CH 104

Rain came down in buckets over Springwood Street that morning.

Whipped by wind, rainwater streamed down the French windows of the cafe, heavier and heavier, blurring and cocooning the inside of the cafe from the world outside. 

The sky was dreary and overcast. The gloom of eight o’clock made it feel closer to the wee hours of the morning. The cafe interior was brightly lit, yet its customers were sparse. The owner kept yawning as he instructed a waiter to send the breakfast items to the table by the window.

“Good morning. A long black and a hot chocolate.” The waiter set down the items from the serving tray one by one. “Two pine nut puff pastries and one pan-fried meat and veggie roll. There’s still one cup of warm milk pending; I’ll bring it over to you in a while.”

“Morning, thank you.” Lin Yuan obviously frequented this place often, and he even greeted the waiter.

Today, he was simply dressed in a beige jacket and denim jeans. He appeared much younger than before and seemed rather unused to not wearing a white coat. 

“I could have slept in this morning,” he said, with drooping eyelids, to the two men seated opposite him.

The waiter had already walked away and the seats around them were vacant. The downpour drowned out their voices, muting them from everyone else.

“You seem to be the one who arranged this timing, Dr Lin,” Yan Suizhi reminded, his hand stirring his black coffee with a silver spoon.

Lin Yuan, as though infected by the cafe owner, yawned a few times in succession.

He dabbed away the tears that were secreted at the corners of his eyes, then caught sight of Yan Suizhi and Gu Yan taking turns to yawn as well, and he said, “I stayed up last night because I was doing a research paper. Why do the both of you look like you haven’t slept either?”

As he spoke, the waiter came back with his serving tray. “Honeyed milk; be careful, it’s hot.”

Without batting an eye, Professor Yan started to spout nonsense, “I was up all night because my neighbour’s cat was being too noisy.”

But the neighbour’s cat had been neutered. It was terribly aggrieved; if it knew that it would be slandered in this way, it’d definitely scratch someone’s face into ribbons. 

Done fabricating a random excuse for himself, Yan Suizhi began to throw others under the bus. “But as for why Teacher Gu didn’t sleep well, I don’t have an inkling.”

Gu Yan shot him a look and directly swiped the long black in his hands, pushing the honeyed milk in front of him instead. He tepidly explained to Lin Yuan, “My upstairs tenant didn’t rest, disrupting my sleep.”

Yan · Upstairs Tenant · Suizhi, “…”

Lin Yuan, naturally, couldn’t make sense of the riddles they spoke in. After listening to Gu Yan, he’d even nodded sympathetically, “Understandable, understandable. The one staying above me probably plays basketball every night, and he doesn’t even lay a carpet.” 

The waiter made his last trip over to deliver a small serving of fresh fruits, compliments of the cafe.

“That’s all. If you require anything else, you can just press the bell. Enjoy your meal.” With that, he nodded and left.

Once making sure that there won’t be any outsiders approaching them, the three of them then tacitly got down to business.

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He referred to the two of them, but he was actually only asking Yan Suizhi.

Yan Suizhi didn’t equivocate, saying with a smile, “There’s nothing to avoid. He can listen to whatever concerns me.”

Lin Yuan nodded. “Okay.” 

In actuality, his previous question had clearly stated his identity and stance. First, that he did know some inside details, and second, that he wasn’t standing opposite to Yan Suizhi and Gu Yan, even going as far as to consider what would be best for them.

Yan Suizhi dutifully drank a mouthful of honeyed milk, then asked, “Were you the one who did the genetic modification surgery on me?”

Lin Yuan, “Yes.”

“So were you the one who got me out of the hotel that time and left me this smart device? Including the fake identity card, bound asset card, and that shuttle ticket?” 

“Not entirely.”

“What do you mean?” Yan Suizhi questioned. “Are there others involved?”

Lin Yuan drank his hot chocolate and finally perked up a bit. He exhaled lightly, saying, “It’s actually like this…”

“I have a senior—he can somewhat be considered my former mentor, I guess—who asked me for this favour,” Lin Yuan said. “Frankly, I didn’t want to deal with this dodgy affair at first. I became a doctor to save people, not to help people change their face and bury their identity, especially considering that it’s easy for the surgery to go awry when unregistered and unauthorised.” 

“Then why did you change your mind after that?”

“Because I found out that the person who required the surgery was you,” Lin Yuan said.

This was very perplexing. Yan Suizhi examined Lin Yuan again, “Did we previously make acquaintance? I have quite a good memory for faces, but I certainly don’t remember seeing you before.”

“It’s true that we hadn’t formally met, but I knew of you long ago,” Lin Yuan said. “Because of my younger brother.” 

“Your younger brother?”

“To be precise, he isn’t related to me by blood, but the son of an old neighbour of mine. His mother is a distant relative to my mother.”

The relation between them was so distant that, apart from sharing a family name, there were no other similarities to be found.

Lin Yuan’s deepest impression of those neighbours was the never-ending quarrels. The house was forever in chaos, and he’d hear the smashing of plates every few days. At that time, Lin Yuan was still in middle school and would take the express rail travelling to and fro these two points every morning and evening. Eight times out of ten, he’d pick up the neighbour’s son beneath the block. 

At that time, the child was only five or six at most, sitting on the stairs of the apartment block, sobbing.

The neighbour’s fight could be heard through the passcode-protected door. It wasn’t appropriate for Lin Yuan to forcibly stuff the crying child back inside, so he could only take him back home; thereafter, offer him some snacks, offer him some toys, and that child would slowly cheer back up.

