Chapter 7: Chrysalis of Crimson Truth
The porcelain cubicle offered no absolution—merely a chrome serpent spewing polar torrents. Xu Ling wrestled his cephalopod captor beneath the aqueous onslaught, Qiu Zhenzhen's drenched chemise transmuting into spectral lace against marble ramparts. Twin Rubicon streams breached his nasal citadel.
The arctic baptism only stoked her nymph's fervour. She writhed closer, siren-song curves dissolving the last bastions of his restraint. When peony-petal lips sealed his silent protest, chronology dissolved into ambered delirium.
Matutinal light found Xu Ling kneading temples that pulsed with divine retribution. The vacant bed's expanse whispered taunts—only a phantom of jasmine essence clung to ravaged linens. His ocular sweep catalogued the battlefield: silk banners torn asunder, armour of modesty scattered like fallen standard-bearers.
A forensic excavation beneath Egyptian cotton confirmed corporeal reality. He'd plundered the realm's most notorious siren—the paparazzi's darling whose legendary retinue of ephebes fuelled midnight tabloid rituals.
"Might as well have yielded to Shuxiang's vineyard whispers," he rasped, channelling qi through petrified sinew. Rising brought glacial floorboard kisses—
"By Huangdi's fractured skull—!"
He folded like a sundered marionette, clawing at the mattress palisade. Healing meridians flooded his ravaged sacrum, reconstructing temples of flesh and resolve.
"Consumed and then discarded like carnival fare?" He hobbled toward the sanctum, her amateurish ardour's afterimage clinging like spider silk. "Though... technical virtuosity proved superfluous."
The scarlet epistle halted his pilgrimage.
Carmine hieroglyphs blazed across snowfield sheets—a biological testament defaming a decade's worth of gossip-column gospels. Xu Ling collapsed onto the sacrificial altar, mental reels projecting tabloid collages of her alleged conquests.
"The Jade Cicada... an unbroken vessel?" Mirth erupted from his solar plexus—half disbelief, half sacrilegious pride. Celestial irony gilded his morning gall.
His discarded breeches disgorged confections of naiveté. Xu Ling dangled the juvenile lingerie before disbelieving eyes—its embroidered ducklings winking through Chantilly lace.
"Qiu Zhenzhen," he addressed the motel-room void, "what sacrosanct mysteries still fester beneath your courtesan's silks?"
The sanguine sigil blazed its immutable verdict. Beyond smog-stained windows, the cosmos continued embroidering its obscene mandala, warp and weft of purity and decadence forever intertwined.
Harvest of Shattered Illusions
The revelation of Qiu Zhenzhen's untainted essence surviving entertainment's miasmic underworld reverberated through Xu Ling's consciousness like sacred bronze resonances. That quivering nightingale now bore his sigil—an imprint etching unprecedented vulnerability into his ossified heart.
He enshrined the infantile garment within his pocket as a palimpsest of paradox, vowing purgatorial ablutions before restitution. The bedding's vermilion cypher lingered in his peripheral vision, corroding battlements of feigned apathy.
Yesterday's crumpled covenant surrendered its numeric runes. Three truncated peals—then her voice, rasping like wind through barren reeds: "Terminate this charade. Forty thousand silvers suffices as recompense."
The strangled whimper underpinning her glacial diction liquefied his resolve. "Zhenzhen, permit me—"
"Preserve antiquated gallantries," she interrupted with fractured mirth. "I'll cleave solely to Eros' anointed. Entomb this interlude, phantom."
The disconnection tone jeered at his petrified grasp. Subsequent entreaties met digital oblivion—expunged from her empyrean ledger.
Morning's odyssey through brume-shrouded foothills proffered meagre balm. Peasants converged like carrion fowl scenting bounty:
"Ling-sprout! Your patriarch's boasts of saplings reached our ears!"
"Twenty mu of terraces demand planting hands, aye?"
"This crone craves the nurseryman's confidences—those slips reek of opulence!"
Xu Ling navigated the cacophony with sepulchral courtesy. At his ancestral gate, the freight handler—tunic translucent with labour's baptism—rebuffed elder Xu Wenhai's aid. This proletarian nobility pierced Xu Ling's melancholic veil.
"Allow intervention."
Harnessing meridians, he shouldered quadruple sapling sheaves. The gawping throng buzzed approbation—here stood their prodigal son, Herculean yet ever benevolent.
"Mobilise!" Headman Xu Dong thundered. Agrarian hordes descended upon the waggon like locusts upon golden millet.
Appreciation materialised as Jade West smoke bundles—indulgences surpassing these gnarled digits' mundane indulgences. Sycophants slithered close, only to shrivel beneath Xu Ling's permafrost gaze.
"Robust lineage, these." Xu Wenhai's fissured fingertips caressed root clusters. "Stout taproots, humus-rich swaddling—nurserycraft of distinction."
Xu Ling inclined his head, vision tracing the eastern slope where auroral rays gilded embryonic orchards. Amidst nurturing arboreal progeny and reconstructing fragmented icons, absolution's seedlings might yet take root. The soil, at least, required no labyrinthine oaths—merely saltwater alchemy and cyclical faith.
