Read Chapter 9: — EVERYONE HAS A JOB

Nuclear Medicine became busier after the public scare faded.

Rare cases arrived: vascular-graft infection, difficult prostate-cancer staging, suspected primary renal lymphoma, inflammatory disease that looked malignant, malignancy that looked benign.

Trainees began treating Li as a walking answer key.

He hated it.

“One person cannot be the department,” he told them. “If every question comes to me, the system is broken.”

So they divided the work.

Wang prepared a teaching session on primary renal lymphoma. Tang handled his finance obsession away from patient decisions. Xu coordinated follow-up and patient education. Li Qiancheng managed imaging logistics. Qin took on more formal teaching.

“Everyone has a job,” Li said. “That is how teams stay useful.”

The lesson was less about efficiency than ego.

Li had spent months being praised for seeing what others missed. He could feel how seductive that became. Diagnostic brilliance made good stories. Systems rarely did.

Yet systems were what kept patients alive at three in the morning when the celebrated doctor was not there.

A former international trainee from Nepal contacted Jingzhou police seeking Li’s advice about a difficult medical case. Everyone was confused about why he had called the police rather than the university.

The young doctor explained, embarrassed, “When I studied in China, people always said that when you are in trouble, you ask the police.”

Old Zhao laughed until he coughed.

Li took the consultation.

The story became a running joke in the Mystery Team, but it changed how Qin saw him.

Li’s value was not that he knew everything.

It was that he moved between specialties without treating their borders as walls.

Zou noticed it too.

During a complicated consultation, one of Zou’s trainees quoted a paper badly.

“If you cannot tell me where the claim comes from,” Zou said, “you do not know it. You are repeating it.”

He pointed toward Li.

“Ask him.”

The room turned.

Li raised an eyebrow.

“Why me?”

“Because you read like a man expecting to be cross-examined.”

It was almost praise.

But the moment carried something stranger. The Zou standing in front of them was calm, restrained, technically detailed.

A week later, at an administrative meeting, Zou was loud, punitive and oddly vague about an operation he was supposedly scheduled to perform.

Li began writing down dates.

Not because he believed in a conspiracy.

Because inconsistency had become a pattern.