The yu-yu slipped across her tongue and down her throat, sliding smoothly all the way. There was no familiar obstruction, no instinctive resistance, just a direct and effortless glide straight into her stomach.
Su Zhi paused.
Ming Can raised her head, a bit of chive blossom still clinging to the corner of her lips, and looked at her with bright, sparkling eyes. “How is it? How is it? Is it good?”
Su Zhi looked at that expectant face, then lowered her gaze and scooped up a second piece.
Without much effort, it went down smoothly too. She scooped a third piece, a fourth piece.
When she finally snapped out of it, the bowl was already more than half empty. Ming Can had leaned in closer at some point, looking immensely pleased with herself. “I told you so! It’s super delicious, and you didn’t even believe me!”
Su Zhi looked down at the yu-yu in her bowl, belatedly realizing something: throughout those last ten minutes or so, she didn’t seem to have thought about the idea of not being able to swallow.
There was no pre-rehearsed fear of a swallowing failure, no self-imposed limits in her mind, and no tensing of her nerves before every single bite. She was simply eating, while listening to Ming Can chatter on and on about how her hometown’s potato paste was even better than this, how the fermented rice water had to be aged to reach just the right acidity, and how yu-yu had to be made to turn out slippery yet chewy.
Those sounds filled her mind, leaving no gap for fear.
Su Zhi lifted her eyes and looked at Ming Can.
The other girl was hugging her own bowl and drinking the last sip of soup. Once she finished, she wiped her mouth with satisfied contentment, looked up to meet Su Zhi’s gaze, and immediately smiled. “Are you full? If you’re full, don’t force yourself; I can help you finish the rest.”
“No need.” Su Zhi’s tone was icy. She paused, then scooped another piece of yu-yu into her mouth.
Ming Can chuckled beside her, looking thoroughly accomplished.
Having gone without food for too long, Su Zhi’s stomach began to protest when she reached the latter half of the meal. She timely laid down her spoon and pushed the takeout box slightly to the side.
“All done eating?” Ming Can smiled cheerfully, chattering away as she tidied up. “I told you it had to be me who found such an economical, affordable, and delicious food!”
She packed the finished takeout boxes into a bag, folded up the small table, let Su Zhi lie back down, and proceeded to tidy up a few final details. During this, Su Zhi glanced at her with a hint of not-so-subtle urge, but Ming Can miraculously understood.
“Got it, I’m going to take out the trash, and when I come back, you can quiz me on algorithmic problems,” she said.
Su Zhi didn’t speak, but the urging in her eyes faded, turning into something akin to tacit approval that even she hadn’t noticed.
When Ming Can returned after throwing away the trash, she found Su Zhi lying on the hospital bed with her eyes closed, her complexion somewhat pale.
“What’s wrong? Are you uncomfortable?” she asked.
Su Zhi shook her head, pressing her hand against her stomach in an attempt to suppress the churning sensation within.
Skeptical, Ming Can sat back down on the accompaniment chair, though her eyes remained glued to Su Zhi.
Su Zhi maintained that posture, her hand pressed against her stomach with her knuckles tightening slightly. She kept her eyes closed, casting a small shadow of eyelashes beneath them, her breathing shallower and faster than usual.
“Are you really okay?” Ming Can asked again.
Su Zhi didn’t open her eyes, only letting out a muffled “mm” trapped in her throat.
Ming Can opened her mouth to speak, then swallowed the words back. She pulled out her phone, tapped a few times on the screen, and adopted a feigned, casual tone. “Then you rest for a bit, I’ll practice some coding problems. It would be too embarrassing if I actually get quizzed later on.”
Suppressing the wave of discomfort in her stomach, Su Zhi acknowledged it with a sound.
Sitting on the accompaniment chair, Ming Can practiced coding problems while using her peripheral vision to observe the person on the hospital bed.
After about three to five minutes, a rumbling sound came from Su Zhi’s stomach, and then her brow furrowed imperceptibly tight.
Ming Can stood up immediately. “Su Zhi, is your stomach hurting?”
Su Zhi opened her eyes, her gaze already growing somewhat unfocused.