Fertile Grounds and Bitter Roots
Xu Wenhai's earth-grooved palms had long since scrutinised the saplings' rhizomes. "Superior cultivars", he acknowledged, "though their procurement must have drained your coffers dry." His furrowed brow resembled terraced fields. "Yet where shall these tender roots take hold? Left exposed, their vitality will wither within days."
Village Chieftain Xu Fengchun emerged through the throng, his conical hat casting a scythe-shaped shadow. "Ten mu's bounty of saplings, Young Ling. Your ancestral acres cannot digest such abundance."
Peasants craned their sun-baked necks like famished locusts, coveting either arboricultural wisdom or clandestine claims upon these juvenile treasures.
Xu Ling's throat-clearing silenced the swarm. "I propose ten mu leased at one thousand silver per annum. Let covenants be sealed with willing partners."
The sapling-bearers surged forth like bamboo after monsoon rains. Here lay emancipation from their two-mu fetters—paltry plots that chained them to meagre harvests while urban fortunes glimmered beyond reach. Eight mu pledges sprouted instantly, visions of metropolitan wages unfurling like lotus blooms.
"Remaining allotments?" Xu Ling's gaze swept the gathering. Profiteers receded like drought-stricken streams, their avaricious stares lingering on the seedling hillock. Third Uncle's milky eyes computed nocturnal plunder—what consequence could one purloined slip incur?
The delivery acolyte proffered invoices with unctuous deference. Three hundred saplings tallied at nine thousand yuan—algebra of aspiration. As the puttering tractor vanished in ochre clouds, Xu Ling addressed his reluctant kinsmen:
"Perhaps adjacent hamlets might lease their barren stretches?" Third Uncle insinuated, his voice slick as lard.
Chieftain Fengchun's staff struck stone. "To the council chamber! Let pacts be inscribed ere midday zenith."
Their procession through sun-scorched lanes morphed into allegorical theatre. "Our village starves while you sow gilded groves," Fengchun orated. "Let ancestral bonds temper future prosperity."
Xu Dahai—Third Uncle's buffalo-shouldered progeny—grunted. "Certain roots asphyxiate more than nurture." His fealty hung tangible, a counterpoise to paternal venality.
Lingering at the retinue's rear, Xu Ling permitted malefactors proximity—their envious susurrations nourishing his fortitude. Let them observe meticulous husbandry. Let their toxic stratagems perish before true cultivation. The soil craved more than petty larceny; it thirsted for revelation.
The Contract Witness
Though devoid of scholarly pursuits, every villager possessed an uncanny mastery of personal accounting. Xu Ling understood that communal prosperity could only bloom after aligning these individual calculators into harmonious arithmetic.
The delegation soon convened at the council hall where Chief Xu Wenhai, his calloused hands moving with bureaucratic precision, draughted multiple contracts. "Let these inked covenants bear testimony!" his voice boomed across weathered beams. "Tiezhu and company shall lease their plots to Lingzi for three cycles of harvest. Annual tribute shall flow punctually as the river in monsoon – the entire commune shall attest!"
A susurrus of compliance swept through the assembly, though certain spectators elongated their necks like carrion birds eyeing wounded prey. Their derision hung thick – the Xu household's threadbare existence since the patriarch's ailment was common knowledge. Eight mu demanded eight thousand annual silver. How could this scholarly castaway-turned-rustic-apothecary conjure such sums?
The leaseholders clutched their parchment with pilgrim's fervour, seeing not inked characters but urban skyline visions. Xu Ling perused the signed folios, then cast his line into murmuring waters: "Orchard stewards shall harvest one thousand silver monthly per mu."
The revelation erupted in incredulous whispers.
"Lunar-cycle wages surpassing solar-cycle yields? The boy's humours are unbalanced!"
"Empty granary boasts!"
"Envious tongues! County magistrates' favour shines upon him..."
Xu Dahai surged forward, oculars widened like bronze dou vessels. "This thousand-per-mu alchemy – truth or tavern tales?"
"Wages shall materialize with the midmonth moon's fullness," Xu Ling affirmed. "No celestial delays."
Before dissent could crystallize, Third Uncle's gnarled digits seized his progeny's auricle in vice-like torsion. "Dolt! This pauper's coffers couldn't yield four thousand monthly dust! Your uncle's construction battalion offers thrice-fold bronze!"
The assembly became a breathless tribunal awaiting an oracular response.
It was Xu Dong who shattered the silence, calloused palms kneading his nape. "Young Ling... should this prove true..." The patriarch of three ducklings grinned like bashful carp. "Our ancestral two mu... perhaps..." His voice trailed into hopeful silence. "Let our household be the proving ground!"
Wrenching free from paternal torment, Dahai roared with convert's zeal: "Two mu! My woman's labour! Four thousand monthly! I pledge fealty to Ling's banner!"
The sceptical congregation now thrummed like a disturbed apiary, mental abacuses clicking behind squinted eyes as golden arithmetic bloomed in every imagination.
