The blood on my hand is flowing down the silver needle.
The archaeological team member in front of him was no longer human. Something had torn out three claw marks on his chest that were deep enough to show the bones. They were scratched from the left shoulder to the right rib. The skin and flesh were rolled up, and the white ribs could be seen. The weirdest thing was not the wound, but the black lines on the edge of his wound, which were slowly drilling deeper into his skin, as if they were alive.
"Don't move."
I held his shoulder, took out the third silver needle with my other hand, aimed it at an inch between his eyebrows, and pierced it. The moment the silver needle entered my body, I felt a slight tremor in my fingertips, as if something was struggling under the needle tip, trying to crawl along the needle shaft toward my hand.
My grandfather Shen Baicao once said that practicing medicine is like using a soldier. If you are uneasy, one injection can kill someone.
But my hands are shaking a little today.
This is not because I am afraid of death - I have seen dead people. When I was sixteen, I followed my grandfather into the mountains to collect herbs. I watched him disembowell a miner who had broken his spine on the edge of a cliff and set the bones. Blood splattered all over his face, and he didn't even blink. I was scared by that thing just now.
Just when I was about to give the second set of blood-activating injections, the ancestral "Baicao Medical Classic" slipped out of my arms. The book fell to the ground, spread out with a snap, and a piece of yellowed paper fell out of the interlayer.
Half a page of paper, with burnt edges, browned and crispy, was painted with a bunch of runes that I had never seen before, densely packed together like ants. I didn't think much about it at the time and just wanted to stuff it back, but the moment I glanced at the rune, there was a sudden buzz in my head.
The sound was not like hearing it through the ears, but like it was exploding directly from the brain.
