Chapter 1: The Origin of the Dead Party's Surgery

  Friday, May 25, 2007.

  The Magic City Shanghai.

  Here is always crowded with people, everyone is walking quickly with their heads down, looking very busy. Rushing to live, or rushing to die.

  The city has tens of thousands of street corners. One of them is formed by the intersection of two perpendicular roads, one called Gu Bei Road and the other Xian Xia Road. In the northeast direction of this corner stands a building called Far East International Mansion, under which there is a Starbucks coffee shop that is always crowded with people.

  At this moment, a man with an ordinary appearance, ordinary physique, and ordinary family background, who came to Shanghai from his hometown in Shandong after the college entrance examination, managed to graduate with a master's degree in law. For some reason, he lingered in this city of steel and concrete, surrounded by material desires, and became a solitary figure, unappreciated and unnoticed. After entering a equity investment company, he struggled through his job for three years, still an ordinary office worker at the age of 28. He sits quietly here, his expression despondent, looking somewhat melancholic.

  Melancholy is one of the expressions that must be put on in a petty-bourgeois place like Starbucks.

  I am this melancholic man, sitting here watching busy people, smelling the aroma of coffee, with a laptop in front of me, and on its screen is a webpage. I like to look at real scene maps, as if God is looking down on the world. It feels very poetic. And, with just a light touch of the positioning button, the picture can quickly track your location.

  It makes me feel that I really exist and am alive, at least this program can find me, at least in the distant sky, there are three satellites that can locate me.

  My existence needs to be proven through this feeling of being watched by others.

  Because I am a genuine "silk", usually, there is only one situation in which people will think of me.

  The phone rang. The screen displayed "Wang Zong".

  I let out a sigh, closed my laptop and stood up. My fingers pressed the receive button as I walked outside. I walked so freely because in fact I had ordered nothing. A cup of coffee cost over 30 yuan, which I couldn't afford to drink.

  "Lin You! What kind of nonsense is this that you handed in to me?! How did you even write this report?! Did you use your brain at all?! Where have you been?! Eating for so long?! The company pays you a salary, not to eat for free! Get back here ASAP and redo the report!"

  I muttered to myself for a while, then hung up the phone. In my heart, I cursed: "I bought a watch last year! It's not like you're paying me a salary, what are you yelling about? This report is for the big boss to see, it was originally your job to write it, all you can do is shirk responsibility and dump work on me. What else can you do?

  "If being a director just means accompanying clients for meals, baths and big health checks, then I can do it too!"

  In my heart, I scold and scold, after all, a higher official can crush people to death. Alas! "A person under the eaves must lower his head!" I sighed towards the sky, "The poor endure, the rich tolerate, sleepless and drowsy! Who's afraid of him?"

  The phone rang again.

  This old guy, what's wrong with his face? One phone call wasn't enough to vent his anger, and now another one comes? I bought a watch last year! Suppressing the anger in my heart, I picked up the phone and took a look, it was actually my undergraduate classmate and sworn brother, Li Haibo, who had already become a partner at a law firm at a young age.

  "Hey, Sha Bo Yi, aren't you dead yet?" This is what I got when I picked up. A greeting between pure men.

  "Almost," Li Haibo replied weakly, "do you have time?"

  "What's wrong?" I asked hastily, noticing that his tone was completely devoid of its usual slyness.

  "I've been diagnosed with heart palpitations and need to be hospitalized for surgery. No one is available to sign for me, can you come and sign for me if you're free?"

  "I'm coming, which hospital are you at? Wait for me, I'll be right there!"

  I rushed to the roadside and hailed a taxi. After Li Haibo finished reporting the address, I said to the driver: "Thoracic Hospital, it's an emergency!"

  I hung up the phone and called Wang. He was furious when I asked for a temporary leave on short notice, so he naturally scolded me harshly. However, there's nothing he can do to me.

  Like me and Li Haibo, a Beijinger who has drifted to Shanghai, our parents and relatives are all back in our hometowns. We're alone in this city where material desires run high and human relationships are cold, struggling to make a living. When we encounter disasters or illnesses, there's no one to take care of us, so we can only lie at home, relying on our resistance and vitality to fight it out. Fortunately, we're still young. At this age, we can generally withstand ordinary exhaustion and pain - as the saying goes, "before 50, exchange life for money; after 50, exchange money for life." This is exactly what's happening to us Beijingers who have drifted to Shanghai.

