Morning sunlight cut diagonally into the hospital room, casting a warm glow over her curled-up silhouette. Ming Can stood beside the bed holding a breakfast bag, looking at that row of cold, chilling words. Even without tapping into the notification, she could roughly guess what was inside.
She gently placed the breakfast on the bedside table and reached out to take the phone from Su Zhi’s hand. Her movements were extremely light. Su Zhi lost her balance at the fingertips, her heavy eyes lifting slightly. When she clearly saw that it was Ming Can, she slowly closed them again.
“Sister, I bought breakfast. It’s from the same soy milk shop as yesterday. I brought two portions,” Ming Can said while unlatching the breakfast bag on the bedside table. “The weather outside is so hot. I had to run through several streets just to get this breakfast. We can’t let it spill this time. If we really must spill it, let’s only have one chance, okay?”
As she spoke, she had already inserted the straw into the soy milk and handed it right to Su Zhi’s lips.
Su Zhi’s consciousness was groggy and hazy. Feeling the movement, she forced herself to open her eyes. The double vision before her was too severe; she couldn’t see clearly. Very slowly, she shook her head. The sharp edge she previously possessed seemed completely nonexistent at this moment, leaving only an instinctive refusal.
“Drink a little, won’t you? You haven’t eaten anything in days.” Ming Can put away her deliberate casualness. Her tone softened significantly as she spoke, mixed with undisguised worry and hope.
Su Zhi tilted her head slightly away, presenting a posture of resistance.
Ming Can continued to persuade: “I already cleaned the inside of your mouth while you were sleeping; it’s very clean. Try taking just a sip, just one sip. If it tastes bad, you can spit it back out, and I’ll catch it, okay?”
Su Zhi’s eyelids felt terribly heavy, as if filled with lead, but that soft, nagging voice kept drilling into her ears, bustling on and on, making it impossible for her to just fall straight asleep.
She managed to keep her eyes propped open. The double vision remained, unclear and blurry. The soy milk straw touched her lips once more, bringing a numb sense of reality.
She wanted to push it away, wanted to scare her off, but her throat felt like it had been rubbed with sandpaper, dry and astringent, making even her refusal look bedraggled and pathetic.
“Sister?” Ming Can leaned closer, her dimples faintly visible. She tried hard to recognize Su Zhi’s facial features. The bruised, purplish marks at the corner of her mouth and the smile gradually became clear in the morning light.
The straw nudged forward again, brushing against her teeth.
Su Zhi closed her eyes and, as if accepting her fate, took the tube into her mouth. But that was all she did. She had no strength to suck out the liquid inside, nor did she know how to swallow or breathe. In the end, the straw she had bitten down on slowly slipped from her lips.
This brief ordeal exhausted the last of her mental and physical strength. A moment later, the straw was replaced by a small spoon. The lukewarm liquid slipped onto the tip of her tongue, rolled around her mouth, and then slowly overflowed. It seemed she had truly forgotten how to swallow.
The sound of tissue paper tearing came from the plastic bag. The water stains at the corner of her mouth were wiped dry, followed by a brief silence. The angle of the slanting sunlight shifted, crawling from her shoulders to her collarbones, feeling warm in a way that seemed almost unreal.
“Sister, shall I carry you up to bask in the sun?”
A warm, soft voice fell from overhead. Before she could answer, two hands reached to her sides, lifting her entire body into an embrace. She lacked the strength to resist. Her body was like a rootless piece of driftwood, at the mercy of another, finally caught by two soft supports.
“Basking in the sun helps with calcium. I’ll carry you to sit by the window for a while. The weather is nice today.”
As Ming Can spoke, she lifted her into mid-air and walked toward the bay window. The room was not big. It was only a few steps from the bed to the windowsill. She walked very slowly and carefully. Su Zhi’s body had no support, her head resting on Ming Can’s shoulder, her neck curving into a fragile line.
“Sister, do you know about photosynthesis?”
The bay window was covered with a thin blanket. Ming Can placed Su Zhi on it, using herself as a backrest for Su Zhi to lean against, chatting idly. “When I learned biology as a child, the teacher said plants absorb nutrients through photosynthesis. At that time, I wondered why humans couldn’t do photosynthesis. If we didn’t have to eat and could just get full by soaking in the sun, how wonderful that would be.”
Su Zhi kept her eyes closed, her face tilted slightly upward. The sunlight fell on her face, illuminating her pallor to a nearly transparent degree. She gave no response to those words.
Ming Can lowered her gaze, her eyes falling on the back of Su Zhi’s hand. An intravenous needle was secured with transparent dressing, the edge of the adhesive tape curled up slightly from friction at some unknown time.
She looked at it for a few seconds, reached out, and pressed her thumb against that curled edge of the tape, smoothing it down gently.
“Sister,” Ming Can’s voice suddenly dropped lower as her warm palm covered that icy hand. “Falling from a divine altar into the mire takes only an instant, but walking from the mire toward the light takes a very, very long time.”
Ming Can’s voice stopped there. She lowered her gaze to look at their intertwined hands. The sunlight cast their shadows onto the wall behind them, forming two overlapping silhouettes. One was sitting up, leaning slightly forward; the other was leaning against her, looking as though she had fallen asleep, or perhaps as though she were silently listening.
“Adjust your mindset and live without being so calculating; perhaps you can walk out of the mud a little faster.”
Su Zhi’s gripped fingertips twitched slightly, and her neck turned ever so slightly.
Ming Can felt a momentary awkwardness being watched by such an overwhelmingly exhausted pair of eyes.
“I haven’t tried it myself, but I’m guessing that’s how it is.”
