DSMIS CH1

Chapter 1: Stationed in Yunnan

Inside a mid-tier residential complex in Jin City, a grand, tearful scene of human-canine separation was currently unfolding.

At the entryway, Shen Xing squatted on the floor, clinging tightly to an under-a-year-old Samoyed with deep reluctance. The Samoyed was clearly well-cared for—its coat was snow-white, smooth, and fluffy, and its constantly wagging tail resembled a giant dandelion.

Around its neck was a blue-striped triangular bib, and the cheerful curl of its mouth was enough to make anyone forget their troubles. The dog’s large head buried itself into Shen Xing’s chest, whining soft and sweet whimpers, brazenly begging for affection.

“Whim~ Woof, woo…”

Holding the dog he had raised single-handedly, listening to its clingy little noises, Shen Xing felt even more reluctant to leave. He cupped the Samoyed’s round, giant head and said softly:

“Qianjin, be good. You’ll stay at Uncle’s house for just a few days. Dad promises that as soon as I settle down in Yunnan, I’ll bring you right over, okay?”

The fluffy ball of cotton candy couldn’t understand human speech. It just kept trying to climb into Shen Xing’s arms, using all four paws. Shen Xing hardened his heart, pulled its paws away, and stood up.

The Samoyed followed right at his heels, wagging its dandelion tail, thinking its dad was taking it out to play. Instead, its neck suddenly tightened as Xu Chun pulled it back from inside the apartment.

The fluffy cotton candy kicked its legs and barked twice. Shen Xing instantly softened again and turned back to scoop it up. Seeing this, Xu Chun glanced at his watch, completely helpless.

“Enough, you two! You’ve been saying goodbye at my front door for half an hour. Even romance dramas aren’t this sappy. Is my place a torture chamber or something? Relax, I’ll take great care of your Qianjin. Canned food and kibble are on unlimited supply, and Hashbrown will play with him. Just go in peace, Dr. Shen.”

Xu Chun and Shen Xing had been classmates in the same class since middle school. Xu Chun was a well-known animal lover, and Hashbrown was his Golden Shade British Shorthair cat.

Due to some nasty drama at the hospital, Shen Xing needed to take a temporary assignment in Yunnan to lay low. His brainless little cotton ball got motion sickness, so he originally wanted to drop Qianjin off at his mother’s place. Unfortunately, his mother was severely allergic to dog hair.

Reluctant to trust commercial boarding facilities, his only option was to leave Qianjin at Xu Chun’s place for a few days.

Looking at Xu Chun, Shen Xing couldn’t help but nag one last time:

“I saw that it’s supposed to rain over the next few days. If it thunders at night, you must check on him. She’s terrified of thunder. If it thunders, hold him, comfort him, and give him a little canned treat. And…”

Seeing that Shen Xing was about to keep rambling, Xu Chun cleanly pushed him out the door.

“No more ‘ands’! Raising a human kid isn’t even this exhausting. I get it—if it thunders, I’ll cuddle him in my blanket, okay? Just go already!”

Only then did Shen Xing step into the elevator, looking back three times with every step. The second the elevator doors were closing, he caught sight of the cotton ball breaking free and chasing after him. In an instant, he fully understood the anxious heart of a parent watching their child leave home—even if, in this case, it was the father leaving the child.

Time was tight. Coming out of Xu Chun’s underground garage, Shen Xing drove straight onto the highway. Doing the math, if he drove aggressively and everything went smoothly, he could reach the designated county in Yunnan in about four days.

On the afternoon of the third day, driving down National Highway 214, Shen Xing stared at the automatic wipers sweeping faster and faster. He knew the weather forecast had betrayed his trust once again. Yesterday, the forecast showed a bright, shining sun, yet today it wept without warning. With such a big sun on the forecast, why was its temper so unstable?

Just as he was inwardly complaining and growing increasingly irritated, a notification popped up on his navigation screen, accompanied by the voice broadcast of Zhu Guangquan:

“Landslide ahead. The road is closed. The closed section totals 19.5 kilometers. Re-routing your path. The new route will add 338 kilometers.”

