His grandfather smiled up at him and squeezed his hand.
"All right, boy. Our secret. I won't say a word to anyone, not even your father."
"Rest for a minute," Chen Yang said, standing. "I'm going to go and get a doctor to look at you."
Out in the corridor he leaned against the wall and let his heart slow down.
He could never sell this. That was the first thing to be clear about. A panacea like that did not make you rich; it made you a resource, and resources get owned. He still did not properly understand how his own ability worked — not the rules of it, not the limits — and he could not guarantee a stable supply of anything. One bad month and the people queuing at his door would stop asking politely.
And if anyone ever traced it back and worked out that a man was walking two hundred years into the future and back before dinner, there would be no polite conversation at all. Not for him. Not for anyone standing near him.
He raised his hand. The used syringe dissolved into light off his palm and was gone.
The ring can't be replaced, he thought, watching the last of the glow fade. But I can. Anybody can be replaced.
Which meant getting stronger, and fast — as fast as the absorption rules allowed.
Then he arranged his face into something frightened and ran for the nurses' station.
"Please, you have to come, my grandfather just sat straight up in bed—"
"Which room?"
"Forty-three."
The nurse pulled the chart, and her expression softened into professional patience. Chen Jianxiang. Terminal-stage carcinoma with metastases. Immobile. Palliative transfer under discussion.
"Sir, patients at this stage sometimes seem to—"
"He's standing up. I'm telling you he's standing up."
"You're imagining it. It's very common with family, the mind plays—"
He took her hand and pulled. "Then come and look with your own eyes. Two minutes. Please."
She came, mostly to settle him.
In room forty-three, Chen Jianxiang was on his feet beside the bed with the blanket folded over his arm, looking out of the window.
"Ah," he said. "Any news?"
The nurse made a sound that was not a word and dropped the chart.
Then she screamed, and went out of that room backwards, shouting into the corridor that she was calling Dr Han right now, this second—
Chen Jianxiang watched her go and smiled to himself with enormous satisfaction. So it really had worked.
The door banged open thirty seconds later.
"Where is he?" Dr Han came in fast, already reaching for her stethoscope. "Where's the—"
She stopped. The patient was standing in the middle of the floor with his hands behind his back.
"May I?" she said. "Let me take a look at you, Mr Chen."
She examined him there and then, quickly, competently, saying nothing at all for four full minutes.
"Well," she said at last, straightening up. "On the basis of what I can see here, Mr Chen is in good shape." She frowned at her own words. "Remarkably good shape. That's not a figure of speech."
"Does that mean he's recovered?" Chen Yang asked, letting all the hope he could manage into his voice. "Completely?"
"That means he needs a full examination, and it means I'd appreciate the family's cooperation in getting one."
"Grandpa." Chen Yang turned to him. "Go and do the tests. All of them. Let's be sure."
"Fine, fine." The old man waved a hand, cheerful. "I don't mind. Poke away."
"Then come with me, all of you." Dr Han held the door. "And the hospital will cover the cost of the tests. All of them. Don't worry about that side of it."
Chen Yang's father thanked her twice, and his grandfather thanked her three times, and neither of them could quite manage it without their voices cracking.
The results took the rest of the day.
Dr Han put the scans up and stood in front of them with her arms folded.
"The tumour is gone," she said. "There is no evidence of malignant cells anywhere in these images."
"I'm twenty years younger!" Chen Jianxiang announced to the room. "I could run to the market and back. I could carry the market—"
"Grandpa. Calm down."
"Dad, please," his son said. "You're still weak, whatever the pictures say. Don't overexert yourself."
"There's nothing to worry about." Dr Han turned a scan in her hands, studying it again. "In fact, judging from the whole panel, his age-related conditions have gone as well. The arthritis. The kidney values. All of it."
She lowered the film.
"Chen Yang. The nurse says you were alone with your grandfather immediately before this happened."
"That's right."
"So tell me," Dr Han said, and her eyes did not leave his face. "Exactly what happened in that room?"
Chen Yang produced a look of blank, helpless bewilderment.
"Honestly? Nothing. I sat with him. I held his hand and talked to him about when I was small, and told him he wasn't allowed to give up, and he told me he wasn't planning to." He shrugged. "There are cases like this, aren't there? People who recover because they decide to. I know it isn't scientific. I know how it sounds. But he decided to."
Dr Han looked at him for a long moment.
"I'll agree to the discharge," she said. "On one condition."
His father blinked. "A condition?"
She glanced away, thinking, and then back. "A case like this is extremely rare. I want to monitor his condition on a regular basis — properly, with scheduled follow-ups. That's all I'm asking."
"Of course!" His father was almost laughing with relief. "Come to the house any time. Any time at all, Doctor, you'll always be welcome."
"One week from today, then."
Chen Jianxiang shook her hand warmly on the way out, and then, in the doorway, in front of everyone, added: "And you're not married, are you? Neither is my grandson. Have a think about it."
"GRANDPA."
Dr Han watched the three of them go down the corridor, the old man walking in front.
He is hiding something, she thought. That boy is hiding something, and I have no idea what.
And that patient — that patient had been in worse condition than old Mr Chu. Considerably worse. She had seen both sets of images this month.
At the Chu family mansion, three people were coming down the staircase, and the woman in front had a phone against her ear.
