2026-07-26 10:29:19"That is impossible," Victor Vance muttered, stepping off the stage and approaching the gurney, desperate to assert his medical authority in front of the province's most dangerous matriarch. "A distension of this volume without cellular density or fluid accumulation defies basic human physiology!"
"Then explain why my daughter’s heart is stopping!" Beatrix demanded, her hand closing tightly over the brass handle of her walking cane.
Dr. Samuel Reed's hands shook violently as he held the diagnostic tablet. Deep in debt to black-market gambling rings controlled by dark factions, he had already been pressured by Victor Vance to act as the primary fall-guy for high-risk medical anomalies.
Pushed to the brink, Samuel’s eyes darted frantically around the room until they landed on Melvin, who was quietly observing the patient's meridian pathways from the edge of the corridor.
Seeing a sudden, sinister opportunity to pivot away from his administrative failure, Victor Vance’s lips curled into a subtle, malicious smile. He stepped beside Lady Beatrix, gesturing toward Melvin with calibrated solemnity.
"Lady Beatrix," Victor spoke softly, his voice dripping with false concern. "Standard modern medicine appears baffled by your daughter's condition. However, this intern—Melvin—just claimed before the entire board to possess transcendent, absolute diagnostic sight. He insists our senior specialists are incompetent."
Gavin Vance instantly caught onto his father's scheme, stepping forward with an arrogant sneer. "That's right, Lady Beatrix. Melvin claims he can see things no machine can detect. Why not let him take full responsibility for Miss Chloe’s emergency treatment?"
Vanessa let out a quiet, cruel breath from the bench, realizing the trap Victor had laid. If Chloe Sterling died on the operating table under standard care, the hospital board would face catastrophic legal fallout from the Sterling Syndicate. But if a lowly, blacklisted intern officially assumed primary care and failed, the ruthless underworld dynasty would direct their entire bloody vengeance directly onto Melvin.
Beatrix turned her head slowly, her cold, piercing eyes anchoring onto Melvin. The air in the corridor grew heavy with implicit threat.
"You," Beatrix said, her voice dropping to a dangerous, quiet register. "Intern. Is what they say true? Can you diagnose what is killing my daughter?"
Unfazed by the surrounding hostility or the lethal trap woven around him, Melvin took three measured steps forward, stopping beside the gurney.
Focusing his Astral Sight deeper into Chloe’s body, Melvin bypassed the superficial swelling and looked directly into her primary meridians. What he saw made his eyes narrow slightly. Lingering deep within her abdominal cavity was not a medical tumor or a biological pregnancy, but a swirling, pitch-black vortex of corrupted, volatile spiritual energy—a Void Energy Core, born from an insidious, ancient curse designed to devour her life force from the inside out.
"I know exactly what is inside her," Melvin said calmly, looking directly into Lady Beatrix's eyes. "And I can purge it."
Beatrix stared at him for a long, silent second, searching his clear, unbothered expression for any sign of hesitation. Finding none, she stepped back and gestured toward the double doors of the VIP isolation bay.
"If you restore my daughter to health," Beatrix declared, her tone echoing with immense, unyielding weight, "the Sterling Syndicate will grant you whatever reward you name. But if she dies under your hands... not even the gods will protect you from what comes next."
"Lady Beatrix, wait!" Dr. Samuel Reed interjected frantically, clutching a tray of surgical scalpels. "We cannot allow an unlicensed intern to perform an unverified procedure! Standard protocol dictates an immediate exploratory abdominal incision to relieve pressure!"
Melvin warned softly, stepping toward the VIP doors. "Touch her with a blade and the reaction will kill her within three minutes!"
The thick, pressure-sealed doors of the VIP isolation suite slid shut with a heavy pneumatic thud, severing the chaotic murmurs of the hallway.
Outside, behind the double-paned observation glass, Vice Director Victor Vance and his son stood like vultures waiting for a carcass, their eyes glued to the scene within.
