Chapter 8: Toxins and Tenets—The Healer's Paradox
"Relinquish your grip—your sister's been poisoned!" Xu Ling's voice grated, his exhalations mingling with Ruoxue's frantic breaths. The urban tempest who'd earlier recoiled from masculine proximity now adhered like clematis, her jasmine essence cloying in the crepuscular gloam.
Ruoxue recoiled as though scorched, her gaze darting to Ruoya's tumescent extremity. "Does she convulse? Wretch? Must we ligate—"
Xu Ling's calloused palm stifled her anew, abrasive ridges grazing lips of unanticipated softness. "Your dissonance accelerates mortality."
When Ruoxue's incisors snapped at his retreating hand, meeting only her own traitorous lingua, the resultant whimper bore more wounded hauteur than somatic distress. Xu Ling redirected focus to the afflicted sural region—a Parian sculpture desecrated by livid marbling.
The limb's perfection arrested him: a logarithmic curvature worthy of Bernoulli's study, epidermis luminous as xuan paper beneath the hunter's moon. Even the dual fang marks appeared sacrilegious—nature's defacement of its own magnum opus.
"*Agkistrodon halys* venom—neurotoxic and hematolytic," he intoned, labia descending toward the tainted dermis.
Ruoya's inhalation fluttered like captive Fringillidae wings. Her amah's admonitions reverberated through the miasma: *a maiden's cutis is her sanctum; its profanation necessitates nuptial restitution.
Ruoxue's alder switch whistled toward Xu Ling's spinal column. "Cease this desecration!"
"Court her demise?" Xu Ling's fulmination petrified the descending rod mid-arc. "This toxin annihilates swifter than your nescience!"
Liu Shuxiang observed from penumbral depths, her unguis engraving selenic crescents into her palms. The physician's labial suction upon that alabaster integument ignited a vitriolic effervescence beneath her sternum—a sensation she recognized as envy's primordial germination.
Xu Dong's caution perished unvoiced as Xu Ling expectorated onyx ichor onto bryophytic tapestry. Each ejection hazarded perils no urbanite could comprehend—mucosal permeation, latent caries, and Thanatos' osculum latent in any inadvertent deglutition.
Ruoya's plaintive murmur crescendoed as Xu Ling's ministrations approached her medial femoral zone. Her sibling's glower now alloyed suspicion with constrained veneration, tracking saline rivulets traversing Xu Ling's cervical topography.
"The widow surveils you like a tigress eyeing quarry," Ruoxue sibilated, her susurrus honed by nascent perspicacity. "Does rusticated therapeutics encompass concubinage protocols?"
Xu Ling's rebuttal dissolved as Ruoya's digit grazed his grizzled mandible—a contact more ethereal than descending sakura petals yet freighted with ancestral covenants. Aloft, the primal asterisms emerged as dispassionate witnesses to this convoluted parable: toxin traversing vasculature, longing permeating ocular exchanges, and the tacit verity that certain antidotes portend graver perils than the venoms they countermand.
Embers of Inquiry and the Healer's Crossroads
Ruoya's vermilion-tinted fingers fluttered like autumn foliage to shroud her inflamed countenance, auricular lobes aglow like dusk-infused rubies. Xu Ling preserved therapeutic austerity, his labial exertions extracting residual venom with sacerdotal exactitude until the evacuated ichor transitioned from stygian obscurity to carmine lucidity.
"Imminent jeopardy retreats," he intoned, his pallor reflecting waning selenic radiance. "Residual malevolence necessitates methodical eradication."
Ruoya's compliance mirrored osier tendrils caressed by capricious zephyrs, her receding digits grazing his radial artery—serendipitous contact igniting neural conflagrations. Vertigo assailed Xu Ling's equilibrium, astral phosphenes scintillating behind ocular lenses as ophidian remnants besieged his enfeebled defences.
Liu Shuxiang materialized at his dextral flank, attar-imbued linens dabbing his sudoriferous temples. "Does the dale's exhalation burden you so?" Her matronly veneer fissured as proximity reignited banked embers of yearning.
Xu Dong's ocular oscillation between them fanned infernos of postulation. The widow's storied pulchritude across hinterlands now fuelled the rumour's pyre, her lingering tactile imprimatur on Xu Ling's forearm oxygenating conjecture.
Ruoxue writhed within their intimate triad, metropolitan hauteur dissolving beneath pastoral candour's unvarnished verity. "Are you… matrimonially fettered?" The interrogation escaped unbidden, her sibling's anticipatory gaze mirroring unvoiced inquisitions.
Liu Shuxiang's startled carillon laughter cascaded like fractured celadon chimes. "Mere adjacency of habitations!" The demurral bore inadvertent melancholy, her appraisal of Xu Ling's sculpted profile lingering beyond chronological propriety.
