Inside the oppressive air of the room, bursts of angry curses could be heard one after another. Whatever was ugly, whatever hurt, they cursed.
Suddenly, Qin Xiangnuan smiled.
Fine, she’d repay them.
From then on, the Qin Family would have no relations with her whatsoever.
In the hospital, she stretched out her arm and watched with wide eyes as the doctor inserted a thick needle into her vein and drew out a large syringe of blood. She covered her face with her hand, and for a moment, the light that stabbed into her eyes was painfully unbearable.
"You agree to , right?" The doctor examining her asked with some uncertainty, the glasses on his ears reflecting a faint greenish glow.
Qin Xiangnuan felt a soreness in her throat; she opened her mouth but couldn’t speak. Then, she could only nod slightly, turned her face away, and closed her eyes. In a place no one knew, indeed, a teardrop the size of a bean fell.
The surgery was scheduled tightly: she came in the morning, and the surgery was in the afternoon. She heard the doctor arguing with someone outside; straining her ears, she faintly recognized her father’s voice.
She agreed? How could she agree? She had no children. She had always treated Mingming as her own, willing to do anything for him.
"Have you thought it through?" The doctor paused for a moment, then spoke those inscrutable words.
"We’ve thought it through, of course, we have," Qin Guohua hastened, fearing the doctor might change his mind, speaking eagerly, which made the doctor somewhat startled. He didn’t know what was wrong with this man—was he mad? One was his daughter, the other his grandson; none showed the kind of care that this grandfather did.
And that gaunt woman inside, does she know what surgery she’s undergoing?
The voices gradually softened, until they became silent.
In the operating room, one could intermittently hear the beeping of various machines.
The doctor’s face kept swaying in front of her, and as the anesthetic was added to her veins, her vision started to blur.
"Doctor, can I know what kind of surgery I’m having?"
Qin Xiangnuan had already sensed that this was not a bone marrow extraction. She had specifically looked it up; it wasn’t . Though she didn’t hear much of the conversation between Qin Guohua and the doctor outside, she could piece together some things she didn’t know from those fragments of sentences.
A flicker of pity passed through the doctor’s eyes but he did not stop the upcoming surgery.
"Didn’t you agree? Your family also agreed."
"The child has a heart problem; a heart transplant is a must."
"Heart transplant..."
The last thing Qin Xiangnuan was conscious of were these two words; empty and echoing. Her heart suddenly tightened, and the last light disappeared completely from her eyes as though it were the aurora.
She could not feel pain, nor could she feel hurt. Her consciousness completely left her...
"Rib spreader, open the chest."
"Prepare to remove the heart."
"Good, heart removed, donor, deceased, time of death, 3:24 PM."
With a ding, as the still-beating, vivid red heart left the body, the rhythm line on the monitor also turned into a straight line... Yet this heart would live on in someone else’s body, representing her, continuing to live, for a very, very long time...
I do not know how much time has passed, perhaps a full cycle of reincarnation.
The wind cut through her skin intermittently; she was very cold, so cold that she shivered constantly, so cold that even her lips started to tremble.
"Nuannuan, Nuannuan..."
Who is it, who is calling her?
"Nuannuan, where are you?"
Who is it, after all?
"Nuannuan, don’t be afraid, brother is here," a scrawny child, using the not-too-dark sky, kept searching for something until he heard a sound like a kitten mewing. His pale face involuntarily brightened, and he hurried over to the source of the sound.
"Nuannuan..." He quickly ran over, took off his own cotton-padded coat that was already not very thick, a coat that he had been wearing for who knows how long, with several patches on it and dark white cotton exposed at the cuffs.
"Don’t be afraid, Nuannuan, brother will take you home now. Once we’re home, everything will be fine."
The frail child’s lips were so cold they had turned blue. He hurriedly picked up another, even smaller child wrapped in the coat—his sister, the sister his mother had given birth to, the sister he had to protect, the sister their father had abandoned.
Qin Xiangnuan opened her eyes and through a blur, she saw a childish face, hair sparse above the eyebrows, large eyes, somewhat familiar, cheeks so gaunt they almost caved in, most likely eight or nine years old, currently running forward.
She could feel the warmth from the young boy’s chest, as well as his breathing, which intermittently escaped and turned into a white mist by the time it reached his lips.
"Brother..." like a small kitten’s voice, that was her stretchig out, a thin and small hand.
She couldn’t believe it as she moved her own hand in front of her face. Suddenly, a fog gathered in her eyes, the warmth coming from the older child’s body seemed to smooth over her lifelong sufferings of body and soul.
"Brother... brother..."
"Don’t be scared, Nuannuan. Don’t be scared," the boy hugged his sister tightly. In the cold wind, his clothes were very thin, yet his forehead was covered in sweat. He only thought to hurry home, to give his sister a bowl of soup to drink, hoping she might survive.
Qin Xiangnuan clutched her cotton-padded coat tightly, still able to sense her brother’s scent on it. This was her brother, without a doubt, her brother who had died so young at the age of nine.
She remembered, that year, when she was sick, her stepmother threw her on the desolate hill at the edge of the village, indifferent to whether she would freeze to death or be eaten by wild beasts, unwilling to spend a single penny on her. It was her brother who had picked her up, her brother who had saved her life, yet she had not been able to save his life in return. If she had known it would come to this, she might as well have died that year too; at least she wouldn’t have had to suffer her whole life.
She wanted to say something, wanted to call out "brother" one more time, wanted to clearly see her brother’s face, wanted to understand what was happening.
However, her eyelids started to droop, powerless, simply falling shut.
Qin Xiang Yang suddenly felt the sister in his arms no longer moving.
"Nuannuan, Nuannuan..." He was so frightened that he broke into a cold sweat, tears uncontrollably streaming down his face. He vigorously wiped away his tears with his sleeve and ran towards home with his sister in his arms.