Inside, the room was steeped in clinical frost and tense, suffocating quiet. Telemetry monitors chimed in erratic, dying rhythms as four black-suited Sterling bodyguards posted themselves against the wall, their hands rested beneath their jacket lapels.
Dr. Samuel Reed stood frozen beside the surgical cart, his hand lingering an inch above the tray of scalpels. Melvin’s parting warning at the doorway still hung in the icy air like a razor, staying the specialist's fingers. His eyes flickered nervously toward Lady Beatrix, seeking cover under authority, but the matriarch didn't even grant him a glance.
She simply stood near the head of the bed, her knuckles white upon the polished brass of her cane, her gaze pinned entirely on the intern.
"You have your room," Beatrix said, her voice dropping to a gravelly, lethal whisper that carried no trace of motherly panic—only cold, absolute finality. "Prove your words, or join the list of those who failed my family."
Melvin paced slowly to the edge of the high-speed gurney and let his gaze drop onto Chloe Sterling.
The nineteen-year-old girl lay paralyzed in silent agony, her pale skin drawn tight over an abdomen swollen to terrifying proportions. A deathly pale face framing features locked in unconscious agony, contrasting sharply against an abdomen swollen to the proportions of a full-term pregnancy.
Melvin subtly channeled his qi into his eyes, stripping away the physical facade to reveal shimmering strands of crimson blood vessels, pale white nerves, and glowing meridian pathways.
A dense, parasite-like vortex of pitch-black spiritual corruption coiled precisely at the intersection of her central Yin pathways. This Void Energy Core, born from an ancient cultivation curse, feasted greedily on her innate life essence. It expanded outward, casting a spatial distortion that tricked standard ultrasound frequencies into reading absolute emptiness.
Melvin calculated silently, 'A classic soul-draining technique, inspecting the erratic pulsing of the dark core. The moment a surgical blade breaches her skin, the sudden atmospheric imbalance will detonate the core and instantly tear her internal pathways to shreds.'
Reaching inside his coat, Melvin drew out the rosewood case he had lifted from his glovebox at dawn. The latch gave under his thumb. Twelve hand-forged silver needles lay against black velvet, each one seated in a groove worn smooth by a dead man's fingers across forty years.
His grandfather had set these same needles into farmhands and fishermen in a village with no clinic and no road out. Melvin had buried him at nineteen, believing the old man's trade was superstition.
Standing over the daughter of the most dangerous family in the province, Melvin understood he had been wrong about that.
"What are you doing?!" Reed blurted out, taking an involuntary step forward as panic broke through his restraint.
"Acupuncture?! She is in acute systemic failure! Her systolic pressure is below sixty! You're going to kill her with primitive nonsense!"
Melvin casually plucked four needles between his fingers. "Step back," he commanded softly. The quiet force in his voice hit Reed like a physical blow, instantly silencing the specialist.
Melvin’s hand transformed into a fluid, golden blur. Swish—swish—swish—swish!
Four silver needles drove cleanly into Chloe’s primary acupoints—Qihai, Guanyuan, Shenque, and Zusanli—sinking with absolute mathematical precision. The metal bypassed mere skin and locked directly onto the hidden node points of her meridian grid.
A sudden, sharp hum echoed through the silent room, vibrating like a struck tuning fork.
From the observation window, Victor Vance scoffed under his breath, crossing his arms in smug anticipation of the girl's vital monitors going flat. Inside the suite, the reality unfolded violently in the opposite direction.
Melvin hovered his right palm two inches above the central needle at her navel. Pure, refined celestial qi surged down his arm, visibly distorting the air around his hand with rippling heat waves. He slammed his palm downward, stopping just above the skin to drive an invisible wave of pure energetic force into her body.
The four needles erupted into a brilliant, golden glow beneath the skin.
Deep inside Chloe’s abdominal cavity, the golden energy wrapped around the pitch-black Void Core like a tightening steel vice. The dark parasite thrashed wildly against the invasion. Melvin’s celestial qi slammed into it from four directions at once, breaking its structure down atom by atom.
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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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