Chapter 9: Viridian Rebirth and Carmine Whispers
Jadeite energy coursed through the poisoned grove as onyx venom dripped from leaf veins into Xu Ling's hand-carved cypress dipper. To his marvel, the cleansing rite amplified his qi instead of draining it—spiritual essence hardening like hoarfrost transmuting to crystal.
At zenith's hour, the blighted arbours vaulted above their pristine kin, foliage gleaming with chrysoprase clarity. Xu Ling's digits quivered not from fatigue but from revelation's tectonic shift within his meridians.
By the orchard's edge, sun-leathered labourers gaped at sylvan transfiguration. "Manager Yu extols your lineage's soil," a worker rumbled, surveying Xu Ling's loam-streaked trousers with devotional awe.
The homestead courtyard unveiled an improbable vignette—Wang Huifen gripping Yu Mengna's alabaster fingers, their mirth flitting like infatuated fireflies. "My fledgling rapscallion once canvassed petticoats for lace taxonomy!" the matriarch proclaimed, heedless of her scion's rubicund auricles.
Yu's stiletto drummed a mischievous tattoo on lichen-crusted stones. "A prepubescent textile savant, no less?" Her gaze charted Xu Ling's disquiet with kitsune amusement. "Shall we audit these resurrected saplings post-ambrosial interlude?"
Xu Ling's rebuttal dissolved as his sire materialized, brandishing a wicker creel spilling with vitreous river prawns, antennae flickering in last defiance. The crustaceans' wok-destined doom mirrored his own—poaching in mortification's fragrant bouillon.
Beyond the paddies, Liu Shuxiang hovered in her eaves' umbra, tracking Li Ruoya's faltering advance. The widow's vermilion talons engraved selenic arcs in her palms as matutinal truths unfurled—woodland resurrection, ancestral confessions, and boyhood roguery spinning tapestries beyond poison's crude design.
Silken Charms and Starvation's Fragrance
"Seeking Xu Ling, child?" Liu Shuxiang's question lingered like magnolia pollen. Li Ruoya's frantic nod sent jade earrings shivering.
The widow gestured toward sun-warmed courtyard stones. "Tarry here briefly, sparrow. We'll alight at his doorstep soon."
Ruoya's gaze clung to the table's rubescent apples, her throat convulsing. Two days' fasting had pared her frame to parchment stretched over bone.
"Celestial guardians!" Liu's bangles clashed like temple cymbals. "Has that rascal not nourished his patients?" Ruoya's cheeks flushed poppy-red as she nodded confession.
Thrusting an apple into trembling hands, Liu vanished in a haze of osmanthus perfume. Ruoya's teeth breached the fruit's vermilion armour, ambrosia flooding her barren senses. Across cobbled paths, her sister accepted the offering—work-hardened fingers cleaving the apple with woodcutter's might.
Liu reemerged transformed—ebony tresses cascading over a blouse of bridal white, hips sheathed in onyx silk that sang harvest moon ballads. "Come, fledgling. Let's test how the village physician tends hunger beyond flesh."
Their procession etched Brueghel-esque parody through wheat-scented lanes. Liu's silhouette wrote odes to fertility; Ruoya's slender form faded to palimpsest. Did healers crave summer's ripeness over spring's bud?
Xu Ling's courtyard unveiled fresh theatre. Yu Mengna's jasmine-scented poise fractured mid-sip, porcelain cup suspended between urban refinement and rural bewilderment. Her raptor gaze dissected Ruoya's proportions—limbs accounting for three-fifths of her willow frame, complexion rivalling Jingdezhen's finest.
"Madam Yu graces our humble plot," Liu crooned, the greeting dripping honeyed malice. Their nods exchanged—metropolitan leopard to pastoral vixen—across battlegrounds of apple cores and simmering woks.
Ruoya hovered at the periphery, uneaten apple segment burning like stolen treasure. In distant clinic shadows, her sister gnawed their shared bounty, oblivious to colliding worlds where sustenance and seduction waltzed to discordant rhythms.
Silken Whispers and Maternal Schemes
The legs in question—sculpted yet soft, avoiding both skeletal starkness and opulent excess—drew Yu Mengna's gaze like forbidden calligraphy. "And this vision?" she enquired, crimson nails denting teacup porcelain.
Li Ruoya's blush deepened to peony hues beneath Xu Ling's appraisal. The physician intervened with practiced diplomacy: "Our clinic's newest convalescent—rescued from the mountain's maw yesterday." His chair-offering gesture encompassed both women, though Wang Huifen's entrance transformed the tableau.
The matriarch's eyes lit with matchmaker's fire. Here stood living poetry—dove-like docility tempering rosebud beauty, limbs proportioned like celadon vase curves. In that heartbeat, even Yu's metropolitan glamour paled beside this rustic ingénue.
"Child, your beauty outshines morning jasmine," Wang crooned, wiping flour-dusted palms on his apron before claiming Li's hand. The girl's fingers fluttered like caged sparrows, silent pleas winging toward Xu Ling.
