Before the security guards took Ma Hao away, Jiang Xu finally showed a bit of mercy. He grabbed Ma Hao’s hand, gave it a pull and a twist, and set the dislocated wrist back in place. “If you’re worried, spray some Yunnan Baiyao when you get home.”
The people in the waiting area had no idea what had just gone on inside. They only knew that a fierce-looking man had suddenly barged in earlier, and a short while later a group of security guards escorted him out. Everyone was guessing whether it had been a case of medical troublemaking, some even wondering if, in a moment, someone might come out carrying a stretcher with a bloody, half-dead person on it.
But they waited until it was their turn, saw the doctor themselves, and left, still without seeing any doctor carried out.
The outpatient doctors all got off work around the same time. Jiang Xu stepped out of the consultation room, having taken off his white coat, and happened to run into Shen Fangyu from the opposite room.
“Not going to thank me?” Shen Fangyu took the initiative to speak.
Since that unpleasant fallout between them, they had hardly spoken. On the rare occasions they crossed paths, it was the same snide back-and-forth as before today’s clinic session. But this time… Jiang Xu glanced at him.
“Thanks.”
Since Shen Fangyu hadn’t interrupted this time, the word came out in full at last.
Shen Fangyu looked a bit surprised. “You didn’t get hurt today, did you? Did that bastard knock you on the head or something? I can’t believe I just heard that from your mouth.”
“…Then I take it back,” Jiang Xu said.
“Don’t—”
Jiang Xu gave him a look, and Shen Fangyu, quick to adapt, said, “Alright, alright, I get it, you’re fine. Just… stop looking at me like that, okay? That look makes me think you’re about to smash my head open.”
Jiang Xu withdrew his gaze. Shen Fangyu went on anyway, “As long as you’re not hurt.” He seemed to fall into some kind of memory, and after a moment he chuckled to himself. “You know, today’s little incident, makes me think all those fights we had back then weren’t for nothing.”
A flicker passed through Jiang Xu’s eyes.
Shen Fangyu’s words stirred up old memories.
His first brush with close-combat training had actually been in university P.E. He had always been a model student, not much into fighting, with only a bit of Taekwondo learned as a child. It wasn’t until university that A Medical University, citing the need for doctors to learn self-defense, made “Close-Combat Fighting” a compulsory course.
Everyone knew that compulsory courses counted toward credits, and credits affected your GPA.
Because medical students already had a heavy course load, A Medical University scheduled classes by cohort, with fixed times and seats, no option for students to pick. As a result, for the fighting class, Jiang Xu and Shen Fangyu ended up in the same group.
That class became another battleground for the two of them.
Grades for the course came from technique tests, fitness assessments, and a final one-on-one sparring match. To keep things fair, the instructor ranked students based on their combined scores from the earlier assessments: first place fought second place, third fought fourth, and so on, minimizing the skill gap between opponents. Winners got an extra three points added to their scores.
By sheer bad luck, Jiang Xu and Shen Fangyu had tied for first place in the early rounds. Naturally, the instructor paired them together, unaware at the time just how disastrous a decision that would turn out to be.
While other pairs finished their matches in under five minutes, Jiang Xu and Shen Fangyu fought for an entire class without a clear winner. In the end, the instructor, worried they’d soon need the campus clinic, called it off and gave them each 1.5 bonus points.
But neither would accept a draw. They insisted on rematches, forcing the instructor to referee for them every week. Yet week after week, there was still no victor. Finally, the instructor, unwilling to spend his weekends refereeing, sat them down for a heartfelt lecture on the principle of “friendship first, competition second.”
They had answered in unison: “We have no friendship.”
The veteran instructor had nearly fainted from anger.
In the end, each of them was given the full three-point bonus, which finally put the matter to rest. Rumor had it the instructor even went to the school leadership to beg not to be assigned their class for the next semester’s fighting course.
Jiang Xu glanced at Shen Fangyu, who was quietly amused about something, and suddenly realized that most of the fights he’d been in over the years had been with this man.
Perhaps it was some kind of shared wavelength, because Shen Fangyu caught his look and grinned. “I just remembered, back in university, because of that fighting class, we nearly drove the instructor’s blood pressure through the roof. Why were you so stubborn back then?”
“You weren’t?” Jiang Xu shot him a sidelong glare.
“I remember one semester, we had twelve professional courses, each with its own lab. During exam month I pulled several all-nighters in a row. I was so exhausted from cramming that I went to you and asked if we could stop competing for once and just sleep.” Shen Fangyu chuckled at the memory.
“And you looked at me exactly like this—” He slipped his hands into his pockets, lifted an imaginary pair of glasses, and, wearing a cocky, challenging expression, imitated Jiang Xu’s tone, “Sure. You can be second.”
Watching the reenactment, Jiang Xu had to admit the act captured a bit of his old self.
“You smiled, Jiang Xu.” Shen Fangyu pointed at him, like he’d caught him red-handed. “Maybe it’s because you smile so rarely that it’s precious, makes me really like seeing it.”
