Chapter 22: The Orchard's Rebirth and Veiled Affections
Xu Ling orchestrated the orchard's purification with a necromancer's precision, villagers exhuming blighted roots like pallbearers disinterring cursed relics. To Xu Dajiao, he decreed, "Summon your titanic ploughs—steel behemoths to churn this tainted earth into rebirth's canvas."
Dusk's indigo shroud descended as oxcarts bore arboreal cadavers through funereal silence, their creaking axles composing dirges for lost harvests.
In the ancestral courtyard's amber-lit theatre, Yu Mengna's silk blouse shimmered incongruously against weathered pine tables. Xu Wenhai shattered the unspoken taboo between fermented cabbage and modernity: "Boy, how'll you leash this Liang Xiaoyong cur?" Crisped anchovy scales glinted on his calloused thumb like tiny daggers.
Xu Ling's jade spoon traced mandalas in the eight-treasure congee. "Should evidence condemn him, legal hydras shall consume his machinations whole."
Yu Mengna's vermilion-tipped chopsticks hovered mid-dumpling, her smile a Ming vase's fracture lines. "My jurist—a statutory arachnid—spins tortuous webs for such agricultural saboteurs."
Xu Wenhai exhaled camphorwood smoke through teeth like weather-beaten palisades. "Mind Yu-laoban's metropolitan wisdom, son. Our rustic name mustn't shame her urban luster."
Concealed beneath mahogany planks, Xu Ling's thumb inscribed promises on Yu Mengna's palm—a braille of burgeoning desire that pinkened both their earlobes.
"Uncle Xu's modesty veils his mentorship," Yu Mengna parried, dipping her rhetoric in guileless honey. "Xiao Ling navigates these currents like Confucius reborn—surely your paternal tides guided this prodigy."
The patriarch's sternum expanded with bucolic pride. "Adversity's furnace tempers boys into..." His voice fractured, dissolving into firefly-dappled shadows.
Li Ruoya breached the moment's sanctity, proffering saucer-borne potato slivers glistening with vinegar's acidic tears. "For your palate, Elder Brother." Her trembling wrist betrayed the novice chef's trepidation.
Xu Ling's molars met disproportionate citric assault. "A triumph of pastoral gastronomy," he perjured through saccharine grit.
Li Ruoxue's snort cleaved the tension. "When will you graduate from spud-sculpting to bourgeois cuisine? I pine for proper…"
Crickets harmonized with chopsticks' porcelain percussion—nature's orchestra underscoring rustic perseverance and metropolitan incursion. Beyond compound walls, tillers growled primaeval lullabies, their steel mandibles hungering to digest corruption and gestate viridian tomorrows.
Whispers in the Moonlit Orchard
Li Ruoya puckered her lips at her sister's vinegar-steeped glare. "Mastering caramelized ribs demands time!" she implored, her tongue darting out in playful defiance.
Li Ruoxue traced a fingertip along her sister's nasal bridge. "Were this dish Ling-ge's favourite, you'd have perfected it ere the rooster's first crow." Though her tone bore mock severity, pride glimmered in her gaze at her sister's burgeoning confidence.
Li Ruoya swivelled toward Xu Ling, oculars shimmering with artless inquiry. "Do your taste buds yearn for honeyed pork, Elder Brother?"
Xu Ling suppressed a visceral shudder. Between Qiu Zhenzhen's relentless advances and Yu Mengna's lingering jasmine perfume, this fledgling admirer's attentions threatened to capsize his precarious romantic skiff—particularly beneath Li Ruoxue's tigress-like vigilance.
Wang Huifen's laughter rippled through the courtyard's golden warmth. "Our Ya-ya hoards affection for her Ling-ge like winter squirrels stockpile nuts."
"My heart overflows for Huifen-ayi too!" Li Ruoya proclaimed, abandoning her chopsticks to entwine arms with the matriarch, her cheek nuzzling against homespun fabric.
As lunar argent bathed the reborn orchard, industrial tillers growled their mechanical psalms where cicadas once sang. Farmers marvelled at these steel colossuses churning earth—their ancestral plots unaccustomed to such mechanized baptism. Children wove between spotlit furrows chasing phosphorescent fireflies, their giggles slicing through diesel's acrid hymn.
Xu Ling stood sentinel between the Li sisters, observing the soil's metamorphosis. His mobile's vibration fractured the pastoral serenity.
"Ling…" Liu Shuxiang's whisper carried the nocturne's secrecy through the receiver. "A mishap in the privy… my lumbar protests. Might your healing hands…?" The unspoken plea hung like peach blossoms on spring air.
Li Ruoya's fingers tightened around his forearm. "Must you abandon us?"
Xu Ling disentangled himself with courtier's grace. "Duty's call brooks no delay."
