Chapter 3: The Nurse

…

Noise.

Qi Ran struggled to decipher the noise around her. It sounded like a man and a woman arguing, mixed with the cries of a child, the sound of shattering glass, a fist pounding on a wooden table, roars, and shrill shrieks…

Deafeningly loud.

She opened her eyes to find herself standing inside a room, faced with utter chaos.

… I’m sick! Qi Jianguo, do you even know what medicine the doctor prescribed for me? I’m sick, don’t you understand? You need to be understanding… You just don’t believe I’m sick! I have so many illnesses. Look, let me read you the prescription. You listen! You’re just escaping reality, afraid to know how many illnesses I have! I’m saving myself, you get it? Traveling is my way of saving myself! That person is also sick, and so-and-so’s family member is sick too, she just doesn’t know it! I know I’m sick, so I’m helping myself, regulating my emotions…

The woman waved a paper slip in her hand, shouting aggressively.

… Yeah, you’re sick. Fine, happy? When have I ever complained about you spending money on your pills? You don’t work, you don’t take care of the house, you just eat, drink, and have fun all day. Hell, I think everyone wants your ‘illness,’ everyone envies your life. I’m not asking you to help me, I’m just begging you to stop causing trouble! Just don’t add to my burden, and I’ll be satisfied! Do you even realize if I collapse, who will earn money for this family? You think anyone can be as capable as I am? Go find someone! Let me tell you, there are tons of people out there who’d envy your life right now…

The man waved his arm, pounding the table fiercely, roaring.

They really made a pair.

Qi Ran sighed.

Fine. Fight all you want. Scream your heads off. I can’t be bothered to care anymore.

Mom, you are sick. Really sick. But don’t worry, you were sick ten years ago, and you’ll still be alive in another ten. You’ll be perfectly fine. It’s the people around you who’ll be driven insane. Dad, don’t get an inferiority complex. Don’t let Mom look down on you. You’re genuinely capable. A fifteen-year sentence—that’s not something just anyone can pull off. You’ll be a notable figure even inside.

She leaned back and fell.

She landed on a soft, white hospital bed.

Pain.

When she opened her eyes, the first things she saw were the pale yellow ceiling and the harsh light above.

“You’re awake?”

She turned her head to the right with difficulty, seeing a masked nurse sitting beside her. The nurse waved a hand in front of her eyes and asked with apparent interest, “How do you feel? Ah, don’t try to sit up yet. Your wounds will burst open.”

“Wounds?” Qi Ran tried to sit up once. Realizing she truly had no strength, she immediately gave up.

“Yes, wounds. Otherwise, you were hit by a car and flung nearly fifty meters, and yet you have no injuries at all? That’s way too dramatic. I thought it was a bit too abnormal. Drawing attention isn’t a good thing. So I added some injuries for you and moved you to a normal location, so you don’t end up splashed across the news headlines.” The nurse clicked her tongue. “A high school sophomore girl, in close contact with a serious car accident. She was originally at a safe distance, but she stumbled and fell from fright. Sprained ankle, scraped knee, a slight concussion, and a gash on her waist from flying glass… Well? Doesn’t that sound less like an eerie stroke of luck and more like a laughable stroke of bad luck?”

She spoke animatedly, as if discussing not a severe traffic accident, but some highly amusing comedy talk show.

By now, even Qi Ran understood the person before her wasn’t a real nurse. “Who are you?”

“Who am I?” The nurse acted as if she’d heard the funniest joke in the world and pulled down her mask. “Who do I look like?”

Under the mask was a bloody, mangled face. Qi Ran’s own face.

Qi Ran said nothing, just quietly watched that face. The nurse, seeming not to get the reaction she’d hoped for, clicked her tongue in slight boredom and pulled her mask back up.

“You’re really no fun, kid.”

“Scaring a kid, don’t you think you’re the childish one here?” Qi Ran felt a bit amused in exasperation. She asked, “Are you a ghost? I was mangled like that, so why am I still alive? How did you do it?”

“Silly child, what nonsense are you talking? You didn’t survive. You’re already dead.”