Jiang Xu glanced down at the mask covering half his face, but Shen Fangyu seemed to read his mind and laughed. “Even with a mask on, I can tell when you’re smiling.” He revealed the answer, “Your eyes give you away.”
It wasn’t just his eyes, when Jiang Xu smiled, the small mole beneath them seemed to come alive.
Jiang Xu turned his head at the words, avoiding Shen Fangyu’s gaze, hands in his pockets, and said lightly, “I’m leaving.”
He didn’t go back to his office but headed straight for the laboratory.
It had been a few days since Jiang Xu last went there. Now that he was an associate chief physician, equivalent to an associate professor in academia, he supervised several graduate students. Most experiments no longer required his own hands.
On top of that, because of his pregnancy, Jiang Xu was concerned about the teratogenic drugs commonly used in the lab affecting the fetus. Most of the time, he simply listened to his students’ reports, revised their papers, and offered guidance on the overall direction.
He checked on the students’ work, taught a younger student how to use the confocal microscope for imaging, and by the time he finally left the lab, it was already past nine.
Jiang Xu thought back to the days when, during his PhD and early years as an attending physician, he would often work in the lab until two or three in the morning after his hospital shift. Back then, he didn’t have his own lab and was doing projects in Professor Cui’s group.
By midnight, the lab would be deserted except for him and Shen Fangyu, one in the south, one in the north, working at the farthest benches from each other.
It was so exhausting that, when they left together, they often didn’t even have the strength to bicker. They would just walk in silence under the three a.m. moonlight, their minds still spinning over the bottlenecks in their projects.
Warm water soaked Jiang Xu’s body as he leaned against the bathtub with his eyes closed, for once not thinking about work.
The lazy atmosphere, combined with the baby inside him quickly drawing on his nutrients, sometimes made his mind wander to things long buried in the river of time.
For example, on his way back to the dorm from the lab, he would pass a small shop selling bozai gao, a specialty from Guangdong that was rare in City A. Jiang Xu had never tried it.
Every time he saw the shop’s sign, with those bright, crystal-like little cakes that looked like jewels, he would feel tempted.
But the shop closed at ten and didn’t open until eight in the morning, so he never managed to get any.
Later, when he finally had the chance to leave work before ten, he had already bought an apartment and no longer stayed in the dorms. His route home no longer passed that street.
Efficiency-obsessed Dr. Jiang would never go out of his way just for a craving, so for years he never once tasted bozai gao.
In fact, Jiang Xu had never cared much about food and drink. His family even kept only one flavor of instant noodles at home. So he had long forgotten that, years ago, he’d once had a passing longing for this little sweet treat.
But tonight, his thoughts drifting, Jiang Xu sat in a bathrobe, poking at the instant noodles in front of him with a little fork, and suddenly felt a pang of dissatisfaction.
That long-forgotten yearning for bozai gao sprouted in his mind like bamboo shoots after spring rain, taking over his thoughts.
He really wanted to eat it.
This kind of whimsical and delicate craving had only started after his pregnancy. At random moments, he would suddenly have the urge to eat something, maybe an eye-watering lemon, maybe a pungent, fragrant piece of stinky tofu, or perhaps the sesame flatbreads made by Old Lu next to the hospital (and they had to be made by Old Lu himself; his son’s didn’t count).
But every time, Jiang Xu suppressed the urge.
Until tonight.
He suddenly remembered that not long ago, after sending Yu Xin off, he had called his mother. Jiang’s mother’s voice on the phone had been gentle: “Xiao Xu… Mom knows you’re busy with work, and now’s the time to be ambitious. You don’t want to go on blind dates…”
She sighed. “But Mom just worries about you being alone, your eating and sleeping are irregular. Ever since you were a child, whenever you got busy, you stopped taking care of yourself. You’d pull all-nighters doing practice problems. I think it’d be good if you had someone to live with, someone to look out for you and remind you of things. That way Mom could worry less.”
“All these years, every time your dad and I see news about another doctor or professor dying suddenly, we get scared, terrified that something might happen to you one day and there’d be no one by your side to even call 120.”
Jiang Xu lowered his eyes to his phone’s contact list, his mother’s voice echoing in his mind over and over. After a long pause, he lowered his head and, for the first time, gently placed his hand over his belly.
“Hello.” Jiang Xu dialed a familiar number.
“Jiang Xu?” The voice on the other end was clearly surprised. Shen Fangyu paused for half a beat, probably checking the time. “What is it?”
“That note you wrote last time, does it still count?” Jiang Xu asked.
“Huh?”
“Yuefeng Residential Complex, Building 3, Unit 4, Apartment 1202.” Jiang Xu glanced at the clock by the dining table. “Before ten-thirty, bring bozai gao from that shop on the lab route, and move in with your suitcase.”
Author’s Note:
Mama Jiang: I never imagined that my nagging him to settle down would end up sending a wild man straight into my son’s home.