The harsh blinding flash of the Space-Time Fold collapsed into the quiet, dim interior of the St.
Jude Medical Ward.
The heavy smell of wet coal, damp wool, and stale rain from Baker Street instantly vanished, replaced by the pungent, sterile tang of rubbing alcohol, formaldehyde, and faint ozone.
Zhou Yuxuan lay flat on a narrow cot in the corner of the infirmary.
Overhead, a single gas-powered lamp hummed inside a brass glass cage, casting low, flickering golden shadows across the stone walls.
Heavy velvet curtains were drawn tight across the high arched windows, blocking out the dull, grey drizzle outside.
Beside his bed, leaning back in a wooden chair with his boots propped up on a low footstool, sat Sunny Stark.
He was holding his tarnished brass lighter, flicking it open and shut with a steady, rhythmic cadence—clink…
click…
snap—watching the tiny golden flame dance over the wick before snapping the lid closed.
“You really are a piece of work, Yuxuan,” Sunny said low, his voice lacking its usual lighthearted drawl.
He didn’t look over, but the lighter snapped shut with a sharp, final click.
“Rupturing your own capillaries to absorb the pain of a stray hound behind a butcher shop…
If Mr.
Juvier found out how you used high-level neurological inversion, he’d have you stripped of your coat before sunrise.”
Yuxuan shifted slightly, a sharp, white-hot knife of pain flaring through his chest and throat.
His central nervous system was still vibrating from the neural shock of taking on the dog’s phantom agony.
He grimaced, his hand instinctively gripping the iron frame of the cot.
His wire-rimmed glasses sat on the small wooden bedside table, flecked with dry droplets from the rain on Baker Street.
Even through the haze of internal hemorrhaging, Yuxuan’s analytical mind moved methodically.
He didn’t regret taking the pain.
The dog would live; the needle could be removed without the animal thrashing itself to death.
In a world where cruelty moved quietly through shadowed alleys, taking the burden was simply a matter of cold, logical calculation to him.
Before Yuxuan could speak, the heavy timber door of the medical ward creaked open on rusted hinges.
A young woman stepped into the room.
She couldn’t have been older than nineteen, but her presence commanded an immediate, heavy stillness.
Her long, raven-black hair fell over a dark woolen shawl, contrasting sharply with her pale, almost translucent skin.
Her eyes—a piercing, luminous amber—carried a suffusing weight of grief.
Despite the faint smudges of exhaustion beneath her eyelashes, her features possessed an ethereal, quiet beauty that made the gloomy hospital room feel suddenly vast.
In her hands, she carried a small brass basin filled with clear water and a folded linen cloth.
“I heard the resonance shift in the hallway, Sunny,” she said, her voice soft, melodic, yet laced with an undeniable brittleness.
“Is this the one who collapsed near the public fountain?”
Sunny sat up, swinging his boots off the stool, his casual demeanor softening as he looked toward her.
“Yeah.
Passed out from neural recoil.
I had to use the Space-Time Fold to drop us straight into the ward before he choked on his own blood.”
The girl walked over, setting the brass basin on the side table beside Yuxuan’s glasses.
She turned her amber eyes down to Yuxuan, studying his pale face, the dark crimson blood dried along his lips, and the shallow, strained rattling in his chest.
“I am Melissa,” she introduced herself softly, her gaze holding a gentle, melancholy warmth.
“Melissa Wilson.”
Yuxuan’s eyes remained flat and vacant, his stoic mask holding firm despite the agony radiating down his neck.
“Lie Longterm.”
She pulled a low wooden stool beside the cot and carefully rolled up her sleeves.
“Hold still.
This will burn at first, but please…
try not to fight the sensation.”
She hovered her slender, delicate hands inches above Yuxuan’s chest and throat.
Slowly, her palms began to glow with a soft, iridescent light.
A shimmering silver vapor—smelling faintly of crushed lavender, ozone, and dried winter leaves—began to pour from her skin, hovering over Yuxuan’s chest.
[Pain Vaporizer Art: Rank I]
The silver mist sank directly into Yuxuan’s skin, penetrating his throat and ribs.
Instantly, a freezing, searing sensation flared through his chest.
It felt as if his internal tissues were being unstitched and bathed in liquid ice.
Yuxuan locked his jaw tight, refusing to utter a sound, his knuckles turning stark white where he gripped the bedsheets.
Slowly, agonizingly, the dark, internal trauma inside Yuxuan’s throat began to draw upward.
The iridescent silver vapor bonded with the dark neural recoil, lifting the physical hemorrhage out of his body and dissipating it into the air above the cot as a faint, dark grey smoke.
