Chapter 28: A Life for Whom?

14TH SEP 2022~ VERALUCTL

The next time Mo Cong opened his eyes, it was out of sheer pain. He found that he was lying on a clean but not so tidy bed, a pile of maps, illustrations, and books on it all pushed to one side, barely leaving a space for him to lie down in. Occasional bursts of nerve-wracking pain came from his back.

Mo Cong tilted his head with great effort to see what Mongolian doctor1 was doing surgery on him without anesthesia. Just this one look made him almost lose his voice. He couldn’t help but tremble slightly. “… An Jie?”

There were only two reasons for his trembling: one was pain, the other was fright. Anyone would be scared when they opened their eyes to see their kind high school neighbor cutting flesh off their back with a knife. The fact that Mo Cong didn’t faint from sheer terror meant that his mental strength was actually quite good.

“Oh, you woke up?” An Jie asked brightly, so brightly that it seemed a little like he didn’t care either way. He sighed lightly. “Right, yes, I know that much blood loss must have made you thirsty but I don’t have free time to deal with that right now, I have to finish taking off this bad meat over here. Bear with me for a bit.”

Talk was just talk, but this man’s hands hadn’t stopped for a moment as he spoke, going at a pace neither fast nor slow like he was chopping vegetables for soup. Mo Cong suddenly felt a little chilly and gritted his teeth to keep himself from yelling in pain.

What kind of person was An Jie? Where had he found him? Why had he dared to take this blood-soaked, knife-by-their-side person into his house? And why hadn’t he called the ambulance or the police, but instead had cut him open?

Mo Cong felt like the thread of rationality in his head had been dammed up by this line of questions, the logic terminal of his brain short circuiting every time he tried to input a command. He could only grit his teeth, tightly clutching the sheets, bearing it as this madman hidden in plain sight butchered him like a pig while whistling an off-tune folksong.

People had said that the hurts of the body could never match the hurts of the heart. Now, Mo Cong was certain that those people were full of shit, their hands on their hearts mournfully like they were Xi Shi2. The whole lot of them should be sent off to tie bamboo in the provinces.

That murderous, needle-in-heart pain repeated over and over again, scraping at his last nerve. With a ‘poof’, he managed to claw a hole through the sheets and couldn’t help but scream. Immediately, he bit down on his wrist, denying himself another chance to show weakness.

An Jie listened to his scream, thought, and seemed to remember something with an ‘oh’. “Oops, it seems like I forgot to give the patient anesthesia.”

In an instant, Mo Cong thought he had gained the will to die.

So An Jie wasn’t a Mongolian doctor – he was a fucking vet school trainee!

“Can you still bear it a bit longer?” An Jie rapped his knuckles against the back of Mo Cong’s head. Mo Cong didn’t even have the strength to pant. Seeing that he wasn’t answering, An Jie decided to save his time by interpreting the silence as a ‘yes’. With the scrape of metal against metal, the ungraduated veterinary intern said with smug pleasure, “Then I’ll continue, okay? And since I only have a little left, there’s no need for anesthetic anyway, it’ll only be more trouble than it’s worth.”

After who knew how long, Mo Cong thought he had gone bungee jumping down the eighteen floors of hell – up, down, up, down again, the off-tune whistling the background music to his eerie torture. His consciousness faded between waking and fainting in the numbing pain, and he felt that those supposed ten great tortures of the Qing dynasty were nothing compared to this.

Years later when Mo Cong recalled this incident, he finally understood why he couldn’t win against the Sleeping Lion, Zhai Haidong. Because those men were all madmen, and the most crazy of them was the An Yin Hu from back then – An Jie. He played the role of a normal person with his exceptional acting skills, meandering through human society as if as long as he wished to, he could present any personality of any identity.

He could be elegant and graceful, he could be savage and wild, he could even accurately control the gentle look which seemed to have flashed by involuntarily… but no one knew what he was thinking. As a madman, maybe he didn’t even know himself.

But he, Mo Cong, had fallen into that madman’s thrall.

An Jie wrapped up the final bandage and finished his job. He looked down and saw that Mo Cong’s consciousness had floated off to some monkey mountain under his ministrations and couldn’t help but straighten up and massage his waist. “And you dare say you’re part of the mafia with that attitude? You cattail in a greenhouse.”

He thought a little, then poured a cup of water for Mo Cong and placed it on the bedside table where it wouldn’t be too difficult to reach, so he could drink whenever he woke up. He then took the bad flesh cut off of Mo Cong, his bloody clothes, and his knife, to be destroyed before packing up himself and his luggage.

An Jie glanced at Mo Cong who had taken over his entire bed, then pulled out another blanket from the cupboard, cursed under his breath, and curled up on the sofa.

Not bad, he would finally be able to meet his long-missed friend Morpheus before four in the morning.

