Chapter 156: Ch 156: Caution and Tests

Su Wanyan stopped in front of Jingxue and the cluster of men, the leftover sting of their earlier coldness folded carefully out of sight. What she offered instead was a bright, open smile—the kind that suggested the morning’s hostility had never quite reached her..

"So," she said, "what seems to be the problem?" The question was the same one she had already asked from the field.

Jingxue studied the alpha in front of him. Something in her posture—steady, unhurried, the particular stillness of someone prepared to carry bad news without flinching—loosened a knot he had not fully admitted was there. She gave the impression of a person who would listen to the whole of a trouble and then try, in practical terms, to move it. The shaking under his own composure eased. He exhaled once, slow and controlled.

Then his attention slid to the men still watching Su Wanyan with undisguised hostility.

He sighed, filed a private note—I’ll speak to them later—and let his gaze pass over them. The gaze he turned on them was the cold that froze rather than the cold that merely dismissed; it swept the group like a blade laid flat on a table.

The men who had been fixed on Su Wanyan as if sheer dislike could remove her, shuddered when that attention found them. Eyes dropped. Shoulders tightened. Whatever private verdict they had been nursing about outsiders shrank under the reminder of who, in this village, still set the temperature of a conversation.

Jingxue shook his head once, reset his expression, and faced Su Wanyan again. A small, unconscious smile touched his mouth before the facts reclaimed it.

"Well, you see—"

He laid out what the men had told him: three days of children complaining that their throats hurt, the complaints set aside as ordinary; they turn this morning into high fever and tears; the refusal to swallow anything at all. The more he spoke, the more the shape of the problem hardened in his own hearing.

By the time he reached the end, worry and doubt had replaced the brief relief of having someone competent to tell.

"And that’s the only thing we know," he finished, the sigh that followed weighted with both.

Su Wanyan listened as if the account were new. Her expression stayed gentle, unchanged. When he finished she hummed once and nodded.

"I have an idea what they might be dealing with." Expectation flickered, faint and hopeful, in Jingxue’s eyes. She answered it with a small laugh that did not mock the hope. "But I need to examine the children to confirm the guess."

The words had barely settled before the men erupted.

"We will not let you touch our children!"

The shout came from the back of the group and was answered at once by a rising chorus of agreement—raw, overlapping, loud enough to pull heads around from farther down the field.

"That’s right!" Another man jabbed a finger toward her. "I don’t know what you outsiders are planning, but don’t bring the children into your schemes!"

Outrage fed on itself. Volume climbed. Guests, staff, and the distant eye of the broadcast all turned toward the noise; the morning’s ordinary work rhythm broke as attention drained toward the argument. Curses and refusals layered over one another, every edge aimed at the woman who had simply said she would need to look at the patients before she could be sure.

In the middle of it Su Wanyan only continued to smile.

Not a twitch of temper. Not a flinch of offended pride. She had stood in this weather before—young face across a clinic counter, parents measuring her age instead of her record; hands refused before a single chart was opened; every suggestion met with the particular suspicion reserved for anyone who did not match a family’s private picture of authority. She had wondered, more than once in those rooms, why a parent would bring a child for care and then refuse the care. However after going through it so many times, she had learned not to take the refusal as a verdict on her skill.

So the shouting did not move her. In a narrow sense she even welcomed it. Caution, even the loud and unreasonable kind, meant these men were not prepared to hand their children to a stranger without a fight. That instinct, stripped of its hostility, was not worthless..

Another accusation cut across the air. Su Wanyan’s smile turned wry at the edges.

Well, she thought, listening without answering yet. A bit too cautious.

Meanwhile, Jingxue’s left eye twitched.

The noise had passed the point where patience could still pretend to be useful. Voices layered over voices—accusations, warnings, the same fear dressed in different volumes—until the field edge felt smaller than the outrage filling it. He closed both hands at his sides, the motion tight and deliberate, and fixed the cluster of men with a look that had nothing theatrical in it.

"Be quiet."

The chattering died at once.

Faces turned toward him: the man who, in the practical order of the village, stood second only to the chief, the one whose word settled disputes when the chief was elsewhere and whose silence could be heavier than most people’s anger. Whatever argument had been feeding itself on volume lost its fuel under that attention. A few mouths remained half open. No one finished the sentence they had been building.

His eyes were terrifying in their coldness, and not because they burned. There was no sharp flare of temper to push against, no raised voice to match with defiance. What settled on the men was a stillness so complete it seemed to press the air tighter around them, as if he were looking through the noise and the bodies and finding very little worth keeping. He did not need to threaten. The absence of warmth did the work on its own. Even the boldest among them felt their gazes drop toward the trampled grass at their feet.

Jingxue crossed his arms and held the silence a moment longer, letting the quiet finish what the command had started.