The clinic's antiseptic ghosts clung to his white coat as he navigated shadowed footpaths. Persimmon leaves performed their susurrus ballet overhead, casting dappled patterns across Liu Shuxiang's curtained window where silhouettes performed their ambiguous pantomime.
"Ling… is that your footfall?" The query floated through the night air, its tremor artfully calibrated.
Within, lamplight sculpted Liu Shuxiang's form against the doorframe—her peony-patterned negligee clinging to contours that mocked anatomical distress. The true diagnosis shimmered unspoken between them—a malady no herbal remedy could assuage.
Nocturnal Allure and Silent Promises
Liu Shuxiang's smoky, honeyed tones sent ripples of electricity across Xu Ling's skin, leaving him awash in a cascade of gooseflesh.
"Lingzi… Is that you beyond the threshold?"
Her query now quivered with tremulous urgency, as though phantom footsteps might be trespassing through moonlit courtyards.
"'Tis I – approaching presently!"
Xu Ling's consciousness snapped back to his surroundings, medical satchel swinging rhythmically against his thigh as he ascended the veranda steps.
"Enter unimpeded – the portal remains unchained."
Even through laconic syllables, Xu Ling detected the thrum of suppressed exhilaration vibrating beneath her words.
Crossing into the parlour's shadowed interior, he discerned breathy whispers spiralling from the inner sanctum. The bedchamber's revelation stole his breath – there lay Shuxiang, recumbent upon silken sheets, her diaphanous alabaster negligee performing treasonous service to the obsidian lace beneath. The forbidden canyon between ivory peaks commanded his gaze with gravitational force.
"This wretched spine…" she lamented with artful frailty, accentuating her arch like a Baroque odalisque. "The agony left me helpless even to don proper attire." Xu Ling's veins pulsed with liquid fire. What mortal could withstand such calculated seduction from this perennial enchantress?
"Do these new draperies please you, Lingzi?"
Wordless, Xu Ling found himself advancing like Icarus toward solar radiance.
"This delicate waistline cries for your healing touch – might you…?"
His palms descended upon her tapered silhouette of their own volition. "You bewitching creature!" he rasped through clenched molars, restraint unravelling thread by thread. Shuxiang possessed the courtesan's instinctual mastery over masculine unravelling.
As digital pressure intensified, her respiration fractured. "Southward… mere inches…" she exhaled against his jugular, carmine lips parting in invitation. Xu Ling's touch migrated downward, tracing the cartography of her form. The flimsy chiffon abraded her nectarous flesh, imprinting coral-hued hieroglyphs.
"Such abrasive textiles ill-befit your porcelain canvas," he admonished gently. "I shall procure proper raiment – this eyesore wounds me more than your epidermis."
A blush bloomed across her décolletage as she acquiesced, lashes fluttering shut in sybaritic surrender. Without warning, she rose like Aphrodite from sea foam, taloned fingers anchoring his forearm.
"Lingzi… your brother's prolonged absence leaves me desolate," she implored, auroral hues staining her cheekbones. "Take me – let me dwell in your shadow as a clandestine companion!"
Misconstruing his paralysis, she marshalled surprising vigour to haul him onto the eiderdown bower. "Lingzi…" The shattered whisper preceded her assault – lips devouring his with starved ardour, mouth charting a descending constellation along his throat. Xu Ling trembled beneath this novel cosmology of adoration and craving.
"You cannot abhor this ruined vessel?" Shuxiang lifted her glistening countenance, palms framing his jawline. Each pore radiated desperate supplication. "This heart… it beats solely for you now."
At his mute nod, her confession overflowed: "I comprehend my unworthiness. Let me linger as nameless paramour – before your advent…" Pearlescent tears breached their levy. "I wandered eternal twilight. You are my Helios, Lingzi – let me bask in your radiance."
The unvarnished verity in her gaze pierced Xu Ling's defences. Two years of silent ministrations flashed before him – support offered without recompense or grievance. Where he'd perceived mere carnality, now bloomed the hothouse flower of devotion.
Their congress became tempestuous – kisses descending like monsoon rains, limbs entwined in Dionysian frenzy. When spent passions yielded to witching-hour stillness, Xu Ling stared sightless at the canopy, Shuxiang's crown heavy upon his thorax. The phantom weight of a cigarette yearned between his fingers.
Vows sworn to Qiu Zhenzhen materialized like accusing wraiths. How now to meet her gaze – or Yu Mengna's? As nocturnal insects chanted beyond latticed windows, he initiated careful extraction from Shuxiang's octopus embrace.
"Departing ere dawn's reprieve?" she slurred, clinging like clematis.
"When circumstance permits return," he murmured against her hairline, planting benedictions until she subsided into quilted contentment.
Skulking through Argentine courtyards, Xu Ling collided with a willowy spectre at his own threshold.
"Elder Brother Xu! What arcane business detained you till this hour?" Li Ruoya's accusatory susurrus quivered with wounded innocence.