"Mother, you'll frighten the phoenix from its perch," Xu chided, extracting Li's captive hand. Their touch lingered—physician's calluses brushing petal-soft skin—before Wang's realization dawned like a winter sunrise.
The matriarch's smile faltered. This exquisite creature's muteness explained her reticence. Maternal calculations shifted—a mute daughter-in-law wouldn't sing lullabies to future grandchildren. Pity softened her tone: "Stay, child. My kitchen overflows with comforts."
Yu's polished laugh fractured the tension. "What fortunate souls, bathed in such hospitality!" Her compliment carried double-edged grace, manicured fingers adjusting blouse seams that suddenly felt provincial.
Liu Shuxiang advanced, silk sleeves rolled to reveal jade-bangled wrists. "Let me assist, Auntie Wang!"
"Nonsense, child!" The matriarch blocked her path. "Keep your finery unsullied." The widow's pout transformed into triumph as lunch invitations bloomed—another foothold in Xu's domestic sphere secured.
Xu Ling observed the feminine ballet—his mother's artless warmth, Yu's calculated charm, Liu's persistent allure, and Li's silent grace—each movement composing intricate agricultural opera. The shrimp in their wok hissed sympathetically, their crustacean fate mirroring his own simmering disquiet.
Gilded Chalices and Rustic Revelry
Liu Shuxiang's fingers waltzed through shrimp viscera by the lichen-mantled well, her mirth infused with matrimonial triumph. "Domestic arts become me," she cooed, charting Xu Ling's retreat toward the clinic through half-shuttered gaze.
The agrarian banquet table sagged under rustic splendour—steamed crustaceans glinting beside lacquered pork shank, their terrestrial redolence duelling with Yu Mengna's Elysian bergamot. Li Ruoya's desperate pantomime pierced the olfactory cacophony.
"The sibling!" Wang Huifen's revelation dispersed flour spectres. "Retrieve the ailing songbird!"
Xu Ling's return procession unfolded as a bucolic parable—Li Ruoying swaddled like Song-dynasty porcelain, her incendiary spirit damped by recovery. The patient's onyx orbs dilated at Yu's Médoc ambrosia spiralling in celadon rice vessels.
"A Dionysian revel for Ceres' brood!" Yu proclaimed, cascading crimson libations. Liu's goblet clattered with studied vulgarity, her silk-clad foot mapping clandestine territories beneath the board.
Wang's cheeks blazed burgundy after triad ritual toasts. "Our Ling once distilled potato-skin ambrosia!" Her wine-loosened chronicles unleashed mythic torrents—horticultural follies recast as argonautic quests, corporate sieges reframed as pastoral legends.
Li Ruoying's chopsticks trembled, her mute surveillance archiving each nuance—the widow's territorial patella, the executive's strategically spilt merlot, and the matriarch's bride-price computations etched in millet grain cyphers.
As selenic radiance gilded the courtyard, nacreous crustacean armour murmured of transmutations—marine denizens to nectar, venoms to theriac, outsiders to dramatis personae in Xu's inadvertent serial. The *medical canon* languished in tenebrous corners, its sagacity null before this crucible of eternal femininity's alchemy.
The Rural Prodigy's Awakening
The revelation that Xu Ling—a youth hailing from rustic origins—had secured admission to Jiangnan Metropolitan Medical University rendered the three women momentarily speechless. This ivory tower of academia accepted only the most exemplary scholars, its hallowed halls reserved for paragons of intellectual distinction.
Li Ruoxue and Li Ruoya locked eyes in silent communion, their gazes kindling with scholarly fascination as they reassessed the provincial youth. Both maidens pursued their studies at that very institution, and Wang Huifen's casual remarks suggested an astonishing truth—they might share academic years with this unassuming son of the soil.
Yu Mengna's porcelain fingers traced her wineglass rim. "How does one blessed with Apollonian features remain unattached?" She enquired, her voice laced with theatrical wonder.
A glacial silence descended. Wang Huifen's careworn features tightened as decades-old indignation resurged. "There was a faithless jade," she spat, the words dripping with maternal ferocity. "Succumbed to some silver-spooned wastrel's baubles. That spawn of privilege had my Ling'er beaten to the verge of Hades' gates. When his father sought retribution..." Her throat constricted before forcing out, "Two years in hospital beds."
Though the matriarch's account was ruthlessly abbreviated, Yu Mengna's obsidian eyes glimmered with protective fire while Li Ruoya's gentle soul wept silent tears. Even Li Ruoxue's customary frost revealed fissures, her compassion as fleeting as morning dew.
Xu Ling shifted beneath their suffocating solicitude. "Providence's design!" he declared, raising his wine bowl like a chalice of triumph. "Had that peacock not preened elsewhere, would I have discovered my true calling? Become shepherd of this village's health? Crossed paths with such celestial company?"
