Victor Vance had chosen the hour with considerable care.
They had assembled for a public execution.
When the heavy oak doors at the rear of the hall swung inward, every head turned in unison.
Melvin walked down the carpeted aisle with measured, rhythmic steps. His attire remained modest, yet the man carrying it had become unrecognizable.. Gone was the slouched, exhausted intern weighed down by double shifts and quiet endurance. He held himself upright, his chin level, his dark eyes clear and absolute.
Beneath his shirt, the Sovereign Astral Meridian hummed with circulating celestial qi, refining his senses and sharpening his awareness to a razor's edge. Through his newly awakened Astral Sight, the entire auditorium unfolded before him in transparent layers—he could discern the irregular pulse signatures of the board members, the arterial calcification of the senior staff, and the stagnant, dark qi decaying within Victor Vance’s liver.
"Look at him, still trying to project confidence," Vanessa muttered to the colleague beside her, her lip curling in quiet disdain. "He doesn't even comprehend that his career ends today."
Melvin stopped at the foot of the stage, coming to a halt before the disciplinary dais.
"Melvin," Dr. Victor Vance began, his voice magnified by the podium microphone, echoing through the silent hall with practiced, institutional authority. "You have been summoned before the executive medical board regarding a critical breach of professional ethics and patient safety."
Victor tapped a thick leather folder resting beside the microphone, his tone laced with calibrated disappointment.
"Over the past six months, a standing internal audit of the emergency ward has documented serious discrepancies in your handling of high-risk pharmaceuticals. Signed affidavits confirm you falsified patient records to conceal critical diagnostic errors — errors that directly jeopardized human life."
Six months.
Melvin turned the number over.
The audit had opened the same week his name vanished from every promotion list in the building. Whatever was in that folder had been growing there since winter, waiting for a morning exactly like this one.
A wave of hushed shock rippled through the gallery. Malpractice allegations of this magnitude meant far more than termination; they guaranteed the permanent destruction of his credentials and immediate criminal prosecution.
Dr. Samuel Reed rose from the second row, smoothing his tie, and stepped up to the stand. He kept his eyes on the paper in front of him rather than on Melvin.
"As chief of gynecology, delivering this assessment brings me no pleasure," Reed read. "Melvin was once a dedicated student. Extreme personal financial strain and outside nocturnal employment have severely compromised his cognitive judgment. He is unfit to hold a scalpel, let alone make decisions regarding human lives."
Melvin watched the man's hands shake against the podium and read the rest without needing to. Elevated cortisol. Sleep debt running weeks deep. Two healed fractures in the left ring finger, set badly, the kind of injury a collections crew leaves behind as a message.
Vanessa leaned back into her bench, a subtle, satisfied smile settling across her face. She waited to witness the breaking point—the frantic panic, the pale trembling, the pathetic pleas for leniency that had filled their apartment hours prior.
Instead, Melvin stood perfectly still.
His silence stretched across the auditorium, heavy and absolute. The unbothered stillness in his eyes caught Gavin off guard, sending a sudden, unexpected chill down the young master's spine.
"Is that the extent of your filing?" Melvin asked quietly, his voice cutting through the hall with effortless resonance.
Victor Vance slammed his palm onto the podium, his face flushing dark. "The extent? You stand formally accused of gross negligence and falsification, intern! Do you have a single defense before this board strips your credentials and remands your file to the state medical commission?"
Melvin took a single step toward the stage. Through his Astral Sight, the Vice Director's body remained fully exposed—revealing not only the forged signatures tucked within the folder, but the thin, volatile arterial wall expanding precariously along Victor Vance's left carotid artery.
"I have plenty to say, Dr. Vance," Melvin said, a faint, cold tilt touching the edge of his lips. "Starting with the fact that every affidavit in that folder bears a forged signature... and ending with the reality that your left carotid artery won't survive the afternoon if you continue to raise your blood pressure."
A suffocating silence gripped the auditorium, so dense that the low hum of the overhead projector sounded like grinding iron.
Elevated upon the stage, Dr. Victor Vance froze, his knuckles turning pale as his fingers dug into the edge of the wooden podium.
For two agonizing seconds, the Vice Director’s mouth opened, but no sound emerged. Across the front row, the smirk on Gavin’s face faltered, replaced by an uneasy twitch beneath his eye, while Vanessa leaned forward, her brow furrowing in sharp confusion.
Before Victor could regain his composure or bark an order for security to seize the unbothered intern, the heavy double doors at the back of the auditorium burst open with a deafening metallic crash.
A dozen men in tailored black suits flooded down the central aisle, their sharp, synchronized footsteps reverberating off the mahogany walls. The attending physicians and senior department heads scrambled backward, clearing the benches in a wave of sudden panic. Walking at the center of the armed escort was a woman whose very presence seemed to drop the room’s temperature by ten degrees.
Lady Beatrix Sterling.
Draped in a charcoal-grey silk suit, her silvering hair swept back in a disciplined, elegant chignon, the matriarch of the Sterling Syndicate moved with the icy, unquestioned authority of an empress entering a conquered territory. Her dark eyes, cold and sharp as polished obsidian, swept over the stage, ignoring the administrative dais entirely.
Behind her, four paramedics pushed a high-speed emergency gurney, the telemetry monitors beeping in a frantic, irregular rhythm.
"Clear the room," Beatrix commanded. Her voice was not loud, yet it carried an absolute weight that silenced the entire hall. "Now."
Dr. Victor Vance swallowed hard, forcing his blood pressure down as he stepped away from the microphone, adjusting his lab coat with trembling hands. "Lady Beatrix... we were in the middle of an executive disciplinary hearing, but if the Sterling family requires emergency facilities—"
"My daughter is dying," Beatrix interrupted, her gaze locking onto Victor like a drawn blade. "Every senior specialist in this hospital will report to the VIP isolation suite immediately. Anyone who fails to move within ten seconds will be removed permanently."
Panic erupted across the stage. Department heads scrambled for their coats, while Dr. Samuel Reed, the chief specialist of gynecology, rushed toward the gurney with a portable diagnostic tablet.
Melvin remained where he stood at the foot of the stage, his hands resting casually inside his jacket pockets. As the gurney rolled past him, his Astral Sight activated effortlessly. The physical surroundings dissolved into transparent, shimmering layers of energy and tissue.
Lying upon the white sheets was Chloe Sterling. The nineteen-year-old heiress was trapped in a deep, unresponsive coma. Her features were delicate, her skin a waxy, translucent pale—yet beneath her waist, her abdomen was distended to an impossible degree, swollen as if she were carrying a full-term pregnancy.
"Vitals are collapsing!" Dr. Samuel Reed called out, his forehead dripping with nervous sweat as he glanced at the monitor. "Systolic pressure is dropping below sixty! Ultrasound scans from the transport vehicle show absolute spatial emptiness within the uterine cavity—no mass, no fluid, no internal bleeding!"
Latest Chapter
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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