The smell of antiseptic was thick enough to sting.
It clung to the walls, the floor, the air itself—sterile, cold, unforgiving. The kind of smell that reminded everyone inside exactly where they were.
Hospital.
The last place anyone wants to visit, yet the only place where humans come to fight for life.
Footsteps thundered down the corridor.
"Move!"
The shout cut through the noise of machines and distant alarms. Nurses instinctively stepped aside as a figure in pale blue sprinted past them.
WenQingfeng.
Her surgical gown fluttered behind her like a torn banner, the hem already darkened by blood that wasn't hers. A disposable cap pinned her black hair tightly, yet damp strands had escaped, sticking to her temples and the curve of her neck. The surgical mask concealed half her face—but not her eyes.
They were sharp. Focused. Burning.
Not with panic but with urgency.
"The ICU doors—clear them now!"
The automatic doors of Beijing Central Hospital slid open with a sharp hiss, revealing a gurney being pushed at full speed.
"Patient's blood pressure is crashing!"
"Heart rate unstable—ventricular tachycardia!"
"Oxygen saturation at seventy!"
The man on the bed was barely conscious. His skin had already taken on that unnatural grayish pallor—the color doctors learned to recognize as the edge of no return. The oxygen mask fogged weakly with each breath, as if even his lungs were uncertain whether they wanted to continue.
Wen Qingfeng caught the side of the gurney with one hand, stabilizing it mid-run.
"How long since onset?" she demanded.
"Forty minutes!"
"CT?"
"Confirmed acute aortic dissection. Type A. Rupture risk extremely high."
Her jaw tightened. Type A meant death came fast. Sometimes without warning and sometimes before the patient even reached the operating room.
"Prep emergency surgery. Notify cardiothoracic. Now."
No hesitation. No wasted syllables.
The doors slammed shut behind them. Inside the operating theater, the world became smaller, brighter and just extra colder.
The lights overhead burned white, washing all color from the room. Steel instruments lay arranged with surgical precision, reflecting her face back at her in fragments—distorted, multiplied, inhuman.
"Anesthesia ready."
"Vitals dropping."
"Doctor, we're losing him."
Wen Qingfeng stepped forward. For a single second, she looked at the patient's face.
A man barely in his late twenties. Young, handsome and still alive who probably had a life waiting somewhere outside these walls—unfinished conversations, unpaid bills, a future that still believed it existed.
One mistake, one careless cut or one second too slow...and all of that would vanish. Not in a dramatic way or with final words...just… gone.
Doctors could escape lawsuits. They could escape investigations and headlines. But they could never escape the moment their own hands became the reason someone stopped breathing.
That was why, when no one wanted to examine him—when nurses hesitated and doctors looked away because he seemed dangerous, because he looked like someone who carried violence with him—she was the first to move.
She did not ask who he was or what he had done.
When did a doctor earn the right to judge?
Police existed to investigate crimes, courts existed to decide guilt.
But a doctor's duty was simpler—and far heavier. To treat the injured, to keep the dying alive. This was what she believed in.
So she stepped forward and decided to saved him.
"Scalpel." Her voice was steady, hands firm and dedicated.
The incision was clean. Blood surged immediately.
"Suction!"
The red flooded the surgical field, thick and warm, spilling faster than it could be cleared.
Her mind sharpened into something ruthless.
The torn vessel pulsed weakly beneath her fingers, the heart struggling to keep rhythm as if it already knew it was losing.
Please don't give up...
The thought wasn't poetic, It was an order.
To the heart.
To the blood.
To fate itself.
The monitor screamed showing a flatline. The sound was thin, piercing and absolute. For one heartbeat, no one moved.
Then, her voice boomed.
"Defibrillator—200 joules!"
She pressed the paddles down.
"Clear!"
The body jerked violently yet nothing.
"Again."
Another shock was given but of no use. The silence after the machine's scream was worse than any noise. It was the sound of a life drowning and of a future collapsing.
"300 joules." Her voice cracked for the first time. "Clear!"
The body arched and just when the everyone had lost all hope, the monitor flickered.
