Read Chapter 1: — THE NEWS

“Professor Zou Shiming is dead.”

Li Xiangyang did not sleep that night.

November came to Jingzhou without subtlety. The day before, office workers had eaten lunch in shirtsleeves. By morning, rain struck the towers sideways and the wind drove people into padded coats. It reminded Li of Zou: brilliant, difficult, capable of turning cold without warning.

Police cars were already cutting through traffic toward Hongda Hospital, the teaching hospital of Handong University. Outside the entrance, patients who had travelled from other provinces stood beneath umbrellas, bewildered. A consultation with Professor Zou had once taken months to secure. Now the hospital was refunding appointments, and white chrysanthemums gathered at the steps.

The official version was simple enough to fit into a headline. Zou had been abducted while travelling to an urgent consultation. Months later, human remains had been recovered. The famous orthopaedic surgeon was presumed murdered.

Li walked the final kilometre from the metro station in the rain. By the time he reached Nuclear Medicine, his hair was plastered to his forehead and his eyes were red enough that no one asked whether the weather was entirely to blame.

People whispered around him.

“They barely found enough to bury.”

“Someone wanted to send a message.”

“A surgeon like him…”

Li heard them without listening.

Because eighteen months earlier, Professor Zou Shiming had not been a martyr, a victim, or a man Li ever imagined mourning.

He had been his enemy.

The memory began in a mortality conference. Several patients from affiliated hospitals had died after surgery. Li, then a relatively junior nuclear-medicine physician, had reviewed their imaging and arrived angry enough to forget hierarchy.

“You operated before establishing the true extent of disease,” he said. “If our own intensive-care unit uses PET-CT when anatomy alone is uncertain, why are smaller hospitals pretending uncertainty doesn’t exist? Humility is not weakness. It is part of keeping people alive.”

The room went silent.

At the far end of the table, Zou’s expression hardened.

He was not merely a surgeon. He led a surgical group, supervised satellite hospitals and sat on committees where reputations could be made or quietly buried. Li, by comparison, was young, blunt and administratively easy to punish.

The hospital did exactly that.

His comments were judged to have crossed departmental boundaries. A research-publishing application he had filed through an outside route was also treated as a breach of procedure. He was suspended from clinical work pending review and ordered to submit a written reflection.

Most colleagues stopped meeting his eyes in corridors.

Li did not blame them. Hospitals had invisible sterile fields too. Everyone knew where not to step.

He moved his laptop to Blue Sea Café near the hospital and worked there instead, among students, exhausted residents and pharmaceutical representatives conducting discreet conversations over coffee.

One afternoon, a private room erupted into shouting.

The owner, Zhou Xifu, ran toward him. Normally jovial and broad as a wardrobe, he was now grey-faced.

“Doctor Li. Please. Someone collapsed.”

“Call emergency services.”

“I did. But he’s barely breathing.”

Li followed him into the room.

A large teenage boy lay on the carpet, lips turning blue.

Authority could be suspended. Training could not.

Li dropped to his knees.

He found a weak pulse, lost it, and began compressions.

He did not know yet that the boy was Professor Zou’s son.

He did not know that saving him would change everything.

And he certainly did not know that the man everyone would one day mourn as Zou Shiming might not have been the man they thought he was.