'After the Clan Leader's household was notified, a family doctor should have been sent over immediately. By now, the doctor should have arrived long ago. Was the person responsible for communications at the Clan Leader's home just negligent, or did the doctor simply refuse to come?'
Milady's feet were planted firmly on the ground, yet as she took a step or two closer to the sickbed, she felt as if one misstep would send her plummeting off a cliff. Suppressing waves of terror, she bent down and carefully studied her mother.
Through the device covering Yidan's face, Milady could clearly hear the urgent, feeble gasps coming from her throat. The sounds were hoarse and sharp, as if Yidan's windpipe was struggling to cry out for help in vain. 'What kind of illness could this be?'
Milady closed her eyes, desperately racking her brain for what little knowledge of illnesses she had. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't think of any disease with symptoms like Yidan's.
Even Hailan admitted defeat. "I don't understand either," she said softly. "Why would she suddenly have trouble breathing... She has no other underlying conditions."
Trouble breathing... The two words spun endlessly in Milady's mind.
'Mom isn't just tired.' She wanted to comfort herself, but she wasn't foolish enough to believe her own reassurances. She still remembered the strange feeling when she had carried her mother on her back—like a sack filled with iron blocks...
"I need to go somewhere," the words suddenly slipped from her lips, startling Hailan.
"Where are you going? Do you have to go right now?" Hailan asked, her expression worried as she glanced from her friend on the bed to Milady. Her unspoken words seemed to swirl just beneath the surface, but just as she was about to voice them, she pushed them back down. "You shouldn't go," she said instead. "What if your mom wakes up and you're not here..."
"If Mom wakes up, tell her to wait for me for a little while." Milady turned from the bedside and walked, step by step, toward the entrance of the emergency care tent. Her legs were so stiff that she had to look down to confirm they hadn't turned to crystal. "And if she... tell her to wait for me for a little while, too."
'But that's impossible.'
Every child in the world knows their parents will leave them one day, but every child in the world feels like their parents will be there forever.
As Milady sprinted through the pale blue crystal mountain, she completely forgot to take shallow breaths.
She gulped down lungfuls of the scorched air surrounding the crystals. Her feet pounded rapidly along the path. She leaped across the broken bridge, her palms pressing directly against the blue crystal to steady herself on a shortcut, long forgetting that this was disease-causing Pollution Crystal, not ordinary mountain rock.
If she didn't run like her life depended on it, she felt the fear would overwhelm her. Only when the wind whipped against her cheeks until they stung did she feel the slightest bit better.
From the moment she rushed into the Crystal Mountain until she burst out of the polluted zone like a whirlwind and strode back toward the emergency care tent, only twenty-some minutes had passed. When Milady's gaze fell on the tent entrance and she saw Hailan craning her neck, looking out for her, her heart sank.
The moment she saw Milady's silhouette, Hailan's worry and reproach practically materialized and burst forth. She hurried forward a few steps, about to speak, but Milady cut her off. "Is she still alive?"
She was terrified of what she might have missed while she was away.
Hailan froze, caught completely off guard by the question. "She's... still breathing. But it's getting weaker and weaker. I'm worried..."
Unlike the decisive Milady, she still couldn't bring herself to voice the reality of the situation.
Hailan's gaze shifted to what Milady was holding, and her expression grew puzzled. "What's that?"
"You'll see," Milady said, having no time to explain. She hurried past Hailan into the care tent and rushed toward Yidan on the bed. She wasn't surprised at all to find no doctor in the tent.
'She never imagined a human face could take on such a heavy color.'
'Did Hailan wait by the tent entrance because she was waiting for me, or because she couldn't bear to look at Mom's face anymore?'
Milady took a deep breath. As she inhaled, it suddenly occurred to her that this simple act was something her mother could no longer do.
Ever since she had sat by the bed waiting for the doctor, she had been observing and turning over Yidan's symptoms in her mind again and again. In the end, only one suspicion remained, a suspicion that grew larger and heavier like a rolling snowball, rumbling as it crashed against her thoughts.
"Mom," Milady said softly, comforting Yidan, whose breathing was now barely audible. "I never told you what this device I won can do. Let me show you now, okay?"
Hailan, who had followed her into the tent, hugged her arms tightly and slowly sat down in a chair.
Milady raised the square, gray device with both hands. It had fallen on the path in the polluted zone, but thankfully, it hadn't been damaged. Following Uncle Chang'an's instructions, she aimed the bottom of the device perpendicularly at Yidan's chest and activated the beam. Several beams of pale white light instantly fell upon Yidan, disappearing beneath her skin.
"See," she said, trying to keep her voice steady, "its beams can pass... pass through barriers... The ends of the beams can sense objects behind the barrier..."
To keep her trembling hands from affecting the device's operation, Milady pressed them tightly against its casing, her nails turning white from the force.
'If it can penetrate a barrier of leather, then perhaps it can also penetrate human skin and muscle.'
'She was grateful that Hailan was just watching silently, not questioning what on earth she was doing.'
Just as it had at the "New Mechanical Techniques Showcase," the device scanned over Yidan's body a few times. The middle-aged uncle had said that even if there was more than one object behind the barrier, they would all be projected at the same time... Milady had never imagined she would one day be peering inside a human body. She didn't know what the organs looked like, but thankfully, Hailan was a nurse. 'She'll know.'
Perhaps because the human body was far more complex than any other barrier, Milady had to hold the device and scan for nearly ten minutes. Just as sweat started to bead on her forehead, she finally saw the white beams retract into the device, and an image flickered to life above it.
Hailan shot up from her chair. "This... This is..."
"Mom," Milady said, calling out to Yidan before even looking at the image in the air. "Look, it can recreate an image of the objects behind a barrier... It can even show a person's internal organs. Isn't that amazing? It's the one I won. I wish you could have seen it then."
Hailan stared intently at the image, stumbling a little as she walked closer. Pointing at the human organs floating in mid-air, she whispered, "That's her heart... The image isn't moving, is it? The heart isn't beating... This is her stomach, her kidneys, they all look fine..."
Her gaze circled over the internal organs a few times before stopping in one place.
Milady followed her gaze to two of the images. They were located in Yidan's chest, on either side of her windpipe, like a pair of folded angel wings.
Even with her limited knowledge of human anatomy, she could tell.
The other organs, though also images formed from shadows, still showed faint textures, folds, and vessels. They looked thick and soft.
But those two folded wings were of a different texture entirely.
Looking closely, you could even make out their sharp, flat edges. The blood that should have flowed through the organs had drained away completely, leaving behind a pair of gradually crystallizing, translucent, hard, and cold crystal lungs.
Surrounded by her daughter and her friend, Yidan finally stopped her struggling breaths at eleven o'clock that night.