2026-07-26 10:28:28"My father is the Vice Director. Tomorrow morning, I’ll personally ensure your evaluation records are filed with gross medical malpractice. By the end of this week, your medical license will be permanently revoked, and you'll be kicked out of Apex Medical Center like a diseased dog."
Vanessa wrapped her arms tightly around Gavin’s waist, leaning against his shoulder while staring at Melvin with absolute indifference. "Get out of our apartment, Melvin. You're ruining our mood!"
Melvin stared at the woman he had loved and protected for half a decade. The final embers of warmth in his heart died completely, replaced by a pitch-black abyss of icy silence.
Slowly, agonizingly, Melvin dragged himself up from the floor. He didn't gather his clothes. He didn't look back at the trash can. He turned his back on them without uttering another word and walked out into the dark hallway.
Outside, torrential rain poured down, soaking Melvin to the skin the second he stepped out of the building. Rainwater mixed with the blood trickling from his forehead, but he felt no physical pain—only a crushing, hollow void inside his chest.
He stumbled toward his battered sedan, unlocked the door, and collapsed into the driver's seat.
His career was sabotaged. His five-year love was a lie. He had reached absolute rock bottom, stripped of his dignity and left with nothing in the cold, unforgiving city.
Five years of devotion. Six months of midnight fares. All discarded alongside a half-carat diamond ring.
He sat motionless in the dark, his mind numb, when his phone suddenly vibrated against the console. The rideshare screen flashed with a high-priority, black-tier pick-up dispatch—a luxury request originating barely two blocks away near the VIP exit of the Grand Plaza Hotel.
Mechanically, Melvin tapped the screen to accept. He cared nothing for the fare; he simply needed to move, to drive, to keep his thoughts from sinking back into the sound of Vanessa’s laughter.
Five minutes later, the sedan glided to a halt beside the shadowy side exit of the plaza. The rear door burst open almost immediately, bringing with it a sudden wave of high-end jasmine fragrance and an intense, unnatural heat.
A woman tumbled into the backseat, collapsing heavily against the leather interior.
"Drive..." a voice gasped out—sharp, commanding, yet shuddering with breathless desperation. "Get away from this place... now!"
Melvin instinctively glanced toward the rearview mirror, and his pulse froze.
Even beneath the dim dashboard glow, her face was unmistakable. It was Evelyn Cross—the famously ice-cold CEO of the Cross Consortium and majority executive director of Apex Medical Center.
Renowned across the province as an untouchable corporate empress, Evelyn was legendary for her formidable intellect, regal poise, and ruthless composure.
Yet right now, the untouchable CEO looked entirely unravelled.
Her porcelain skin was flushed a deep crimson, and fine beads of perspiration glistened along her collarbone.
Her dark eyes were dazed, heavy-lidded with an uncontrollable, feverish fog, and her slender fingers pulled frantically at the top buttons of her dark silk blouse.
"Ma'am." Melvin twisted around in his seat, one hand already reaching for her wrist. "Your core temperature is climbing past forty. I need you at Apex Emergency, right now."
"No." Evelyn's fingers locked onto the headrest, scorching through the leather. "No hospitals. No authorities. If anyone photographs me in this state, everything I built is finished by morning."
Melvin held two fingers against her radial pulse and counted.
One hundred and sixty-four. Skin flushed carmine from throat to collarbone. Pupils blown wide and unfocused. Severe hyperthermia stacked on top of acute chemical neuro-stimulation — a compound engineered to strip a person of judgment and manufacture a scandal.
What Melvin had no way of knowing yet: Julian Cross had been feeding his wife measured doses of the same compound for eight months, hidden inside a nightly herbal tonic prescribed by a private physician. Tonight's glass at the banquet carried forty times the usual concentration.
"Westridge Hill," Evelyn said, her breath hitching. "My estate. Take me there."
Ten minutes later the sedan skidded to a halt before the wrought-iron gates.
Melvin came around to the passenger door. The moment he extended his hand, Evelyn tumbled forward into his arms, radiating heat through the silk like a furnace.
"It hurts—" Her arms locked around his neck, dragging his chest against hers. "Help me. Please. Make it stop."
Melvin caught both her wrists and drew them down, holding them steady between them.
"Miss Cross." He kept his voice level, the way he had been trained to speak to patients past the point of reason. "Listen to me. Whatever you think you want right now, the drug wants it. Not you. Tomorrow you would never forgive either of us."
"You—" Her eyes struggled to focus on his face.
"I am your doctor tonight. Nothing else."
Lifting her, Melvin carried her through the entrance and laid her flat on the sofa in the grand living room. He knelt beside her, pressed his palm firmly over her sternum, and reached for the deep pulse.
In that exact instant, Evelyn's Pristine Yin Qi — driven to a volatile pitch by the toxin — poured through his palm and struck something buried far beneath his ribs.
A deafening resonance rolled through Melvin's consciousness, like an ancient bronze bell tolling across centuries.
Beneath his torn shirt, a hidden dragon mark flared gold. An ancestral seal, dormant in his bloodline for eleven generations, shattered.
The Sovereign Astral Meridian.
A vast ocean of memory broke over him — divine medical scriptures, celestial acupuncture, martial disciplines refined across centuries — all of it flooding into his soul at once.
BOOM!
Golden celestial qi erupted from his core and tore through his limbs. The severe myopia that had chained him to heavy lenses since childhood dissolved inside a single heartbeat. His vision opened into absolute clarity, unlocking the legendary Astral Sight.
