Ji Tan was still a little apprehensive before registering for the appointment.
Judging by the movies he’d seen, medical care in a quasi-cyberpunk district like this was hardly any different from a horror film. Mental trouble? Strap you into a treatment chair and give you a few shocks. Broken leg? Take it off and replace it with a mechanical one. Burns? Weld a titanium-alloy Golden Bell Shield around you.¹
Elio’s Note ¹: The “Golden Bell Shield” is a martial-arts technique associated with protecting the body from blows. Ji Tan is imagining a rather more literal, metal-plated version.
“If they want to use electric shocks, we’re not getting treated,” Ji Tan muttered, clutching his brother’s identity card and rehearsing how to refuse the doctor. “No electric shocks. We won’t do electric shocks.”
The registration nurse took the identity card. “Are you here for electroshock therapy?”
“N-no!” Ji Tan hastily waved his hands.
So they really did offer electroshock therapy here! Did that mean they also had brain-replacement therapy? Treatments where they drilled straight through the frontal lobe? The more Ji Tan thought about it, the more nervous he became. He began planning how to grab his brother and run if things looked wrong.
“Don’t worry. Electroshock therapy is wonderful! I used to talk to shadowy figures in thin air all the time. After a course of shocks, I only talk to real people!” A man waiting behind them encouraged Ji Tan, then turned to the empty space on his left. “Right, Old Six?”
The corner of Ji Tan’s mouth twitched. “…Was Old Six the one your treatment cured?”
People in the Western District certainly had flexible ideas. If they couldn’t cure the person, they’d cure the “illness.” Instead of making the “shadow” disappear, the electric shocks had apparently brought Old Six into physical form and discharged him as a real person. At a loss for words, Ji Tan gave the man a thumbs-up.
Beep! The information appeared on the screen. The nurse recognized the familiar name and photograph and paused for a moment. “Dr. Ji is back for a follow-up? Then let’s book you with Chief Physician Yuan again.”
Ji Tan accepted the registration slip and glanced at it.
[Sanity Department, Consulting Room 2 · Chief Physician Yuan Xingxing · Ji Sinan · Follow-up Visit · No. 7]
“Was it Chief Physician Yuan who saw you last time, too? How did he treat you?” Ji Tan asked his brother, who sat obediently beside him without speaking or playing with his phone.
Ji Sinan nodded, then shook his head. “He was the doctor. I don’t remember how he treated me.”
He didn’t remember. That sounded an awful lot like the aftereffects of electroshock treatment. Ji Tan frowned, gripped his brother’s wrist, and instructed him, “If I say we’re leaving, follow me immediately. If the doctor tries to strap you down, hit him and run behind me. Got it?”
Ji Sinan blinked, not entirely understanding, but nodded anyway. “All right.”
Chief Physician Yuan was a kindly-looking old man with graying hair. He invited the brothers to sit and asked a few simple questions, patiently listening as Ji Sinan repeated his account of his condition three times.
Without commenting on Ji Sinan’s condition, the doctor stood and gestured for him to go behind the curtain.
The blue partition was drawn back to reveal a silver metal chair. Multicolored electrode pads were attached to it, and above it hung a bowl-shaped device that looked like a “brainwashing machine” from a movie.
Ji Tan instantly tensed. “Doctor, we don’t want electroshock therapy!” he blurted. All that rehearsal had paid off.
“You must be Little Ji’s younger brother. He used to mention you all the time,” Yuan Xingxing explained with a chuckle. “This isn’t for electroshock therapy. It’s for measuring his sanity level.”
Ji Tan saw the doctor placing electrode pads on his brother’s forehead and still couldn’t relax. He watched every movement without blinking.
Chief Physician Yuan pulled open a Velcro strap and tried to secure Ji Sinan’s neck. In the next instant, without warning, Ji Sinan swung a fist at the old man.
“Don’t!” Ji Tan cried in alarm. He hadn’t expected his brother to skip waiting for him to say “leave” and go straight to throwing punches.
Ji Sinan looked slender, but his arms were strong. This old fellow surely couldn’t take a beating as well as Little Zheng. After seven punches, Chief Physician Yuan would become Chief Physician Flat.