“I.” She opened her mouth to speak, but the next second, the cramping pain in her intestines intensified. Her entire body shuddered, and a more urgent, uncontrollable sensation began dragging downward from deep within her abdomen.
Before Ming Can could even react, an unfamiliar odor drifted into the air.
Su Zhi’s hand was still pressed against her stomach, her fingers stiffly maintaining that meaningless posture. Her stomach didn’t hurt anymore, or rather, the pain had been overridden by an even more violent sensation. She didn’t dare move, didn’t dare look down.
She simply maintained that posture like a sculpture whose soul had been drained away.
Ming Can snapped to her senses, freezing for half a second.
Just half a second.
Then she stepped forward, bent down, and pressed her palm against Su Zhi’s cheek.
“Sister,” her voice was as warm as her palm, gently cupping half of that face. “It’s okay, I’ll clean it up.”
Su Zhi’s eyelashes trembled. When she opened her eyes, her gaze collided with a pair of supremely soft pupils. All the humiliation, degradation, and unbearable pain and pressure were instantly vacuumed away.
“It’s okay,” Ming Can’s eyes held a pool of clear spring water, her voice clean and gentle. “It’s okay, Sister, don’t be afraid.”
She gently stroked Su Zhi’s cheek with her thumb, comforting her bit by bit. That warmth seeped in from her skin, flowed through her veins all over her body, and finally gathered in her eye sockets, melting the layers of ice at the bottom of her eyes.
“I’ll clean it up, okay?” Ming Can asked with a smile.
Su Zhi didn’t answer, simply closing her eyes gently and tacitly handing over all of her wretchedness to the kid before her.
Ming Can moved quickly. She turned and walked into the bathroom, where the sound of running water echoed. Shortly after, she came out carrying a basin of warm water with a towel draped over the rim, wisps of steam floating upward. She placed the basin on the bedside table, then fished out a nursing pad and a clean set of hospital clothes from the cabinet at the end of the bed.
“Sister, I’m starting.” Before she began, she gave a soft warning, granting the other person a few seconds of mental preparation.
Su Zhi didn’t open her eyes, but she could feel Ming Can’s movements, the lifting of the blanket, the hands supporting her waist, the nursing pad being smoothed out underneath her.
No matter which step it was, it was done with extreme care. Yet even so, as every inch of her skin was exposed to the air, her body still couldn’t help but tremble slightly.
Sensing her stiffness, Ming Can paused her hands for a moment before continuing, chattering away about unrelated things: “Sister, I just solved a coding problem about dynamic programming, and that state transition equation is particularly interesting.”
Her voice was like a slender, soft thread winding through the silent hospital room, attempting to pull the other person out of that suffocating sense of shame.
Listening to those gentle, soft-spoken comforts, Su Zhi still couldn’t control her body from shaking. The chilly air clinging to her skin raised goosebumps, accompanied by a colossal, uncontrollable sense of panic.
“Don’t be afraid, it’ll be over soon.” Ming Can wrung out the damp towel, pressed it against Su Zhi’s lower leg, gently wiped, and then moved upward bit by bit. Every inch the towel moved, Su Zhi’s breathing grew more chaotic.
“Nn.”
When the towel covered her inner thigh, a muffled groan spilled from her throat. Su Zhi’s entire body stiffened. She instinctively pressed her legs together, her fingers tightening around the bedsheet beneath her until her knuckles turned white.
Ming Can didn’t rush her. She just stopped there, waiting a few seconds for that wave of tension to pass before resuming her movements.
Su Zhi bit her lower lip until it turned pale. She forced herself not to think about what was happening right now, but the sense of humiliation still forced its way uncontrollably into her mind, and so did her body’s limits. The next second, another wave of cramping pain surged from deep within her abdomen.
She tried to tighten up, tried to control it, tried to halt the impending disaster. But her body no longer obeyed, those muscles were relaxed like a net that had lost its elasticity, catching nothing at all.
Another wave of warm moisture surged out of control.
Right in front of her.
The fingertips buried in Su Zhi’s palms relaxed, and the very last bit of tension left her entire body. She simply lay there weakly, opening her eyes to reveal a vacant, nearly resigned expression in her pupils.