The hamlet materialized through nubilous veils—smoke spirals from hypocausts pirouetting about cerulean-slated rooftops. Lithic byways pulsed with bucolic vitality, indomitable graminae erupting through timeworn interstices. Ruoya's respiration suspended before this pastoral rhapsody—combusted biomass and orographic mists entwining above terraced loam.
Xu Ling's sanatorium arose as a patinated sentinel adjoining Liu Shuxiang's thatched cottage, their propinquity provoking renewed scrutiny from the twins. As the widow receded, her valedictory glance conveyed mute supplications—a silent adjuration against urban allure's encroachment.
Ruoxue's inquisition lingered in the crepuscular ether, its reverberations outlasting Helios' departure. Within Xu Ling's jingluo network, a novel toxin proliferated—neither reptilian nor humoral, but the insidious venom of kindled ardour contending with ancestral duty. The inselbergs observed through eternal brume, their immutable silence assimilating another mortal enigma into the valley's infinite scroll of paradoxes.
The Gambit
Unobserved by him, the twin sisters exchanged covert sighs of relief upon Liu Shuxiang's utterance.
Having secured the sisters at his modest clinic, Xu Ling proceeded to seek out Wu Tiedan without delay.
"Hold."
From her infirmary cot, Li Ruoxue uttered the command with stiff dignity, halting Xu Ling's departure. "Provide your banking details. Shall twenty thousand suffice? If greater compensation—"
Xu Ling pivoted, surveying the haughty young woman. "Unnecessary. The standard consultation fee suffices—five hundred yuan," he stated dispassionately. Preempting protest, he continued, "Should rustic accommodations displease you, summon escorts. Venture not beyond these walls—further skeletal displacement may condemn you to perpetual confinement."
The noblewoman blanched yet scoffed, "My osseous framework shall mend unaided. You dramatise trivialities."
Li Ruoya's gaze lingered on the retreating physician, her lips compressed in silent apprehension as she studied her sister.
"Were that knave not marginally competent, I'd have his epidermis flayed inch by inch," Ruoxue hissed, brandishing an ivory fist until injury compelled a grimace.
"Sister, do we have luxury for such theatrics?" Ruoya murmured, her cadence freighted with portent.
The elder sibling gnawed her vermilion lip into chastened silence.
---
Xu Ling now stood before Wu Tiedan's abode, where a congregation of inveterate gamblers from neighbouring hamlets encircled a splintered scholar's desk. At its epicentre loomed the ursine Wu, rattling his dice cup with performative vigour. "Wagers sealed!" he roared.
The physician shouldered through the rabble.
"Non-gaming interlopers abstain from jostling!" carped Second Uncle, displaced by Xu Ling's passage. His reproach withered beneath the healer's glacial countenance—an uncharacteristic aura that stilled the gathering's cacophony.
Wu's dice cup faltered mid-shake as their eyes met. "Master Xu... care to test Fortune's whim?" He ventured, grin strained. "Merely divine greater or lesser."
Xu Ling's piercing gaze penetrated both the cup and its weighted contents. "Simplicity itself," he intoned, smacking a banknote upon the demarcated desk. "Five figures on *minor*."
A collective gasp rippled through the assembly—five thousand yuan eclipsing triennial agrarian earnings. Avarice ignited as copper coins and crumpled notes piled across the ink-bisected tabletop.
Wu's Adam's apple bobbed. Though privy to Xu Ling's recent prosperity, such audacity surpassed expectation. The telltale tremor in his grip betrayed what the physician already knew.
The die was cast.
High Stakes
The "Big" section of the gambling table swelled impressively, resembling a towering financial Mount Everest. Crisp hundred-yuan banknotes commingled with grimy coins, creating a rich tapestry of wealth. In stark contrast, Xu Ling's "small" domain existed in a state of penury. His solitary bank card lay atop a meagre collection of copper coins, a paltry offering in comparison.
"Fortune smiles upon the steadfast!" rasped a voice, coarsened by years of tobacco abuse, from Wu's entourage. "The master dice player pitted against this humble herbalist posing as a contender? What hope can there be for a beggar's chances?" Another onlooker jeered scornfully, eyeing Xu Ling's worn and tattered boots. "What glory lies in such long odds?"
Wu stepped forward, brandishing a substantial stack of banknotes, a veritable sacrificial offering. The bills were neatly bundled, a tangible testament to his confidence. "Twenty-one thousand yuan!" he announced with a flourish, slamming the brick of currency down onto the polished surface of the table. "All the celestial winds blow in favour of 'Big'!"
Chaos ensued. The farmers, once simple and unassuming, transformed into financial sorcerers, unearthing hidden stashes of money from rice jars and ancestral altars. Amidst the hazy fug of hand-rolled cigarettes, Xu Ling's voice cut through the din like a scalpel. "Let the game begin. A single round."
