what happened when shen lian went to hospital [flashback of the previous chapter]
The hospital smelled like bleach and old coffee and the brittle kind of urgency that never slept. Fluorescent lights lined the corridor in a hard, indifferent row. Shen Lian walked through them like a man who had been awake too long, jaw tight, coat collar up against the rain still drying in his hair. He had the steady, impatient gait of someone with a list of things that would not be finished by pleading.
At the ward, he found the boy on a narrow bed: a tangle of bruises, bandages, and a face mapped in pain. Doctors moved with an easy efficiency, voices clipped and full of practice. The report was blunt. The boy was stable for the moment. Not out of danger but alive, held at the edge by tubes and medicine.
Even before he had let himself breathe, Shen took out his phone and dialed Zhao.
"The kid is stable," he said when Zhao answered. The words were meant to give, to ease the tightness he could hear in Zhao's tone.
"Thank God," Zhao breathed, a small sound crowded by relief and the memory of last night. "Do they think he will be okay?"
"Concussion, deep bruising. We are monitoring swelling. For now, stable," Shen answered, the clinical cadence making the word hollow. He ended the call and tucked his phone away. He had to move. There were leads to pull, fingerprints to chase, small threads at the edge of a vast tangle.
As shen lian arrived in forensic department, Dr. Huo immediately took him to her cabin. she looked disturbed.
"What kind of case are you handling, detective?" she asked, sans preamble. There was curiosity in the question and an edge of something else, like a hand touching a wound.
Shen's patience thinned. He had been on the razor edge for hours, and someone asking rhetorical questions felt like a provocation. "What do you want to say, Dr. huo...? I have no time for lectures. Tell me the facts."
Shen expected routine. His mouth narrowed. "Then stop dancing. Tell me."
She laid the printouts on the desk, pushing the pages across with quick, precise fingers. "The boy's DNA matched He Mingzhao."
Shen lian's eyes widened... but he still couldn't understand why Dr. Huo looked so stressed. "There's more... right?"
"Yes." Dr. Lin's voice was clipped. "we ran a full match. We ran it three times. No contamination in our process. The machine gave a clear read."
Shen drew in air. He tried to keep his voice steady. "That man was killed a year ago. Postmortem. The case file closed. If his DNA matches the boy, then someone used old blood, or we have a clerical nightmare, or something far worse."
Dr. Lin's hand tapped the file again. "There is more. If that were all, I would have simply told you the match and let you decide the rest. But the file is.odd. He Mingzhao had no listed next of kin. After the postmortem no one came to claim the body. His file had no family attached. We traced addresses and phone numbers. Nothing. He was processed and then held. That was unusual, but not impossible."
The lab light hummed like a small insect. Shen felt something low and territorial stir in him, the slow, practical anger of someone who had seen systems broken and wanted to fix them. He thought of the little gift box at the apartment, of the charred fingers, of the honeyed voice that had called Qin Yuelin's name from the mirror. He had sleepless hours to solve the mechanics of malevolent cleverness, but now there was another layer, a bone-deep uncanny that made him cold.
Then another call came, a phone clamped to the side of his face with impatience. He cursed under his breath. The hospital would not stop. "These bastards will not let me breathe, if this goes on i'm definitely going to become monk sooner than expected" he muttered. He stepped outside the cabin and answered.
"It had better be something worth my time, or else book a bed for yourself in the same ward" he said before the doctor even took a breath.
"The boy is awake... he's screaming and scratching himself" doctor took a pause before continuing "we can't control him-"
He got cut off by shen "And what makes you think i can handle him?! what am i? a baby sitter?... DO YOU WANT ME TO LULL HIM TO SLEEP OR WHAT!"
Doctor stuttered "Detective shen-"
"Fine DAMMIT!," Shen snapped. "I am coming."
He ended the call and moved at a run. The corridors blurred, doors sliding past, nurses' faces like pale, practised moons. He reached the ward and pushed inside.
The boy was a tangle of motion, nails digging into his arms until blood welled bright. He screamed without words, an animal sound made human. The sheets were stained red. Nurses moved with calm, trying to contain a storm. One had a firm, clinical grip on a shoulder; another was ready with sedatives, hands shaking slightly because some things cannot be routine.
Shen stepped closer and tried the thing he always tried first: words. He spoke as if speaking could hold storm clouds back. "Hey. Listen to me. Breathe. Look at me."
The boy's eyes found him but they were white on the rim, frantic, and the scream tore his mouth open again. Shen felt the noise press in. It was a thin, high thing that made the edges of bones ache. He tried again, and the boy's panic took on the speed of something spreading.
Shen's edge cracked. He slapped the boy hard across the face, a flat, shocking sound. The noise stopped instantly.
"ONE MORE SOUND OUT OF THAT MOUTH AND I'M PEELING YOUR SKIN MYSELF!" Shen was loosing all his patience.
The impact knocked the panic like a struck bell, the boy's arms falling limp in a spill of sobs.
The room sucked a small breath. Nurses stared, some startled, some with a private, empathetic understanding. The doctor looked at him with a mixture of reproach and a raw, professional pragmatism.
"Sedate him," the doctor recommended. "He is self harming. We must stop the bleeding."
Shen felt the guilt climb up the inside of his throat. He had watched the boy mutilate himself with nails, hands raw with red. His palm ached with the memory of the strike. But the boy's scream had been a jagged thing that could not be reasoned into silence. Sometimes the world required blunt tools. Sometimes the blunt tool had to be the human hand.
The doctor nodded. "Yes. I will call if anything changes."
shen looked doctor dead in the eyes "Listen doctor... if i received another call from you... you might need a doctor for yourself".
Shen stood by the bed until the sedative took the edges off the boy's eyes. He watched the harsh posture of fear smooth into something dim and dream-locked. He felt hollow and raw and more like someone who had been sharpened against a knife than like a man who kept order.
He returned to the apartment in the evening, the building shedding rain as he climbed the stairs. The flat opened to the soft light of living rooms and the quiet of people trying to stitch normality back over ragged edges. Zhao was on the couch, he was working on his laptop... as he does work from home most of the time to stay with li an. his face stubbled, eyes red from worry. Li An sat close, fingers fidgeting with the hem of his sweater. The apartment smelled of tea and something small and domestic that felt like an attempt at healing.
He came near and said, half as a joke, half to keep the room from the edge of being too serious, "You said the storeroom was empty, right?" It was a small, human thing to ask, and in that second the world narrowed to the three of them, to the apartment and the small, fragile hearth they had made. The question was practical and absurd, and in it was the exhausted humor of a man who would not allow the night to win yet. The evening light pooled soft and uncertain on the floor. Rain hammered the windows. The boy they had found lay under sedatives so he would not scrape himself into ruin. The forensic results sat like an accusation on a paper in a lab that knew too much. And the name that kept returning, Qin Yuelin, looped in the back of everyone's mind like a curse that also felt like a key.
END OF THE CHAPTER.