Chapter 2
The operating lights cast pale beams like swords, exposing every inch of the top anatomy theater in America.
I floated beside the ceiling camera, looking down at the ravaged shell that had once been mine.
Three hundred well-dressed medical elites sat in silent concentration.
Then the heavy doors swung open.
The sharp rhythm of high heels striking marble sounded like the pendulum of judgment, hitting my soul one beat at a time.
Evelyn entered.
She wore a spotless sterile gown and protective goggles, like a queen coming to her coronation.
And I, on that steel table, looked like rotting waste.
“Dr. Hayes, here are the decedent’s medical records and—” The academic director held out a paper folder with both hands.
“Take it away.” Evelyn didn’t even raise her eyes. Her voice was cold enough to freeze. “I’m here to demonstrate top-tier pathological dissection, not to hear some sewer tragedy about a lowlife addict.”
The director awkwardly pulled his hands back.
In the front corner of the first row, Dr. Sarah watched with icy eyes.
She said nothing.
Her fists simply tightened.
I smiled bitterly.
Sarah knew Evelyn too well.
Arrogance was my mother’s deadliest weakness.
Sarah knew Evelyn would never read the file containing my real identity.
“Let’s begin.”
Evelyn stepped to the table and took the German No. 10 scalpel from her assistant.
She lowered her eyes to my face—beaten, twisted by agony, deformed beyond recognition.
Disgust flashed openly through her gaze.
“Severe malnutrition. The skin surface is covered in ulcerated needle marks and bedsores,” she explained into the microphone with clinical coldness. “A textbook white-trash corpse. If the ER hadn’t reported his neurological degeneration as extremely rare, this kind of garbage would never be allowed to stain my dissection table.”
Garbage.
That was the final destination I held in the eyes of my own mother.
The blade touched my collarbone.
Shhk—
A precise Y-shaped incision.
The cold steel split my gray skin and cut across my shriveled chest.
I felt no pain.
But my soul screamed itself apart.
Before I was five, whenever I had a fever, she used to press her cheek to this same chest, listening to my heartbeat, soothing me to sleep.
Now she was peeling back my body with the indifference of a butcher.
“Bone saw.” She held out her hand impatiently.
The shriek of the electric saw filled the theater.
My sternum was cut open and spread apart like a slaughtered animal.
Evelyn parted diseased organs with practiced ease, working lower and lower until her forceps lifted the atrophied nerve bundle beside my spine—shrunken like a dead twig.
And in that second, the forceps stopped.
The anatomy theater fell so silent a pin could have been heard.
Evelyn’s breathing suddenly changed.
She ripped off her goggles and practically threw herself over my body, staring at the strange blue-violet patterns of necrotic muscle.
“That’s impossible…” she whispered, her voice trembling with disbelief.
Then, like a madwoman, she snatched the high-powered magnifier from her assistant and pressed it over my nerve endings.
“Dominant spinocerebellar ataxia! And the rarest SCA-7 mutation subtype!”
Evelyn shot upright, her eyes blood-red from a fusion of academic frenzy and furious disbelief.
She seized the microphone, voice sharp enough to crack.
“This is the terminal disease my team has researched for ten full years! Five years! Five years ago I already secured FDA approval for a targeted breakthrough treatment!”
She pointed at my wrecked organs and roared at the three hundred elites below.
“Look at these neurons! He’s been tortured by this disease for at least five years! When it flares, the nerves feel like ten thousand red-hot needles stabbing through them at once!”
I floated above, tears falling from a body I no longer had.
Yes, Mom.
It really did hurt.
It hurt so much I ground my teeth to pieces.
It hurt so much all I could do was roll in the filthy water on the basement floor.
“Who was treating him?!”
Evelyn was completely out of control now. She waved the scalpel stained with my blood like a raging lioness.
“If he’d gotten one injection of my treatment in the early stage—just one—he could have run, lived, functioned like anyone else! He never needed to suffer like this! He should not have died!”
She slammed her fist against the edge of the dissection table so hard my opened body trembled.
“Which worthless doctor neglected him?! This kind of medical exploitation is murder! The killer should lose their license and go to prison!”
The entire theater was dead silent.
Only Evelyn’s righteous fury echoed against the dome.
How noble she was.
A god saving the world.
Outraged on behalf of a nameless corpse.
But I didn’t need miracle medicine.
Three years ago, that night, dragging my broken leg, I only wanted to hear my mother’s voice.
Click.
A small sound broke the silence.
From the first row, Dr. Sarah pushed back her chair and stood.
She was not wearing a white coat.
She was dressed in black mourning clothes, stark against the blinding lights.
“Dr. Hayes, you’re right. This was murder.” Sarah’s voice wasn’t loud, but the microphone at her collar carried it with icy clarity to every corner of the room.
Evelyn frowned. “You’re Sarah from the ER? Do you know the quack who delayed treatment?”
“I do.” Sarah raised her head. In her red-rimmed eyes burned a hatred that wanted to destroy everything.
She walked down the steps, crossed to the table, and stopped half a meter away, staring straight into Evelyn’s eyes.
“Three years ago, when the first phase of neural-tearing complications appeared, this boy dragged himself three miles on a broken leg and called the nation’s top SCA-7 expert for help.”
Evelyn froze. “Then why—”
“Because that top expert never even looked at his file. Over the phone, she called him a junkie trying to scam prescription drugs.”
Sarah’s voice shook. Every word was a poisoned knife driven into Evelyn’s heart.
“That expert not only blocked his number, she warned him that if he ever called again, she would have him thrown in prison.”
Sarah spun suddenly and pointed at me—cut open on the table.
Then, staring at Evelyn and at the three hundred cameras recording everything, she delivered the verdict in a voice cold as death:
“The expert who personally strangled his last chance at life…”
“was you, Evelyn Hayes.”
