctors and nurses blended together, filling the lobby with a strange kind of bustling sorrow.
Lin Wei was still saying something on the phone. Mu Wan answered softly, but her gaze followed one of the patients into the nearby large emergency room.
The room was spacious, with its heavy iron door left open. People hurried in and out, and the white coats moving through the room flashed past like streaks of light.
Mu Wan looked for a few moments. The oppressive atmosphere made her slightly uncomfortable, and she was about to pull back her gaze and continue waiting for the elevator when her eyes stopped on one corner of the room.
In the middle of the chaos, there was one place that felt especially still.
A man and a woman, both wrapped in bandages, stood beside a hospital bed. On the bed lay a young boy covered in blood. His eyes were shut, his face pale and ashen, without the slightest trace of life.
On the other side of the bed stood a doctor and a nurse. Neither of them was treating him. The nurse kept her head lowered, her eyes faintly red. Beside her, the male doctor bent slightly and took the boy’s blood-and-mud-streaked hand into his own.
He was the sort of man people noticed at once.
His brow bone was high, his eyes clear and bright, his nose straight, his lips thin and lightly pressed together. He was like bamboo leaves washed clean by rain—cool, refined, and quietly striking. There was something detached about him, as if he were the one still point in the middle of the chaos, or a distant mountain standing apart from the world, untouched by dust and noise.
He held the boy’s hand gently. A few drops of blood had stained the cuff of his white coat and slowly spread through the fabric, but he seemed not to notice. His fingers were long and elegant, completely enclosing the boy’s hand. His eyes were lowered, his expression calm.
The tightness in Mu Wan’s chest eased a little, and a memory came back to her.
A few years ago, in the waiting hall of a train station, a passenger had died suddenly. A monk had held that person’s hand in much the same way while performing rites for the dead.
Hospitals were no strangers to death. But when the doctor released the boy’s hand and pulled the white sheet over his face, and the man and woman beside the bed broke into piercing sobs, a chill still passed through Mu Wan.
At the same time, the doctor seemed to sense her gaze and looked over.
His eyes were quiet and deep. The glance was light, almost fleeting, but it brushed across Mu Wan’s heart like a breeze moving through a bamboo grove.
Mu Wan stilled for a moment, then looked away.
Ding.
The elevator arrived on the first floor. Mu Wan glanced at the sign above the room—Emergency Department—and asked Lin Wei, “Do you have an emergency room upstairs?”
“What emergency room? Which building are you in?”
“The one directly across from the hospital entrance.”
“That’s the emergency building! I’m in inpatient!”
“...”
By the time Mu Wan reached Lin Wei’s room, Lin Wei had already set up the little meal table and was waiting to eat. She had her appendix removed two days ago and could only have liquids. While Mu Wan had still been away filming, Lin Wei had already been complaining that the hospital’s plain congee tasted awful. The moment Mu Wan got back to Xia City, she dropped off her luggage and went straight to Xu Ji Congee Shop before coming to visit her.
“How are you feeling? Does it still hurt?” Mu Wan asked as she set out the bowl and utensils, then pulled over a chair and sat down.
She had just returned from Wen City. It hadn’t been raining there, and the weather was still warm, so she was wearing only a black T-shirt and white shorts. When she sat down, she crossed her long legs with an easy, lazy grace.
Mu Wan was a little-known actress, the type no one in the entertainment industry really noticed. But she was undeniably beautiful. She had a palm-sized oval face, a delicate chin, vivid red lips, and large dark eyes that were clear and lovely, naturally alluring without seeming overly flirtatious. She was one meter seventy tall, with long legs, a slim waist, full curves, and a slender figure without looking frail.
Her beauty carried a slightly wild edge, the sort of glamorous charm that called to mind old Hong Kong actresses from another era. But there was nothing vulgar about it. She was vivid and striking in a way that still felt refined.
“It only hurts if I pull at the wound,” Lin Wei said, eating her congee carefully because it was still hot. After a few bites, she glanced at Mu Wan, who was looking out the window, lost in thought.
“What are you thinking about?” Lin Wei waved her spoon in front of her face.
The rain outside had softened. Large drops gathered on the edge of the window and rolled down the glass, leaving winding trails behind them, almost like the doctors moving in and out of the emergency room.
“When I was waiting for the elevator just now, I saw a doctor. It looked like he was performing rites for a little boy who had passed away.”
Coming back to herself, Mu Wan told Lin Wei about what she had seen in the emergency room.
Doctors were supposed to save lives. Their work was to keep people alive. Rites for the dead, on the other hand, belonged to those who were already gone. The two things sounded contradictory together. But Lin Wei didn’t look shocked at all. Instead, her eyes lit up.
“Was Doctor Liu really handsome?”
“So you know him? He really is,” Mu Wan said with a smile, thinking back to his face. It had been a quiet kind of beauty, memorable precisely because it wasn’t loud. Especially that one glance when he had looked up at her.
“Doctor Liu Qianxiu from surgery. Nickname: Taoist Liu. He’s basically the emotional support pillar for all the women in Tang’er Hospital.”
A few days ago, Lin Wei had been taken to the emergency by coworkers from her studio, and Liu Qianxiu had been the one who treated her.
At the time, she’d been in so much pain she felt half-dead, but it still somehow turned into love at first sight. The moment she came out of surgery, she had grabbed a nurse’s hand and asked everything there was to ask about him.
“That nickname is pretty special,” Mu Wan said, leaning back in her chair. “Why do they call him that?”
“He’s religious. Taoist, I think. I heard he takes four days off every month to stay at a Taoist temple in retreat. And if there’s a patient in emergency who doesn’t make it, he performs rites for them. But he’s really distant in real life. He barely talks to anyone, barely has any contact with anyone. It’s like he has no worldly desires at all. He feels almost like an immortal.”
Only then did Mu Wan feel like her impression of Liu Qianxiu had settled into place. No wonder there had been something detached and otherworldly about him.
“I guess people devoted to Taoist practice are like that,” she said. “Clear-hearted, detached, quietly cultivating themselves.”
She didn’t continue after that. Talking too much about someone behind their back didn’t feel right. Besides, she had a good impression of Liu Qianxiu. He seemed like someone who had been washed clean somehow, someone unusually pure. As a doctor, he tried to save the living. As a Taoist believer, he offered comfort to the dead. Whether those rites truly meant anything or not, at least they gave the families some peace.
“Still, the name Liu Qianxiu sounds familiar,” Mu Wan said.
Edited by Little Kitty on 19/09/20