Within moments, the sharp, suffocating pressure in his lungs eased.
His breathing straightened into a soft, steady rhythm.
The taste of copper on his tongue faded.
Melissa pulled her hands back, her face noticeably paler, a light sheen of sweat glistening on her forehead.
She wiped her brow with the back of her sleeve, her shoulders slumping with physical fatigue.
“You…
absorbed the trauma and converted it into a gas,” Yuxuan noted, his hoarse voice returning, though his mind calculated the sheer impossibility of the technique.
“You didn’t just mute the nerves; you altered the state of the internal damage.”
“It is a fragile, painful art,” Melissa whispered, staring down at her trembling fingers.
“It does not erase suffering from the world…
it merely changes its form so the body can breathe again.
My father taught it to me before he was taken.”
At the mention of her father, the air inside the room grew noticeably colder.
Sunny quietly leaned back into his chair, setting his brass lighter down on the table, his playful edge vanishing entirely.
“Your father?” Yuxuan asked, his voice steady, detached, yet attentively observant.
Melissa let out a soft, shuddering breath.
She reached into her dark shawl and pulled out a small, tarnished silver pocket watch.
The glass cover was spider-webbed with cracks, and inside, a faded photograph showed a middle-aged man with kind, tired eyes and a gentle smile.
“His name was Neil Wilson,” Melissa said, her voice cracking slightly as her thumb traced the cracked glass.
“He was a senior warden at the Hullsperk Correctional Facility…
until two years ago.”
Yuxuan remained silent, listening closely.
“My father was a quiet, gentle man,” she continued, a single tear escaping her eye and trailing down her cheek.
“He didn’t belong in a cold place like Hullsperk.
He took the double night shifts in the lower sectors just so he could afford my medicine…
Every morning, he would come home at four o’clock, smelling of damp coal and cold rain.
But no matter how exhausted he was, he would always bring back a small paper bag of warm roasted chestnuts for me.
Every single night, without fail.”
She pressed the cracked pocket watch tightly against her chest, her shoulders trembling silently.
“Two years ago…
the Null Tangent breached Sector 4.
The wardens told the press that my father lost his mind.
They said he suffered a psychological breakdown, started screaming about a ‘Reboot’ and the ‘Endweaver,’ and that his mind collapsed in on itself,and he killed two staff’s.
But I know him.
He didn’t go mad.”
She wiped her eyes with a trembling hand, her voice dropping into a heart-wrenching whisper.
“He locked himself inside the lower vault to seal the breach from the inside…
to stop the anomaly from leaking out into the residential streets.
He held the lever alone in the dark while the walls collapsed around him.
And when they finally cleared the rubble…
there was nothing left of him to bury.
Just his coat…
and this watch.”
She looked up at Yuxuan, her amber eyes brimming with profound, unadulterated heartbreak.
“They didn’t even grant him a warden’s service.
The directors erased his name from the official ledgers to avoid an investigation.
They called him a ‘compromised casualty’ and closed the file.
He didn’t die but prisoned in the jail like a murderer,only we were the only people’s who does know that he was alive,Lie…
protecting the very city that threw his memory away like garbage.
The world didn’t even care enough to remember his name.”
The silence in the infirmary was absolute, save for the faint, steady patter of rain against the windowpanes.
Sunny reached out, picking up his lighter, and flicked it open.
The tiny golden flame illuminated his somber, quiet eyes.
“Neil was a good man,” Sunny said softly, staring into the flame.
“He didn’t deserve to be swallowed by the mysterious organization Null Tangent.”
Yuxuan looked at the weeping girl, then down at the cracked silver pocket watch in her pale hands.
His sharp features remained an unreadable, cold mask, but behind his wire-rimmed glasses, a quiet realization settled deep within his analytical mind.
In his old world, people like Lin Meilin used their wealth and arrogance to inflict pain over petty ego, walking away without a second thought.
But in this fog-draped realm of Hullsperk, people like Neil Wilson bled silently in the dark to protect others, leaving behind only cracked watches and weeping daughters.
Yuxuan slowly swung his legs over the edge of the cot, sitting upright.
The suffocating pain in his throat was entirely gone, replaced by a cold, sharp clarity.
“Neil Wilson,” Yuxuan spoke, his flat voice cutting through the heavy grief in the room like steel.
Melissa looked up, wiping her tear-stained cheeks.
“What?”
“I will remember his name,” Yuxuan said, his eyes reflecting the warm flame of Sunny’s lighter.
“Now tell me, Sunny…
what exactly happened in Sector 4 during that breach?”