She tried to patch things up for herself. The next second, the woman’s thin lips parted slightly, speaking the four words almost in a breath: “You’re too noisy.”
Ming Can: “What?!”
This person really did it. After she racked her brain to think of so many comforting words, not only was there no gratitude, but she was also being called noisy. Fine, she would not speak anymore.
Su Zhi’s lifted eyes slowly closed again after Ming Can’s mouth finally shut tight.
Such a child, where did she copy all those grand principles from when her own life is an absolute mess?
She thought fuzzily in her heart.
Ming Can said nothing more. The two of them leaned against each other quietly as the sunlight moved a bit westward, sliding off their knees and falling onto the edge of the bay window.
After maintaining this posture for a long time, the person leaning on her shoulder began to slide downward. Feeling the weight on her shoulder dropping, Ming Can reached out to support her back and pulled her upward.
Su Zhi’s body regained its support, but the very next second, she felt something flowing out from her lower body.
I did not even drink any water, why is it still like this?!
At that instant, all her exhausted consciousness was shattered by this sudden, warm wetness. Her entire body stiffened in Ming Can’s embrace, her breathing stopping altogether. Under a state of extreme embarrassment, her body began to tremble first.
“Are you uncomfortable?” Ming Can’s voice came from overhead.
Su Zhi’s eyelashes fluttered.
“I…” Her dry lips were bitten white by her teeth, yet it remained unspeakable. In the end, she looked down at her lower body in despair.
Ming Can realized what was happening right away. “It is fine, I will clean it up.”
She helped Su Zhi up from her body, leaning her against the wall, and then stood up. Moving quickly, she went to the bathroom to fetch a basin of warm water, a towel, a nursing pad, and a clean set of hospital clothes.
“Do not be nervous. I am fast, it will be done in a few minutes.”
Su Zhi was shaking all over, her fingers clutching the edge of the bay window so hard her knuckles turned white. Her closed eyes revealed no emotion, but the tips of her ears were turning red enough to drip blood.
Humiliation and degradation, these two words rolled over her consciousness like a branding iron, grinding through it again and again.
No matter how many times it happened, the moment Ming Can peeled off her clothes, this sensation would come rushing back with a vengeance.
The moment the towel touched her skin, Ming Can’s movements abruptly halted. She lowered her gaze, staring fixedly at that area for two seconds, her pupils suddenly contracting.
It was not urine. It was blood.
“Sister, is your period here?”
As soon as she asked, Ming Can felt something was wrong. Warm liquid, still seeping outward, trickled down the inner thighs, soaking the newly changed nursing pad and blooming a shocking, alarming patch of red against the beige background.
Ming Can’s fingers froze there, her brain exploding with a loud boom.
She snapped her head up to look at Su Zhi’s face. That face was as pale as paper, her lips completely devoid of color. Yet Su Zhi herself did not seem to realize it yet. She kept her head turned, her eyelashes tightly shut, still enduring that imagined humiliation.
Ming Can panicked completely, her mind buzzing, her hands not knowing where to put themselves. Yet her body moved instinctively. She tossed the towel aside, her legs turning weak as she stood up, her knee slamming against the edge of the bay window in a sharp jolt of pain. Ignoring it, she staggered toward the door, yelling at the top of her lungs, “Doctor, I am going to call a doctor!”
Her trembling voice echoed down the corridor, sharp, hurried, and completely distorted: “Doctor! Doctor! Someone, come quickly!”
Su Zhi leaned against the wall, looking down at the pool of blood between her legs. The color was deep, and the volume was not small, but she felt nothing. There was no pain, just a bit of chill. She struggled hard, trying to pull up her half-stripped clothes to preserve that last shred of dignity, but she tried several times without success.
Soon, urgent footsteps echoed outside the ward, with Ming Can’s voice mixed in, sounding somewhat incoherent.
Gong Que was the first to rush into the ward. Seeing the patient on the hospital bed hoisted onto the bay window, the anger in the depths of her eyes surged. Her voice spiked an octave higher as she glared at Ming Can: “The patient is still in the recovery period. Who gave you permission to act on your own initiative?!”
Ming Can was stunned dumb by the scolding.
“Bring the stretcher bed over!” Gong Que shouted at the nurse behind her, crossed the distance to the bay window in two strides, squatted down, and pressed her fingers against Su Zhi’s radial pulse.
It was cool, the beat extremely weak, but it was still beating.
Su Zhi lowered her eyes, her eyelashes casting tiny shadows beneath them. She did not look at Gong Que, nor did she look at the child by the door whose eyes were welling up with tears. Instead, using the hand that was not being held, she very slowly and stubbornly pulled the lapels of her hospital gown together in the middle.
“The blood loss is substantial, but she is conscious,” Gong Que turned her head to instruct the medical staff nearby. “Prepare an intravenous line, draw blood for coagulation and a complete blood count, and contact the blood bank for backup.”
“Is it gastrointestinal bleeding or…” The nurse’s voice cut off midway.
Gong Que did not answer. She lifted the hem of Su Zhi’s hospital gown to take a look, then covered it back up. The expression on her face did not change, but the fingers pressing on Su Zhi’s pulse tightened for a split second.
“It is not gastrointestinal,” Gong Que’s voice was steady, steady to the point of being heartless. “It is traumatic bleeding. Surgery is required immediately.”
She turned around and gave orders to her subordinates behind her: “Notify the operating room to prepare for general anesthesia, contact the blood bank to dispatch four units of red blood cells and two units of plasma first, call their company’s person in charge, and then contact the dean to come and sign the consent forms.”