Blossoms of Trust Amidst Thorns of Doubt
Xu Dong and Xu Dahai—the village's scarce bearers of junior academia—emerged as lynchpins in this agrarian revolution. Their decisive allegiance to Xu Ling's vision melted the reservations of three burly sceptics, forging an embryonic coalition. The hamlet thrummed with polarised discord, spectators cleaving into factions of derisive vultures and tremulous believers.
With hierophantic calm, Xu Ling catalogued each doubting visage before shepherding his nascent disciples toward the derelict orchard. The gnarled apple trees stood as arboreal pariahs, their once-cherished fruits having glutted both market stalls and communal patience. "Uproot these decaying sentinels," he decreed, surveying the blighted terrain with alchemist's eyes. "Our saplings shall drink from rejuvenated earth." His gaze sought telltale moss patterns betraying hidden wells—conduits for his arcane elixirs.
The crunch of desiccated leaves heralded Madam Liu's approach, her sable sheath dress undulating like midnight oil across sun-burnished limbs. "Dearest Ling," she cooed through demurely fluttering lashes, "this widow's orchard sprawls beyond solitary stewardship..." Her trailing cadence carried the musk of prior midnight confessions.
Madam Wang's strangled exclamation shattered pastoral pretence. "Your flesh bears strange constellations!" The assembly stilled as sunbeams illuminated Xu Ling's throat—a celestial map of amethyst nebulas. Village elders clucked about chigger infestations and miasmic humours while younger wives tittered behind calloused palms.
"Moonlit trysts with winged succubi, perhaps?" Madam Liu's barbed interjection hung suspended, her wounded gaze belying the jest. The compact mirror she thrust forward became a confessional booth, reflecting not merely dermal blemishes but hotel-room transgressions. Xu Ling's complexion mirrored persimmon flesh at harvest—memories of adolescent peach-theft shame rekindled.
"Air your linens beneath solar judgement," Madam Liu relented, her magnanimity laced with rue. Beyond the throng, Old Liu Dagou's phlegmatic snort carried ancestral cynicism. "August-sown saplings?" he rasped. "Five winters' wait for fruition? The boy will greet creditors bare-arsed ere the first blossom."
Yet as the condemned boughs creaked their elegy, Xu Ling's fingertips caressed embryonic leaves softer than bridal veils. Let scepticism fester. Let derision bloom. These tender shoots would drink not merely well water and sunlight, but the collective hunger of a people yearning for metamorphosis—their roots destined to bind earth and ambition into indissoluble unity.
Lunar Crucible and the Widow's Imprint
Liu Dagou's ocular daggers carved invisible scars across the simpering women orbiting Xu Ling's sphere. Xu Dong's and Dahai's visages joined his mental catalogue of vendettas—their future harvests already condemned to suffocate beneath his vindictive pricing schemes.
The assembly remained oblivious to this festering rancour, their attention monopolised by Xu Ling's payroll pledges. The earlier hickey scandal dissipated like morning mist beneath collaborative fervour—apple carcasses surrendered to spades as coin's golden alchemy worked miracles. Dusk's first breath witnessed eleven acres baptized with infant saplings.
Midnight's obsidian veil descended, pierced only by watchdogs' sporadic sonnets. Xu Ling emerged beneath the ancient elm's argentine choreography, his meridians thrumming with post-meditative vitality. The clinic door's arthritic creak admitted moonlight to his alchemical theatre.
For hours, mortar and pestle performed lunar rites, transmuting herbs into viridescent broth. His submerged palm catalyzed metamorphosis—murky liquid brightening to celadon radiance under qi's caress. A widow's stifled sob fractured the trance.
Liu Shuxiang's courtyard tableau arrested him: moonlit décolletage spilling from surrendered straps, tear tracks glistening on alabaster slopes. "Persecution pursues this husbandless wraith," she keened into his tunic, saline anguish permeating the fabric. Canine choruses swelled in macabre accompaniment.
Clinic lamplight unveiled the atrocity—a hand-shaped constellation swelling her left cheek. Her modesty-restoring manoeuvres kindled paradoxical regret as ebony silk reinterred pearlescent revelations.
"Name the architect of this disgrace." His whisper carried a bladesmith's edge, fingertips grazing the wounded topography. Beyond the window, the elixir vat pulsed with jadeine luminescence—its purpose expanding beyond agrarian salvation.
From shadowed alleys, Liu Dagou's hyena chuckle merged with the clinic clock's sepulchral tolling. The slumbering village remained ignorant of impending conflagrations—wars to be waged not in orchards but in ledgers, not with spades but through the perilous alchemy binding a widow's vulnerability to a healer's awakening fury.
Silhouettes of Deceit and Lunar Confessions
Liu Shuxiang's porcelain composure fissured beneath Xu Ling's interrogative gaze. "Depart," she implored, her whisper laced with crepuscular fragility. "Starlit isolation incubates venomous gossip." Tremulous palms banished him into the frosted courtyard's embrace.
"Unmask your aggressor," Xu Ling commanded, syllables glacially honed. The village's celadon widow—benefactress to his family's famine years—now demanded crimson recompense.
"A nocturnal misstep", her deceit dissolved into darkness as the oil lamp's amber nimbus expired, entombing both contusion and unspeakable chronicles.