The physician's abrupt demand to take control of the dice cup brought Wu's blustering bravado to an abrupt halt. "According to the established customs—"
"—are null and void tonight," Xu Ling interjected firmly. His long fingers wrapped around the rosewood cylinder, a gesture of authority. The supporters of the "Big" side let out a chorus of dismayed cries.
"Give me a chance to adjust my bet!" Wu pleaded, his jowls quivering with a palpable sense of panic.
Xu Ling's obsidian eyes swept over the trembling piles of life savings and bridal dowries. "Withdraw your bet or take the risk. There is no middle ground."
A whimsical breeze swept through the room, causing the banknotes to flutter like frightened doves. Wu's pores exuded a cold sweat as he suddenly realized the gravity of the situation. The memories of the cracking sounds he had heard in the clinic when bones were set now seemed to transform into the final, fateful rattling of the dice cup.
The Die's Revelation
Defections occurred like autumn leaves abandoning branches, yet the greater multitude clung to deluded avarice—jackals salivating over fractional claims from Xu Ling's fifty-thousand-yuan trove.
The physician manipulated the dice cup with deliberate clumsiness, its esoteric cadence alien to his healer's grasp. Two alabaster cubes escaped during his fourth simulated fumble, provoking sneers from ne'er-do-wells. Xu Ling concluded the mummery with calculated negligence, anchoring the chalice upon timeworn timber.
Wu Tiedan's porcine optics blazed with impending triumph as collective focus converged upon the physician's surgeon-precise digits capping the vessel. *Unveil!* his convulsing dewlap silently shrieked. *Let this charlatan genuflect before true artifice!
Xu Ling's rime-edged smile heralded disclosure.
A sepulchral hush prevailed. Six onyx voids glared like malevolent constellations from the solitary surviving die.
"Fate's... verdict?" quavered a yeoman clutching his matrimonial pledge—a muttonfat jade bangle.
Wu's ululation sundered twilight's peace. "Sorcery!" Froth adorned his tremulous lips as Xu Ling commenced reaping his windfall—even Wu's twenty-one thousand yuan haemorrhage vanishing into indigo cotton recesses.
"Charlatan!" the odds-monger shrilled, spying the telltale quicksilver die amidst ceramic shards. "You've defiled the sacred implements!"
The congregation fractured—some bellowing for sanguinary justice, others petrified beneath Xu Ling's glacial regard. The physician danced the remaining cube across phalanges, its hexadic verdict immutable through every rotation.
"Ancestor's wisdom!" A grizzled patriarch lunged, seizing the artefact. His betel-stained talons traced concealed seams. "By Taishang Laojun's beard—this vessel's voided!"
Bedlam transmuted into epiphany. Wu's lardaceous complexion broadcast culpability as communal fury swivelled—a typhoon stayed by Xu Ling's upraised hand.
"Enlightened?" The query suspended like a jadeite headsman's axe. Within his opposite palm, three cleaved dice leaked argent treachery.
Retribution's Resonance
The alabaster die's terminal spin resonated through glacial silence, its hexagonal facets gleaming with six onyx pupils of incontrovertible truth.
"Preposterous..." A tiller's quavering whisper shattered the silence. "Wu would never pillage brethren?" A constellation of incriminating stares impaled the quaking fraudster.
Elder Kin commandeered the cube, subjecting it to methodical inquisition. Five successive casts. Five consecutive hexadic verdicts.
"Manufacturer's flaw!" Wu protested, digits splayed in pantomimed guilelessness. "Acquired from Lisboa's Golden Phoenix—"
Elder Kin's scornful exhale bisected the falsehood.
"Verminous leech!" A youth bearing metropolis-honed bravado hurled himself at Wu with piston-driven fists. "Half year's sustenance!" Their entanglement birthed pandemonium—spasmodic grappling, rent linens, and the cloying stench of despair.
Xu Ling's heel executed precision intervention amidst the tumult. The crystalline fracture beneath bast fibres escaped detection as Wu's communication device met digital demise.
"Notable," Xu Ling observed, orbiting the combatants like an anatomist scrutinizing dissection subjects. "What alchemy transmutes a village outcast to a twenty-one-thousand-yuan alchemist?" His ocular sweep ignited nascent suspicions. "Unless..."
Wu's suet-like visage undulated. "Municipal gambling proceeds! These agrarian simpletons—"
"—mirror pilfered quantities?" Xu Ling interjected, producing a creased codex from Wu's splintered threshold. Villagers recoiled at recognized numerals—Matriarch Li's funeral coffer, Dowager Zhang's agrarian capital—inscribed adjacent to dates mirroring their bereavements.
Enlightenment proliferated like wildfire through drought-stricken reeds. Within breaths, the courtyard seethed with wrathful denizens brandishing threshing rods and oxidized harvesting blades.