Shen Xing stared with wide eyes at the navigation screen:

“What?!”

A 19.5 km closure meant adding 338 kilometers? Did the GPS lose its mind?

Controlling the urge to curse, he pulled into the nearest temporary parking area and zoomed in on the map. Sure enough, the section ahead of Peacock Mountain Tunnel had turned gray—impassable.

After messing with his phone for a while, it turned out the fastest alternative was indeed the recommended detour. It meant making a massive circle around the county, adding over 300 kilometers for nothing!

Taking a deep breath to accept this stroke of bad luck, his phone began to ring.

The caller ID displayed the name: “Patrick Star”.

Patrick Star was his childhood best friend, Pei Daxing. As soon as Shen Xing picked up, a rapid-fire barrage of words shot through the speaker:

“Little Star! I heard from my aunt that you were fired from the hospital because of that medical disturbance last time, and now you’re going to Yunnan? How come I didn’t know about this?!”

Pei Daxing’s aunt was the sister-in-law of Shen Xing’s maternal aunt; besides being best friends, they were distantly related by marriage.

Shen Xing’s mouth twitched upon hearing this:

“Not only did you not know, I just found out myself. I’m being stationed in Yunnan, okay? Stationed. Not fired.”

He had dedicated himself to his work despite dealing with intensely aggressive patient families and communication barriers as wide as a biological species gap. If the hospital had actually fired him, he would have made a scene and appealed all the way to the central government.

The other end breathed a sigh of relief:

“I was going to say! Why would you get fired out of nowhere? How did this rumor even spread?”

Shen Xing let out a dry laugh. He could easily picture the exact chain of transmission.

His Mom: “Shen Xing is going to support Yunnan, so he won’t be working at the hospital for now.”

Maternal Aunt: “Shen Xing went to Yunnan and isn’t at the hospital anymore. It might be because of that medical disturbance last time.”

Aunt’s Sister-in-law: “Shen Xing was fired over the medical disturbance and has gone to Yunnan.”

Very good. Absolutely flawless.

Noticing his expression, Patrick Star cautiously asked:

“Is that medical disturbance thing really completely settled?”

Shen Xing leaned back against his seat and stayed silent for a long moment before nodding:

“Yeah. After the Health Commission stepped in to investigate, they determined that I had fully fulfilled my duty of risk disclosure. It was the patient himself and his family who insisted on limb-salvage treatment. The risks were clearly listed in the subsequent treatment plan, and they signed it. Still, the hospital gave them 50,000 yuan as a humanitarian gesture.”

This whole ordeal had started half a month ago. He was on night shift that day when the patient was brought in following a traffic accident. Upon arrival, the patient suffered a degloving injury on his left leg, meeting the criteria for amputation. After discussion, the family insisted on saving the leg. Shen Xing did everything he could—debrided it three times until the lower leg was almost hollowed out—but there was still no blood flow, and large areas of skin were necrotic.

Later, the patient’s organs began failing to varying degrees. Shen Xing talked until his lips were dry, pleading with them to amputate to save his life. He laid out every terrifying consequence, but the patient and family refused to listen.

They kept believing that if they just pushed the doctor a little harder, a miracle would happen. Of course, there was no miracle. The next night, the patient suffered rapid multi-organ failure and passed away by morning.

Once the person died, the family immediately turned hostile, claiming the doctors didn’t put effort into saving him because they weren’t given a red envelope (bribe), leading to his death…

After that, the family naturally partnered with a “professional” medical-troublemaking gang for a full-service harassment campaign.

The man died in the morning; the mob dressed in mourning clothes arrived by the afternoon.

Patrick Star comforted him:

“Well, as long as it’s settled, that’s fine. It wasn’t your fault anyway. Just treat this trip to Yunnan as a chance to relax. By the way, you should be arriving today, right?”