"I'm on my way in now," Chu Xin said. "Tell them to start setting up, I'll be there for the—"
The voice on the other end changed everything.
"Miss Chu. It's Dr Han. I have something you should hear about — a cancer patient of mine, terminal, palliative transfer already under discussion. He recovered yesterday afternoon."
Chu Xin stopped on the stairs.
"Recovered," she repeated. "Say that again. He's actually fully recovered?"
"All tests are normal. The tumour is gone and there are no cancer cells anywhere in the imaging. I've run the panel twice."
"Postpone the meeting," Chu Xin said over her shoulder, and the two people behind her turned around at once. She put the phone back to her ear, and there was something new and very awake in her voice. "What treated him? What was the medication, what was the protocol — how did it work that fast?"
"That's the point," Dr Han said. "His recovery has nothing to do with my treatment plan. Nothing at all."
"Send me the complete file. Everything. The whole course of treatment from admission."
"I'll send it." A pause. "I'll send it, but I don't think you'll find your answer in it."
"Then where would I find it?"
"Start with the grandson," Dr Han said, and Chu Xin's eyebrows went up. "The patient was in critical condition. His grandson visited, alone, in the evening. By the next morning he was standing up in his room asking for the news."
"The grandson."
"His name is Chen Yang," said Dr Han. "Ask about him."
"Xiao Yan!"
His father caught him in the courtyard the next morning. "Where are you off to so early? You haven't eaten anything."
"Meeting a classmate," Chen Yang called back. "I'll get something out."
"Then be back early. Dinner tonight — a proper one, for your grandfather coming home."
"Understood!" He waved cheerfully and went out through the gate.
Two streets away he found a service alley between a shuttered laundry and a wall, checked it end to end, and nodded to himself. Ideal. No windows, no cameras, no reason for anyone to come down here.
A classmate, he thought, and smirked. Leelu and Uncle Wei would not have passed for classmates under any lighting.
He raised his fist over his head and shouted, and the light took him.
In District D, a red-haired girl was sitting on a crate in a scavenged white nurse's tunic, eating something out of a wrapper with her eyes half shut in bliss.
The door opened.
"Boss!" Leelu was on her feet with the wrapper stuffed behind her back. "You're back! Did you deal with the urgent thing?"
Chen Yang gave her a thumbs up. "Dealt with. And I've strengthened our cooperation with the Doctors' Association while I was at it."
He sat down on the other crate. "So this is the task now. Two parts. One: get that bio-armour. Two: keep exchanging vegetables for potions, as many as they'll give us, for as long as they'll give them."
Leelu frowned. "All the vegetables? For potions?" She turned her hands over. "Boss, forgive me, but a person can only take each level once. You can't drink the same serum twice. What are we going to do with a warehouse of them?"
"They're not for the two of us."
"Then who—"
"Our organization," Chen Yang said, "has decided to open a branch here."
Leelu's mouth opened.
"Look around at what's out there." He counted it off. "Zombies. Mutants. Hostile groups with better guns than yours. If we're going to operate in this area, I'm not doing it out of a basement. I want a real base — a full operational base, right here."
"Can you trust the people here, though?" she asked doubtfully — and then answered her own doubt with her chin up. "They're weaker than the city crews, I won't pretend otherwise. But they're united. And they're reliable. I'd stake my life on nearly every person in this district."
"That's exactly right, and that's exactly why." Chen Yang nodded. "Brute strength I can buy in a bottle. Character I can't buy anywhere. I'd rather have a loyal weakling and a case of serum than a strong man I have to watch."
He leaned forward.
"So here's the plan. Every member of this base gets brought up to level four, minimum. And the leaders — people like you — go to five. Higher, if it can be done."
Leelu stared at him, and the colour drained out of her face.
"Every— level four? Everybody?"
"What's wrong?" He was honestly puzzled. "Don't we have enough potions? I thought—"
"It's not the potions." She sat down heavily. "Boss, if you strengthen this many people at once, you will cause a serious problem for the entire area. Not for us. For the area."
"What problem?"
"Did you notice how your appetite changed after you took the tier one?"
Chen Yang scratched his cheek and looked at the floor.
"...I may have noticed something."
He had gone from one bowl of rice to four. He had eaten an entire twenty-five-kilo ham order's worth of trial portions and called it lunch. He was, now that he thought about it, eating three or four times what he used to.
"That's the side effect," Leelu said. "The serums rebuild your cells and raise everything you can do — and they raise what it costs to run you, in exactly the same proportion. Strength isn't free. It's paid for in food, every single day, forever."
Chen Yang went very still.
More enhanced people meant more consumption. Not a little more. Multiplied.
"And it climbs with every level," Leelu added. "Each one costs more than the last."
"So instead of half a kilo of food a day," Chen Yang said slowly, "a person needs, what, a kilo and a half?"
"I need two and a half," Leelu said. "Personally. Today."
"You—"
"And I ran the numbers once." She looked at him steadily. "A fourth-level enhanced adult needs about eight kilos a day. Eight. If you put a whole district at level four, they'll strip every living thing off this land inside a season — every rat, every root, every bird — and when it's gone they'll starve, and they'll starve much faster than they would have if you'd left them weak."
Chen Yang sat back on the crate.
Hundreds of people at level four. Tons of food a day. Every day, without a break, forever.