His indomitable spirit hung suspended in the lantern-lit air—a phoenix rising from betrayal's ashes. Yu Mengna's appraisal deepened into something perilously akin to reverence. At four-and-twenty summers, having spurned countless suitors for their pedestrian ambitions, she now beheld rough-hewn excellence. This agrarian scholar-warrior, with his earthbound wisdom and latent puissance, embodied everything her mercantile soul had unknowingly craved.
The symphony of clinking porcelain resumed until electronic intrusion shattered the pastoral idyll. Four pairs of eyes tracked Xu Ling's retreating form as he vanished into moon-dappled shadows, the glowing screen betraying "Xie Yuxuan"—a name resonating with alchemical significance.
Yu Mengna's vermilion nails whitened against her wine vessel. "Aunt Hui", she purred, venom honeyed by social artifice, "does our village Apollo still converse with Yongchun Hall's golden pheasant?" The question hung like a guillotine blade. For in elite circles, Xie Yuxuan's name whispered of gilded cages and a patriarch's desperate schemes to ensnare worthy bloodlines.
The Earth's Golden Secret
"Three million for a centenarian root?" Xu Ling's voice splintered like drought-stricken bark, fingers whitening around the humming device.
The line hissed with Xie Yuxuan's confirmation, her dulcet tones laced with residual awe. "Jiangnan's nouveaux riches clamour for immortality. The bidding notice flies raven-winged through elite circles—claim this boon ere nightfall."
Rice wine's warmth fled his veins as phantom silks slid across his skin—Wang Huifen's fretful gaze, Yu Mengna's shredded black hosiery imitating spiderwebbed jade, Li Ruoya's linen skirt become unravelled poetry, and Liu Shuxiang's crimson-streaked legs burning like sacrificial runes.
"Yongchun Hall's hunt begins." He retreated into the mountain's indigo breath.
Arms entrapped him—yuletide ribbons of flesh and desire. Yu Mengna's vermilion talons anchored his left, Li Ruoya's lotus-petal wrist his right. "Our constitutions demand woodland wanderings," they trilled, dismissing thorn-marred flesh as triviality.
The arboreal cathedral devoured them whole. Brambles orchestrated their flesh's symphony—Liu Shuxiang's manic giggles harmonizing with snapping twigs. Moonbeams liquefied into mercury pools until Xu Ling's pupils dilated with ancestral sight. The cosmos inverted, revealing dendrological veins throbbing argent where phoenix-tailed ginseng roots coiled beneath spectral oaks.
Li Ruoya's hands fluttered like crippled doves as ethereal amber radiance haloed Xu Ling's fingers. "You desecrate treasure!" Her whisper curdled the air while he caressed the root's cervical spine.
With the mandarin-grove planter's nonchalance, the ginseng emerged—its alien limbs preserved like Qin Dynasty silk manuscripts. Yu Mengna's stiletto pierced sacred soil as she purred, "One might mistake you for harvesting turnips, not peddling Midas' cure."
But Xu Ling's spirit already haunted carpeted auction halls where withered plutocrats traded cardiac years for rhizomatic salvation, while in his palm's lifeline, an heiress' lingering vibration hummed of affairs transcending commerce.
The Century-Old Ginseng and an Enigmatic Omen
"Merely a hundred-year ginseng!"
Xu Ling declared, enveloping the prized root in a shimmering aura of spiritual energy before carelessly depositing it into the woven bamboo basket slung across his shoulders.
The three women recoiled in collective dismay. Such nonchalance toward a *centuries-old relic* bordered on blasphemy!
"We ought to descend before nightfall," Xu Ling remarked, pivoting only to halt mid-motion.
Before him stood the trio; their cheeks flushed from exertion, sweat-slicked garments clung provocatively to their dewy skin. His gaze swept over them, lingering with deliberate appreciation on Liu Shuxiang.
"Astonishing… Shuxiang-jie, your proportions remain unparalleled."
Yu Mengna and Li Mengya blinked in bewilderment, while Liu Shuxiang's face bloomed scarlet. She cast him a smouldering glance before feigning composure. "Cease this frivolity—the mountain's serpents stir at twilight." With a deliberate sway of her hips, she began the descent, her silhouette a hypnotic rhythm against the fading light.
Xu Ling observed her retreat, ruminating: *The allure of experience eclipses youthful innocence.
---
Upon their return, Xu Ling resolved to hasten the ginseng's delivery to Yongchun Hall. Yu Mengna, her orchard duties concluded, prepared to depart.
Li Mengya grasped Xu Ling's sleeve. "My sister implores your escort to the county markets," interjected Li Ruoxue, her tone clipped yet eyes alight with unspoken intrigue.
"Join us—I shall provide conveyance," Yu Mengna offered, her warmth softening Li Ruoya's timid demeanour. The maiden's ethereal grace rendered refusal inconceivable.