"By the August Personage of Jade's mandate!" Wu elevated tremulous digits toward cumulus sentinels. "Smite this unworthy vessel should I—"
Celestial timpani reverberated.
The congregation's synchronised apnoea suspended chronology. Xu Ling's buccal contours crescented imperceptibly as his palm retreated from the hamlet's solitary fulgurite conduit.
Precipitation descended in silvery judgement threads.
Silken Provocations
"My savings bore a dog-eared corner," Widow Chen asserted, knuckles whitening on her apron. "My child's tuition money carried his schoolyard doodles," Farmer Zhao growled, sun-leathered palms striking worn overalls.
Wu Tiedan's ashen countenance mirrored winter frost as Xu Ling unveiled the fiscal corpus delicti. With numismatic precision, the physician extracted each damning specimen—water-stained fifties, hundred-yuan notes tattooed with childish calligraphy, and counterfeit tender branded crimson condemnation.
"Defiler of trust!" The indictment reverberated through mulberry groves as villagers reclaimed their plundered sustenance. Xu Ling withdrew through the therapeutic bedlam, Wu's lamentations dissolving into twilight's embrace like a forgotten folk melody.
---
Beneath the millennial pagoda tree, Liu Shuxiang's silhouette emerged—a vision in chrysanthemum-hued silk that pooled about her form like gilded twilight. Night-blooming jasmine nested in onyx tresses cascading past her waist, while pearl powder highlighted collarbones rising above the cheongsam's mandarin collar.
"The serpent's venom?" she inquired, carnelian nails brushing imagined dust from his shoulder.
"Neutralized," Xu Ling affirmed, pulse quickening as gardenia essence enveloped him. His recounting of Wu's digital demise prompted her laughter—crystalline notes that fractured into breathless silence when he described her sartorial transformation.
---
The clinic's antiseptic stillness ruptured at his return. "Behold the philandering physician," Li Ruoxue drawled from her gurney, pallid complexion clashing with emerald intravenous tubing. "Do all rural healers neglect Hippocratic vows for paramours?"
Xu Ling's shadow stretched across sterilized tiles, sunset gilding his profile. "Unrepentant," he conceded, fingertips grazing the lapel where Shuxiang's perfume lingered. "Though 'enchantress' better conveys her allure than crude 'paramour'."
Ruoxue's monitor screeched protest as she thrust upright. "Licentious quack! You dare—"
"Jiejie!" Li Ruoya materialized with a sphygmomanometer cuff, her admonishing glare at Xu Ling shimmering with unspoken complexity. "Must you antagonise the infirm?"
The physician's fingers danced across apothecary drawers. "Merely administering verbal moxibustion—your sister's choleric disposition requires counterbalance." He lifted ginseng root with ceremonial gravitas. "Shall we compound a tincture of contrition?"
Ruoxue's indignation dissolved into a grudging snort. The clinical chessboard's parameters had irrevocably shifted.
Silken Needles and Scarlet Rebukes
Li Ruoxue's protestations withered beneath her sister's admonishing glance, though her disdainful exhale lingered like smouldering incense ash. Xu Ling turned his attention to the quiescent younger sibling. "Residual venom lingers in your meridians," he intoned, retrieving his lacquered acupuncture case with ceremonial care. "Assume position upon the neighbouring berth."
Li Ruoya's fingertips blanched against sterilized linens as she acquiesced, her jade amulet quivering like a captured hummingbird. "The outer robe must be relinquished," Xu Ling directed, unfurling silk-wrapped needles that gleamed like frozen starlight. "Preserve only essential modesty."
"Deviant sophist!" Ruoxue's intravenous stand clanged against terrazzo. "Must every antidote involve unveiling flesh?"
Xu Ling's gaze sharpened. "Shall we consult your scrolls of medical canon, Dame Li?"
The elder sister's neck flushed coral. "Were I versed in your barbaric arts—"
Ruoya's sparrow-light touch grazed Xu Ling's sleeve, her phoenix eyes shimmering with silent entreaty. The physician's clinical detachment wavered—this ethereal creature evoked custodial impulses foreign to his practitioner's creed.
As argent filaments caught the dying light, Ruoya's exposed dorsum emerged—a moonlit landscape of alabaster curves interrupted solely by the sacred dimples above her sacrum. Xu Ling's respiration shallowed imperceptibly before needles found their celestial coordinates: Mingmen (Gate of Life) and Guanyuanshu (Pivot of Origin), his qi-imbued digits conducting an invisible symphony above nacreous epidermis.
"Your presence here whispers mysteries," he murmured, probing beyond corporeal boundaries. "What celestial mischance cast metropolitan orchids into our hinterland snare?"
