Read Chapter 2: — THE DOCTOR WHO SPOKE TOO LOUDLY

Li’s arms were shaking by the time the emergency team arrived.

He had been performing CPR for close to half an hour. The teenage boy had shown intermittent signs of circulation, then slipped away again. When the monitor finally caught a sustainable rhythm, Li sat back on his heels and realised sweat had soaked through his shirt.

The private room looked absurdly cheerful around them: cake, soft drinks, playing cards, bright balloons from an end-of-term celebration.

Then the door opened and Professor Zou Shiming forced his way inside.

“My son has a cardiac problem,” Zou said. “Cardiology will take over. This is outside your specialty.”

Li pulled off his gloves.

“I don’t think the heart is the primary problem.”

Zou stared at him.

“Then what do you think it is?”

“Thyroid storm.”

For the second time in a week, Li managed to silence a room by saying exactly what he believed.

Zou’s face darkened.

“You’re guessing.”

“I’m forming a differential diagnosis.”

“You are suspended.”

“And your son is alive.”

The ambulance doors closed between them before the argument could become something worse.

Later, sitting alone in the café, Li discovered his hands were still trembling. He had saved a life while officially barred from practising medicine. The contradiction would have been funny if it had not felt so cruel.

Zhou Xifu brought him coffee on the house.

“You saved my business,” the owner said.

“I saved a patient.”

“If he had died in my café, I would have been finished.”

“You called the ambulance. That was the correct thing.”

“I also promised you money.”

“You panicked.”

“I’m a man of my word.”

Li waved him away.

At Hongda, the boy’s diagnosis came back as Li had suspected: thyroid storm, with severe cardiovascular stress. Endocrinology, cardiology and critical care took over. The news spread through the hospital faster than any formal notice.

The same people who had been avoiding Li now sent him discreet messages.

You were right.

He hated those messages.

Medicine was not supposed to be a debate trophy.

A few days later, Zou’s son, Haiyang, was transferred to a ward where nuclear medicine was involved in his follow-up care. He became fixated on one request.

“I want Doctor Li.”

His father objected every time.

“I am a surgeon.”

“You’re not my nuclear-medicine doctor.”

“I am one of the best surgeons in the province.”

“That is still not the same thing.”

Mrs Zou, elegant and calm, sided with her son.

“If we transferred him there, perhaps we should listen to the people who work there.”

Haiyang went further.

“You’re brilliant with a scalpel, Dad. But sometimes you behave as if the operating theatre is the whole universe.”

Zou turned crimson.

The argument would have remained a family embarrassment if Haiyang had not threatened to refuse further cooperation unless Li came to see him.

That was how a suspended doctor was summoned back into the hospital by a patient whose father had helped push him out.

Old Zhao Zhigang, the detective who had recently become acquainted with Li through another matter, found the situation hilarious.

“A doctor with no job and a patient who won’t accept anyone else. Very efficient system.”

His daughter, Zhao Chenxi, did not smile.

Li had met her only briefly. She was a forensic pathologist with a precise voice and an expression that made most people feel they had already died and were disappointing her at autopsy.

“Your father jokes too much,” Li told her.

“He thinks you talk too much.”

“Then we agree on something.”

None of them understood yet how often they would be forced to work together.