Kelly continued to act polite and cheerful around Tony.

She occasionally touched him, showed the cleavage and even held his hand dearly. Any man could have been entrapped in this lovey-dovey acting... But Tony was observing everything with a smiling face.

"Be very careful Tony, The patients here are critical cases," Kelly said, walking the corridor with the ease of someone on familiar ground. "Terminal illness, organ failure, late-stage conditions. Most of them have weeks at best." She glanced back at him. "As a healer, you learn the most from the hardest cases. That’s where real skill shows itself."

"That makes sense," Tony said.

Of course it makes sense. You want me near dying people... so when they die, it looks like me... Killer of Healing Tower.

He noted the two nurses already stationed outside the room at the end of the corridor— positioned slightly too casually, slightly too ready. He noted the way Kelly walked directly toward that specific room without checking any of the others. He noted the small, almost imperceptible tension in her shoulders— the specific tension of someone executing a prepared plan.

’Everything is in place,’ he thought.

They both entered the ICU room. [Intensive Care Unit.]

The room held a young woman. Early twenties, pale as the pillow beneath her head, breathing in the shallow, effortful rhythm of someone whose body was running out of reasons to continue.

Tony noticed the chart. ’A gut cancer case— advanced, beyond conventional treatment. The monitors beside her bed tracked irregular numbers.’

Tony looked at her and felt real pity. She was young... This was unfair.

As expected, suddenly the warning light above the bed went red.

The alarm blinked on with a loud alarming noise.

"She’s crashing!!" Kelly moved fast, genuinely fast, reaching the bedside and pulling needles from her case with practiced speed. "Tony— stay close and watch!! This is what a real emergency response looks like!!"

She worked. Tony watched. The needles went in at precise points— good placement, correct theory— and Kelly pushed life energy through them with focused effort. The monitor numbers wobbled. Climbed slightly. Then dropped again.

Climbed... Dropped.

Climbed... Dropped.

The patient’s condition refused to stabilize. It hovered in that terrible middle zone— not dying fast enough to be beyond help, not recovering enough to hold.

Kelly’s eyes cut sideways to the two nurses by the door. The nurses exchanged a look and stepped into the corridor.

"We’ll get the emergency compression equipment!!" one of them announced loudly, and both disappeared.

’Good acting...’ Tony thought.

"Tony!!" Kelly turned to him with a serious face. "I need to get the specialist medicine from the dispensary— it’s only on floor one and there’s no time!! Stay here and maintain her life energy— just channel it through... the needles already in place!! Don’t remove anything!! Can you do that?!"

She was already moving toward the door before the sentence finished. Not waiting for yes or no.

The decision was made, the stage was set, and she walked out of the room with the confident stride of someone who had just done exactly what she planned to do.

The door swung shut behind her.

Tony stood alone in the room with the dying girl, the blinking red alarm, and Kelly’s needles arranged in a pattern that was technically correct and fundamentally insufficient.

He looked at the monitors. Looked at the needle placement. Looked at the young woman’s face— still, pale, the shallow breathing getting shallower.

Then he looked at the door.

Through it, distantly, he could already hear it starting— voices gathering in the corridor, the crowd was forming.

Kelly’s nurses, clearly, spreading the word fast. Tony Clark is alone in the emergency room. Tony Clark is operating on a critical patient. Come and see. Come and watch what the evil boy does when nobody is supervising him.

Tony reached into his uniform and removed his personal needle set— the brand new one he had collected two days ago from the supply counter and had been carrying since. He set it on the tray beside the bed. Then he reached for Kelly’s needles— one by one, clean and quick... and removed every single one.

Outside the door, the voices grew louder. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

"He’s in there ALONE?!"

"Someone needs to stop him— that patient could DIE!!"

"She’s already critical— if Tony Clark touches her she won’t survive!!"

"Where is Dr. Kelly?! Where is Moon Goddess Hikaru?! SOMEONE GET PEAK MASTER NATASHA!!"

Tony ignored all of it. He pulled the first needle from his own set, held it between two fingers the way Pagma’s memory had shown him ten thousand times in inherited practice, and found the first point.

Not the conventional entry point. The deeper one— the one that bypassed the surface meridians entirely and went directly to the cellular corruption in the gut. The point that conventional Rank Five medicine didn’t know existed because Pagma had mapped it himself over forty years of practice and never written it down anywhere.

He breathed out. Pushed. The needle went in at exactly the angle it needed.

The monitor numbers stabilized immediately— not recovered, not saved, but stopped falling.

He reached for the second needle.

Outside, the corridor had become a crowd. Nurses, junior doctors, a few patients who had wandered out of their rooms drawn by the noise— all of them pressed against the window of the emergency room door, watching with the specific expressions of people waiting for a disaster.

"Is he— is he replacing all her needles?!"

"He pulled out Dr. Kelly’s needles!! She’ll bleed internally... that’s BASIC knowledge... you cannot just remove acupuncture needles mid-treatment!!"

"This is murder!! Somebody write this down... this is happening right now... Tony Clark is killing a patient!!"

"GET PEAK MASTER NATASHA NOW!!"

Tony placed the third needle. The fourth. Each one going deeper than the last, following a map that existed nowhere except inside Pagma’s inherited memory. A route through the body’s energy channels that untangled the cancer’s corruption at the source rather than managing the symptoms at the surface.

The young woman’s breathing changed slightly.

Tony placed the fifth needle and held still, feeling the flow through his fingertips, monitoring the response the way Pagma had taught... not through instruments, through sensation. The life energy in her meridians was moving again. Weakly. But moving.

He exhaled slowly.

"There you are, Hold on..." Tony said while biting the lower lip with a smiling face.

Then —

"Ahhhhh—!!"

The young woman’s voice broke out of the room and into the corridor like a thunderclap.

That moaning cry was loud, sudden, raw.

"__"

The crowd outside went completely silent.

Every face at the window froze. Every breath held. The junior doctor who had been recording on his golden orb stopped moving mid-motion. The nurse who had been about to run for Peak Master Natasha stopped with one foot raised.

Nobody moved... Nobody spoke.

They stared at the closed door of the emergency room, at the window where Tony Clark’s back was visible and tried to process what that sound had meant.

And in that frozen, breathless silence, not a single person out there could say for certain whether what they had just heard was pain— or something else entirely.

As Tony covered the small window of the ICU room, they began speculating wildly.

"Is he doing that...!!!!!!!!!?"