“Hey, Little Ji! What’s all this?” Before Ji Tan could stop his brother, Yuan Xingxing dodged the punch with one perfectly timed sidestep.
Ji Tan stared, openmouthed. Gray-haired Yuan Xingxing darted left and right like a martial-arts master, effortlessly exchanging seven moves with “Iron-Fisted Ji Sinan.”
“That’s enough, Brother. The doctor isn’t trying to tie you up.” Ji Tan hurried forward to intervene.
“It’s fine, it’s fine. He’s certainly full of energy.” Chief Physician Yuan didn’t mind in the slightest. Abandoning his plan to secure Ji Sinan’s neck, he simply lowered the device and began the test.
The test was very quick. Within seconds, the machine printed out a long strip of paper covered in waveforms.
“Chief Physician Yuan, are you an Orderbearer?” Ji Tan had just felt that familiar dizziness. It was so faint he wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t experienced it several times before.
“Mm-hmm! So you know about Orderbearers, too?” Chief Physician Yuan looked at him in surprise, then nodded. “I’m an Orderbearer of the Doctor Sequence. That dodge just now was pretty impressive, wasn’t it? Ha! I knew that move would come in handy for dealing with violent incidents at hospitals.”
Sequence.
Ji Tan had heard another unfamiliar term. He guessed it referred to a classification of supernatural abilities. The Doctor Sequence, for example, would be powers belonging to a sequence called [Doctor].
Huo Zhaixing had said before that he was a C-rank domineering CEO. So supernatural abilities were divided into [Sequences], with [Ranks] within each sequence.
Was Huo Zhaixing’s sequence actually called [Domineering CEO]? He was a C-rank domineering CEO, and his grandfather was a B-rank domineering CEO…
“Then what rank of Doctor are you?” Ji Tan ventured.
“What rank do you think? The very lowest, E-rank, of course. If I were some high-ranking powerhouse, would I still be sitting here seeing patients?” Dr. Yuan shook his head, apparently thinking the young man had fanciful ideas.
Ji Tan understood.
It seemed Orderbearers weren’t everywhere, growing like cabbages. They were still quite rare. Moving up the ranks wasn’t easy, either. Chief Physician Yuan was almost old enough to retire, yet he was still only E-rank.
Old Yuan pushed a simple report across the desk. It read:
[Sanity Level: 53.23%]
“Do you understand what this sanity level means?” Chief Physician Yuan asked, staring directly into Ji Tan’s eyes.
Ji Tan curled his toes with guilty embarrassment but kept his face composed. “Not particularly.” He didn’t know how much an ordinary resident was supposed to understand. For his part, he knew absolutely nothing.
At that, Yuan Xingxing’s eyes lit up. He eagerly launched into an explanation of sanity levels, with far more enthusiasm than he’d shown when talking about Orderbearers.
Sanity level was a bodily measurement that everyone in City A had to pay attention to, even more important than blood sugar or blood pressure. The maximum was 100%, though under normal circumstances nobody could reach it. Living in such an uncanny place, people could be frightened at any moment, see things they weren’t supposed to see, or hear sounds they shouldn’t hear. Any of those experiences could lower their sanity level.
“Once it drops, it can’t recover on its own.” Chief Physician Yuan spread his hands and pointed to a diagram on the wall.
The colorful diagram showed a segmented line, with human sanity levels divided into bands of twenty percentage points each.
The area above 60 was green. Below 60, the colors shifted from yellow to red, then dark red, and finally pitch-black. The band from 60 to 40 was labeled “Severe Mental Illness”; from 40 to 20, the bright-red label read “Uncontrollable Lunatic.”
Ji Tan stared at the three dark-red characters marking the area below 20. The hairs on his arms rose one by one. It was the name of a condition that had no business appearing in a scientific theory: Ghoul.
“Ghoul? Are they still human?” Ji Tan didn’t understand what the term meant.
“No. And the change is irreversible. Once someone becomes a ghoul, they can never become human again.”
Another line of small print appeared on the chart:
[Anyone who sees a ghoul may kill it without incurring legal liability.]