Wang Huifen added, "Xiao Ling, these young blossoms lack even basic attire. Attend to their necessities."
Li Ruoya fixed Xu Ling with a beseeching gaze, her silent plea dissolving his hesitation.
---
At Yongchun Hall, a stewardess in immaculate linen greeted them. "Master Xu Ling? Elder Xie awaits your audience."
Within the sanctum, Xie Baosheng shuffled forth, his rheumy eyes bypassing the ginseng entirely, transfixed instead on Li Ruoya.
"Xiao Ling… You procured it so swiftly?" The elder's voice quivered, his parchment-like skin flushed with unfathomable fervour, as though beholding a spectre from eras past.
Xu Ling turned, perplexed. Li Ruoya stood serene, her habitual timidity supplanted by an inscrutable smile—a silent communion with the ancient herbalist.
Threads of Blood and Betrayal
"Have you some shared history?" Xu Ling's inquiry sliced through the charged silence.
Xie Baosheng lurched forward, his cane clattering forgotten as gnarled fingers seized Li Ruoya's delicate wrists. "Child—tell me Ruoxue remains unharmed?" The herbalist's voice frayed like aged silk, trembling with decades of unspoken anguish.
Xu Ling became spectral in his own scene, the ginseng's weight in his palm dwarfed by the theatre of reunion. He retreated to a corner, porcelain cup in hand, its bitter contents ignored as ancestral dramas unfolded.
The chamber doors burst inward. Xie Yuxuan descended like an avenging nymph, gathering Li Ruoya into her arms. "Wisdom guided your flight," she murmured into the girl's hair. "No jewel should be bartered in flesh markets."
Xu Ling's teacup hovered, forgotten. The mountain's mists now seemed trivial against this labyrinth of human treachery.
Xie Baosheng surfaced from emotion's tide, palms upturned in sacerdotal offering. "Name your desire, young saviour. Every leaf, every petal in Yongchun's treasury bows to your claim."
Xu Ling extended the ginseng—a priest presenting sacraments. "Our soil breeds abundance. But gold…" His knuckles whitened. Visions arose of venal educators prostrate before Li Guangfei's gilded altar, of midnight negotiations where innocence became currency.
Xie Baosheng's arthritic fingers danced along the root's labyrinthine veins. "A paragon…" Breath abandoned him. "A paragon preserved." Clutching the rhizome like Excalibur reclaimed, he vanished into alchemical sanctums.
Xie Yuxuan's jade composure cracked. "That carrion crow Li Guangfei stirred your grandfather's sleeping ailment."
Li Ruoya's porcelain complexion drained to ash. The elder's cyclical anaemia—a reaper's pendulum counting borrowed breaths.
"The ginseng brews hope," Xie Yuxuan soothed, though her gaze sharpened. "Curious—your uncle's sudden philanthropy. Three million yuan dripped from the vulture's claws."
Xu Ling's spine straightened. "Li Guangfei orchestrated this?"
"You tread familiar waters?" Xie Yuxuan's laugh held winter's edge. "His clan rules Jiangnan's twilight realms—gilded fists clutch magistrates' throats."
Revelation crystallized—Li Guangfei's collegiate farce, the headmaster's oiled simper as expulsion papers sealed with blood-money wax.
Li Ruoya's facade shattered. "He demanded we…"
Xie Yuxuan's finger pressed against rosebud lips. "Hush, cygnet. Certain serpents hunt best unseen."
In the silence, Xu Ling's teacup chimed against the saucer—a death knell for innocence. The mountain's bounty had unearthed not medicine, but Pandora's roots.
Clash of Needles and Fury
"A vendetta deeper than marrow binds us," Xu Ling's voice crackled like winter ice, its frigid edge stilling the room.
Li Ruoya's breath caught behind trembling fingers. "Brother Ling... Was *he* the architect of your ruin—thief of love, breaker of bones?"
A blade-sharp nod. "That day approaches when Li Guangfei will choke on the ashes of his atrocities," Xu Ling vowed, eyes reflecting smelted iron. The "love" in question—a venomous blossom whose lies had poisoned his family's name.
Xie Yuxuan's pity curdled into warning. "Their talons pierce Jiangnan's beating heart. Strike their golden whelp, and you court annihilation."
Yet Li Ruoya's gaze blazed solar-bright. "I stake my soul on your triumph!"
Xie Yuxuan's lips parted in silent astonishment. The mute dove who'd required *half a decade* to trust *her* now sang allegiance to this storm-bringer after three dawns. Her gaze narrowed—here bloomed affection's first fragile petals.
"By your grace", Li Ruoya entreated, fingers knotting in Xu Ling's sleeve like prayer beads, "restore Grandfather. Your arts eclipse even the Yellow Emperor's treatises."
Xie Yuxuan wordlessly guided them through labyrinthine alleys to the county's crumbling medical sanctum—its halls reeking of hopelessness and withering mugwort.
In a shadowed chamber, a living skeleton rasped beneath fluorescent glare.