Xu Ling recoiled. "By what alchemy do you haunt these grounds?"
"Auntie Huifen deemed the clinic's solitude perilous," she confessed, teeth worrying her lower lip. "Our pallets now occupy your private quarters…"
Arctic dread flooded Xu Ling's veins – the cabinet housing his arcana remained unsecured.
Silken Evidence and Dawn's Disquiet
Xu Ling's head swivelled with vehement urgency. "Preposterous notion! Does slumber claim your sister within her chamber?"
Li Ruoya dipped her chin, lunar luminescence crystallizing her bewilderment. "She sought Morpheus' embrace upon our homecoming."
The maiden's unperturbed mien confirmed his clandestine hoard remained undetected – those damning fabrics still veiled from scrutiny. Xu Ling's breath escaped through ivory gates parted infinitesimally. "I shall procure vestments and seek refuge at Xu Long's hearth. Retire to your repose."
He phantomed past her into the selenite-drenched sanctum where Li Ruoxue lay in Dionysian abandon across the bed, limbs splayed in artless candour. The chaste practicality of her cambric nightdress afforded scant solace as he feverishly swaddled the damning lingerie-enshrouded jersey with arbitrary raiment from his coffers.
"Elder Xu," Ruoya's tremulous petition hung like jasmine-scented smoke, "will you not repose betwixt our pallets?" Her gesture encompassed the floor's barren expanse.
"Profanation!" His rebuke shattered like winter's first frost fracturing lake ice. "Unwed blossoms sharing nocturnal quarters with virility incarnate? Village crones would card rumours into eternal yarn. To bed!"
Flagstones leached warmth from his unshod soles as he absconded, oblivious to Ruoya's orbs expanding like eventide blossoms as they alighted upon twin discarded garments shimmering with culpability in the moon's argent gaze.
She descended into a supplicant's crouch, digits caressing alien stitching. "These bear neither sister's mark nor mine…" The epiphany hovered like incense smoke as she contrasted the divergent silhouettes – one carved for Junoesque splendour, the other stitched for sylphlike grace.
"Ruoya! Desist your nocturnal symphony!" Ruoxue's slumber-gravelled decree cleaved the darkness.
Panic-stricken, the girl conjured fiction: "The moon's tide requisitions fresh swaddling!" She entombed evidence in the wardrobe's stygian recesses, carotid drumming war chants as she counterfeited Hypnos' embrace.
Aurora's fingers revealed Li Ruoya at the breakfast board, twin obsidian medallions stamped upon alabaster plains.
"Chrysalis! Have night terrors gnawed your essence?" Wang Huifen's broth-laden ladle petrified mid-arc, milky optics distending.
Xu Wenhai peered through Nicotian veils. "Skeeter armies besieging tender flesh, aye?"
"V-verily! Legion formations!" Ruoya's frantic affirmation betrayed her as Ruoxue's spoon clashed against porcelain in staccato rebuke.
The elder sister hauled her charge post-prandial to their cell. "You've distilled insomnia into bitter tisane this evensong," she indicted, slamming the oaken barrier. "Unsheathe truth's blade!"
"Merely… a womb's lunar grievance!" Ruoya burrowed beneath coverlets, prevarication acrid upon her tongue. Her psyche whirled through a tumultuous gallery of taboo imaginings – might Xu Ling be some erotic archivist hoarding intimate vestments? Ought she to commission cobweb-fine frippery for his clandestine reliquary?
She convulsed at these heretical tableaux, the armoire's umbrous alcove throbbing with mute indictments as slumber's velvet shroud finally enveloped her near matins' chime.
Fractured Innocence and Venomous Verities
Li Ruoxue exhaled a sigh steeped in fraternal resignation. "Have it your way. But mark this – shared womb-blood binds us. Should shadows trouble your spirit, seek sanctuary in my counsel."
Entombed beneath sweltering bedclothes, Li Ruoya's tears embroidered saltwater cartography upon linen. The crucible of sleepless hours had forged crystalline certainty: *Elder Xu must harbour paramours… cycling through feminine vestments.* The sartorial discrepancies dissolved before love's first funeral pyre. As oak panels sealed her solitude, suppressed whimpers metastasized into desolate lamentations – virginal ardour entombed ere its whispered confession.
---
In the mercantile district's periphery, Xu Ling's sternutation erupted like a volcanic portent before Shilixiang's gilded fruits. Knuckling his septum, he mused, "No rheum's curse… What malefic tongue invokes me?"
Xu Long's elbow connected with ribcage mischief. "Perchance some lovelorn wraith chants your name?"
"Cease this buffoonery." Xu Ling's auricles burned with a crimson tide of mortification, spectral memories of Liu Shuxiang's recent brazenness materializing.
Within the emporium's perfumed aisles, Liang Xiaoyong petrified at his brass-bound ledger. His accomplice met his gaze in silent complicity – both recognized these harbingers of reckoning.