Looking down, Melvin's gaze pierced straight through skin and muscle. Crimson meridian pathways lit up across Evelyn's body, and there — clustered thick around her heart and threaded deep into her nervous system — sat eight months of accumulated black residue.
Eight months and Melvin realized, and something cold settled in his stomach. Somebody has been killing this woman slowly, and she has no idea.
The same celestial qi swept back through his own exhausted vessel. His split knuckles sealed over. His fatigued muscles rebuilt themselves into something dense and refined. Thirty-six hours of accumulated exhaustion evaporated, replaced by the boundless vitality of an urban cultivator.
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Chapter 214
The public did not recover its trust that week, yet it stopped sliding. The families who had met Melvin in the small room went home and told their neighbours what they had heard. The anchors kept logging their pulses at the gates, and the cold patches kept walking in the same order.Chen came to the window with the ledger under his arm. He looked out at the car park, at the striped canopies and the folding chairs, and at the volunteers who sat on their positions with their hands folded."It will not come back fully, Doctor. Not in a month, and perhaps not in a year.""No. It will hold, though, Chen. That is the most a broken trust can give us at the start."Evelyn's raw data reached the western hospital by the second bell, and the anchors sent copies of every log down the line to the car park. For the first time since the eastern arc, the volunteers heard the census read aloud in their own voices, and they listened without fear.Lin's frame chirped on the sill beside them. She had bee
Chapter 213
"Why did nobody warn us?" the next family asked. Melvin told them about the census, the rotation, and the four hundred anchors who were learning to read a pulse by hand. He told them what the cold patches had done to the north wing, and what Yan Shou had done to the chamber under the delta.Nobody in the room interrupted him. When he finished, the father nodded slowly and asked for a copy of the map.Ruth Alden's husband came last, and he did not sit down. He held a folded cushion against his chest, the same faded blue cushion his wife had carried to the car park every morning for nine weeks."She brought this every day, Doctor. The chair was hard, and she said she would not sit on bare concrete for anyone." His voice was steady, and his hands were not."Then she should have it back on her position, and the anchors will put it there. Chen, record the cushion against her name.""It is already recorded, Doctor," Chen said quietly, and he wrote a line in the margin.By the afternoon ther
Chapter 212
The councillor wrote the figure on his slate and underlined it twice.Merrow took the stand in a grey suit that hung loose on his frame. He described the afternoon he had stood in a doorway and watched his own hands. The councillors wrote it down without looking up from their slates.Lu was not in the hall. Mo's wardens had kept him at the crater with his plates and his brush, and the high table had not asked for him. Melvin noticed that the seat Lu had been promised stayed empty all morning."Councillor, it is being read aloud by a voice that has already decided how the sentence ends." Merrow's voice cracked only once, on the last word.A murmur ran along the benches. Iris Varga sat at the centre of the high table in her grey federal coat, and she did not write anything down. She waited until the murmur died before she spoke."Doctor Melvin, the council has heard that a man on a slab can be spoken through. Can you show us how it is stopped?""Doss will show you, Councillor, with a pr
Chapter 211
"Sun Wen, do you give your consent? Freely, and in your own voice, with the right to stop whenever Doss says so.""Given," the old carrier said, and he crawled across the gravel on his hands and knees.He reached the litter and laid his palm flat on Merrow's wrist. Merrow's body went rigid under the blankets, and the cords stood out along his neck. The core under Sun Wen's hand gave one deep note that Melvin felt through the stone."Old carrier, you have no right to this vein." The voice hissed through Merrow's throat."I had no right to a thousand years in the dark, Yan Shou. I took them anyway, and I am still holding."Merrow's heart stuttered. Doss's hand flew to his throat, and her lips began to count aloud. Melvin watched the old carrier's palm darken and then brighten against the wrist.The voice fought him for almost a minute. It pushed up through Merrow's chest in short hard waves, and each wave broke against the full core. The blankets slipped from Merrow's shoulders, and his
Chapter 210
Melvin looked at Lin's frame. The sixty-fourth chamber's readings glowed beside the census map, and the thread from the carrier's socket ran up the shaft toward the disc beneath him. He had read that carrier for an hour that afternoon, and he had felt a patience in the slow beat that no living man should have.The council had sealed Yan Ming alive so that his brother could keep a seat on the deputy's bench. Melvin understood now that the bargain had never been fair to both of them. He had spent two days learning the carrier's architecture, and he had begun to think of the sixty-fourth entry as a living man who had been filed away."Doctor, do I stop him?" Doss asked over the line, her voice thin."Not yet. Let him talk, and get me every word. Then tell him I need a reason to bring anyone up out of the stone."Lin's voice cut in from the frame. "The thread is warming, Melvin. The sixty-fourth socket has started reaching for the line again.""Let it reach. It can't pull what it hasn't g
Chapter 209
"So Yan Shou's proxy came through the gate wearing Lu's face. Hui saw the face and let it in, and then someone killed him and wrote a fever over the death," Melvin reasoned."That's the reading, Doctor. I have entered charges against the dead man for the record, as the law requires. The charge is obstruction of a sealed escort, and the defendant is Gate Warden Hui," Chen said, and his voice did not change at all."Enter a second charge against the physician who signed the record, in the same ink.""Already entered, Doctor.""Then keep every entry open for the federal observers, Chen. Varga will want to read every name before she reads a single rule."Outside, the light had turned copper over the crater rim, and the cots along the edge of the stone threw long shadows across the disc. A cold wind came off the far ridges, and the marshals pulled their coats tighter.Lin had not spoken for several minutes. She stood with the frame in one hand and the day's sheet in the other, and she was
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