Time after time, even his parents said so—the child essentially became half a brother to him.

But Lin Yuan’s family wasn’t staying there for the long term; they moved away after residing there for a few years. It was impossible to haul a neighbour along when moving, so in the years after, the opportunities for Lin Yuan to meet that younger brother would gradually diminish. 

By and by, they would grow apart, and they might never cross paths again.

Or, at least, that was what Lin Yuan had assumed back then.

But it wasn’t long before he heard that misfortune had befallen upon his former neighbour’s family.

The neighbour’s father encountered a midlife crisis and his alcoholism worsened. What used to be petty quarrels gradually evolved into domestic abuse that escalated with each incident. The young boy, just in his teens, often endured flailing fists and vicious kicks to protect his mother. 

“I ran into him a couple of times. He was covered all over in bruises; it was rather uncomfortable to look at,” Lin Yuan said.

During that period, he began having more contact with that younger brother again. He attempted to treat the wounds for him, which eventually honed his skills. It was just about time to advance to university, then, so he simply chose to study medicine.

During Lin Yuan’s first year of university, when that younger brother was merely thirteen years of age, his mother was finally unable to bear the abuse, rushing into the kitchen during an episode, brandishing a fruit knife taken from the kitchen cabinet…

“You were the one who took on his mother’s case,” Lin Yuan looked at Yan Suizhi. “It was a thing from many years ago; you might not remember it anymore.” 

Across the many years, Yan Suizhi had accepted too many major and minor lawsuits. Yan Suizhi truly wouldn’t have remembered that there was this case had Lin Yuan not brought it up. But after hearing a few sentences of it, he managed to hook onto some fuzzy memories.

“I have a little impression of it,” Yan Suizhi said.

“If it wasn’t because of you, his mother would have been caught in a rather troublesome situation at that time,” Lin Yuan said. “After that, my brother worshipped you a lot, but he was very shy and was embarrassed to tell others, so he kept going on to me about how he also wanted to study law after entering university.”

Yan Suizhi smiled. “So, did he?” 

Lin Yuan gently shook his head. “He didn’t. He had a genetic disorder, you know, the kind often seen over at Helan thereabout. The success rate of genetic modification surgery in the past wasn’t as high as it is now. The technology had yet to mature, so it wasn’t uncommon to see people dying on the operating table.”

Slightly distracted for a moment, Yan Suizhi lowered his gaze and uttered a soft tone of assent. “It wasn’t uncommon, indeed.”

When that younger brother passed on, Lin Yuan had yet to complete his studies. He was still doing his clinical rotations and hadn’t decided on a specialisation. Since then, he had his heart set on the genetics department.

But no matter how much progress he made, how much he perfected the genetic technology, and how much he raised the success rate of the surgery—the child, who the hearts of Lin Yuan’s family went out for, was no longer around. 

“This was the reason why I was willing to go off the books,” Lin Yuan’s tone was gentle but assured. “That younger brother of mine was a bit silly; he kept saying to my family that good things happen to good people, and afterwards he used to say this of you as well. To me, the many years that I’ve worked at the hospital is neither a blessing nor a curse. I’ve seen so many deaths, both accidental and deliberate, that I’ve become numb to them. It’s almost as if I can’t do this job without being numb. Maybe because he told me this too many times; I actually quite believe in what he said. Or rather than believe, I wish for good things to happen to good people… which was why I couldn’t just watch this happen to you with my arms folded.”

“Thank you.”

“No need for that,” Lin Yuan said. “I hope you don’t mind, but I also did it with a little selfishness.”

Yan Suizhi wasn’t able to react. “What selfishness?” 

“I selfishly chose to use my brother’s name for your fake identity.”

“Your brother’s name?” Yan Suizhi tugged that vague tendril of an impression, recalling, “But I don’t remember that your brother had this name, or am I wrong?”

“You’re not wrong. He used to be called Sheng Ye. Later, he changed to take on his mother’s surname, in a sense becoming part of the family on my mother’s side. The surname’s Ruan.”

Yan Suizhi’s doubts were dispelled. 

After listening to Lin Yuan’s motivation, he suddenly remembered the scene of their first meeting in Wine City. While it made him emotional, he was also rather peeved. “I have to say, your acting skills are really top-notch. When I burned my leg and had a consultation with you, you seriously acted as if you didn’t recognise me at all.”

Lin Yuan laughed drily and waved a hand. “Not to that level, I’m not capable of that. I really didn’t recognise you. The effect of genetic modifications when it first onsets is different from when it expires. The change isn’t immediate; it requires several days to run in. I left right after doing the surgery for you and truly didn’t know how you appeared after the corrections settled in.”

That day in Wine City, he really hadn’t recognised Yan Suizhi.

It was only when he clicked into the patient’s medical history on the photon computer and saw the name ‘Ruan Ye’ did he then realise who the person sitting in front of him was. 

For a fleeting moment, it was very easy to immerse in an illusion…

…that he and his younger brother, Ruan Ye, had no more than grown apart after not having met up in years. While he was busy with work, Ruan Ye continued to grow up quietly, somewhere out of his sight, with the course of life. Then, on a certain year, a certain month, a certain morning or afternoon, sunlight languidly crept through the window into the consultation room, and he, ever-so-coincidentally, had a young man come in for a consultation. Maybe this young man was a bit under the weather, but it was harmless, and he’d get better within the week.

He would look at the name on the medical history interface in a daze, then laugh, and he would say, “Long time no see. I almost didn’t recognise you.”