Lin Yue did not ask her brother to attend the school event. She left the flyer on the kitchen table, pretended it was not important, and spent two days glancing sideways to see whether he had noticed it.
Lin Xuan saw it the first night.
The event was an academic guidance fair for secondary students. Parents, teachers, talks about universities, club booths, obligatory photographs beside overly colorful posters. Nothing urgent. Nothing surgical. Precisely for that reason, deciding to go was difficult. The hospital always knew how to disguise absence as responsibility.
On Saturday morning, he appeared at the school gate in a clean shirt and dark circles impossible to hide. Lin Yue saw him from the courtyard and froze, as if she did not know whether to run toward him or punish him for being late to all normal things.
"I thought you had a shift," she said when he approached.
"I changed it."
"For me?"
"No. For the balloons. I heard they were famous."
She tried not to smile and failed.
The school smelled of dust, chalk, and fair food. Lin Xuan walked among teenagers discussing exams as if they were wars and parents pretending to understand university brochures. He felt awkward. In the hospital, he knew where to put his hands; here, he did not.
A teacher recognized Lin Yue and approached.
"Is this your doctor brother?"
Lin Yue straightened her back.
"Yes."
The pride in that syllable was so clear that Lin Xuan had to look away.
The teacher asked Lin Xuan to speak for a few minutes with students interested in science. He wanted to refuse. Lin Yue looked at him with shining eyes, and the refusal died before it was born.
He found himself standing before fifteen teenagers, a blackboard covered in DNA drawings, and a cardboard heart model. He did not speak of geniuses or heroic vocation. He spoke of fatigue, studying when no one watched, respecting patients, and not choosing medicine if one only sought prestige.
"Medicine does not make you important," he said. "It places you near people in the worst moments of their lives. If one day you have that privilege, do not confuse it with superiority."
The students fell silent. Lin Yue looked at him as if he had revealed one of the world's secrets.
Afterward, in the courtyard, she bought him a sweet drink with her own money.
"You talked weird," she said.
"Badly?"
"No. Like a sad adult."
Lin Xuan nearly choked.
"Thank you for the evaluation."
They walked to a quieter part of the courtyard, where several trees gave shade. Lin Yue played with the straw in her drink.
"Sometimes Mom says you seem farther away even when you are home."
The sentence hurt because he had no defense.
"I am sorry."
"I am not saying it so you apologize. Just... don't disappear completely, okay?"
Lin Xuan looked at his sister. He remembered her small, with crooked braids, following him down the hallway with a storybook. Now she was growing without asking permission, learning to hide worries so she would not add weight to the family.
"I will not disappear."
"Promise."
He hesitated. Easy promises displeased him. But some promises were not predictions; they were anchors.
"I promise."
That afternoon, when he returned to the hospital, the white world of corridors seemed colder. But something inside him was steadier. His ambition could not swallow Lin Yue. It could not turn his parents into faces he only saw asleep. If the road to the summit demanded sacrificing everything that gave him a reason to climb, then it was a misunderstood road.
The system did not speak until night.
[Emotional record integrated.]
[Warning: the Medical Dao must not cut away one's own roots.]
Lin Xuan stared at the message. He had not known the system could formulate something so close to a human lesson.
In his notebook, he wrote: "Do not disappear."
Then, beneath it, he added: "Becoming a surgeon must not cost me being a brother."
For the first time in days, he slept four hours straight.