"Grandsire..." Li Ruoya crumpled at the bedside, tears baptizing translucent skin. "Our folly carved these wounds."
Xu Ling's palm hovered above the cadaverous chest. "Life's ember still glows."
Xie Baoshen observed inscrutably as explanations unfurled. The master herbalist's brows arched—his protégé, who decoded ancient pharmacopeias like love letters, had anointed this village ascetic as healer.
Xu Ling's fingertips ignited with spiritual fire. Energy cascaded through petrified meridians, illuminating necrotic blockages—arteries choked by time's detritus, blood congealing into mortal amber.
Silver needles gleamed like starlight in his grasp.
"*DESECRATER!*"
A serpent's hiss pierced the stillness. Xu Ling wheeled—too late. Malice incarnate slammed into him, sending needles arcing through antiseptic air. Li Ruoya's shriek intertwined with the metallic clatter of fallen salvation.
Serpent's Pulse and Shattered Oaths
"By what authority do you lay hands here?" A man with a falcon's predatory nose—its bridge twisted thrice in sinister curvature—loomed over Xu Ling, spittle flying with venomous accusation.
Xu Ling smoothed his rumpled collar, unflinching beneath the glare. "One versed in Zhongyi's arts," he remarked, studying the man's physiognomic ill-omen, "should recognize _qi_ stagnation masquerading as mere anemia."
Silence descended like a burial shroud. Li Ruoxue's fingers danced across her grandfather's radial artery, paling as they traced riverbeds of congealed vitality. "Brother Ling… These meridians resemble tangled funeral cords. How did I miss this?"
Xie Baoshen's calloused digits confirmed the verdict. "Life's channels petrify—death's hourglass quickens."
The hawk-nosed man's veneer splintered. "This impostor mocks our legacy! I've tended—"
"Tended him with draughts to blur the pulse's truth?" Xu Ling's blade found its mark.
Li Ruoya's world fractured. The uncle who'd coaxed her toward Li Guangfei's gilded cage now stood revealed—a viper nursing poison into familial roots.
"Cleanse this darkness," she implored Xu Ling, "with your needles of dawn."
The uncle interposed his bulk. "Shall we let this stray dog butcher our patriarch?" Malice dripped honey-sweet. "Child, your folly already felled him. Would you wield the blade anew?"
Xu Ling's gaze dissected the ward—averted eyes, monitors chirping coded warnings. This sanctuary had metastasized into the uncle's chessboard, every pawn aligned against truth.
Li Ruoya's grip on Xu Ling's sleeve trembled—a moth clinging to lightning. "His shadow rules these halls. Our hope… resides solely in you."
Xu Ling's needles caught the sterile light—silver serpents poised to strike. "Then let us compose an aria of resurrection."
Symphony of Needles and Resurrected Pulse
"Begin, Brother Ling." Li Ruoya's conviction eclipsed her uncle's sputtering malice, her gaze an unbreakable covenant.
Xu Ling's hands became conduits of celestial precision. The inaugural silver filament pierced Shenshu (BL23), igniting a constellation across the patriarch's lumbar region. Each subsequent insertion—Zusanli (ST36) blooming at his knee—transformed flesh into astral cartography.
The uncle's protest died as Xu Ling's fingertip grazed the primary needle. A primordial vibration awoke—a dragon's growl entwined with a tiger's roar resonating through sterile walls. Charts fluttered like terrified doves; cardiac monitors chanted arrhythmic psalms.
Behind veiled lids, Xu Ling's spirit vision witnessed congealed malice dissolving—obsidian blood clots unravelling beneath the dragon-tiger duet.
"Heretic!" The uncle surged forward as hollow needles replaced solid ones. "Those pipes of folly—"
Xu Ling's touch brushed Jianjing (GB21). Arctic rigour mortis seized the uncle's frame—a living gargoyle preserved in panic's rictus.
"Stillness becomes you," Xu Ling intoned, aligning glass capillaries beneath silver conduits. Spiritual torrents surged through atrophied vessels, ejecting necrotic sludge—a decade's venomous stratagem exposed upon bleached linen.
Li Ruoya cradled her grandfather's hand—papyrus skin warming beneath her tears. "The channels... they flow anew!"
Xie Baoshen staggered. "This corruption... not mere decay, but engineered damnation!"
The patriarch's eyelids trembled—ancient glaciers calving. Milky irises absorbed dawn's first rays as Li Ruoya's teardrop baptized his wrist.
Xu Ling withdrew the final needle. The dragon's hymn faded, leaving only the uncle's frozen snarl and EKG's renascent cadence.
"Awaken, venerable phoenix," Xu Ling murmured, "to the pyre your viper kin prepared."
Awakening's Price and Gilded Chains
The uncle's smile curdled like rancid cream as the patriarch's eyelids fluttered open. "Father! Heaven smiles upon us!" His hands hovered with serpentine concern.