"Salutations! What orchard treasures might we—" The clerk commenced, a veneered smile cracking at its gilded edges.
"Our business lies with *this cur*." Xu Long's accusatory digit transfixed Liang, whose calculating device executed a death rattle upon terrazzo.
Xu Ling advanced, voice sheathed in permafrost. "Unburden your conscience ere I summon the law's hounds."
Patrons became phantoms, abandoning pomegranates mid-inspection. Liang's ocular signal dispatched trembling underlings, steel shutters descending like theatre curtains post-tragedy. Four players remained: the brothers, the quaking Judas, and his consort grafting talons to his bicep.
"We share bed and board," she proclaimed, chin tilted in Hestian defiance. "My presence stands non-negotiable."
Xu Ling's basilisk stare never faltered. Beneath its gorgon potency, Liang's knees betrayed him, genuflecting upon cold marble. "N-no hand in the hemlock draught! That harpy poisoned her husband's matriarch! We merely… proposed fiscal recompense from your establishment…"
The brothers communed in silent tribunal as Liang's confession unravelled.
"*Her* serpentine scheming!" Liang's digit became a stiletto aimed at his consort. "The viper's nest resides in her cranium! I'm but a hapless spectator!"
A staccato assault upon corrugated steel suspended the chamber's breath.
---
Judicial Steel and Serpentine Shadows
The shutter's metallic groan echoed through the fruit-scented gloom as authoritative fists hammered its surface. "Unseal this den! Constabulary demands entry!"
Liang Xiaoyong's complexion bleached to match the blanched lychees in his display, pupils dilating in primal terror. "Y-you've summoned the magistrates?" He croaked at Xu Ling, spittle flecking quivering lips.
Xu Ling's ocular glaciers remained unthawed. "Do the Black Dragons' talons clutch your ledger?"
"Blasphemous conjecture!" Liang's protestations crumbled like desiccated longan shells, digits carving crescent agonies into the teak counter. His dread exuded veracity's musk – even gutter schemers knew better than to dance with the twin leviathans coiled beneath the county's civic facade.
At Xu Ling's imperceptible nod, Xu Long breached the iron veil. Sodium-vapour luminescence sculpted two lawbringers, their Sam Browne belts sagging with institutional might. "Liang Xiaoyong and Lin Xiaodie – bound by Zhou Lian's testament regarding Liu Shufen's toxicological demise."
The cashier – Lin – became a barnacle to Liang's arm as chrome manacles kissed her wrists. "Slanderous fictions!" Her shriek curdled the mango-sweet air.
"Preserve theatrics for the interrogation chamber." The senior officer's radio spat static requiem as he inclined toward Xu Ling. "Your arboreal vandalism may intertwine with this web, Master Xu. Your testament is required."
Xu Ling's mandible became marble sculpture. Provincial gendarmes were cudgels – efficient for bludgeoning street vermin, inept at parsing the silken threads binding village loyalties. "Merely arboreal juvenilia sacrificed to malice. Unworthy of your august scrutiny."
Yu Mengna materialized in a cloud of osmanthus wrath, stilettos cracking linoleum like a judge's gavel. "The wheel of dharma grinds exceeding small, Liang," she intoned, her vermilion lacquered nail tracing his jugular's pulse.
Beneath the precinct's fluorescent inquisition, the pomaceous tycoon diminished to a shrivelled prune. Across the holding tank's acrylic divide, a human tumbleweed rocked and mumbled – Zhou Lian, architect of poisoned chalices, her unravelling confession stripping Liang's empire to bare branches.
As blue-clad scribes chronicled transgressions with bureaucratic sacrament, Xu Ling discerned the unspoken taxonomy: true puppetmasters (Black Dragon phantoms?)? Tiger syndicate spectres remained veiled, while minnows like Liang gasped in the net. This piscine capture sufficed for daylight's theatre – but abyssal currents still churned with scaled terrors.
The Calculus of Compassion
The interrogation chamber's sterile luminescence fell upon Zhou Lian's spouse—a crumpled parenthesis of defeat upon institutional linoleum. His whitened knuckles betrayed torment as the junior officer intoned, "This man bears dual burdens—Liu Shufen's progeny and reparation arbiter."
"*Ill-chosen matrimony blights ancestral lines*," the constable murmured, withdrawing with bureaucratic finality.
The man's obeisance unfolded in two acts: first, a ceremonial ninety-degree bow, then knees impacting cold tile with penitential force. "My transgression! My eternal failing!" The ritual commenced—palm meeting cheek in staccato percussion, each slap echoing through soundproofed walls like failed absolution.
Xu Ling's interrogation cleaved the theatrics: "What of Zhou Lian's condition?"
The suspended palm quivered midair. "Mother… persists in twilight," he rasped, voice freighted with surrender's gravity.
