Me

It was impossible to tell how much time had passed.

The fluorescent light in the hallway hummed incessantly, like a fly trapped inside the tube, circling round and round, never finding a way out.

Zhang Xian hadn’t changed his posture against the wall. The hem of his Zhongshan suit draped from the sides of the chair, brushing against the cold ceramic tiles. Qiu Shubai sat beside him, her hands resting on her knees with fingers interlaced, silently staring at the red light above the operating room door.

She wasn’t sure how long she had been sitting there. When one’s heart was heavy with worry, the passage of time often lost all meaning.

Footsteps suddenly echoed from the other end of the hallway.

Above the operating room where Li Jinqi was being treated, the red light abruptly went out.

The door was pushed open from the inside, the stainless steel panel hitting the rubber bumper on the wall with a dull thud. A middle-aged man in light green surgical scrubs stepped out first, his mask pulled down below his chin, the sweat stains on his forehead not yet dry. He was followed by two people in Punisher combat uniforms; the emblems on their chests identified them as medical-type Punishers belonging to this hospital.

Zhang Xian and Qiu Shubai stood up from their chairs almost simultaneously.

“The surgery is over,” the surgeon said, removing his surgical cap. He pinched the brim with two fingers, rolling it back and forth a couple of times before letting go. “He’s out of danger.”

Zhang Xian’s shoulders slumped slightly with relief.

The surgeon tucked the cap into his chest pocket. His gaze shifted between Zhang Xian and Qiu Shubai, his tone turning heavier.

“However, that arm...”

He gestured toward his own left arm.

“The damage to the tendons and nerve plexuses is too deep. Furthermore, some strange power we can’t identify has caused the bone and some tissues to undergo complete necrosis. We managed to save the limb itself, but for it to recover to the point of being combat-ready is essentially impossible.”

Zhang Xian’s gaze didn't waver. He simply nodded slowly and thanked them for their hard work.

A long sigh escaped Zhang Xian’s nose. Qiu Shubai looked at his back; the old Principal’s shoulder blades poked through the wrinkled fabric of his Zhongshan suit, and his spine seemed much more curved than she remembered.

He had long since guessed this outcome.

This was an old wound left over from a Beast Tide decades ago. Normally, Li Jinqi almost never participated directly in combat, allowing him to use his own strength to suppress that highly corrosive power. But today, it had finally succeeded in its encroachment. Since no one could figure out the source of this power, even the most skilled medical Punisher would be powerless to reverse it.

Being able to keep the arm at all was already the best possible result.

When the gurney was wheeled out of the operating room, Li Jinqi was already awake.

His face was pressed against the pillow, turned toward the hallway, his eyes half-open. His left arm was wrapped in thick gauze and fixed with splints from shoulder to wrist, elevated on a specialized support cushion. The fingers of his other hand twitched slightly against the bedsheet.

“Luo Yang’s side...” he spoke, his voice as raspy as nails scraping against sandpaper, “how is he?”

Zhang Xian walked to the side of the gurney and looked down at him.

“He hasn’t come out yet.”

Li Jinqi’s eyelids fluttered, and his throat moved, but he couldn't say anything more.

The nurse pushed the gurney toward the ward, the rubber wheels emitting a dense rolling sound as they passed over the tiles. Li Jinqi didn't speak again. He slowly faded into the distance with the gurney, the white of the gauze on his left arm being the last color to vanish in the hallway.

Qiu Shubai sat back down on the chair, and Zhang Xian did the same. He fastened three of the buttons on his open Zhongshan suit from the bottom up, but the top one was out of reach, so he left it open.

No one spoke.

Inside the other operating room, the scene was entirely different. The three high-ranking medical-type Punishers surrounding Luo Yang were all standing still, their hands motionless. The three of them stared at Luo Yang on the operating table; not one of them dared to step forward and operate.

The eldest, a female medical-type Punisher in her forties, had her right hand suspended in mid-air. The azure light-flame that had been glowing in her palm had long since dissipated, but she stared blankly at the youth on the table, not pulling her hand back for a long time.

The situation on the operating table was beyond their imagination.

From the wounds on Luo Yang’s body that had been bleeding earlier, some kind of liquid was currently flowing out.

But it wasn't blood.

Or rather, in terms of form, it still looked like a red liquid, still flowing from the wounds and following the curves of his body. However, the surface of every drop of “blood” was now coated in an extremely faint golden fluorescence.

The youngest medical-type Punisher couldn't help but take two steps back, his shoe scuffing against the sterile floor with a light sound that made the other two look at him simultaneously.

“I wasn’t planning to run,” he explained quickly, his voice dry. “It’s just... look at that.”

He pointed toward Luo Yang’s left ribs.

There had originally been a gash about seven centimeters long, with fragments of broken ribs poking out beneath the skin just moments ago. But now, the golden liquid flowing from that gash wasn't following normal physical rules by flowing downward.