He tried to change the subject to keep Shen Xing from stressing, but the moment the landslide was mentioned, Shen Xing felt even more annoyed:

“Arriving my ass. There was a landslide. I have to drive over 300 extra kilometers. I’ll have to sleep on the road tonight.”

Patrick Star fell silent for a moment before offering:

“Well… that sounds normal. You’ve been a jinx since you were a kid.”

Shen Xing… had no comeback for that.

Aside from his academic life—which was smooth sailing all the way through his Master’s and Ph.D. degrees—he was a walking jinx in every other aspect of life.

Growing up, every time he graduated, his school would get renovated. Whenever he hung his blankets out to dry, the weather turned overcast. New shoes were always stepped on, and white shirts were guaranteed to get grease stains.

The most bizarre incident happened to someone as respectable as him: he went 800 years without wearing a holy sock, but the one time he did, he happened to hit a strict airport security check requiring shoes to be taken off. Embarrassed, he curled his toes to hide the hole, only for the security agent to glare at him suspiciously and ask what he was trying to hide between his toes…

What was he hiding? He was hiding his dignity…

Thinking about it that way, encountering a landslide on a road trip didn’t seem so impossible to accept anymore. After all, when a person is unlucky, even a fart hits their heel.

Hanging up the video call, Shen Xing rubbed his face. Truth was, things weren’t as simple as he had made them sound. He had underestimated the tactics of professional medical agitators; simple mourning-dress protests were out of style.

The morning after the patient died, an awkwardly angled photo of him leaning over to check a medical record written by a newly appointed female resident was widely leaked. Rumors spread that he had an affair with a married resident and used his power to help her stay at the hospital!

He already belonged to the Department of Orthopedics—a department infamous for scandals—and to make matters worse, a deputy director in their department had actually been reported for misconduct the previous year!

The rumor instantly gained vivid detail, almost describing their bedroom positions. Damn those agitators, tailoring their slander to specific department stereotypes now.

Fortunately, he was completely innocent, and the hospital promptly hired lawyers. Still, someone managed to stalk him to his apartment and threaten him. His application for the Yunnan station was approved so quickly precisely because hospital leadership feared violence against him and wanted him to lay low. While called “laying low,” it was practically an exile.

He hadn’t mentioned any of this to Patrick Star, that big blabbermouth. If Patrick Star knew, his whole family would know.

Shen Xing let out a silent sigh, placed his hands back on the steering wheel, and watched the windshield wipers turning like spinning pinwheels. Putting those troubling thoughts aside, he drove for another two hours until night fell, then casually found a local guesthouse to stay the night.

To make up for lost time, he woke up early the next morning. He barely made any stops along the way except for bathroom breaks. At noon, he picked a quiet service area, pulled out a self-heating hotpot from the trunk, gobbled it down while gasping from the spice, washed it down with a can of iced Coke, and got back on the road.

The navigation showed 308 kilometers remaining to his destination, but only a small portion was on the highway—the rest was national highway. He planned to push through in one go and arrive by nightfall.

However, he severely underestimated the bumpiness of the national highway.

The red-oil tripe self-heating hotpot and the iced Coke began to wage war in his stomach as the car bounced along, making loud, rumbling noises. A familiar, terrible premonition rose from his cramping gut, and his very first thought was: I’m done for… I shouldn’t have drunk that iced Coke…

The orange Audi A6 sped straight toward the nearest service area, executing a clean drift into a parking spot right next to a black off-road vehicle. Before Shen Xing even had time to glance sideways, he burst out of the car door like an arrow and sprinted wildly toward the restroom.

There is a kind of luck in life called having a restroom right when you get diarrhea. Shen Xing enjoyed this stroke of luck for two minutes before preparing to stand up—only for tragedy to strike.

The packet of tissues in his pocket slipped out and fell straight into the pit.

Shen Xing stared at the tissues sitting in the pit. He froze for three seconds, then immediately fumbled through his pockets, only to discover in utter despair that it was the only pack of tissues he had on him…

Classic cursed luck…