Ji Tan slowly drew in a breath and looked at his brother, sitting quietly nearby. His heart went cold. City A was more dangerous than he’d imagined. An ordinary person could slip into an abyss from which there was no return at any moment. He had to become stronger as quickly as possible so he could protect his brother.
Chief Physician Yuan pulled out Ji Sinan’s medical records.
When Ji Sinan had first been brought in for emergency treatment, his sanity level had collapsed to 39%. He had already become uncontrollable. The medication record showed that he’d received a single injection.
But the prescription for that drug was… blank.
“What did they inject him with?” Ji Tan asked, frowning.
“A drug that raises sanity level. It’s the only medication in all of City A that can treat this. Its effects are limited, though. One injection usually raises the level by only 10 to 15 percentage points. Your brother’s recovery to this level, a gain of more than fourteen percentage points, is already a miracle.”
But even with that miracle, his brother hadn’t returned to normal. Ji Tan stood in a daze outside the pharmacy, holding his brother’s hand and clutching the blank prescription Chief Physician Yuan had just written.
“A special medication, one million per vial. It can raise sanity level, but the side effect is the random loss of a portion of one’s memory. Are you certain you want to buy it?” the pharmacy staff member asked cautiously.
One million. There was that number again.
Ji Tan finally knew where the one million from the high-interest loan had gone.
“I’ll think about it.” Clutching the gold card Xie Zhi had given him, Ji Tan found himself regretting that he hadn’t accepted the black card instead. What on earth was he doing, insisting that poverty must never shake his principles?²
Elio’s Note ²: Ji Tan is poking fun at the classical ideal that a person’s principles should remain firm even in poverty. With a treatment costing a million on the table, he’s having second thoughts about turning down Xie Zhi’s more generous card.
Still, even if he’d had the money right then, he would have needed to think it over first.
According to Chief Physician Yuan, people with sanity levels above 40 could just about get by, but their levels could still drop at any time. Ji Sinan was down to 53. If he lost a little more and fell below 50, even an injection might not bring him back into the normal range. That would make the expense even harder to justify.
And with someone suffering from a psychiatric disorder, you never knew what might frighten them or when. The mere sight of his younger brother riding a motorcycle with some yellow-haired punk might be enough to send his sanity level plunging.
Ji Tan: “…”
Besides, when he’d asked Chief Physician Yuan, “Is this drug safe?” the old man’s meaningful expression had made his heart pound. He had the distinct feeling there was something about all this he hadn’t figured out.
“Brother, wait here a moment. I’m going to the restroom.” Ji Tan told Ji Sinan to stay where he was and not wander off.
“I’m not a child.” Ji Sinan reached out and ruffled his younger brother’s head, petting him like a puppy. He only had severe obsessive-compulsive disorder now; he wasn’t intellectually impaired. It wasn’t as though someone could just lure him away.
Ji Tan acknowledged him and hurried into the restroom, splashing cold water over his face. He washed it more than ten times before his heart, which had felt as though it were being tossed about in boiling oil in a hot wok, finally began to calm.
He was going to call Xie Zhi again, the only connection he had in City A.
He had just dialed the number when he suddenly heard someone talking in the neighboring stairwell. The voice sounded very familiar. Ji Tan stepped out of the restroom and moved closer to the emergency exit, where he could hear a woman speaking through tears.
“It’s all your fault! You just had to go and provoke him. Happy now? The whole hospital is saying my family is so poor we can’t even put food on the table, that I have to swindle people out of meals!” Wanwan’s voice was a little shrill. Her sobs echoed through the empty stairwell, sounding rather eerie.
“I just wanted to know whether he’d really forgotten that period, or whether he was pretending.” Little Dr. Zheng’s voice was unmistakable. He kept hissing in pain between words, clearly still hurting where he’d been rammed.
“Boo-hoo-hoo…”
“Stop crying! It’s frightening. My sanity level is right on the safety line. I can’t listen to this.”
“You’re being mean to me!”
“Ow… sss, ahh…”
Ji Tan tightened his grip on his phone. These two definitely knew something about the stretch of memory his brother had lost. As he held his breath, Xie Zhi’s puzzled voice came through the phone.
“Little Ji Tan, did you call me in the middle of the day just to make me listen to this… porn?”