They stayed at the edge of the wound as if frozen there, and then began to extend in all directions.

Like sentient streams, they followed the path of the wound, spreading out equidistantly along both sides of the opening. The gold and red intertwined liquid formed a bridge over the wound—very thin, almost flush with the skin’s surface—connecting the two ends of the gash with extremely fragile bonds.

“It... they are repairing it!”

The female healer’s voice finally squeezed out of her throat. “This stuff that looks like blood is autonomously repairing the patient’s injuries!”

On the operating table, the same thing was happening on Luo Yang’s abdomen, chest, and back—everywhere a wound was visible. After the gold-wrapped liquid flowed out, each drop had its own direction, as if assigned a task, flowing toward its designated position without hesitation.

The places with the heaviest injuries had the highest concentration.

Above the collapsed tissue of his left lung, at least four or five of these liquid bridges were layered over the skin. The color was much deeper than elsewhere, and the golden light was brighter. Beneath the bridges, the skin was closing millimeter by millimeter; the progress was visible to the naked eye, though the speed was as slow as an ancient mineral growing and crystallizing over eons.

The three medical-type Punishers looked at each other. They surrounded the operating table, but none of them dared to touch the strange liquid or even release a bit of their abilities, fearing they might disrupt Luo Yang’s self-repair process.

At this moment, Luo Yang’s consciousness was no longer in his body.

From the first second he lost consciousness, he felt himself falling, falling toward a very, very deep place. His surroundings were entirely blue—a blue so thick it wouldn't dissipate, pouring from the top of his head to the soles of his feet.

It was a heavy, quiet blue. He felt as if his entire being was soaked in it, yet his breathing was not obstructed in the slightest.

He snapped his eyes open.

He was standing on a perfectly flat water surface. He couldn't feel any support beneath his feet, yet as long as he willed it, he wouldn't sink into the water by even a centimeter.

A faint golden light shone down from the golden tree in front of him, penetrating the azure water and casting countless thin pillars of light.

“This is... my Sea of Consciousness?”

He recognized this place.

Every Punisher possessed an independent Sea of Consciousness and Sea of Energy, which were the places where they stored their mental power and blood energy, respectively. The appearance of the Sea of Consciousness wasn't the same for everyone; some were clear, while others were turbid.

Luo Yang’s Sea of Consciousness, however, was clear to a terrifying degree.

He could even see that there was no bottom in the mundane sense deep beneath his feet; there was only the deepening azure sinking toward infinity.

He looked down. The water surface was without wind or waves, like a liquid mirror, reflecting his appearance without a single error.

But the reflection wasn't him.

No... it was him, but not the him of this body.

The face in the reflection had softer features, and the curve of the chin wasn't as sharp as this current shell. The hair was black, not as long as it was now, and a bit messy, as if it hadn't been groomed for days. There were no glasses on this face, and the eyes were squinted, showing a hint of fatigue that wasn't too deep.

He was wearing a T-shirt and shorts that were all too common on Earth, with wireless headphones hanging from his ears—the left one was in, and the right one was in the charging case in his pocket.

That was him.

That was the him who had been sitting at a computer desk in an apartment building on Earth, the him who hadn't yet graduated from school.

Luo Yang stared at the face in the water. His consciousness was stunned, but his fingers unconsciously clenched.

The water surface had no ripples, and the reflection made no extra movements; it simply reflected his appearance from before he existed in this world, like an old photograph tucked away at the very bottom of time, finally being unearthed.

He crouched down.

When his knees touched the water, the azure didn't indent. Instead, the water climbed a short distance up his skin. It was warm, carrying a familiar saltiness that was no different from the seawater he knew so well.

He reached out, his fingertip touching the forehead of the face in the reflection.

The him in the reflection also raised a hand, his fingertip pressing up from the other side, their two index fingers meeting across the water’s surface.

His breath hitched for a beat. The reflection’s mouth didn't move, yet he heard a voice. That voice didn't come from any direction; it appeared directly in the center of his mind.

It sounded like his own voice, yet also like another person’s, carrying a strange sense of familiarity.

It was the voice he had used for eighteen years on Earth, with that slight laziness when speaking and the way he would deliberately draw out certain sounds—it overlapped perfectly with the habits belonging to himself in his memory.

“Do you still remember the way home?”

Crack!

The moment the words vanished, the azure water surface shattered.

Countless tiny ripples exploded in all directions from the point where his fingertip touched, churning the reflection into fragments. That face belonging to Earth twisted, decomposed, and reorganized in the ripples, finally shattering into countless points of light that sank into the deep blue depths.

The points of light sank deeper and deeper, darker and darker, until they became tiny specks embedded in the bottomless blue beneath his feet.

Luo Yang knelt on the water, his hands supporting himself on the now-calm surface, his head bowed.

The water surface reflected a new image.

This time, it showed his current face—the one wearing plain glass spectacles, with several scratches that hadn't yet scabbed over.

END