Read Chapter 8: — THE BEST DOCTOR

Treatment began.

Chemotherapy took Zhao’s hair and much of his appetite without giving the family the dramatic improvement they wanted in return. He shaved his head before the next cycle and arrived at the station wearing a cap that made him look, Tang said, “like a retired action-movie detective.”

Zhao considered that a compliment.

Chenxi did not.

The first reassessment was disappointing.

She returned to Li with the same question patients and families always asked when medicine failed to behave like a contract.

“What else can we do?”

Li did not promise a miracle.

Instead, he told them about an elderly patient who had lived for years with more than one malignancy. The man had endured treatment when he could, paused when toxicity became intolerable, resumed when necessary and organised his life around something larger than the scan results.

“So the answer is stop and start?” Zhao asked.

“The answer is individualised care,” Li said. “The right treatment is the one your body can survive long enough to benefit from.”

“Very elegant.”

“It means listen to your oncologist and stop behaving like your body is police property.”

Zhao grinned.

Chenxi rebuilt daily life around her father. Real meals. Fruit he used to forget existed. Follow-up appointments he could no longer quietly delete because she began accompanying him. She was aware that no juice, vegetable or perfect routine could erase cancer. The point was not magical prevention. It was participation.

“The best doctor is yourself,” she repeated one morning while placing breakfast in front of him.

Zhao looked offended.

“Li said that to insult me.”

“He was right.”

“Children become cruel when educated.”

At the hospital, another familiar figure reappeared.

Blue Sea Café owner Zhou Xifu had lost weight and the permanent shine of prosperity. Imaging showed a large right-sided renal mass and suspicious lymph nodes. The first fear was kidney cancer. Pathology instead pointed toward lymphoma involving the kidney.

Either way, treatment would cost money.

Li then discovered that Zhou had transferred him fifty thousand yuan—the reward promised on the day Haiyang collapsed.

He was furious.

“I was joking.”

Zhou, now lying in a hospital bed, shook his head.

“You saved a person in my café.”

“And now you need treatment in my hospital.”

Li ordered Tang to return the money.

Then, after a long pause, he made the worst financial suggestion of his life.

“Could you make it grow first?”

Tang stared at him.

“You want me to invest a sick man’s money?”

“You keep telling us you understand markets.”

“I understand gravity too. That doesn’t mean I can fly.”

The first trade went badly enough to cure everyone of fantasy. Tang became cautious. Later, a more disciplined position produced a meaningful gain.

Li insisted principal and profit go back to Zhou.

Tang called it the best trade he had ever made.

Not because of the return.

Because he knew exactly who benefited.