Yunhe's first snow did not deserve to be called snow in any northern city. It was only white specks melting before touching the ground, an indecisive gesture from winter. For the people of Yunhe, however, it was enough. Children lifted their faces. Vendors covered their stalls with tarps. The old men in Qing'an Park argued about whether it announced a damp year or merely more painful knees.
Lin Xuan was crossing the park on his way to the hospital because his bus had stopped with a minor breakdown. His hands were in his pockets and his mind on a list of sutures he wanted to practice. He stopped when he saw a group gathered beside the stone pavilion. An old man sat on the ground, leaning against a pillar, face ashen and one hand pressed to his chest. Around him, three Chinese chess companions argued with useless panic.
"He says it passed," one insisted.
"Then why is he so white?"
"Call his son."
"Call emergency services," Lin Xuan said as he arrived.
The men moved aside with immediate relief at the sight of someone making a decision. The old man did not want to go to the hospital. That was the first thing he said, even before giving his name. He was Xu Shuren, eighty years old, though he insisted on seventy-nine and a half. He had felt chest pressure while moving a piece on the board. It had lasted several minutes. Now he said he was better.
Lin Xuan crouched before him. The radial pulse was irregular, not violently, but with a treacherous pause every few beats. His skin was cold. His breathing held. There was no severe pain at that moment, but his body was still negotiating with something.
[Observation: irregular pulse with history of chest pain.] [Risk: cardiovascular event not excluded.] [Recommendation: transport and urgent electrocardiogram.]
"Mr. Xu, you need to go to the hospital."
"I don't want to die on a stretcher," the old man replied.
One of his friends made a choked sound.
Lin Xuan held the man's gaze.
"Then do not waste time arguing on the ground of a park."
The old man looked surprised. Then he gave a dry laugh that turned into a cough.
"You have a sharp tongue for someone young."
"Yours still works too. Use it to give me your family's phone number."
While they waited for the ambulance, Lin Xuan kept the old man still and warm. He had no equipment, no monitor, only his hands, eyes, and what he had learned. He practiced pulse reading as something more than a system technique. He did not try to turn it into mysticism. He used it as sustained attention: rhythm, strength, pauses, temperature, expression, history. The traditional medicine the system hinted at did not replace an electrocardiogram; it reminded him that before any device, there was a body speaking under the skin.
Xu's son arrived before the ambulance, wearing an expensive coat and breathing hard. He came prepared to scold his father, but the sight of the old man on the ground broke his speech.
"Dad..."
"Don't make a scene," Xu grumbled. "The boy says my heart may be being dramatic."
"I did not say dramatic," Lin Xuan corrected. "I said we should not trust the pain just because it has eased."
The transfer was tense. In emergency, the electrocardiogram showed changes that justified the alarm. It was not the catastrophic heart attack the family feared, but it was a serious warning. Cardiology took the case. Xu's son, still pale, tried to thank Lin Xuan with formal words that would not come out properly.
"My father never listens to anyone."
"Today he listened enough."
"Are you a cardiologist?"
"No. I want to be a surgeon."
The man seemed confused by the answer. To most people, medicine was one large word. They did not understand its internal borders, ambitions, or the fact that a surgeon in training might stop in a park because of an irregular pulse. Lin Xuan was not sure he had understood it himself before that day.
Later, Doctor Sun reviewed the story and clicked his tongue.
"Good eye."
"It was the pulse."
"A pulse does not speak if you do not know how to be quiet inside."
Lin Xuan kept the sentence. Sun, as always, had thrown it out like an insult, but inside it was teaching.
In the afternoon, when he passed by cardiology to check the result, he found old Xu sitting in bed with better color, arguing over the phone about who had actually been winning the interrupted chess match.
"Young doctor," he said when he saw him. "You ruined a victory."
"I gave you a chance to claim it later."
"I hope so."
On the table sat a small box of sesame sweets brought by his son. Xu offered one to Lin Xuan.
"Take it. It is not a bribe. I am too poor to bribe doctors and too old to start now."
Lin Xuan accepted one. Not for the sweet, but for the gesture. In medicine there were gifts that dirtied, gifts that compromised, and gifts that simply closed a human conversation. Learning the difference was part of growing too.
That night, the system unlocked a minor improvement in Pulse Reading of the Nine Heavens. It was not spectacular. It did not let him see diseases as colored lights or diagnose with a touch of the wrist. It only refined his perception of irregular rhythms, subtle tension, and correspondence between pulse and general state.
[Progress: Pulse Reading of the Nine Heavens - initial stage strengthened.] [Warning: all perception must be confirmed with clinical evidence.]
Lin Xuan was inwardly grateful for that warning. He did not want to become a charlatan with divine tools. He wanted to be a doctor capable of integrating without betraying reality.
When he left the hospital, a few white specks were still falling. In Qing'an Park, old Xu's chessboard remained on the stone table, covered by a thin layer of dampness. A red piece stood halfway between two squares, forever suspended in the decision pain had interrupted. Lin Xuan looked at it for a moment, then kept walking.
Life did not always warn with screams. Sometimes it did so with a pause in the pulse, a hand on the chest, a piece that did not finish moving. The duty of a doctor was to be present enough to notice that interruption and act before silence became final.
Old Xu refused to admit he had been afraid. He said he was only bothered by the idea of losing a chess match because of an opportunistic heart. His son, exhausted from arguing with him, asked Lin Xuan to try convincing him to continue treatment. Lin Xuan agreed, but he did not use speeches about mortality or statistics. He sat beside the bed and asked Xu to explain the exact position of the board before the pain.
Xu spoke for ten minutes about horses, chariots, and a trap he insisted would have destroyed his opponent. While he spoke, Lin Xuan truly listened. At the end he said:
"If you want to finish that match, you need to stay alive and strong enough to argue about the result."
The old man looked at him in silence. Then he snorted.
"You are manipulative."
"I am learning clinical communication."
"That sounds worse."
He accepted treatment with the offended dignity of a general forced to retreat in order to win another battle. His son almost cried with relief. Lin Xuan left cardiology with a strange feeling. He had used the patient's life, not fear of death, to convince him. Perhaps listening was not only receiving information. It was finding the door through which a person still wanted to enter the future.
That night, while practicing Pulse Reading, he did not think of powers or secrets. He thought of the interrupted board. Of the old man's desire to finish one move. Medicine, he understood, rarely saved lives in the abstract. It saved unfinished games, promised dinners, unsent letters, arguments someone still wanted to win.
Xu Shuren was discharged a week later with a medication list, a diet he said he would not respect, and orders to walk without turning every stroll into a competition. Before leaving, he left a red chess piece at reception for Lin Xuan. It was neither old nor valuable. One corner was worn by years of impatient fingers. On a note he wrote: So you remember that an interrupted move can also save a match.
Lin Xuan kept the piece in his desk drawer beside pens, receipts, and medical notes. Every time he saw it, he remembered that patients were not merely organs at risk. They were wills with strange shapes. Some wanted to live for children. Others for debts, pride, love, or to finish an absurd argument beneath a pavilion. A doctor who did not understand that will could achieve obedience through fear, but rarely true cooperation.
That night, while reviewing patients, he tried asking each what they hoped to do after leaving. The answers changed the ward: cook for a grandchild, sell flowers again, finish repairing a roof. Small things. Anchors. And Lin Xuan began to suspect that treatment often held better when tied to a concrete reason to return to the world.