Ming Can’s hand remained suspended in mid-air, her fingertips stained with a trace of warm moisture. The moment she saw the other person’s reaction, without a shred of hesitation, she reached out directly and grasped that hand.
“Sister,” she wrapped that hand inside her own palm, using her thumb to stroke the back of Su Zhi’s hand over and over. “It’s fine. The human body is like an old machine, if it’s not used for too long, it gets rusty, and when it gets rusty, it breaks down.”
Su Zhi’s hands were freezing, her palms covered in cold sweat, but Ming Can’s hands were warm. Holding her, she transferred her warmth bit by bit.
“You haven’t eaten properly for too long. Your stomach suddenly received a task, so it’s definitely going to protest and throw a little tantrum. That’s completely normal. Later I’ll find Sister Gong Que, have her prescribe some medicine to soothe the stomach, take it for a couple of days and you’ll be fine. It’s nothing.”
Her voice was warm and soft. Without caring whether Su Zhi responded or not, she kept talking to herself: “Well, taking medicine is one thing, but you can’t starve yourself like this anymore in the future. The stomach is the kind of thing where if you starve it, it tortures you back, it holds grudges especially well, just like this.”
While speaking, she used her other hand to test the water basin on the bedside table. The temperature was still sufficient, so she re-soaked the towel, wrung it out, and continued what she hadn’t finished.
When the towel wiped across her skin, she was still just as careful, but that cautiousness no longer made Su Zhi feel humiliated.
After cleaning up, replacing the nursing pad and hospital gown with clean ones, Ming Can rolled the soiled sheets and duvet cover into a bundle and tossed them into the laundry hamper in the bathroom. She then brought out a basin of fresh water, washed the towel she had just used, and hung it over the back of a chair.
After finishing these tasks, she opened the window to air out the room, then went to Gong Que to grab some stomach-soothing medicine. When she returned to the ward, Su Zhi had already closed her eyes and fallen asleep. Ming Can watched her by the bedside for a few seconds without waking her up.
She thought that once the other person fell asleep, the discomfort in her stomach would subside, but within a few minutes, Su Zhi was jolted awake again by the cramping pain in her stomach. Ming Can gave her the medicine, but the medication’s efficacy couldn’t defeat that wave of pain. Repeated bouts of embarrassment and agony battered her body, dragging Su Zhi’s consciousness from initial shame and resistance down into a hazy blur.
Cleaning, changing, wiping, replacing.
Ming Can stayed by her side, repeating these actions over and over. Su Zhi’s consciousness was groggy, occasionally uttering a few murmurs. Ming Can leaned in close to her ear and caught words like “interview,” though they weren’t complete, eventually turning into unclear syllables mixed into her breathing, only to be swallowed back up by it.
In the middle of the night, the medicine finally took effect, and Su Zhi stopped convulsing and spasming. Ming Can wiped away all her cold sweat, changed her into clean clothes, and cleaned the room until it was spotless. In the early hours of the next morning, just as dawn was breaking, Su Zhi woke up.
The light in the ward was very faint, like a thin layer of gauze draped over the room. She stared at the ceiling for a few seconds before her consciousness slowly returned, and yesterday’s events floated back into her mind piece by piece with vivid clarity.
She didn’t move.
She just lay there, her breathing very light, her gaze fixed on a certain empty point in space.
Then she heard a very soft movement beside her.
Turning her head sideways, Ming Can was slumped over the bedside with her face resting against her arms, fast asleep. Her hair was somewhat messy, with a stray lock of hair stuck against her cheek, trembling gently with each breath. Her other hand still rested on the edge of the bed, her fingertips only a few centimeters away from Su Zhi’s hand.
She had stayed slumped over like that, sleeping for an entire night.
Su Zhi watched her for a long time.
The daylight brightened bit by bit, shifting from a hazy gray to a pale gold, until a small patch finally landed on Ming Can’s profile. Her eyelashes fluttered, and she slowly opened her eyes.
The very first thing she did upon opening her eyes was look up at Su Zhi.
Their eyes met.