Chapter 3: Preposterous
The massive impact finally finished off the old hinges.
The door panel slammed crookedly into the whitewashed wall, knocking off a huge patch of plaster.
Wood splinters and dust swirled wildly in the beams of sunlight.
The stainless steel thermos went rolling, clanking dully across the concrete floor.
Scalding hot water splashed everywhere, sending up a cloud of white steam.
A dozen plump red goji berries smeared across the dusty floor like a pile of crushed flesh.
Gu Ye looked down at the goji berries on the ground.
He wiped his fingers on his pant leg.
He was a little annoyed.
These were top-grade Ningxia goji berries left behind by the old military doctor.
Heavy, ragged breathing shattered the dead silence of the infirmary.
That thick, black-haired arm was clamped tight around the throat of the new recruit, Chen Dabai.
Chen Dabai was a rich second-generation who'd just been assigned to the company. Normally slick and polished, his face was now squeezed into the color of pig liver.
His legs dangled in the air, toes scrabbling uselessly against the concrete floor.
Both hands clawed desperately at the arm crushing his neck, his fingernails splitting from the strain.
It was useless.
The fugitive was nearly one meter ninety, built like a mountain of meat.
His battered leather jacket hung open, revealing a black undershirt soaked through with blood.
A gash gaped beneath his left ribs, skin and flesh peeled back, blood dripping down his pant leg.
In his right hand he gripped a butcher's knife.
The spine was thick, the edge coated in a layer of black-brown rust.
That knife was pressed hard against Chen Dabai's carotid artery.
The sharp blade had already sliced through the outer layer of skin.
A glaring line of blood ran down Chen Dabai's collarbone.
"Medicine! Get me the medicine!"
The fugitive roared at Gu Ye, spit flying onto the glass medicine cabinet.
His vocal cords sounded like they'd been scraped over sandpaper, rough and ugly.
His eyeballs were shot through with blood, his face caked with a grimy mix of blood and sweat.
A centipede-like scar on his left cheek twitched madly along with his facial muscles.
"Bandages, Yunnan Baiyao, anti-inflammatories, Dolantin!"
The fugitive shouted as he dragged Chen Dabai deeper into the room.
A horrifying trail of blood smeared across the floor behind them.
"Put it all in a bag for me! Hurry up!"
He panted heavily, pressing the butcher's knife down another half inch.
A gurgling, air-leaking sound came from Chen Dabai's throat, and the whites of his eyes rolled up.
If this had been Gu Ye two hours ago, facing a desperate criminal like this, his heart rate would have shot past a hundred instantly.
Against a crazed felon, he was just a surgeon who couldn't fight his way out of a paper bag.
There was nothing he could do except raise his hands and surrender.
But now, Gu Ye stood in place, his breathing not even half a beat off.
He even found the fugitive's shouting a bit too loud.
Max-level combat mastery hadn't just rebuilt his muscles and bones.
It had reshaped his senses and combat instincts.
Beyond the piercing stench of blood, Gu Ye could also smell the acrid smoke of gunpowder in the air.
He studied the fugitive's body.
The surgeon's anatomical knowledge and combat experience overlapped in an instant.
Fractures of the sixth and seventh ribs on the left side, causing rapid, shallow breathing.
A through-and-through wound on the outer right thigh, muscle spasms, forcing all his weight onto his left leg.
The fingers gripping the knife were white at the knuckles, but the wrist trembled slightly.
That was a neurological reflex disorder caused by massive blood loss.
In the vision of max-level combat, this ferocious-looking fugitive had at least seventeen fatal openings all over his body.
If Gu Ye wanted, he could completely cripple him in three seconds using seven different methods.
The fugitive saw Gu Ye standing there like a wooden post.
Rage mixed with panic shot straight to his head.
He'd been chased by armed police across two whole mountains, and had barely managed to slip into this remote company infirmary.
He was already at the end of his rope.
"Are you deaf?!"
The fugitive kicked over a small green camp stool in his way.
The stool smashed into a metal cabinet with a dull thud.
"I'll count to three. If you don't get the medicine, I'll slit this kid's carotid first, then kill you!"
"One!"
Chen Dabai cried.
Tears mixed with snot ran into his mouth, salty and bitter.
He felt a warmth in his crotch, and pale yellow liquid ran down his camouflage pant leg.
He'd pissed himself.
Gu Ye finally moved.
He didn't go to the medicine cabinet, and he didn't raise his hands.
Instead, he turned his head and looked at the mechanical wall clock from the last century.
The second hand dragged with a dull mechanical sound.
"Tick."
"Tick."
The red hand stopped steadily on the number three.
2:03.
"Chen Dabai."
Gu Ye called out, calm and even.
In this room filled with the threat of death, that flat call seemed completely out of place.
Chen Dabai struggled to open his tear-blurred eyes.