Then, the sound of life breathing again through the monitor was heard.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
A rhythm returned. It was weak yet there.
Breathing. Alive.
The room exhaled as one. Some nurses covered their mouths. Someone laughed shakily. Someone else whispered a prayer they didn't even believe in.
Wen Qingfeng stepped back. Her legs finally remembered gravity. She leaned against the wall, her gloved hand sliding down cold steel as her lungs dragged in air she hadn't realized she'd been denying herself.
Tears blurred her vision slightly. Not from fear but from relief.
From the unbearable weight of almost becoming a murderer.
She removed her gloves slowly, staring at the man now breathing under observation—alive, fragile, still tethered to the world by nothing more than stitches and will.
"You did great," she whispered.
But she wasn't sure whether she meant him or to herself.
Outside the operating room, quiet applause broke out.
"That was insane, Dr. Wen."
"Three years in service and still saving impossible cases."
"You never hesitate."
A junior intern gathered the courage to ask, "But… if you're this skilled… why do you still look like you're about to collapse every time?"
Wen Qingfeng paused. Then smiled faintly as she spoke,
"Because I don't see this as talent."
They waited as she finished her sentence,
"I see it as debt."
Confusion spread across their faces as she explained further, "Every life I save," she said softly, "is something I owe back to the world. Until that debt is paid… I don't allow myself peace."
The intern frowned. "But people call doctors gods."
She shook her head, "Do you have the same perception as them? No, right? That's a lie people tell themselves so they don't have to face how fragile life is. They want to believe that there's someone capable to give life again."
Her gaze returned to the ICU doors.
"But we know that there's no divine power here... No miracles."
Only hands trained to stop shaking.
Only minds trained to keep moving when everything screams to stop.
"We're not gods," she said quietly. "We're just humans who refuse to let go."
Then she smiled again—gentle, sincere, almost warm, "And that's why this is the closest thing we'll ever have to a supernatural ability."
None of them noticed the irony except herself.
The woman who fought death every day…was never meant to belong to the world of the living.
Wen Qingfeng was not just a surgeon.
She was the youngest heir of one of the top ten mafia clans in the country—the WenClan, known in the underworld as WhiteLotus Organisation.
Her father, WenZhaoyun, was a name praised in daylight and feared in darkness.
To the public, he was a philanthropist.
A self-made tycoon who owned hospitals, real estate, pharmaceutical companies, and private universities. A man who donated millions every year to medical research and disaster relief.
But beneath the polished suits and charity galas, Wen Zhaoyun was something else entirely.
He was the undisputed leader of White Lotus—the most powerful underground organization in the city.
A man who controlled smuggling routes, arms trades, information networks, and black-market medicine.
A man whose single word could erase families, rewrite identities, or start wars that never made the news.
And Wen Qingfeng was his only daughter, after his three sons.
Born into a throne built from blood, yet from the moment she learned how to speak, she had learned one thing instead:
"How to save lives."
She never wanted the guns, power or fear that followed her surname.
So, while her brothers trained in negotiation, assassination, and loyalty codes, she studied anatomy.
While others learned how to break people,
she learned how to keep them breathing.
And once she hit eighteen, she ran for once and all. Leaving her background, family and criminal world to Beijing.
She chose medicine over weapons.
Hospitals over mansions.
Scalpels over bullets.
She erased her identity from the underworld and rebuilt herself as just one thing:
A Surgeon.
No one at Beijing Central Hospital knew who she truly was.
No one knew that the hands stitching arteries had once been meant to inherit an empire.
No one knew that the woman preaching about life was born from a dynasty of death.
And she believed—foolishly—that as long as she kept saving lives, she could outrun the blood in her veins.
She was wrong.
Because the man lying on her operating table that night…was not just a patient. He was the future ruler of the world she had abandoned.
And fate had just forced the White Lotus and the Devil to touch for the first time—two worlds that were never meant to intersect had collided and no one could tell if this meeting was the beginning of redemption…
or the birth of something far more monstrous.
.
.
.
To be continued...