Yu Mengna's stiletto heel hammered impatient semaphore. "Filial devotion lies strangled by your negligence," she denounced, a Fury clad in Hermès silk.
The man's metamorphosis shocked—from grovelling worm to rabid hound. "You gilt-edged harpy! While you count blood money, we rend flesh for sustenance!" Spittle arced through fluorescent glare like a treasonous projectile.
Leather soles thundered on linoleum. "Disturbance reported?"
"Full indemnity", Yu proclaimed, a tempest in human form, "or let jurisprudence's wheel grind." Her exit left an ozone and shattered hubris.
---
**Echoes Within Institutional Walls**
Novice officers clucked like scandalized" sparrows—"Capitalist ice queens!" countered by the battle-hardened matron's growl: "Wretchedness self-forged in sin's furnace." This generational discord mirrored society's schism—millennial empathy versus Mao-era pragmatism.
**Sanctuary of Suffering**
Liu Shufen's ventilator hissed arrhythmic counterpoint to adjacent laughter – comatose matriarch versus cherished grandmother. Yu's murmured epitaph—"Her" tragedy? Maternal love's fatal overdose" crystallized Confucian devotion's paradox.
---
**Dialogues Recast**
- *Yu's Ethical Inquiry*: "Does my resolve strike you as glacial?"
- *Xu's Tacit Endorsement*: "Frost preserves what sentiment corrupts."
Their sedan glided past Hospital Willows, leaving in their wake:
- A man's dignity dissolving in salt and phlegm
- Justice's ferric aftertaste upon the tongue
- Mortality's eternal masquerade – life's cruel comparative pageant
---
Hippocratic Farce and Gilded Cowards
Xu Ling inclined his head in solemn concordance.
Though the middle-aged wretch warranted no succour, Liu Shufen's intrinsic virtue remained unblemished. Moreover, this calamity sprang from LoveLing Orchard's roots – as both physician and moral sentinel, Xu Ling found intolerable life's fragile ember extinguishing beneath his vigilance.
"Lingzi, I shall procure the VIP sanctum. Tarry here momentarily."
Ambrosial warmth suffused Xu Ling's breast as Yu Mengna's prescience anticipated his unvoiced needs.
Her egress coincided with invasive theatrics – a white-coated hierarch processing through the ward attended by his constellation of sycophantic nurses.
"Next-of-kin to Liu Shufen!" The physician's bark sundered palliative tranquillity. "Liquidate arrears or relinquish this pallet!"
All ocular vectors converged upon Xu Ling. While medical evictions bore no particular ignominy in urban centres, their rarity within county infirmaries rendered the spectacle irresistibly prurient.
The timbre sparked recollection. Xu Ling pivoted to confront Yu Dawei – sleeves theatrically rolled in counterfeit proletarian solidarity, ocular flames burning with histrionic indignation.
"Thou!" Yu Dawei's ejaculation emerged malformed through his ill-fitted dental prosthesis, three incisors still absent from their prior contretemps.
"Verily," Xu Ling acknowledged with gelid civility. "Astonishing how swiftly contusions mend, is't not?"
The jibe found its mark. "Previous engagement constituted ambuscade!" Yu spluttered, spittle escaping his ill-sealed dentition. "Engage me in honourable contest!"
Xu Ling's dismissal wafted like zephyr-borne ash. "Scarcely merits exertion."
Xu Long advanced, deltoids rippling with tectonic potential. "Ancient enmity binds you, Lingzi-ge?"
The steroid-sculpted Adonis bristled. "This cur maimed my blood-sworn brother!" Yu's growl reverberated. "Our feud concludes solely in Thanatos' embrace!"
Xu Long scratched his stubbled jaw, earnest as an acolyte before sacred texts. "Defeat awaits thee. Shall I stand proxy?"
Yu's bravado faltered before the challenge. "Thy sapling limbs would splinter 'neath my knuckles!"
"Lingzi-ge?" Xu Long's metacarpi crackled staccato anticipation.
"Let it be a paladin's duel," Xu Ling ordained.
The ensuing fraternal backslap near shattered Yu's clavicle. "To the palaestra, compatriot!" Xu Long thundered, oblivious to the haematoma blooming beneath his palm.
Yu staggered, cuprous torrent flooding his oesophagus. "Convalescence… claims precedence!" He fled, crimson pearls adorning his lab coat's epaulette.
His Nightingale attendants flocked like panicked columbidae – "Physician Yu!" "Hæmorrhage manifests!" "Take mine arm!" Their solicitude bore dual impetus: Yu's Apollonian visage and his sire's position as Nosokomeion archon rendered him the nursing staff's ultimate quarry.
The ward's curtain rings shivered with departing drama, leaving residual echoes:
- The ventilator's implacable tempo juris
- Xu Ling's sardonic curl at human frailty exposed
- Xu Long's canine disappointment at martial opportunity denied
Thus unfolded another act in humanity's eternal histrionics – where hubris scripts downfall, and institutional privilege cloaks biological vulnerability in the emperor's new scrubs.