The terminal needle pierced Huantiao (Leaping Circle). Ruoya's gasp harmonized with silk's whispered descent. "Defiler of innocence!" Ruoxue's outcry shattered clinical sterility as her sister's complexion blossomed into peony embarrassment.
"Site of intramuscular administration," Xu Ling clarified, his baritone unperturbed. "Common anatomical knowledge."
Ruoya buried her countenance in medicinal herbs' fragrance, her muffled assent lost in cotton down. Ruoxue's subsequent reticence bore the weight of reluctant concession.
"Communication device", the elder sister demanded, palm upturned with regal expectation.
Xu Ling's evasion precipitated calamity—the hospital cot shrieked metallic protest, saline tendrils coiled like angry serpents, and Li Ruoxue plunged earthward in tragicomic descent, her collision with destiny averted solely by the physician's grudgingly extended forearm.
The Alchemy of Ascension
Xu Ling's essence-drained digits quivered as he realigned Li Ruoxue's displaced osseous structure. "Further histrionics", he cautioned through enamel-gritting restraint, "shall earn you convalescence beneath municipal hospice fluorescents." The argent filigrees retreated into their onyx reliquary like serpents to sacred coils.
Lunar luminescence gilded his faltering pilgrimage homeward, saline pearls crystallizing upon his brow like celestial condensate. "Child?" Wang Huifen's labour-forged palms anchored him at the vestibule. "Your vital embers gutter like midnight lampwicks."
"Merely... chrysalis repose required," he croaked, succumbing to the kang bed's embrace. As consciousness ebbed, his terrestrial form ascended—a suspended effigy tethered by astral filaments. Nacreous vapours pirouetted through the chamber, permeating dermal gateways like sidereal plasma.
Within this liminal sanctum, Xu Ling navigated stratocumulus tapestries where each respiration distilled quintessential vigour. Chronos dissolved—Aurora's maiden blush transmogrified into Vesper's valediction as his gyration ebbed, the nebula's effulgence assimilated into Dantian's prismatic nucleus.
The cellular oracle's carillon fractured contemplative silence. "Young Ling," Yu Mengna's dulcet tones cascaded through the receiver like alpine rivulets, "our pomological troves hemorrhage aureate bounty anew."
Xu Ling's mirth resonated with phoenix-renewed puissance. "Mobilize your chariots at Eos' first blush, Elder Sister Na. The arboreal sentinels exude carbuncle tears."
Post-dialogue, his extension echoed with tellurian dynamism—synarthroses crackling with ur-force. Nocturne's tableau unveiled itself in hyperdefined veracity: gryllid membranae engraving rime filigree, nematodes undulating beneath humus' sable shroud.
An empirical fist arced through the ether. The courtyard's ancestral ulmus quaked, rhytidome detonating in dendritic pyrotechnics. "Brigands?" Xu Wenhai's silhouette manifested, brandishing an agricultural halberd, his somnolent visage bathed in astral iridescence.
"Merely... assay nocturnal zephyrs," Xu Ling demurred, contemplating his unmarred metacarpi. The fragmented moonlight divulged phyllotactic fractals upon the wounded arboreal epidermis—a dendrological yantra of apotheosis.
Alchemical Seductions
Xu Wenhai's paternal anxieties evaporated like dawn mist beneath selenic beams illuminating his son's silhouette. Their fleeting exchange culminated in somnolent counsel, devoured by night's inexorable march.
The clinic's chambers lay draped in lambent patterns as Xu Ling navigated its umbral passages. Upon the cramped divan, the sisters reclined in slumbering symbiosis—Ruoya's marmoreal limb spilling across Ruoxue's ebon-sheathed calf like lunar radiance vanquishing nocturnal shrouds. The physician averted his gaze from this living chiaroscuro, soundlessly retreating to the apothecarial sanctum.
Within the herbarium, pandemonium had alchemised into order. Xu Ling's breath suspended at the metamorphosis—desiccated peony diadems nestled alongside codonopsis filaments within alabaster receptacles, each vessel adorned with Ruoya's precise brushwork. "An archivist's soul," he whispered, fingertips skimming ink-etched serifs.
The alembic beckoned. Botanicals relinquished their vital essences to a verdant elixir under Xu Ling's essence-infused manipulations. As the concoction deepened to viridian profundity, a gilded fissure materialized within the courtyard's stygian curtain.
Liu Shuxiang manifested like a phantom coalescing from twilight, her cheongsam transfigured into gossamer nocturnes that traced each silken contour. "Somnolence eludes me," she lamented, guiding Xu Ling's palm to her palpitating décolletage. "This cardiac discord craves your unique antidote."
His exploratory palpation elicited a tremulous sigh. She dissolved into his embrace, nocturne-blossom perfume intertwining with the elixir's humic aroma. "The cure..." Her lips grazed his angular jawline. "...demands heterodox application."