"*Desist!*" Xu Ling's command sliced colder than surgical steel. "Would you fracture his newly spun life thread?"
The uncle jerked backward, fingers twitching as if scorched. The patriarch's gaze—weary yet piercing—lingered on his son, etching fresh disillusionment into timeworn features.
"A sliver of heaven's breath to anchor his soul," Xu Ling instructed. Xie Baoshen presented the century-old ginseng root with ceremonial solemnity. As the spirit-infused fragment melted beneath the elder's tongue, alchemy unfolded—waxen flesh blossoming into peach-blossom vitality.
"Yaya, why court calamity's gaze?" The patriarch clasped Li Ruoya's trembling fingers. "That asp Li Guangfei's fangs—"
"Your breath still warmed this world," she murmured, recounting their odyssey—Xu Ling's primal duel with the mountain boar, their flight through moonlit thickets.
The patriarch's gnarled hand closed around Xu Ling's wrist like ancient ivy. "Young phoenix… this debt stains beyond mortality's ledger."
His milky eyes scanned the room. "Where dances my wild-fire granddaughter?"
"Ruoxue guards our sanctuary's threshold," Li Ruoya whispered, edging closer until her shoulder brushed Xu Ling's arm. "I… I would return to those mist-woven valleys with him."
The heart monitor's cadence faltered. The patriarch studied his granddaughter—the blush staining her cheeks, the quiet revolution in her stance.
"Let autumn winds carry you," he sighed, glancing at his statue-like son. "This withered oak shelters no more."
As he rose, miracles cascaded—joints supple as spring bamboo, mind sharpened like honed jade. The patriarch stood reborn, a dormant volcano rediscovering its fire.
"You've bartered with Death himself," he thundered, wheeling on his immobilized heir. "Now yield your poisoned gold—the 100,000-yuan blood money. Let Mammon's tongue sing redemption."
The uncle's frozen snarl twisted grotesquely as Xu Ling's needles hummed a requiem for betrayed kinship.
Ominous Portents and Gilded Peril
The patriarch tore the glinting card from his son's claw-like grip—a metallic whisper of kinship's demise. Xu Ling accepted the tainted offering, recognizing the elder's silent atonement.
Li Ruoya hovered at the doorway, her grandfather's farewell glance—a monsoon of unshed tears trapped in parchment skin—branded upon her soul.
As they stepped into the corridor, destiny manifested as collision. A granite-jawed man nearly upended their group, his weather-beaten features stirring Xu Ling's memory like wind through autumn leaves.
"Celestial physician!" Bureau Director Liu Zhonghua boomed. "What sorcery draws you to this temple of quackery?"
Xie Baoshen interposed with courtier's grace: "Director Liu honours us while visiting an ailing brother-in-arms." Recognition blossomed—this was the bureaucrat whose constitution Xu Ling's ginseng alchemy had resurrected seasons past.
Xu Ling's focus sharpened. A funeral shroud clung to Liu's aura, its tendrils coiling like asphyxiating vines. "Pardon the intrusion, Director, but Thanatos himself shadows your footsteps."
Liu's counterfeit mirth expired mid-chuckle as his phone wailed—a jewel heist turned bloodbath downtown. The bureaucrat's grip blanched the device to bone-white, confirming Xu Ling's dire augury.
"My needles ride with you," Xu Ling declared, already striding toward the official's sedan. "The reaper's breath congeals by the heartbeat."
The ravaged jewellery store emerged—its fractured vitrine weeping crystal shards onto sanguine concrete. Sirens screamed their elegy as Liu's badge parted the morbid gawkers like Moses at the Red Sea.
Xu Ling's fingertips caressed silver needles transformed—no longer mere healing implements, but psychopomp's arrows forged in mortality's forge.
"Three steel-hearted jackals," a tactical commander snarled. "Innocent fledglings among the hostages."
Liu's face petrified into an imperial magistrate's mask, yet his eyes betrayed primal terror. Xu Ling's third vision ignited—the death-miasma now coalescing into carrion crow wings above the bureaucrat's crown.
"Remain behind steel cordons," Liu commanded, struggling into ill-fitting Kevlar armour.
Xu Ling's smile held winter's bite. "Apologies, Honoured Director—my Hippocratic oath forbids passive witness to fate's cruelty."
He dissolved into the pandemonium, needles catching floodlights like frozen comet trails in the crime scene's artificial dawn.
Ticking Shadows and Quicksilver Deliverance
Xu Ling's gaze swept across the besieged plaza—SWAT operatives hunkered behind crystalline shields, their weapons trained on the jewellery store's jagged maw. Through splintered glass phantoms, hostages cowered like autumn leaves in a storm.
"Report!" Liu Zhonghua barked, his voice a taut garrote.
"Hostiles remain unresponsive," replied an officer with charcoal-shadowed eyes. "Attempting—"
Xu Ling's eyelids fluttered. The veil of reality dissolved—clairvoyant vision piercing concrete and fear alike. "Explosives! They're grafting plastic to living flesh!"