Xu Ling consecrated the predawn hours anointing saplings with mystic tinctures until auroral incandescence gilded the orchard. His return pilgrimage collided with escalating bedlam—villagers clustered like panicked plovers, their dirges intertwining with renewed canine fanfares.
Wang Huifen's staccato assault on his chamber door shattered residual drowsiness. "Marauders defiled our night! Inspect your apothecary!" Her admonition concluded with an afterthought—"Madam" Liu's sanctum too was violated."
The disclosure petrified Xu Ling mid-stride. Recollections of Shuxiang's dishevelled midnight tableau coalesced into tangible suspicion. At her threshold, he encountered Chief Xu Fenchun presiding over a tribunal of plundered households beneath accusatory glares.
"Our noctivigant witnessed your sylvan vigil," the chief stammered, ocular focus skittering. "Did… phantasmal shapes trespass your awareness?"
Xu Ling's scrutiny decrypted Shuxiang's artfully averted countenance—the erased oedema on her cheekbone a masterful subterfuge. "Sleeplessness compelled agrarian stewardship," he deflected. "No shadowy figures crossed my purview."
The impasse ruptured with Xu Dong's thunderous advent. "Four thousand evanesced!" he bellowed, calloused fists cratering the oaken table. "Our sapling stipend—obliterated! We require magisterial intervention!"
Chief Fenchun languished beneath twin onslaughts—communal suspicion's smoulder and Xu Ling's silent hermeneutic gaze. Beyond the human theatrics, the sanctified saplings stretched infant leaves toward tainted dawnlight, their roots imbibing mysteries far profounder than pilfered lucre.
Celadon Betrayals and the Widow's Calculus
In this hinterland where two thousand silver coins might nourish a clan through twin winters, Liu Shuxiang's lacquered composure revealed fissures—tear-swollen eyes betraying seismic anxieties beneath. The congregation remained oblivious to this tectonic shift, save Xu Ling, whose gaze functioned as a human divining rod, detecting subterranean tremors of deceit.
"Xu Dong and Dahai's counsel prevails," Xu Ling proclaimed, each syllable a chisel striking judicial marble. "Forty-eight hours for contrition's bloom. Then—gendarmerie intervention." His edict wove invisible armour around fractured resolves, steadying communal psyche where the chief's milquetoast diplomacy had faltered.
As the tribunal dissolved, the courtyard transformed into intimacy's arena. Xu Ling positioned himself opposite the widow like a grandmaster confronting a renegade chess piece. "The marauder's identity rests upon your tongue," he asserted, eschewing interrogative syntax.
Shuxiang's throat contracted before disgorging truth's bitter phlegm. "Wu Tiedan… pilfered coin… and captured phantoms." Her confession carried the gravitas of lynched virtue. "Nocturnal silken… tableaux."
The disclosure ignited conflagrations in Xu Ling's chest—incendiary wrath interlaced with perverse mirth. "Terrorized by constabulary perusing these… keepsakes?"
Her alabaster extremity lashed outward, delivering reprimand softer than a peony's caress. "Deride my impending infamy?" Carmine's lips quivered. "These purloined phantasmagoria would render me a communal leper!"
"Serenity, nephrite sister." Xu Ling ensnared her rebellious ankle, thermal energy permeating homespun fabric. "This transgression I shall annihilate."
Shuxiang's tear-stippled visage metamorphosed into perilous allure. "Triumph", she intoned, satin-sheathed digits charting his femoral topography, "and your recompense shall transcend carnal cartography."
The vow hovered like peach flesh at overripeness' precipice. Xu Ling's mounting fury toward Wu's violation duelled with the widow's jasmine-scented adjacency. As he mobilised for departure, her olfactory aura engulfed him—night-blooming epiphyte mingled with saline vulnerability.
Their labia oris collided in ionic embrace, her oscillating mouth imprinting gratitudes and latent starvation. Xu Ling's palms discovered her cypress-waist, societal pretense disintegrating—
The courtyard portal detonated inward.
Shuxiang recoiled like an albino crane startled mid-migration, her lunar pallor mirroring the intruder's jagged silhouette. Wu Tiedan's Dionysian entrance reeked of sorghum spirits and foiled stratagems, his ham-fist brandishing Polaroid rectangles that fluttered like indictment-winged lepidoptera.
"Conspiring retribution, jade vixen?" He gutturated, nicotine-stained dentition gnashing. "Your herbalist paramour cannot salvage this blighted yield!"
Xu Ling's phalanges morphed into agrarian armaments—calloused from terracotta tillage, now honed for stygian husbandry. The photographic evidence flaunted its venom: Shuxiang's crepuscular fragility petrified in celluloid purgatory.
As matinal rays commenced their second soliloquy, the orchard's consecrated saplings quivered in empathic zephyr. Their custodian's crusade had transcended irrigation and fiscal ledgers—now waged through the alchemy of compromised virtue and a widow's calculated desperation.
Duality in the Chasm's Embrace
"Physician Ling! Urban maidens lie ensnared in the hinterland crevasse!" Xu Dong's eruption into the courtyard tore through lingering tensions, his calloused grip hauling Xu Ling toward perilous slopes. Liu Shuxiang's mortification dissolved into trailing footsteps as the trio ascended serpentine trails.