Beyond the rice-paper screen, the neglected crucible pulsated—its luminous ichor throbbing in congruent cadence with their merged silhouettes.
Nocturnal Horticulture and Unspoken Allure
Liu Shuxiang's inebriated poise lingered in the lunar glow like jasmine-scented vapour. Xu Ling withdrew with the strategic finesse of a chess virtuoso sidestepping checkmate, his tone blending pragmatism with veiled mirth. "Sister Shuxiang, Eos already stretches her rosy fingers across the firmament. Allow my elixir to first fortify these sylvan sentinels."
The nutrient amphora loomed behind them, its viridescent contents shimmering with latent potency. When Liu's eyes widened at his assertion of solo transport, Xu Ling merely hefted the vessel with Herculean effortlessness. Moonbeams cascaded along his corded forearms as they navigated the orchard, his tread soundless against humus-rich earth while Liu's respiration crescendoed behind him.
Beneath the mercury lamp's spectral glow, their collaboration unfolded in electric stillness. Liu's chiffon blouse metamorphosed into epidermal drapery through perspiration's alchemy, each curve delineated by dampened fabric. Xu Ling's gaze traced the saline rivulet charting her clavicular topography before wrenching away, his larynx desiccated despite the nocturnal humidity.
"The harvest's celestial mandate brooks no delay," he rasped, observing her ladle the elixir with naiad-like fluidity. "Mengna's caravans arrive with Sol's golden chariot."
Their choreographed symphony of dipper and cauldron concluded as indigo night dissolved into auroral hues. Returning to the clinic, Xu Ling proffered a zinc basin—a gesture both personal and decorous. Liu's ablutions transformed into terpsichorean ritual: crystalline droplets navigated the clavicular delta, linen cloth charting terrain more treacherous than any orchard.
As her lashes ascended, twin onyx orbs harboured cosmic implications. Xu Ling's thyroid cartilage oscillated in silent harmony with retreating constellations, the clinic's confines suddenly oppressive with unwritten potentiality. Beyond mullioned windows, diesel engines growled into consciousness, their mechanical chorus dispelling the enchantment of what might have unfolded.
Serendipity's Dangerous Waltz
Xu Ling's respiration faltered—Liu Shuxiang's aura eclipsed pastoral simplicity, her marble décolletage and sylphlike contours surpassing even jade-carved concubines. When a rosaceous hue bloomed across her cheeks, betraying cognizance of his ocular trespass, he pivoted with orchestrated indifference, though lunar tendrils illuminated his lingering peripheral observance.
"Sister Shuxiang, your visage outshines Selene's argent chariot," he exhaled, the encomium escaping through parted lips.
The ether congealed like molten opals. Liu's guileless bearing—the swanlike curve of her bared nape—assaulted Xu Ling's ascetic resolve. Her susurrus trembled against his clavicular ridge: "Healer... might you diagnose my... nocturnal affliction?"
His palm levitated at the damask frontier of her bodice. "Within which quadrant resides this disqui—"
The infirmary detonated in bronchial percussion. The convulsive expectorations suggested imminent visceral expulsion, fracturing erotic hypnosis. Liu dispersed like a flushed ptarmigan, deserting Xu Ling betwixt chagrin and deliverance.
As selenic penumbrae elongated, a lintel's dolorous creak unveiled Li Ruoya's silhouette—her complexion incarnadine as pulverized garnets. Xu Ling's mimesis of sangfroid disintegrated when her unshod sole encountered viscous unguent residue.
Her descent transmogrified into tragicomic pantomime. His chivalric intercession proved overzealous—Ruoya's frontal os collided with his thoracic redoubt, emitting a tellurian thunk.
"Clemency germinates where design falters," he intoned, qi-permeated phalanges administering cranial therapy. The treatment dissolved both the cephalic protuberance and propriety's ramparts.
Ruoya's cilia trembled against his xiphoid process. "This... pedagogical unorthodoxy..."
"Iconoclastic yet salutary," he conceded, viscerally cognizant of her carotid cadence synchronising with his own. Osmanthus and sudoriferous essences wove thaumaturgy exceeding alchemical craft.
Aurora's feathered harbingers carolled their jape. Xu Ling contemplated this cosmic burlesque—when had his sanatorium transmuted into Anteros's amphitheatre?
Poisoned Harvest
Li Ruoya scattered like a leaf in a tempest at her sister's cry, slipping from Xu Ling's grasp as dawn's amber fingers stretched across the orchard.
The physician stalked through his emerald kingdom, fingertips grazing leaves that shuddered with unnatural vigour. A cloying chemical miasma fouled the dawn's crystalline breath, the acrid sting of herbicidal poison draping his saplings like a mortuary veil.
"Cease!" His command cleaved the twilight silence.