Exposed Deceptions and Fraternal Vigilance
Enveloped in feminine ministrations during his diagnostic ordeal, Yu Dawei's wounded pride discovered salve. *Let the peasant champion preen*, he sneered inwardly; *he remains supplicant at indigence's shrine.
Xu Long scratched his crown, mystified by the strategic withdrawal. "He… verily sustained corporeal harm?"
"A convalescence spanning dual lunar cycles at minimum," Xu Ling affirmed, observing dawning cognisance illuminate his protégé's countenance.
"Yet my touch scarce grazed him!" The colossus contemplated his palm as a traitorous instrument. The ward rippled with suppressed mirth – years enduring Yu's lubricious commentary and bureaucratic tyranny found catharsis in this karmic pantomime.
Matriarchal enthusiasts descended upon Xu Long like carrion fowl scenting vulnerable prey.
"Scion of our soil! Do local roots nourish your stock?"
"That carriage – forged in a special operations crucible, certes?"
"My kinswoman demands introduction! Freshly demobilized – a camellia blossom seeking robust terrain!"
Xu Long's frantic ocular entreaties sought sanctuary in Xu Ling, who reclined against saline-drip apparatus with Mephistophelean mirth. "My brother's cardiac acreage lies fallow, venerable dame. This niece you herald – what nomenclature does she claim?"
The battle-axe basked in communal scrutiny. "Zhang Miaomiao – our garrison's magnolia! Epidermis rivalling lunar radiance, silhouette echoing supple bamboo!"
Chromatic vitality evacuated Xu Long's visage. "Miaomiao… Zhang?"
"Cosmic synchronicity?" The auntie's gaze narrowed at his ashen pallor. "Demobilisation synchronised with thine!"
Xu Long's disavowal expired stillborn. "Her… current amorous entanglement?"
The auntie's dewlaps quivered with righteous umbrage. "Some gilded profligate trifling with her affections! The maternal progenitor – cupidity incarnate – abets this charade!"
The ward thrummed with sympathetic discourse – chronicles of mercenary cousins and perfidious betrothals eddying like miasmic vapours. Xu Long's framework collapsed onto the vacated cot, spinal integrity compromised.
Xu Ling guided his catatonic sibling into the antiseptic corridor. "Lingzi-ge…" The iron-wrought warrior's timbre fractured. "Should this Miaomiao prove… mine own…"
"The unworthy unveil their essence through temporality's crucible," Xu Ling orated, hand anchoring the younger's tectonic tremors. "Superior fates await those tempered by Promethean flames."
Xu Long's revelation struck with fulgurous intensity – Xu Ling's anomalous engagement with the auntie's prattle now assumed dreadful coherence.
"You… possessed foreknowledge?"
Xu Ling's muteness resonated volumes, selenic glare ricocheting off the nutri-dispenser's vitreous surface as the nosocomial nocturne played its perpetual anthem of cardiac rupture and restoration.
---
Sanctum of Healing and Tyrants' Onslaught
Xu Long's mirthless laughter dissolved into self-castigation. "How could I have forgotten your clairvoyant gaze – scrying souls like open codices?"
Xu Ling's exhale bore ancestral winds as he steadied the younger man's frame. "Let trust be your compass – grander constellations await those tempered in betrayal's furnace."
"Yet the cinder of ire still smoulders," Xu Long rasped, his counterfeit smile fissuring like drought-stricken earth.
Recognizing this mirrored desolation – an argent scar from his own youthful naivete – Xu Ling's voice crystallized with certitude. "Pursue truth's precipice, then. My bulwark stands immutable."
The staccato percussion of combat boots receded as Yu Mengna manifested like lunar phantasmagoria, admittance forms fluttering like captive doves. "Lingzi?"
He pivoted, enfolding her in an amalgam of urgency and veneration. "Your essence… a verdant spring amidst civilisation's arid masquerade."
Her initial petrification liquefied into empyrean tenderness. Though uncomprehending, her palms inscribed solace along his vertebrae. "Disentomb your phantoms. I serve as both lodestar and refuge."
Xu Ling imbibed her neroli-kissed aura before disentangling, digits lingering to shepherd rebellious tresses behind her helix. The gesture rekindled academic quadrangle ardour, epochs compressed into synaptic fire.
Unseen in the corridor's chiaroscuro ballet, Li Yuqing's lacrimal tributaries engraved diamond trails. "Advance to subsequent diagnostic rites," her sibling intoned, guiding her toward parturition wards where genesis and ruin performed their eternal pavane.
Yang Feng's ophidian glare from an arterial threshold dissipated unrequited – till Xu Ling's primal intuition quivered. The passageway yielded only Atropos' shadowplay.