Both men pivoted. "Divine physician, do your eyes now transcend matter?" Liu's jest curdled as Xu Ling painted hell's fresco—a gravid woman shackled by detonation cords, children transformed into human timepieces.
"EOD—*now!*" Liu's roar summoned a perspiration-drenched savant clattering with specialized tools.
Xu Ling's fingers skimmed silver needles—each a potential scalpel of salvation or spark of apocalypse. His third eye revealed three architects of doom: one calibrating chronometers of annihilation and two others herding lambs toward slaughter.
"Transport secured!" An officer's cry harmonized with engine growls beyond the cordon.
Steel shutters shrieked—a behemoth emerged, a human shield clutched like butchered meat. "Deviate an inch," the ringleader's megaphone boomed, "and these wretches become celestial fireworks!"
Xu Ling's focus laserized on the pregnant hostage's collar—mercury-switch tendrils caressing a dead man's trigger. The bomb technician exhaled sulphur. "Tilt-activated… This is a maestro's composition."
As the terrorist kingpin retreated toward armoured salvation, Xu Ling's thumb traced a needle's spine. Spiritual current surged, illuminating neural constellations beneath leather armour. One precision strike might paralyse—but the bomb's liquid conscience permitted no error.
"Sniper status!" Liu hissed into his comms.
"Targets obscured—hostage proximity and blast radius prohibitive."
The second terrorist yanked the weeping mother-to-be forward, her explosive corset blinking 00:02:00 in sanguine numerals. Xu Ling's consciousness became a scalpel—dissecting trajectories through the killbox's geometry.
"At my cue," he breathed to the EOD savant, "sever the azure lifeline."
"What *cue*?!" the man rasped.
Xu Ling's needles caught dawn's first rays as he stepped into the killzone. "Gentlemen! Shall we discourse on *delicate* mechanics?"
Three muzzles snapped toward him. The pregnant woman's wail pierced the stalemate as Xu Ling's inaugural needle found its destiny—a terrorist's trigeminal nexus.
Chaos detonated in argent ribbons and countdown screams.
Dragon-Phoenix Gambit and Voltaic Salvation
"You! Assume the wheel!" The terrorist chieftain jabbed his pistol at Xu Ling, its barrel denting the temple of an alabaster-skinned girl—her twelve-year-old twin brother mirrored the terror in the adjacent vehicle, their synchronized panic a macabre dance.
The EOD specialist behind them exhaled through clenched teeth. "Spawn of hell—to imperil such dragon-phoenix twins... Their lineage's flame risks eternal extinguishment."
Xu Ling advanced, only for Liu Zhonghua to interpose—a human shield with tremor-laced fingers. "My experience outweighs his," the bureaucrat implored.
"Relics belong in museums!" The brigand leader's muzzle swung between them. "The whelp drives, or the girl's cerebellum adorns this asphalt."
Xu Ling shouldered past with a micro-nod. "I comply." His voice quavered with Oscar-worthy frailty while his mind charted escape trajectories.
Sliding beneath crossed gun barrels into the driver's seat, Xu Ling caressed the accelerator. The sedan crept forward—a stalking panther.
"Who sanctioned movement?!" The terrorist's steel kissed Xu Ling's occipital bone.
"Clutch... recalibration required," Xu Ling stammered, pupils darting to the rearview where Liu's vehicle clung like a shadow.
"Worthless grub!" The leader's spittle rained on the dash. "One errant twitch—"
Xu Ling floored the pedal. The sedan surged—a startled mustang. A gunshot cracked, the bullet grazing air where Xu Ling's head had been milliseconds prior.
"Corpse fodder!" The enraged leader's weapon swung, intercepted by the twin boy's calculated cry: "Eliminate him and we become permanent fixtures!"
Xu Ling's peripheral vision catalogued the boy's gambit—fear veneered over tactical genius. "Mercy!" Xu Ling simpered with theatrical tremors. "I'll navigate with silk gloves!"
As the convoy accelerated, the leader's gold-stuffed satchel clinked against the boy's knees—a metallic metronome. Xu Ling's pinky brushed a needle nestled in the gearshift—its tip glazed with nightshade essence.
In pursuit, Liu's whitened knuckles strangled the steering wheel, his dashboard clock synchronized to the twins' explosive corsets.
"Portward at the crossroads," the leader growled, muzzle nesting in the girl's strawberry-ribboned hair. "Divergence earns these cherubs wings prematurely."
Xu Ling's jawline hardened—not with dread, but with thermodynamic calculation. Docks meant brine. Brine meant conduction. Conduction meant...
His needle found the cigarette lighter's socket.
Titan's Gambit and Sanguine Reckoning
The convoy swerved onto a forsaken ribbon of asphalt, flanked by an eternal river and primaeval thickets. The constricted lane funnelled them toward a precipice scarcely wider than the sedan's steel ribs.
