The heart monitor's flatline tore through OR-4's sterile silence like a scalpel slicing taut skin. Dr. Lin Zhao's gloved hands froze mid-incision, crimson blooming beneath the 23-year-old patient's sternum. Her own pulse thundered in sudden discordance with the failed transplant heart lying exposed on the stainless steel tray.
"V-fib!" cried the anesthesiologist as the donor heart began twitching autonomously in its preservation solution. Lin's resident, Dr. Chen, dropped his retractors with a clatter. "That's impossible - it's been disconnected for twelve minutes!"
Lin's vision fractured. The overhead LEDs warped into glowing talisman patterns as the surgical suite's walls rippled like ink-stained rice paper. Phantom whispers coiled around her scrub cap - ancient words in a language her modern tongue shouldn't recognize, yet understood with visceral clarity.
_"Liánxī mìngmài..."_
The dying command vibrated through her bones. Her left pectoral burned where the childhood scar tissue puckered beneath her scrubs - that peculiar Lichtenberg figure she'd borne since the orphanage fire. Without conscious thought, her scalpel arced downward in an altered trajectory, severing invisible threads only she could see cascading from the ceiling.
The donor heart leapt from its tray.
"Code Blue!" alarms wailed as nurses scrambled. Lin watched detachedly as her own hands moved with preternatural precision, catching the airborne organ mid-fall. Her fingers danced through membranes of light surrounding the cardiac tissue, plucking at luminescent strands that pulsed with stolen vitality.
When her palms pressed the heart into the patient's chest cavity, reality snapped back with concussive force. Monitors screamed back to life displaying sinus rhythm. The surgical team froze in collective disbelief as the previously rejected organ integrated seamlessly with surrounding tissue.
"Dr. Lin..." Dr. Chen's voice trembled. "That donor was AB-negative. Our patient is O-positive."
Lin stared at the now-quiescent heart pumping crimson life through freshly connected vessels. Through the viscera, she glimpsed faint scales shimmering beneath the myocardium - impossible iridescence that vanished when she blinked. Her own scar burned like brand-new flesh.
"Run new crossmatches," she ordered, stripping off bloodied gloves. The phantom whispers condensed into a woman's voice dripping with archaic elegance:
_"You're late to the banquet, little thief."_
Three Hours Earlier
The hybrid ambulance's turbine whined as it descended through smog-choked clouds above Shanghai New Grace Hospital. Lin watched from the rooftop helipad as steam-powered rotor blades sliced through pollution particulates glittering with residual qi. Even in 2047, the city's cutting-edge fusion of cultivation tech and quantum engineering couldn't fully purge the haze clinging to its neo-gothic spires.
Her pager vibrated with the transplant team's final alert: Donor ETA 08:47. Cargo hold temp critical.
Lin adjusted her biosafety visor, its augmented reality overlay identifying the approaching aircraft's markings. Her breath hitched. The characters stenciled beneath the Red Cross logo weren't standard Mandarin, but flowing seal script that translated as Soul Ferry Express.
"Dr. Lin?" The charge nurse materialized at her elbow, tablet glowing with patient vitals. "The recipient's developed antibodies against the artificial heart. If this transplant fails..."
"Then we'll invent new antibodies," Lin snapped, sharper than intended. The peculiar symbols on the transport chopper had triggered memories of fragmented dreams - visions of jade-scaled creatures swimming through starless skies, their mournful songs vibrating through her childhood nightmares.
The ambulance touched down in a whirlwind of coal-scented exhaust. Lin's scar pulsed rhythmically as orderlies unloaded the cryogenic capsule. Through frosted glass, the donor heart floated in preservation fluid, its surface marbled with vein-like patterns eerily reminiscent of her chest scar.
"Wait." Lin's hand shot out, latex glove squeaking against the capsule. The heart's right ventricle twitched. Not residual electrical impulses - a deliberate contraction. Her visor's thermal imaging flared with sudden golden heat signatures radiating from the organ.
The transport coordinator checked his manifest. "Harvested from a John Doe in Xiamen harbor. No ID, but the cellular regeneration rate's off the charts. Perfect for our antibody-resistant case."
As they wheeled the capsule toward the elevator, Lin caught her warped reflection in its curved surface. For a heartbeat, another face superimposed over hers - a woman with hair like liquid mercury and eyes that burned with drowned stars. The vision whispered words that bypassed Lin's ears to etch directly into her skull:
_"The Ninth Tide rises, Keeper of Broken Chords."_
Then the elevator doors closed, leaving her clutching the railing as vertigo washed through her. Her left breast burned like she'd swallowed live coals.
Now
Lin slammed her locker shut, the metal door vibrating with force that cracked its biometric scanner. The staff lounge's qi-recycling vents hummed overhead, doing nothing to dispel the medicinal herb scent clinging to her scrubs. Her reflection in the mirror showed dark circles blooming like ink in water - and something else.
She leaned closer. The Lichtenberg scar across her chest now branched upward in fractal patterns, luminous veins pulsing beneath her skin with each heartbeat. When she pressed trembling fingers to the markings, they came away smeared with iridescent residue smelling of sea brine and burnt myrrh.
"Looking rather peaky, Dr. Lin."
The sardonic baritone came from the lounge doorway where a lean figure leaned against the frame. Lin's breath caught at the intruder's anachronistic appearance - a white lab coat over hanfu-inspired scrubs, silver hair tied with crimson cords that matched his unnaturally glowing eyes. The ID badge clipped to his chest read *Dr. Jiuyou, Pathology Consultant*, but the characters bled into archaic seal script when she blinked.
"You shouldn't play with hearts that don't belong to you," he continued, tossing an apple between gloved hands. With each catch, the fruit mutated - flesh rotting to bone, then reforming perfect and gleaming. "Especially ones that sing lullabies to the Drowned Throne."
Lin's scalpel appeared in her hand through muscle memory. "This hospital doesn't employ consultants under sixty."
The man's smile revealed slightly pointed canines. "Oh, I'm much older than I look." He took a crunching bite from the apple, juices running blood-red down his chin. "Tell me, when did you first hear the Tide's song? Was it before or after you stole a goddess' heartbeat?"
The emergency lights flared crimson as power fluctuations rippled through the building. Somewhere below them, the morgue's cryogenic units began screaming in mechanical unison. Lin's scar lit up like a live wire, flooding her vision with memories not her own:
_A silver-haired woman standing knee-deep in frothing black waves, her hands buried in a glowing chest cavity. "The Covenant requires balance," she wept as scales peeled from her arms. "One heart to bind the realms, another to sever the chord."_
The vision shattered as cold fingers closed around Lin's wrist. Dr. Jiuyou's touch burned like dry ice, his breath smelling of funeral incense. "She's waking up in there," he whispered. "When the Dragon's Warden realizes what you've taken, this fragile reality of yours will unravel faster than a mortal's life thread."
Alarms erupted hospital-wide as the floor shuddered. Dr. Jiuyou dissolved into swirling smoke just as the ceiling split open, revealing not structural beams but starless void dripping with liquid shadows. Lin's final coherent thought before the darkness swallowed her was that the descending tendrils looked exactly like coronary arteries.
Somewhere beyond time, a dragon laughed in thunderous counterpoint to her racing heartbeat.