"Let us consummate this therapeutic sacrament," Yu Mengna entreated, the VIP sanctum portal sealing against profane clamour. Argent filigrees glinted in Xu Ling's grasp, poised to embroider Liu Shufen's astral latticework.
The barricade detonated inward. Yu Dawei's Hippocratic inquisition arrived braceleted with truncheon-armed myrmidons. "Desist your shamanic pantomime, agrarian charlatan!"
Xu Ling coalesced before him like materialized fury, diction glacial. "Withdraw while mortality's candle yet flickers."
Yu's braggadocio faltered then metastasized – the trepanated rodent's terminal screech. "I'll have your peasant hands manacled for quackery! Who assumes liability when this relic expires?"
"Assay that theorem," Xu Ling riposted, the chamber's atmosphere congealing. Yu's Praetorian guard discarded polycarbonate carapaces, chloride-damp digits grasping toward predestined collision.
Deadlock crystallized – the healer's selenic probes versus bureaucracy's obtuse armaments, tradition's susurrus combating establishment's cacophony. Beyond crystalline panes, cumulonimbus legions mirrored the yang collision, as Chronos' pendulum oscillated between elegy and catharsis.
---
Vermilion Sanctuaries and Shattered Minds
The ward's precarious calm fractured as hinges groaned beneath renewed assault. "An ethicless practice unfolds here," proclaimed the officer, credentials brandished like papal seals – before recognizing Xu Ling's tranquil figure. "Master Xu? Dispensing mercy within our sterile pantheon?"
His gaze traversed to Liu Shufen's insensate form. "Consistent with your beneficent legend," the gendarme adjudicated, bestowing accolades that soured in their recipients' throats.
Yu Dawei's indignation erupted like a cystine rupture. "Detain these defilers!" he ululated, jugulars palpitating with viperous fury.
Entropy incarnate stormed the threshold. "What thaumaturgy curses my matriarch?" howled the dispossessed son, pupils haemorrhaging desolation. Cataclysm's trifecta – parent in Thanatos' antechamber, spouse in carceral purgatory, progeny severed – coalesced into homicidal liturgy.
"Merely orchestrating succour's upgrade," Yu Mengna countered, her sangfroid refracting the officer's escalating disquiet.
As enforcers retreated through bureaucracy's labyrinth, Yu Dawei's splenetic tirade clashed with the assassin's guttural imprecation: "Precipitate fool! Feebleminded clod!"
Xu Ling's forearm encircled Yu Mengna's thoracic citadel nanoseconds preceding steel's lucent arc.
The blade's argent flash found unintended purchase – Yu Dawei's abdomen blossoming crimson under steel's cold kiss. "Demonic fugue," Xu Ling decreed, his centrifugal strike propelling the assailant into diagnostic apparatuses as ferrous perfume violated antiseptic sterility.
"Swift return now becomes necessary," Xu Ling informed retreating law via cellular augury, Oxfords pinning the convulsing pariah to germicide-sheened floors. "Your hallucination of mercantile indolence reeks of aeonic nescience," he censured, observing the wretch's frayed serge suit and disintegrating peasant footwear. "Solar sextodecadans in commerce's forge shape triumph, not hypothetical idylls."
The son's mirth effervesced sanguine spume. "Filthy lucre by the myriad? I'd endure Tartarus' endless shifts!"
Reappearing enforcers gawped at the mise-en-scène – scion of Hippocrates cradling evisceration, marauder immobilized beneath Xu Ling's gravity. "Abrupt psychotic rupture", Xu Ling diagnosed, disentangling order from pandemonium.
"Rabid mongrel!" The officer's manacles clicked final judgement. "Noble patrons, your sustained collegial attendance is humbly petitioned."
Beyond fractured plexiglass partitions, EKG tracings maintained their impassible elegy – indifferent to mortal melodramas, inscribing fresh stanzas in Asclepius' eternal hymnody of preservation and dissolution.
---
Arboreal Renaissance and Cathartic Yields
The zenith sun blazed like Hephaestus' forge as Xu Ling emerged from juridical limbo. Within the village council's sun-dappled courtyard, diesel exhaust coiled around sapling-laden trucks while their sprightly custodian bounded forth. "Brother Xu! This consignment bears lunar-grafted hawthorns and Hesperides figs – arboreal infants sworn to bear fruits rivalling Demeter's cornucopia!"
Xu Ling's gaze, honed by agrarian omniscience, surveyed root systems coiled like subterranean serpents. "Your arboreal progeny sing of exceptional lineage," he decreed, transferring 20,000 yuan with warrior-accountant's precision.
As the truck dissolved into ochre dust, villagers materialized like dryads summoned – calloused palms reverencing chlorophyllous neonates. "When shall these sylvan foundlings grace us with ambrosia?" enquired Widow Zhang, her conical hat etching chiaroscuro patterns upon sun-cured skin.