The fleeing shadow stumbled, then surged forward in frantic retreat. Xu Ling's pursuit became a panther's ballet through twisted silhouettes, lunar glow exposing the vandal's handiwork—hypodermic wounds weeping venom into arboreal arteries.
"Liu the Mutt!" Recognition sparked Xu Ling's wrath to wildfire.
The saboteur's escape dissolved into grotesque theatre. A serpentine root conspired with terrestrial pull, upending the dendrocidal fool. The poison vial executed a macabre pirouette, its contents anointing the wretch's face in toxic baptism.
"Drunk on your own malice?" Xu Ling loomed like an avenging spirit. "A poetic path to penitence."
Liu's ashen lips moved in silent incantation, taloned fingers raking his throat as if to purge the ingested curse. The herbicide's grim epithet—*reaper's vintage*—manifested in spreading dread, evidenced by dark rivulets staining his leggings.
The orchard's avian choir trilled sardonic counterpoint to human tragedy. Xu Ling knelt, clinical detachment overriding fury's flame. "Three parts per hundred," he mused, tilting the vial. "Enough to embalm your vitals while gifting forty-eight moons of exquisite decay."
Liu's whimper harmonized with rustling foliage. Xu Ling's smile held arctic sharpness. "Shall we barter restitution ere your viscera turn to broth?"
The eastern horizon flushed carmine, impassive to mortal frailty and calculated retribution alike.
Venom and Virtue
Dawn's argent tendrils unfurled across the orchard as caretakers arrived, their jocularity dissolving like mist beneath chemical malice assaulting olfactory senses.
"Since when does our grove reek of death's breath?" Xu Dong scowled, boot scuffing earth where paraquat's caustic perfume lingered like a necrotic embrace.
Their bewilderment coalesced into dread upon discovering two silhouettes amidst saplings. Liu Dagou convulsed like a landed piscine, his pallor mirroring toxin-blighted soil. Xu Ling stood as an obsidian monolith, countenance stormier than retreating night.
"Reaper's draught?!" Xu Dong recoiled from the emptied vial, its memento mori emblem grinning in crepuscular light. The orchard stewards formed a funereal crescent, dawn's vigour curdling into disquiet.
Beneath communal inquisition, Xu Ling chronicled the arbicide. "Cosmic retribution," Xu Hai sneered, though pity tempered contempt. As consensus tilted toward summoning Hippocratic aid, Liu grappled Xu Hai's pant leg with poison-stiffened claws.
"Clemency! I beg…" The entreaty drowned in phlegmatic coughs, laryngeal spasms battling searing torment.
Xu Ling's qi-imbued palm descended like a tribunal mallet upon the toxin-wielder's crown. "Name your puppeteer!" The demand cleaved wheezing silence.
"Wu Tiedan!" Liu spewed between heaves, survival eclipsing fealty. "Swore… you'd swindled…"
Xu Dong's device immortalised each damning syllable. The stewards exchanged nods—digital manacles crystallizing around their foe.
As dawn haemorrhaged across the firmament, Xu Ling's curative energies snaked through meridians, purging venom yet etching psychic scars. "Corpus purged," he decreed, retracting touch like revoked royal pardon. "Let iatromancers confirm your reprieve."
Liu scrambled backward, his retreating form silhouetted against the sanguine sunrise—a living testament to vengeance's bitter calculus. The orchard inhaled anew, foliage quivering not from poison but humanity's lingering tremor.
Debt and Damnation
Liu's ashen visage flickered with ephemeral hope as the fire in his throat dimmed to a smoulder. Xu Ling's edict severed the fragile truce: "Before seeking Asclepius' mercy, you'll kneel before Lady Justice's unblinking eyes."
The orchard keepers exchanged uneasy looks. Xu Dong's voice resonated with ancestral wisdom: "Let the village elder weigh this bitter harvest."
The magistrate's arrival brought earthy justice—his work-hardened palm struck Liu's cheek like a whip cracking across still water. "Vile mongrel! Must you forever poison our hallowed ground?"
Liu's defiance crumbled under Xu Ling's frost-laden gaze. Clutching the elder's hem with penitent fervour, he keened, "Let our soil judge me, not stone-walled tombs!"
The elder's sigh carried the weariness of generations. "Young Ling, let us measure loss in coin rather than carnage. Empty this fool's purse to replant what's been plundered."
Xu Ling's verdict hung like a reaper's blade. "Four thousand golden seeds—blood money for these stolen saplings."
Liu's legs failed him. The sum represented his bridal fund—four thousand and one hundred coins hoarded like dragon's treasure. "This... this is daylight robbery!"
Xu Ling's smile curved like a scythe's edge. "The law's embrace remains ever-open."
As dawn gilded the orchard, the elder's nod sealed Liu's fiscal crucifixion. The keepers bore witness to this peasant tribunal, their whispers threading through rustling leaves:
"A bargain at twice the price—four thousand buys wisdom."