His vision was hazy as he looked at Gu Ye standing a few steps away.
"Lunch at the mess hall was pickled cabbage with pork."
Gu Ye turned around, hands in the pockets of his white coat.
"After eating, you said you had spasmodic stomach pain with acid reflux."
He looked at Chen Dabai's blue-tinged face.
"Didn't I prescribe you two belladonna tablets and tell you to come get them at exactly two in the afternoon?"
Chen Dabai's brain completely shut down.
He stared blankly at Gu Ye, even forgetting the knife at his throat.
At a time like this, why bring up pickled cabbage and pork?
Why bring up belladonna tablets?
The fugitive was stunned too.
He'd been about to shout "two," but the sound caught in his throat.
His knife hand froze in midair.
Was this guy in the white coat insane?
Couldn't he see the pig-slaughtering knife in his hand?
"It is now 2:03 in the afternoon."
Gu Ye extended a finger and pointed at the wall clock.
"You are three minutes late."
His tone carried an unmistakable note of reproach.
Chen Dabai's lips trembled violently.
He wanted to speak, but his vocal cords were squeezed too tight, and only a hoarse "hah hah" wheeze came out.
Only then did Gu Ye slowly shift his gaze to the thug-faced fugitive.
He frowned.
His brows knitted into a deep crease.
The obsessive-compulsive disorder left over from his previous life in the emergency department of a top-tier hospital flared up completely in that moment.
In a hospital, there were two kinds of people he hated most.
One was the kind of black-hearted leadership who pretended to know better and gave reckless orders about surgical plans.
The other was the kind of medical troublemaker who didn't take their medication on time and caused a scene in the ward, disrupting medical order.
Unfortunately, the knife-wielding man in front of him had perfectly stepped on both of Gu Ye's landmines.
"Put the knife down."
Gu Ye's voice turned cold.
Not the cold of posturing, but the cold indifference of someone looking at a lesion on an operating table waiting to be excised.
"You kicked in my door."
"Knocked over my goji berry water."
"And now you've delayed my patient's medication."
Gu Ye took a step forward.
"Stomach spasms, when severe, can cause reflex shock."
He pointed at Chen Dabai, who was on the verge of rolling his eyes back.
"If something happens to him, are you going to feel the pain for him?"
A strange, deathly silence fell over the infirmary.
The autumn wind outside rattled the half-shattered window pane.
Glass bottles in the medicine cabinet clinked against each other in the wind, producing crisp tinkling sounds.
The fugitive's mouth hung open, the scar on his face twisted into a lump of rotten flesh.
He'd broken into houses, robbed, killed—more than one life on his hands.
Everyone he'd met along the way had either screamed and fled, or knelt and begged for mercy.
In his entire life, he had never seen a madman who, with a blade at his throat, was still worried about getting his patient to take stomach medicine.
This was an insult to him.
A serious provocation to the butcher's knife in his hand.
"You fucking dare to mess with me!"
After a brief moment of shock, the fugitive's rage shot straight through the top of his skull.
The last shred of his sanity was completely ignited by those few casual words.
He abruptly released his left arm from Chen Dabai's neck.
He raised his heavy combat boot and kicked Chen Dabai hard in the lower back.
Chen Dabai flew out like a broken burlap sack.
He crashed heavily into the metal cabinet in the corner, his eyes rolled back, and he passed out.
"I'll bleed you first!"
The fugitive roared.
Like an enraged wild boar, he threw his whole body at Gu Ye.
All his weight pressed onto his right leg as he launched himself forward.
The rusty butcher's knife cut a sharp arc through the air.
The tip aimed straight at Gu Ye's heart.
The sticky stench of blood on the blade rushed straight at his face.
Two steps.
One step.
Close enough to see the scraps of meat between the fugitive's teeth.
Chen Dabai, huddled in the corner, cracked his eyes open a sliver in the second before he passed out.
He watched in despair as the half-foot-long butcher's knife stabbed toward Gu Ye's chest.
It's over.
This new medic is going to get skewered.
Chen Dabai's head lolled to the side, and his eyes closed.
The expected dull sound of a blade piercing flesh never came.
No blood sprayed either.
Facing the blade thrust straight at him, Gu Ye didn't even blink.
He didn't retreat at all.
Not only did he not retreat, he stepped forward half a pace to meet the rusty butcher's knife.
That half step landed perfectly in the defensive blind spot where the fugitive's center was wide open.
Gu Ye's eyes changed in an instant.
No longer the impatient look of a doctor's obsessive-compulsive disorder from moments before.
They became sharp and cold, like a scalpel under an operating light.
"Since you won't follow medical advice."
Gu Ye's voice exploded next to the fugitive's ear, without a trace of warmth.
He slowly raised his right fist.
"Then I'll loosen your bones for you."