"Twin blossoms—one slumbering in death's antechamber, one muted by terror's paralysis," Xu Dong rasped between laboured breaths. "Da Zhuang's swine forage unveiled their plight—moments from becoming carrion."
Xu Ling's herbalist-honed instincts charted the familiar terrain. They breached a throng of gawkers encircling a three-meter maw in the earth. Below sprawled doppelgänger sisters—alabaster complexions marred by loam, their technical hiking garb shredded like moth-eaten silk. The conscious twin shielded her insensate mirror image with feral protectiveness, a snow leopard guarding its dying cub.
"The silent wraith uttered not one plea," Da Zhuang marvelled, tobacco-stained fingers gesturing. "Celestial vases fractured by mortal clumsiness!"
Villagers wove speculative tapestries of misfortune yet recoiled from intervention—ancestral memories of boar-tusk eviscerations binding their limbs.
Disdain curdling his throat, Xu Ling vaulted into the geological prison sans harness. The conscious twin recoiled, obsidian irises dilating as her spine met earthen walls.
"Salvation's architect stands before you," Xu Ling intoned, his resonance slicing through panic's fog. Her trembling digits mapped air-current hieroglyphs above her sister's contorted anatomy.
"Compound fractures. Thoracic displacement." His prognosis sent seismic ripples through the peanut gallery. "Manual realignment necessitates epidermal contact."
The twin's ocular pilgrimage traversed his steady metacarpals to her sister's waxen visage. After eons compressed into heartbeats, her chin dipped—a monarch's imperceptible nod.
Xu Ling's fingers breached the unconscious girl's soiled outer layers, navigating osseous cartography with a tactile cartographer's precision. The mob detonated.
"Defiler of Hippocratic vows!"
"Medical theatre masking concupiscence!"
The conscious twin's glare sharpened into stiletto blades, her mute condemnation silencing detractors more effectively than thunderclaps. Xu Ling's digits maintained clinical cadence, manipulating ribcage architecture with qi-charged precision. The comatose girl's eyelids rippled—chrysalides stirring before dawn emergence.
Aloft, Liu Shuxiang's scrutiny dissected the tableau, her earlier humiliation supplanted by forensic curiosity. The twins' patrician deportment and arcane outdoor accoutrements whispered of metropolitan intrigues far exceeding rural melodramas. As Xu Ling elevated the reviving sylph toward waiting hands, her silent counterpart pressed a quivering palm against his sternum—a tactile oath destined to shatter meticulously crafted façades.
Vermilion Dilemma – The Physician's Crucible
The villagers' covetous whispers eddied above the geological maw—here bloomed a healer's sanctioned transgressions, privileges for which lesser men would barter their souls. The twins' alabaster countenances eclipsed even Liu Shuxiang's celebrated charms, their marmoreal features exuding metropolitan sophistication that rendered rural allure provincial by comparison.
Xu Ling's digital cartography mapped the insensate twin's osseous labyrinth, his respiration stalling at the calamitous disarrangement. A vagrant rib hovered at the precipice of pleural violation—had Sol delayed its ascent by mere hours, this human magnolia would have expired in a sanguineous deluge.
"Pyrexia's conflagration consumes her," he intoned, retracting his palm from her febrile temple. Providence manifested through Liu Shuxiang's clarion cry from above, her trembling digits lowering his ancestral medicament chest—its cracked leather etched with Xu Wenhai's decades of healing chronicles.
"Linen bindings! Argent acupuncture filaments! Hemp cords!" Xu Ling commanded, intercepting the descending trove. Conservation of spiritual reserves emerged paramount—this osteological enigma required horological precision over thaumaturgical expenditure.
The conscious twin's silent vigil intensified as Xu Ling orchestrated skeletal realignment with chronometer exactness. His manual symphony halted at the inevitable juncture—the art of needlework mandated epidermal revelation. Before him yawned the Galenic conundrum: safeguard maidenly virtue or sanctify biological imperatives?
Bedlam erupted aloft. Peasantry dispersed like startled francolins, abandoning the chasm's brink to Liu Shuxiang's ululations and Xu Dong's stentorian warnings. "Egress! The pachyderm tide approaches!"
Telluric vibrations crescendoed into rhythmic cataclysm—titanic boar phalanxes advancing through nubilous dawnlight. Xu Dong's polymer lifeline serpentined into the abyss as Liu Shuxiang's tear-salt seasoned the morning air. The mute twin's grasp on Xu Ling's radial artery intensified—a voiceless adjuration more compelling than carnal shackles.
"Abscond!" Liu Shuxiang's ululation pierced the cacophony. "Behemoths' ivories have felled titans!"
Xu Ling's ocular sweep encompassed the dual enigmas—one blazing with septic pyre, one incandescent with taciturn fortitude. His phalanges embraced the medicinal reliquary. Millennia of ancestral erudition resonated through his jingluo pathways: the true physician's amphitheatre resides where thanatos waltzes with ethos, not within comfort's cowardly embrace.