Xu Ling's mirth rippled through the assembly. "Let Gaia's adopted children find their earthly stations first. The Vitalis Tonic nears apotheosis."
Amidst the botanical census – Xu Dong's abacus clacking like temple blocks, Xu Dahai's ink-stained digits inscribing dendrological destinies – a fractured titan entered this pastoral idyll. Xu Long's arrival resonated with cosmic collapse, his left cheek emblazoned by Eros' scarlet imprimatur.
"Elder brother...the nymph has fled," the colossus croaked, his Ares-like frame diminished to Hephaestian limpness.
The village chorus swelled. "That city-bred harpy wears Hera's blindness!" thundered Old Chen, betel quid projectile emphasizing his verdict. "My niece – strong as Atlas, unwed at twenty-three summers – awaits your plough's tillage!"
"Your niece tips Thanatos' scales at two hundred _jin_!" retorted Auntie Li, sparking Dionysian laughter that salved Xu Long's wounded hubris.
Xu Ling's palm descended – a philosopher-king's absolution. "Phoenixes only abandon petrified groves for jade forests."
As villagers resumed their Ceres-worthy labours, Xu Long's spine straightened with Promethean resolve. "To Tartarus with Cupid's theatre! I'll be this prefecture's argent titan!"
"Argent?" Xu Dahai interposed, ledger momentarily forgotten. "Who claims auric supremacy?"
"Must we inscribe truths upon ancestral stele?" cackled Granny Wang, igniting communal fervour. "Xu Ling is our Midas incarnate! We'll bath in Pactolus' golden currents!"
The courtyard erupted in Demeterian ecstasy – calloused hands anointing saplings like Delphic priestesses, laughter harmonizing with humus-scented zephyrs. Xu Ling observed this georgic renaissance, recognizing the sacred alchemy transmuting heartbreak into collective mettle.
"Enough Hesiodic verse," he intoned with mock sternness, guiding Xu Long toward the clinic's alchemical sanctum. "The alembic thirsts for acolytes."
In the courtyard's gilded hour, peach saplings cast shadow mandalas resembling celestial cartography – silent witnesses to a hamlet recomposing its odyssey, one rooted scion at a time.
---
Botanical Alchemy and Nocturnal Whispers
Xu Ling's silhouette stretched across the sun-seared courtyard, his footfalls resonating through Xu Long's ribcage like ceremonial drums. The younger man's pulse mimicked hummingbird wings as they breached the clinic's sanctum – this crucible where rural alchemy transmuted despair into jade-hued abundance.
"Elder Brother...the elixir's arcana unveiled to me?" Xu Long's whisper rustled like dried mugwort leaves, boots scattering ginseng root fragments. Behind them, Xu Hai's covetous stare clung like spider silk to doorframe shadows.
Xu Ling's chuckle carried the tart sweetness of winter tangerines. "Kinship's bond transcends guarded wisdom," he proclaimed, digits already waltzing across medicinal drawers. Brittle angelica roots sighed against plump codonopsis, their herbal duet interrupted by Li Ruoya's retreat – the clinic attendant's jade-like composure fracturing as she dissolved into solar radiance.
The apothecary descended into amber twilight. Xu Long's work-hardened palms trembled on bronze balances while Xu Ling conducted his herbal opus: 30g of artemisia leaves to ignite circulatory fires and 15 g of astragalus roots to anchor terrestrial qi. Beyond leaded windows, villagers clustered like monsoonal termites, intoxicated by the narcotic perfume of decocting rehmannia and dendrobium.
"Feed the salamander's maw!" Xu Ling decreed, gesturing to the cast-iron leviathan gulping mulberry timber. Flames coiled around the cauldron's bronze belly as Xu Long fed the beast, perspiration crystallizing on his furnace-lit brow.
Two celestial hours condensed into alchemical gestation. When Xu Ling raised the vessel's lid, viridian vapours unfurled – the tonic's chromatic rebirth mirroring campesino gasps. "One calabash per hearth!" Xu Ling's proclamation pierced the awestruck throng. "Baptise sapling roots in this chlorophyll sacrament ere planting!"
Xu Dashou's brethren pressed forward, former arrogance reshaped into devotion's mask. "Our orchards shall shame the Queen Mother's celestial groves!" The patriarch vowed, horned hands cradling the verdant draught like a sacred heirloom.
Yet amidst agrarian jubilation, Liu Shuxiang's carmine lips grazed Xu Ling's helix, her murmur colder than tomb effigies: "Phantom diggers haunt the orchard's moonlit verges...their spades composing requiems for interred verities."
In crepuscular glow, Xu Ling surveyed his burgeoning realm – saplings ascending like emerald spears, peasant mirth braiding through persimmon-scented zephyrs. But deep within the humus, ancestral memories stirred, awakened by the elixir's siren call.
---
To be continuous…