  Injuries and illnesses are nothing, the key is when you encounter surgery, you need a family member or friend to sign for you. That's when you realize how lonely and helpless you are. You don't dare tell your parents who are thousands of miles away, and you don't have a wife or girlfriend, so you can only flip through your phone contacts to find the most reliable person to help you.

  Li Haibo thinks I'm the most reliable person he can trust, what else can I do but rush to support him immediately?

  I rushed to the 8th floor, room 803, and as soon as I entered, I saw Li Haibo sitting on the bed chatting with a middle-aged man. His spirit was soaring. I went over to take a closer look at him and asked: "What's going on? You sounded so weak when you spoke, I thought you were lying in bed on your last breath, how come you're so lively?"

  Li Haibo smiled and said, "The operation will start soon, I have to find someone to sign quickly. If it weren't for the urgency, how would you arrive so quickly? This is Mr. Gu, come to say hello." He introduced me to that uncle patient.

  I nodded and smiled at the old man, took it as a greeting, walked over and punched Li Haibo, asking: "What's wrong with you? You look like you can climb up to the roof and remove tiles. Are you okay?"

  Li Haibo roughly told me about this so-called heart palpitation, which is simply that some nerves on the heart are over-excited, causing the heart muscle under their control to beat faster than other parts, making people feel very uncomfortable. This is a phenomenon that almost everyone has. However, his situation was more severe, with one premature beat every seven or eight heartbeats. The doctor said that if this condition wasn't treated promptly, it would develop into myocarditis, and further development of myocarditis would lead to sudden death.

  I was also covered in sweat after hearing this: it turns out that many people are only two steps away from sudden death.

  But after all, the problem lies in the heart, how can this operation be done? Do you need to cut a knife on the skin of the heart?

  Just then, the doctor walked in and saw me standing beside Li Haibo, asking if I was there to sign something.

  I nodded.

  The doctor called me into a conference room, told me his surname was Zhu, and then introduced the operation. The general idea is to open a small hole in Li Haibo's thigh, insert a tube, and extend it all the way to the heart position. The front end of this tube is an electric soldering iron, which lightly cauterizes that disobedient nerve on the heart, making it behave from then on.

  Just as I was amazed by the advanced and magical medical technology after listening to this introduction, the doctor suddenly changed his tone and began to introduce the risks of this surgery - all kinds of crises lurking everywhere, making you feel that even if the surgery is successful, the person will be basically disabled. I understand why TV dramas say that doctors' words before surgery can scare family members unconscious.

  But I still signed it. Then Li Haibo was pushed into the operating room immediately.

  I was told that I had to wait until the operation was over and the results were confirmed before I could leave. So I went back to Li Haibo's ward, chatted with a big uncle called Mr. Gu by Li Haibo, and after knowing he was a real estate boss, my stomach churned, it was these people who made me unable to afford a house. So I stopped talking to him and sat on the bed in a daze.

  There are three beds in this ward. Li Haibo's bed is in the middle, the bed on the left near the door is Mr. Gu, and the bed on the right by the window should also have someone, but strangely, this bed was covered with a circle of opaque plastic curtains, and nothing could be seen inside.

  I propped up the pillow and leaned against it. Leaning on the headboard, I stared at this curtain and suddenly thought of a romantic movie in Japan, with a nurse's uniform temptation series, where the plot usually took place around a bed surrounded by such non-transparent curtains.

  Then I thought of various nurse uniforms, beautiful legs in stockings, scenes where they scolded me with a hint of femininity, telling me not to move and to behave, then I thought of the accidental touch of hands, the unintentional brushing of mouths against faces, and the bursting of chest clothes...

  Evil thoughts can sprout at any time in the body of a 28-year-old man who is full of vigor but has no girlfriend.

  But I've never put it into practice. I've never pursued a particularly pretty girl, I'm afraid of being rejected.

  Is silk counter-attacking white rich beauty? This plot only exists in dramas.

  I've also seen many beautiful women on the subway, stunning beauties that catch your eye. But then you glance to the side and there's always a tall, handsome guy who instantly makes you lose confidence.

  Like the song by Jordan Chan: "She's like a fairy, she's too beautiful, heroes and beauties are from different worlds. I'm so ordinary, I don't dare to speak up. Deep down, I know the outcome of chasing her, I don't have that kind of fate, she won't fall in love with me, I don't have that kind of fate, it's not my turn..."

  This song, I always sing when going to KTV with friends. When your mood resonates with a song, you sing it with emotion, you sing it with feeling, and you can always sing it very well.

  But this song, the more you sing it, the less confident you become, and the more people are disappointed.

  As I was thinking, the sound of footsteps echoed from leather shoes stepping on the ground.