"Withdraw!" he thundered at the widow and Xu Dong. "I shall parley with this tempest."
As the primal boar's rhinarium breached the chasm's periphery, Xu Ling unsheathed argent filigrees radiating numinous bioluminescence. The mute twin's oscillating digits initiated the disrobing ritual—her sister's soiled bodice parting like theatre curtains to reveal mortality's vulnerable stage. Above, the bestial thunder attained eschatological zenith.
Bestial Epilogue and the Healer's Resolve
"Xu Dong—escort Madam Liu to sanctuary!" Xu Ling's command resonated with meridian-forged authority, vibrating the atmosphere with sovereign urgency. The addressed man convulsed as though electroshocked, gathering Liu Shuxiang into compulsory evacuation.
Solitary now with the twins and twin brutes, Xu Ling ascended the synthetic tether with qinggong elegance. Two porcine leviathans materialized through crepuscular haze—their onyx quills gleaming like chitinous plates, curved tusks mimicking Damascus steel falchions.
The alpha colossus surged forward, a quarter-tonne juggernaut of atavistic wrath. Xu Ling's esoteric energy reserves coalesced within his palmar spheres, radiating ectoplasmic phosphorescence. At lethal proximity, he executed a corkscrew vault over the beast's armoured crown, phalanges ensnaring sabre-like ivory protrusions. Kinetic alchemy transformed momentum into counteroffensive as he cartwheeled across the thrashing mass.
Infuriated, the boar pivoted—its suidae optics blazing with genocidal fervour. Concurrently, its counterpart orbited the geological fissure, rhinarium aquiver above the twins' defenceless aroma.
Xu Ling's palmar detonation against the alpha's cervical crux unleashed a primordial death knell. Vermilion tributaries cascaded from the creature's gnashing maw as its tectonic bulk imploded, thanatotic reverberations shaking the loam.
The surviving brute abandoned its abyssal surveillance, charging with bereavement-fuelled frenzy. Xu Ling's exhausted jingluo channels shrieked rebellion as he conscripted terminal energy reserves. A balletic sidestep foiled the initial onslaught; his strike located identical fatal topography.
Both titans lay entombed in final stillness. Xu Ling folded against the humid terrain, perspiration-sodden garments adhering like epidermal membranes. Celestial rays filtered through cinnamon bark foliage in mottled elegy.
Post-terpsichorean respiration spanning thirty circadian increments, he stirred—myofibrils keening with metabolic retribution. From the chthonic depths, the mute twin's optical entreaties penetrated crepuscular shadows, her vigil persisting unbroken.
Xu Ling serpentined toward the precipice, intercepting her gaze. "The prologue of survival concludes," he croaked. "Now commences the renaissance through steel and sinew."
The comatose twin's febrile corpus awaited—an anatomical fresco demanding his needlepoint virtuosity, her maidenly modesty poised for iatric immolation. Beyond the sanguine arena, ancestral phantoms inclined in silent ratification. The physician's odyssey is cobbled not with compromise but crucibles that brand both saviour and saved.
Aureate Filaments and Silent Revelations
"Physician, do you endure?" The chasm's whispered entreaty roused Xu Ling. He summoned Herculean resolve to elevate his mercury-weighted limbs, each movement defying terrestrial oppression.
Within the geological crucible, the conscious twin's apprehension materialized as ocular tempests, her chronic anthropophobia stifling verbal articulation. Xu Ling genuflected beside the comatose doppelgänger, their provisional seclusion—a paradoxical boon born of villagers' frenetic exodus—now a sanctuary fraught with peril.
"Garments must yield for antipyretic needlecraft," he proclaimed, intercepting the reticent twin's gaze. To his astonishment, she orchestrated her sibling's disrobing with surgical exactitude, artfully arranging fabric across intimate cartography.
Argent quills penetrated Quchi and Hegu meridians, their tremulous forms conducting Xu Ling's depleted qi into the patient's jingluo network. The mute twin observed, fascination and trepidation entwined, as Xu Ling extracted a gossamer golden filament from his arcane repository.
"Does this auric enigma beguile?" Xu Ling queried, noting my mydriatic pupils. Contravening expectations, she inclined her crown—a tectonic concession from this human sphinx.
The aureate needle, pliant as arachnid silk, breached Baihui's sacred locus through Xu Ling's qi-guided virtuosity. His digital pressure upon her sister's phalangeal extremity elicited onyx pearls of corrupted sanguine fluid. Ten digits purged their venom into humic earth until ebony rivulets transmuted to cardinal brilliance.
Aloft, peasant cacophony swelled—not in humanitarian concern, but in rapacious marvelling at dual porcine carcasses. Xu Ling restored the patient's vestments as nascent vitality animated her phalangeal tremors.
When the comatose twin's cilia fluttered like noctuid wings greeting Eos, her silent counterpart's manus grazed Xu Ling's antebrachium—a contact more ethereal than descending sakura petals yet weightier than blood oaths. Beyond their telluric sanctum, carnal avarice clamoured while true apotheosis unfolded in sacrosanct silence.
