The cardiac monitor's scream cut through OR-4 like scalpel sliding between ribs. Dr. Lin Zhao adjusted her loupes, the magnified view revealing more than human anatomy should allow. The patient's sternum glowed faintly beneath her electric bone saw - an aurora of jade light rippling where the seventh rib should be.
"BP dropping!" The anesthesiologist's voice warped as if underwater.
Lin's gloves grew slick. Not with blood, but with condensation from suddenly freezing steel instruments. Her scrub cap fluttered in nonexistent wind. The phantom heartbeat she'd learned to dread pulsed in her own chest cavity, syncing with the dying man's arrhythmia.
Not again.
Her vision fractured. Twin realities overlaid the operating field: the modern hospital theater, and a crumbling stone altar where black-robed figures chanted over a writhing victim. Both bodies shared the same jagged wound - a star-shaped laceration above the heart.
"Doctor!" The nurse's shout snapped her back. The code blue light bathed everything in electric cyan. Lin's hands moved autonomously, performing the emergency thoracotomy her conscious mind hadn't ordered.
When her rib spreaders touched glowing bone, time crystallized.
The corpse on the table sat up.
Lin stumbled back, retractor clattering into the sterile field. The cadaver's eyes opened - not the clouded grey of death, but liquid mercury shot through with fractal gold. Its lips moved in a language that made the surgical lights flicker.
"Shén mài jiāng wáng..."
The heart monitor flatlined. Code blue became code black.
Three Hours Earlier
Lin pressed her forehead against the morgue's stainless steel door. The chill grounded her, countering the phantom heat coiling behind her sternum. Her sixth post-transplant surgery, and the visions were getting worse.
"Still communing with the dead?" Dr. Everett's lab coat swished into view, smelling of formaldehyde and spearmint gum. The chief pathologist held out a PET scan glowing with impossible activity. "Your midnight visitor's autopsy results. Want to guess what we found?"
Lin studied the neon-bright image. The homeless man's cardiovascular system glowed like fiber optics, his aorta branching into luminous tributaries that shouldn't exist in human anatomy. "Congenital vascular malformation?"
"Try parasitic spiritual infestation." Everett tapped the thirteenth rib shadow - an extra bone fragment glowing nuclear green. "According to Qing Dynasty medical scrolls, this marks-"
"Demonic possession. Yeah, I read your paper on occult forensics." Lin massaged her scar through scrubs. The heart transplant that saved her life two years ago came with side effects no medical journal could explain. "Let me guess - you want to scan me next?"
The older woman's gaze dropped to Lin's chest. "That pulsar-level energy signature you're emitting? My Geiger counter's been singing Wagner since you walked in."
A crash echoed from Cryo Vault B. Their shared reflection in the morgue door showed three figures where there should be two - a translucent woman in ancient battle armor superimposed behind Lin. Everett's breath hitched.
Before either could speak, Code Blue alarms shattered the moment.
Now
The crash team's shouts faded behind quarantine glass. Lin stared at her trembling hands through the decontamination shower. Pink-tinged water swirled around her booties, carrying whispers in a forgotten tongue.
"Sùlí..."
She gripped the pendant beneath her scrubs - a scale-shaped jade fragment that grew warm during episodes. The ER's chaos beyond plastic curtains warped into a memory not her own: armored warriors falling before obsidian monoliths, their blood feeding roots of a colossal glowing tree.
"Dr. Lin?" A melodic voice cut through visions. A silver-haired orderly leaned against the decontamination chamber, ID badge reading *Jiu You*. His gloved hand passed clean through the shower control panel. "Your patient left you a message."
He extended a specimen bag containing a rib fragment. Etched into the bone were glowing sigils that mirrored the scars around Lin's transplanted heart. As she reached instinctively, the orderly's form flickered - for one vertigo-inducing moment, she saw a bronze cauldron covered in screaming faces where his torso should be.
"Don't trust the celestial surgeons," Jiu You whispered through elongating teeth. "They're still cutting."
The quarantine alarms chose that moment to fail. Lin's final sight before security tackled her was Everett convulsing on the floor, her eyes twin voids swallowing the emergency lights.