"Better a pauper than corpse-meat—the fool should kiss the dirt in thanks."
Liu lurched from the grove, his phantom bride wailing in the morning haze. Xu Ling watched him stagger, knowing these coins would grow not trees, but village legends to chill future folly.
Aureate Reckoning and Vermilion Enigma
"These saplings aren't worth the earth they're rooted in!" Liu's bravado disintegrated as Xu Ling's digit hovered above the emergency glyph. "Two thousand—my ancestral coffers bleed their last!"
Xu Ling's silence resonated deeper than temple bells. The digital police sigil blazed like an executioner's steel on his screen.
"I capitulate! By our hallowed ancestors, I submit!" Liu's surrender echoed through his ancestral courtyard. The retinue trailed him to a corroded coffer, its innards exposed—a savings ledger bearing 41,000 yuan, its numerals shimmering like funerary gold leaf.
As Liu proffered the folio, Xu Ling's digits snapped like a magistrate's tally-sticks. "A thousand more shall scourge your poisoned veins."
Liu's obsequious grin curdled the morning air. "Your curative touch eclipses urban mediciners!" The declaration reeked fouler than herbicide residue.
Xu Ling's index grazed Liu's brow—ephemeral as dragonfly wings. "Thirty dawns of congee's embrace. Spurn oil, salt, and spice's temptation."
The assembly gaped as Xu Ling withdrew. Liu inspected his palms. "A thousand taels for this mountebank's theatrics?"
Viscera answered with telluric urgency. A fulminous eruption rebounded from courtyard stones, dispersing officials like startled cranes. Liu's breeches transformed into a marshy battleground—tepid, glutinous, and mortifyingly reminiscent.
"The fox-spirit's hex strikes anew!" He bellowed, penguin-striding toward sanctuary as villagers convulsed with mirth.
Xu Dong's inquisitiveness overflowed. "Does your touch wield true alchemy?"
Xu Ling's ocular gleam mirrored whetted blades. "Triune nights of enteric ablutions. Gaia's purification rite."
Their jollity propelled them to the orchard's verge, where carmine automotive grandeur blazed against viridescence. Beneath the BMW's silhouette stood an apparition—a nymph whose silhouette strained against cordovan-hued shantung, stilettos cleaving fecund loam as mahogany tresses cascaded over shoulders that might inspire armadas.
The custodians' mirth evaporated mid-chuckle. Xu Ling's pulse quickened—not from concupiscence, but revelation. This was no rural vision, but Yu Mengna's corporate harbinger, come to reap more than pomaceous bounty.
Botanical Alchemy and Scarlet Mirage
Yu Mengna's vermilion BMW cast elongated shadows across the orchard path as she emerged, her mocha-hued shantung gown caressing contours that silenced the caretakers' chatter. "Manager Yu," Xu Ling acknowledged, acutely aware of sunlight gilding her collarbones like liquid amber.
"Resistance proved futile against witnessing your agrarian alchemy," she quipped, dimples softening her executive composure. The orchard stewards shifted uneasily, suddenly mindful of soil beneath their nails.
Xu Hai's elbow nudged Xu Ling's flank. "Metropolitan Phoenix covets our pastoral dragon," he murmured, invoking rustic matchmaking lore. Beneath the jape lay unvarnished truth—Yu's fiscal ledgers revealed a 37% profit ascension since aligning with this enigmatic agronomist.
Xu Ling's chuckle carried autumn-leaf fragility. "A soil-stained rustic and corporate siren? Even moonlight requires night's canvas to shimmer." The words bore paraquat's chemical aftertaste, recalling beleaguered saplings awaiting redemption.
As Yu withdrew to oversee harvesters, her parting gaze lingered—not the calculated assessment of commerce allies, but Persephone's tremor upon glimpsing underworld seeds. Xu Ling turned toward the blighted grove where foliage drooped like tattered moth wings.
Kneeling, he pressed palms to humus. Auroral qi filaments permeated through fingertips, charting toxified rhizomes with cellular exactitude. The *Medical Canon*'s wisdom surged forth—not merely anthropic physiology, but chloroplast labyrinths and xylem resurrection.
"Neutralize lipid peroxidation," he intoned, directing energy to amplify superoxide dismutase synthesis. Leaves gradually stiffened, chlorophyll resurrecting under dawn's austere scrutiny. Distantly, Yu's laughter intertwined with labourers' Cantonese oaths, weaving through peach blossoms like illicit silk threads.
Xu Dong's silhouette eclipsed the revival. "Since when do physicians mend flora?"
"Since toxins became agrarian artillery." Xu Ling's smile held winter's edge. Unnoticed by the stewards, his gaze strayed toward the scarlet BMW, where Yu's silhouette blazed brighter than paraquat's ravages.
To be continuous…