Perhaps because Mo Cong had a bit of a fever, but that night, his dreams just wouldn’t stop. For a while, it was Si-ge standing emotionlessly next to the old gun Zhai, the gun in his hand pointed at him; the next second it was An Jie with a small knife, smiling like a beast in man’s clothing, floating towards him in a suit of white.

So life had this many terrors in it…

……

The next day, Mo Cong was woken by a string of loud conversation. Although his wounds had been treated, his body wasn’t quite listening to his commands. He carefully adjusted his posture as he listened to the conversation outside. He would never be unable to recognize his own sister’s voice, so he understood immediately that Xiao Yu had come to return An Jie’s keys.

Mo Cong raised his body slightly – even such a small movement made his face pale, sweat appearing at his temples. His throat was uncomfortably dry and he saw the water on the bedside table… Even though he didn’t know if it had been kept there overnight, now was not the time to care about that, so he picked up the cup and drank slowly.

The girl outside seemed to have laughed happily, said her thanks, and left. Following a period of silence, An Jie walked over in a lazy, foot-dragging way, pushing open the door to the bedroom and yawning quite inelegantly against the frame of the door. He looked at Mo Cong with half-closed eyes. “I wondered why you were so brave, turns out you have the same unbreakable body as a cockroach. It’s only been a night and you’re already able to get up… Mhm, not bad, not bad, you’ll be able to keep jumping around in no time.”

Mo Cong watched him alertly, not making a sound.

An Jie glanced at the clock on the wall, walked out like he was sleepwalking, and came back with a bowl of porridge in his hands. “Sorry, this isn’t some professional nursing home, it’s barely fit for human habitation, you’ll have to make do..”

Mo Cong didn’t acknowledge him, staring firmly into An Jie’s eyes. “Who are you? Why am I here?”

An Jie paused a little, placed the bowl on the bedside table, and lazily leaned back against the door of the big wardrobe, his arms crossed. “You fainted outside the entrance to the neighborhood last night with a knife,” – and also probably created a huge biological hazard, he said simply.

Mo Cong hadn’t considered that he could walk that far. In retrospect, he was a little afraid. If he had returned home in that state, who knew how terrified his two girls would be. He frowned slightly. “Then why didn’t you call the police? The ambulance?”

“I just returned from Bashang and my phone was at home,” An Jie replied easily. “From what I could tell, if I had left you there, went home, made a call, and waited for the ambulance to come, you would have been left to live forever in your sisters’ hearts alone.”

He was obviously avoiding the point. Mo Cong stopped disguising himself and his eyes sharpened. “Then can you tell me how a high school student was able to so efficiently treat a wound? An Jie, just who are you?”

“This…” An Jie tapped his chin, his expression mildly embarrassed.

Mo Cong laughed coldly. “Was the person following me you? I’ve only remembered in the past few days… but when it started, you had just moved in for about a month. Whose are you? The old gun Zhai’s? Or that foreign devil’s?”

An Jie looked at him with wide eyes. “It’s such a loss that Disney hasn’t hired you as a scriptwriter.”

Mo Cong didn’t fall for his words and kept looking at him with cold alertness.

But An Jie smiled.

It was unlike the normal smile of before, but a rather deliberately meaningful and artificial smile. “It’s not that I can’t tell you who I am.”

Mo Cong was stunned, only to see An Jie pinch the bridge of his nose. “But it was past four when I was finished with you last night and I didn’t get many hours of sleep before being woken up by your sister. I haven’t decided what my backstory is yet – come back when I’m finished.”

Saying that, An Jie calmly waited for this brat named Mo Cong to show his temper. To be honest, his mood had improved significantly after going for a walk outside the Great Wall, but who knew that Mo Cong would actually answer him seriously. “What do you want?”

An Jie glanced at him and thought that this kid really had it together, the way he spoke almost sounded mature. “What can you give me?”

Mo Cong laughed lightly. “Si-ge said the same thing to me that year. I said he saved my life, so I could give him my life, and now…” Mo Cong didn’t know why as he said that. The young man who had previously been almost joking around suddenly darkened his expression without any attempt to hide it. He almost instinctively stopped his words.

“Give your life to him… Xu Si?” An Jie’s accent, tone and expression were each as odd as the other. His voice lowered as he said, stressing each word, “He is nothing.”

“He really is nothing.” Mo Cong looked down at his modern-mummy costume and couldn’t help but sigh.

An Jie fell silent for a while, then suddenly straightened his back and walked out. “Remember, your father gave you this life.”

Author’s Notes: Sigh, my poor juniors will start their cadet training tomorrow. This is a reminder of this vet I knew; no matter what the issue was, he’d prescribe the same two medications… and if it was outside the power of those two meds, it was those four big words – to the fifth sector~  

Actually… back then I thought I had the potential to become a doctor.

(Priest went to a university with a hospital subsector. Kind of cool!)

1Slang for bad doctor. 

2One of the renowned ‘Four Beauties’ of Ancient China. It was said that Xi Shi had chronic heart pains, so would often press her hands on her chest and frown.