Emergency department intern Su Yang is the least respected person in the whole department. He gets stuck running errands, delivering medical records, and notifying families. Anyone can dump their work on him, and anyone can give him a hard time.
Then one day, he suddenly starts seeing countdowns to death above people’s heads. When the numbers hit zero, they die.
Late at night, a delivery rider goes into cardiac arrest. The deputy director is ready to pronounce him dead, and the countdown has only four minutes and twelve seconds left. Ignoring the shouting, Su Yang rushes into the resuscitation room and catches a missed tension pneumothorax with a single needle, pulling the man back from the brink of death. A child turns blue all over despite normal blood oxygen; ventricular tachycardia is mistaken for atrial fibrillation; a patient has been dead for six hours, yet the countdown above his head is still ticking down from “00:00:00”...
Before the countdown hits zero, bringing people back from the brink is the only thing he knows how to do.
But a secret from thirty years ago lies behind this golden finger. Emergency department director Zheng Qiming has the words “should have died in 1987” above his head. The final page of a sealed medical file is marked: “The patient was saved. I died in his place.” Where do the countdowns come from, and why was Su Yang chosen? Did the legendary emergency physician Zheng Yuanshan really die?
He can save patients the entire hospital has given up on. And he must uncover the truths the whole hospital is afraid to touch. This time, he not only wants to be a good doctor, he also wants to finish what he started by saving those who could not be saved back then.