The reanimated twin's gaze ensnared her saviour, pupils expanding with neonatal cognisance. In that suspended chronon, triune truths manifested: Xu Ling's enervation could humble Himalayas; the mute sister's inquisitiveness had discovered its polestar; and these metropolitan orchids harboured arcana far more perilous than any boar's ivory dagger.
The Bargain of Salvation and Incipient Storm
"Young Ling! Divine mercy preserves you!" Liu Shuxiang's tremulous voice cascaded into the chasm, her gaze drinking in Xu Ling's ashen visage and the twins' improbable wholeness.
Her inhalation caught at the dual porcine carcasses nearby. "What titanic force felled these brutes? We'll retrieve you posthaste!" Xu Dong stood petrified before the suidae remains, his psyche reeling at the cervical concavities—anthropomorphic sigils stamped into keratinous armour where steel would have failed.
Peasants converged like necrophagous insects, their discourse oscillating between dismemberment techniques. "Xu Dong! Cease your bovine stupor!" Liu Shuxiang's admonition shattered the paralysis. "Vitality supersedes carrion!"
The throng turned grudgingly chthonicward. "Ling, ensnared in his own demesne?" Xu Dahai's derisive snort echoed. "These slopes course through his veins more than familial bonds!"
"Cease prattling!" Liu Shuxiang's knuckles blanched. "The woods pulse with impending bestial wrath!"
Xu Ling's gravelled proclamation ascended: "Extricate us, and claim these beasts as gratuity."
The proposition detonated like New Year's firecrackers. Fourteen rustics transformed into zealous sappers, spades gnawing earth to forge a telluric ascent. Xu Ling slumped against the lithic prison, his depleted jingluo channels aquiver—each fleeting moment now gambled with mortality.
As humus precipitation intensified, he turned to assess his patient's fever. Viridian conflagration met his gaze—the reanimated twin's ocular inferno blazing with primal suspicion. Her protective embrace tightened around the mute sibling, digits morphing into avian talons.
"You…" Her contralto vibrated with metropolitan condescension, "…transgress boundaries, agrarian medicaster."
Aloft, the inaugural spade breached the chasm's lip. Below, Xu Ling confronted a novel adversary—homo sapiens sapiens, wounded and exponentially more perilous than any forest denizen. The twins' urban lineage now exuded warning pheromones, their indebtedness eclipsed by some unspoken civic covenant he'd desecrated.
Liu Shuxiang's outreached manus petrified mid-gesture, antennae sensing the ionized atmosphere. In this crystalline chronon, tripartite wars raged: peasantry versus geology, physician versus enervation, and now polis versus pagus in a collision of wounded hubris.
Hubris' Labyrinth and the Healer's Final Gambit
"Consciousness returns. Does agony persist?" Xu Ling veiled astonishment at the twins' antipodal dispositions beneath professional composure.
"Your hand arranged these wooden fetters?" Li Ruoxue's cryogenic timbre dripped ophidian contempt. The placid twin, Li Ruoya, unleashed urgent susurrations into her sister's auricle, digits fluttering like caged columbidae.
"I am Li Ruoxue; this is Li Ruoya. Appreciation for your meddling." The admission emerged hoarfrost-brittle. Her beryl optics hardened. "Yet your trespass upon my corporal sanctity necessitates recompense."
Xu Ling observed Ruoya's anguished pantomime, awed by nature's whimsy—homologous vessels containing flame and rill. This human habanero ought to be christened Ruolajiao, he reflected.
Retiring to the lithic enclosure's antipode, Xu Ling assumed dhyana asana, harvesting residual qi. Aloft, rustics metamorphosed into myrmidon zealots, their telluric causeway materializing with unprecedented celerity.
Liu Shuxiang descended, oscillating digits grazing Xu Ling's alabaster jawline. "Bodily integrity preserved?" Her décolletage undulated with post-traumatic palpitations.
"Unbreached", Xu Ling murmured, affection blooming at her solicitude—until Ruoxue's scornful ejaculation ruptured the interlude.
Males! Homogenous purveyors of worthlessness!
The completed incline gaped like Charon's invitation. Xu Ling advanced upon the recalcitrant convalescent. "Shall I function as your sedan?"
"Proximity to Y-chromosome carriers induces histaminic cataclysm," Ruoxue hissed. Ruoya's gesticulations escalated to frantic semaphore.
"Then sup on mortality's nectar," Xu Ling retorted, forbearance evaporating. "Suidae savour obstinate viands."
Xu Dong interposed with bucolic pragmatism: "Damsel, fractured costae reject pride's crutches."
Ruoxue's palpebral shutters descended—a portcullis against logos.
"Villageward!" Xu Ling commanded, pivoting sharply. "Let sylvan jaws claim their intractable trophy."
As peasants elevated boar carcasses onto makeshift biers, Ruoya's lacrimal gaze oscillated betwixt sibling and retreating saviour. The arboreal realm suspended respiration—would urban hubris capitulate to Darwinian imperative, or had this salvation birthed an adversary surpassing all suid ferocity?
Hubris' Eclipse and the Serpent's Covenant
The villagers' receding silhouettes dissolved into arboreal shadows, their mirth carrying haematoid resonance. Liu Shuxiang lingered, her porcine allotment lying like a penitential tribute. "Do we truly forsake them?" Her whisper quivered with matriarchal pathos.