"Accelerate, insect!" the brigand chieftain hissed, his firearm oscillating between menace and restraint.
Within the rearview's glass eye, Xu Ling deciphered the twin boy's Morse code gaze—a lexicon of nods and orchestrated blinks. As they breached the descent, Xu Ling activated the hazard lights—a prearranged semaphore.
The sedan erupted forward. Kinetic fury slammed the rear captor into leather as the twins struck—the boy levering the gun toward heaven while his sister's teeth became ivory daggers in their jailer's flesh. Xu Ling's fingertip found the chieftain's cubital nexus, disarming him with neural precision.
"Betrayer's spawn!" The leader's stray round annihilated the driver's window as Liu's pursuing vehicle became a battering ram of vengeance.
The collision birthed a cacophony of screaming alloys. Both cars pirouetted downward, Xu Ling's SUV capsizing to entomb the girl's limbs beneath 1.5 tonnes of industrial might.
Emerging blood-crowned yet undaunted, Xu Ling surveyed the wreckage—the chieftain supine in a sanguine tide, his lieutenant's limbs contorted in surrealist angles. The twins lay entombed in crystalline shards, their synchronized stillness mirroring life's fragile pendulum.
Xu Ling's palms ignited with luminescent vitality. Sinews corded—the overturned behemoth groaned—then righted itself with tectonic fury, exposing the girl's mangled legs to the mercy of dawn.
Liu Zhonghua stirred amidst the carnage, his brow a crimson cartography. "My progeny!" he keened, lurching toward the fallen twins.
Xu Ling's healing current flooded the bureaucrat's cranium, erasing traumatic shadows. Liu's eyes snapped open, laser-focused on his children's still forms.
"Celestial Healer!" Liu clawed at Xu Ling's sleeve, protocol vaporized by paternal terror. "Preserve them—cost be damned!"
Xu Ling's digits already waltzed above the girl's compound fracture. Ethereal filaments reknit shattered ivory and ravaged sinew, their bioluminescence cresting as the twins' chests resumed their mirrored cadence.
The brigand leader roused to his ruin—gilded delusions dissolved before the aurora of Xu Ling's transcendent craft.
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Oracular Veils and Gilded Scars
Xu Ling studied the twins' supine forms—their delicate features echoing Liu Zhonghua's furrowed brow—and grasped the bureaucrat's earlier desperation. The boy's hazard-light gambit crystallized as genius—a luminous semaphore between father and son that cheated mortality's grasp.
"Composure, Director," Xu Ling murmured, kneeling between the children. His fingers traced the girl's meridians. "A femoral fracture requires immobilization, but their qi flows undisturbed."
Liu's exhale misted the air as SWAT teams descended like armoured archangels, liberating captives and clapping irons on the subdued terrorists. The tactical commander crouched beside the bureaucrat. "Your scion's valour transcends his tender years," he observed, appraising the unconscious boy. "A chancellor in chrysalis."
Pride pierced Liu's exhaustion like dawn through storm stormclouds. Xu Ling noted the bureaucrat's transmuted aura—the deathly pallor replaced by a nimbus of impending ascendance.
At Yongchun Hall, Xie Baoshen descended upon Xu Ling like a flustered crane. "Impetuous phoenix! Do you fancy yourself Guan Yu reborn, charging blade-first into calamity?"
Xie Yuxuan's peach-blossom fist thumped Xu Ling's shoulder. "Still playing the humble sage! The precinct's radios hymn your highway odyssey."
Li Ruoya hovered nearby, her silent scrutiny a physician's triage until assurance softened her gaze.
During the reluctant homeward journey, Xie Yuxuan's curiosity overrode propriety. "What thread binds a village apothecary to Li Guangfei's gilded web?"
Li Ruoya's cautionary tug went unheeded as Xu Ling unfurled his history like a silkworm's shroud. "Crowned prince of Jiangnan Medical University," he began, irony curdling each syllable. "Clinched top honours, a campus Aphrodite on my arm—until Li Guangfei's talons claimed my muse as a trophy."
Xie Yuxuan's jade pendant quivered—she could already see the epilogue scripted in venom: expulsion etched in lies, a father's defiance answered with knuckle-dustered jurisprudence.
"The dean became Li's kowtowing hound," Xu Ling continued, clinical detachment belying old wounds. "My father's protest earned him three splintered ribs and a dance with Yama's threshold."
In the rearview's glass eye, Li Ruoya's hands clenched into lotus buds. Xie Yuxuan's sandalwood sigh fogged the window. "That peacocked viper deserves—"
Xu Ling's laughter carried the chill of mountain tombs. "He'll harvest his bitter crop—but not through the magistrate's gavel or the constable's truncheon."
As indigo twilight bled across terraced paddies, the automobile became a wheeled confessional—three souls knotted by shared revulsion, their silhouettes merging into a single entity of retribution.
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To be continuous…