The nurse, who possessed her identical face, dramatically pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and proceeded to sniffle and sob for a good while, truly pulling off a ‘piteously beautiful’ act.

Qi Ran watched her silently. The person before her clearly had a severe histrionic personality disorder and loved grandstanding.

“Don’t believe me? That’s fine. You’ll understand what happened to you soon enough.”

After saying this, the nurse reached out a hand. Lying in the hospital bed, Qi Ran couldn’t dodge. She could only watch helplessly as those slender fingers covered her mouth and nose, turning her words into muffled, choked sounds.

She had thought it was like before, just another scare or a joke. But to her surprise, no matter how she struggled, that pale hand was as solid as cast iron, firmly covering her mouth and nose, suffocating her.

The joke had gone way too far, Miss Nurse… Was she going to die again?

Despair involuntarily surged in her heart. The suffocation quickly plunged her vision into darkness as she began to fall.

Qi Ran jolted awake, gasping greedily for air, adjusting to the sudden light, struggling to sit up.

“Hey, hey, don’t move around! If the stitches burst, it’ll be really troublesome.”

She looked towards the nurse beside her, who was deftly replacing an IV drip bottle. Just as Qi Ran was about to ask where she was and what happened, she realized her throat was terrifyingly parched. For a moment, she couldn’t make a sound.

“Water.”

After slowly drinking a little water, Qi Ran felt her throat become much more comfortable, though a bitter taste remained. She scanned her surroundings again and found herself in a hospital room. White curtains hung on either side, letting in only a faint sliver of light. The sharp smell of disinfectant filled the air. Beside the bed was a chair, and Tao Xiao was sitting in it, leaning against the bed, sleeping rather soundly.

“She’s your sister?” The nurse sighed and said in a worldly-wise tone, “You two sisters really care for each other. She didn’t sleep at all last night, just waiting for you to wake up.”

Qi Ran looked at Tao Xiao’s peaceful sleeping face. After hesitating for a moment, she said softly, “She’s my mom.”

The nurse jumped in surprise, then took another look, praising with slight disbelief, “Your mom’s… really taken good care of herself.”

Qi Ran wanted to explain she was a stepmother, but found it too troublesome. Anyway, the nurse wasn’t wrong. Tao Xiao’s results in preserving her looks were indeed exaggerated.

The nurse was clearly an extrovert who couldn’t stop talking. She soon started chattering again with Qi Ran. “I don’t know whether to call you lucky or unlucky, running into such terrible trouble. But at least you dodged it. The people in those three cars weren’t as fortunate. I heard it was rich kids drag racing drunk after a dispute. Six people in three cars. None of them even made it to the emergency room. What a mess. All that money couldn’t save them…”

Listening to her rambling, Qi Ran found herself momentarily unable to discern if everything she’d experienced before was her own hallucination or something that had actually happened.

“Rich kids, drunk racing?” she repeated.

The nurse misunderstood her meaning and nodded, saying, “Compensation is definitely coming. The boy driving the sports car was—have you heard of Pillar Group? You know, uh… I think I only know they sell appliances, refrigerators, air conditioners and stuff. Their chairman was supposedly the richest man in Pingjiang last year? The boy driving the sports car was his youngest son. Just got his master’s back from the United Kingdom and this happens the moment he returns. What bad luck.”

The name Pillar Group actually sounded quite familiar to Qi Ran. The chairman, that nearly sixty-year-old Bai Youcheng, was supposedly a model of the self-made man. He started by scraping together every penny from friends and family, then brought a dozen or so hometown folks to make plastic bottle caps. Later he made electric fans, then air conditioners. After founding Pillar Group, he spoke of pursuing green energy and full industrial automation. He was said to be highly influential across East Asia. Before Qi Jianguo got hooked on online reading, he used to boast to Qi Ran constantly about his knowledge of Bai Youcheng’s life story. In his mind, he probably thought he and Bai Youcheng were cut from the same cloth.

She recalled the deep blue sports car, its entire front body crushed into scrap metal, and let out an involuntary sigh.

In the face of death, money really didn’t seem all that useful.