Xu Ling's peripheral perception captured Li Ruoxue's alabaster throat arcing skyward—an arrogant cygnet straining toward judgement. "Sylvan law favours survivalist calculus over histrionics," he proclaimed with calibrated projection. "Let us feast on caramelised ribs while Selene purges obstinate ossuaries."
Xu Dong hefted his carnivorous bounty with theatrical gusto. "My consort's mammaries yearn for porcine consommé! Let fools sustain hubris with quercine pap!"
Their retreating footfalls crunched through sclerotic foliage with performative lethargy. Below, doppelgänger shadows elongated across the lithic abyss as crepuscular hues stained the firmament.
The shriek detonated with fulminous suddenness—primaeval, unhinged, reverberating through ancient cryptomerias. "OPHIDIAN! SPECTRE IN THE STRATA!"
Xu Ling's plummet into the chasm defied exhausted meridians. His palm stifled Ruoxue's terror, her labial flames searing his keratinised epidermis like apocryphal scripture. "Your daemon cry beckons greater perils," he growled, nares flaring at approaching telluric resonance—not serpentine, but suidian.
Ruoya coalesced with her sibling; their previous dichotomy dissolved into symbiotic trepidation. Xu Ling's limbs enmeshed both women instinctively, their metropolitan essence clashing with his sudoriferous tunic. "Ascend!" He propelled Ruoxue onto the humic incline, her erstwhile bravado fragmented by nature's impartial ferocity.
As Liu Shuxiang extracted the twins, Xu Ling pirouetted toward the encroaching thunder. His sanguineous palms reignited dormant jingluo pathways—a temerarious qi surge inducing erythropsia.
The alpha boar materialized as Nyx's harbinger, ivories gleaming like osseous falchions. Its sounder materialized behind—twelve chthonic juggernauts oscillating between corporeality and umbra.
Xu Ling's cachinnation startled even his own psyche—a sanitor's madrigal echoing through the canyon. "You've bartered one vanity for another, Dame Li," he vociferated, phalanges coiling around a fractured spade haft. "Let us assay whose intransigence greets dawn!"
The inaugural charge seismized the terrain. Xu Ling's improvised hasta found its mark through ancestral muscle memory—a thanatotic thrust honed through generations of agrarian Darwinism. As the brute collapsed, its vital ichor consecrated the physician's latest amphitheatre: metropolitan hubris versus rusticated exigency, both commingling in humic assimilation.
Vermilion Capitulation and the Ophidian's Adieu
Xu Ling abraded his palm against her deltoid with theatrical fastidiousness, digits shimmering with her trepidation's leavings. "Condolences—I've cultivated anaphylaxis toward refractory cases."
His pivot toward the humic incline carried choreographed indifference, each step calibrated to pulverize metropolitan hauteur.
"You bear the physician's mantle!" Li Ruoxue's exclamation fractured like celadon shards. "We pulse with vita—"
Xu Ling's faltering gait betrayed him. Her ocular spheres—moments prior incandescent with homicidal pyre—now brimmed with aqueous supplication. The dichotomy breached his Asclepian carapace.
"Noncompliant subjects receive no succour." His snarl lacked tonicity.
Ruoxue's incisors penetrated lingual flesh, ferric tides inundating her palate. Survivalist imperative superseded decadal gynocratic catechism. "My… miscalculation," she strangled through occluded dentition, the confession asphyxiating her larynx.
"Obscured gibberish," Xu Ling riposted sans clemency. "Viperine toxins inducing logorrhoea?"
Cinnabar suffused Ruoxue's magnolia complexion. "Mea culpa!" she ululated toward the crepuscular vault. "Satiated, you Hippocratic sadist?"
Xu Ling's obstinacy eroded. "Encircle my cervical vertebrae," he ordained, inclining to enmesh her fractured superciliousness and costal lattice.
Ruoxue's carotid percussion detonated against his clavicular bastions—treasonous myocardium defying her adamantine misandry. She compressed her orbits, mentally notarizing divorce decrees from her insurgent biology.
Ruoya's mitigated exhalation misted the gelid atmosphere—until a tessellated serpent struck from lithic interstices. The stifled cri de coeur escaped her labial portals, more injured passerine than anthropoid vocalization.
Xu Ling petrified mid-ambulation, Ruoxue's abrupt laryngeal constriction nearly reinstating their prior medical crisis. "Your sibling necessitates intervention," he rasped, depositing Ruoxue with paradoxical tenderness.
The senior Li scion adhered like phascolarctos to antipodean flora, her erstwhile braggadocio liquefying into vibrational cognisance of rural actuality's incisors. As Xu Ling genuflected to examine Ruoya's perforated sural region, the nemoral expanse pronounced judgement: metropolitan aegis proved diaphanous against natura's nonpartisan pedagogy.
The ophidian's deltoid cranium oscillated in sardonic valediction before dematerializing into plutonic penumbras—nature's impeccable litigator departing solely dual puncture sigils and pulverized urban pretensions as evidence.
To be continuous…