Prologue

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The saying goes like this, storms gather without warning in nature and bad luck befalls men overnight. That was then. This is now. Life is but a cruel reality.

Wen Muling really never saw it coming, which was true enough.

At twenty-seven, she was still an apprentice compared to her colleagues, a fact that didn’t make her any less talented, competent or well-sought neurologist. She grew up in a big family, renowned for their traditional medicine. However, as much as she liked using herbs and her grandmother’s ways, she did, just like her elder cousins and brothers before her, pursue a more modern medicine.

Five years ago, one of her brothers died in a terrorist attack while he was on holidays in America, leaving with her his latest researches and all his notes. In tears and grief, her grandmother had started her homage by scolding them. All her grandsons and granddaughters. Where was the need to go so far, she had cried; they should have just stayed and kept learning by their family’s side! However, by the end of the day, the same grandmother asked her to finish his researches in his memory. Firstly, for familial's reasons and secondly, because it was something that her brother really held dear and she was the one who studied the same field as him in the family.

Wen Fan, her brother, was researching one of the many mentally degenerative pathologies. The one he was interested in was quite rare, so not many pieces of information could be found about it, and even fewer treatments. Wen Fan's motivation, however, never faltered for his own wife was suffering from that same pathology.

Since then, Wen Wuling had it in mind. It wasn’t quite easy. Researches asked for money, materials and many more. One couldn’t research alone too. There was a need for a team. However, the subject attracted no one at all, no one wanted to participate and even fewer people wanted to sponsor it. It was simply terrible. At the very least, Wen Fan had his own laboratory where he could search and try his different hypotheses; but since his death, the contract he had with the landlord was terminated and his money was left for his wife’s treatment. Wen Wuling didn’t dare to ask for anything from the poor woman and she couldn’t resolve herself to turn to her family: they weren’t that rich and no one knew how long it would take until she finished -if she ever did.

She made do with her salary, struggling with it and her work. It wasn't easy at all. By the end of the second year though, she got a good surprise, one of her previous teachers, doctor Yu Heng, came back to the country and, upon learning what she was doing, eagerly participated and even helped her find sponsors.

They weren’t starting from scratch, they already had the seventeen years or so researches, results, and analysis of her brother and in four years’ time, based on her brother’s results and their own, they found the exact origins of the sickness and how to treat it. There was no cure, but the sickness's progression could be stopped. She was ecstatic.

However, before she could even announce the good news to her family, she was surprised to see on the tv, her own mentor holding a press conference where he was indicated to be, solely, the one who found the right treatment. Wen Wuling was speechless and hurt. Her mentor, the one who taught her everything and for whom she had the deepest respect for, actually stole her brother’s work and put it under his sole name! He had helped, so of course, his name should be stated, but why not put her brother’s too. The late man was, after all, the one whose works they rely on the most. Without him, they wouldn’t find anything since they just followed his lead.

When she tried to make justice for her brother, her mentor discredited her, dirtied her name, and even sullied her reputation, she couldn’t work anywhere anymore.

One night, after a particularly bad day, Wen Wuling infiltrated Yu Heng's apartment and waited for his return. When he came back and close the door behind him, turning on the light, he was vaguely surprised to see her but he still stayed calm.

“Why?” she asked.

She didn’t have many friends, there was never the time for that, and the little she had, all doctors too, all turned their backs against her, vilifying her even more and in a short amount of time, people had reported so many medical faults that she was supposed to have committed that she had ultimately been banned from the medical profession. 

She was completely dejected and too ashamed to return to her family now.

Yu Heng went to the fridge, took out a bottle of water, and while hidden by the fridge, door, carefully sneaked from the icebox, a syringe that he prepared, slipping it in his pocket.

"Why?" her almost lifeless form, slumped on the couch, asked again. Why claim the research his? Why frame her? Why have her expulsed from her own apartment -because she was sure that too, he had a hand on the matter.

At first, she wasn't going to come here but her feet just brought her to his apartment and in the end, she felt the need to ask him directly. He was someone she had known for so many years and until recently again, would never have thought him capable of that. Of that much bitterness and cruelty.

The old man sighed and came to sit in front of her placing the two glasses, he opened the bottle and poured in both. She eyed him as he drank his before she lifted hers.

***

As they were talking, the more she went and the more hysterical she was becoming, not realizing it herself, too caught in the frenzy of her emotions to comprehend that there was something wrong. When it finally kicked in and she all but lost sensation of her feet, landing painfully on the carpet, he swiftly took out a syringe and stabbed into her neck, holding her still as he pressed the liquid down.

All struggles at this point were in vain. She had the sense, however, in her agony, to press the call button of her phone, knowing that the last call she did was to her cousin who had previously talked about taking a plane to come and see her. She left the device in her pocket, flittingly listening to the man who had taken some steps away from her.

“I am sorry” he had told her, with a smile on his face. “But I need this recognition more than a dead man does... And you, my dear, owe it to me! You don't know how ashamed I was that day when you, this child born yesterday actually had the gall to correct me in front of everyone in the operation room. Did you know that I was almost forced into retirement because of you?"

Wen Wuling couldn't quite remember that incident so she didn't even dwell on that.

“Just for that? I considered you a member of the family," she asked, one hand on her neck, straightening her seat. How stupid was she to actually come here she wondered for bit. Staggering, she took a deep breath and sat on the couch again, feeling her life draining away. He was standing in front of her looking at her, as she tried to breathe evenly.

She was never that good with medicinal needles her brothers and grandparents used. She wondered a little if she had been, would she be able to extract the poison running inside of her now?

“Such a little thing and you resorted to murder... ”

"Why? It was a legitimate defense of course. You came, pretending you wanted to talk and then drug our cups." He gestured their glasses.  "The drug running in my blood could testify that now. You then took me by surprise, wanting to stab me, but in our struggle, I had been able to stab you in the neck with the syringe I took from you. Isn't it what happened?" And for good measure, he took her hands and made her hold the syringe so that it would have her imprints.

Wen Wuling had a bitter smile as she told him, "Bath in your fame while it still last, for before you know it, you would perish in jails!"

He didn't get incensed as she thought he would, he simply smirked, "either way, you wouldn't be here to see."

She briefly glanced at her pocket, the phone call was still ongoing, since she had decreased the sound significantly, she couldn't hear her cousin, she just hoped that the woman would still have that app that recorded every one of her calls. If she did, then it wouldn't be complicated to arrest this person. And certainly, one thing leading to another, they would give back the merit of their research to her brother.

Just that thought had her smile as she closed her eyes. It was still a pity though. Her whole life she had been fiddling with herbs, blood, and other things, she wished now, that she had once said yes to outings, yes to dating and yes to all those things she had once been asked about. At the very least her brother was already married when he died. She had so many things to live for. A true pity.

She couldn't help herself then, cursing Yu Heng to quickly follow her in death, to which her grandmother's voice resounded in her mind, 

“No one is bad by essence, circumstances make them so. Never judge people too harshly my dear, for there is always a kindness in everyone.” Those used to be her grandmother’s forever reprimand when she had a fight with someone. But looking at the man’s smirking face for the last time in front of her, she wondered, is this really true?

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