"Why are you all acting like wild baboons?"

The question arrived colder than the morning had any right to be. He looked at them one by one, cataloguing the flushed faces, the half-formed accusations still stuck behind teeth, the particular brand of protective panic that had decided a stranger with steady hands was more dangerous than fever itself.

"No." The correction came sudden and sharper, cutting off any hope that the comparison had been casual. "Even wild baboons don’t act as wildly as you are."

His head tipped slightly. A cold smirk cut the edge of his mouth—not amusement, exactly, but the dry recognition of behavior that had exhausted its own justification.

"Tell me—why are you all acting like animals rather than the animals themselves?"

Someone choked on his own saliva. Another man’s protest died unfinished in his throat. A third shifted his weight as if the ground had become less reliable. The field at the edge of the group had gone quiet enough that the ordinary sounds of work farther out—shovels, low conversation, the distant call of a staff member—felt oddly separate, as if the uproar had carved a small pocket of halted time around them.

Jingxue let the silence stand until it had done its job. Then he turned back to Su Wanyan.

The wryness that found his expression was half apology and half the grim arithmetic of a chance already spent. Tension that had eased when she first asked what the problem was returned to his shoulders in a different shape: not fear of the men, but the heavier weight of believing he had just watched the only practical help walk out of reach because pride and suspicion had shouted louder than need.

There goes any hope of help.

Pity for the feverish children rose alongside fresh annoyance at the men who had driven a solution off the field with volume. He had seen enough of the world to know that competence did not always wait around for people to finish insulting it.

Su Wanyan had still been half-lost in older corridors of memory when she felt the weight of his gaze. Guilt and expectancy sat mixed in his eyes—the particular expression of a man who expected to be told no and was already bracing for it. She met it with a smile that did not account for a single curse thrown her way.

"So," she asked, as if the uproar had been weather that had simply passed, "when can I meet the children?"

Doctor first. The rest was noise.

Turning away from need because the people attached to it had been ugly about their fear would break a vow she had spoken at graduation and meant every year since. Children in pain did not become less real because the adults around them had decided an outsider was the greater threat.

She had not come to the field to win a popularity contest with men she had never met. She had come because someone had said "fever" and "will not swallow", and those words still sat in her hands like a task that belonged to her whether anyone wanted to hand it over or not.

Hope returned to Jingxue’s face so fast it almost undid the cold he had used on the men.

"W-will you help us?"

The words trembled. Expectation that the children might still be reached. Fear that she would decide the chaos had been reason enough to walk away. He had thickened his face to ask once; asking again, after the men had done their worst, cost him something visible.

Su Wanyan only smiled and nodded.

The nod was small, but it was also final.

Then she turned, drew her phone from her pocket, and dialed without hesitation. The screen lit against her fingers. She did not step away for privacy; there was nothing in the request that required hiding.

"Hello, Young Lady?"

The voice on the other end was calm, awake, and already in motion. Behind it came the grunt of people shifting weight, the bark of directions, the solid noise of furniture finding temporary places along walls.

The delivery she had requested at dawn—mattresses, the things that would make a borrowed house feel less like endurance—was underway somewhere between the city and this village. Life, in the Su household, did not pause because one of its members was standing in a field rearranging the morning.

"Uncle." Her tone warmed around the title, the particular softness she reserved for family. "Can you bring my medical tools here too?"

She ran the symptoms once more in her mind while she spoke: high fever, sore throat severe enough that swallowing had become the enemy, days of dismissal before the turn. The list of what she needed assembled itself without drama.

"And please ask Dad to send boxes of rapid strep tests, and penicillin, and amoxicillin." Urgency without panic. Quantities that assumed more than one child. "As soon as you can."

A few ordinary greetings followed—the kind that kept a household running even when logistics had suddenly expanded to include a village’s worth of possible strep. She confirmed the location, confirmed the speed, and ended the call with the quiet certainty of someone who had just moved pieces on a board the men in front of her could not yet see.

She turned back.

Jingxue and the villagers were watching her with a shared expression of confusion edged into disbelief. The phone call had not been part of their script. Neither had the calm with which she had absorbed their worst and then simply continued. She met the stares with the same gentle smile she had offered before the shouting started.

This time a few of the harder faces eased without quite deciding to. Guardrails lowered a fraction under something that did not feel like an order and did not feel like a plea—only a steady assumption that the next useful step would be taken.

Her eyes curved.

"Please gather the kiddos as soon as I give you the signal."

From anyone else the line might have sounded bossy. From her it landed like a favor asked in good faith—soft enough that agreement rose before argument had time to rebuild, and firm enough that the shape of the morning had already changed. The children were no longer only a story told at the field’s edge. They were about to become patients, and the woman who had been called outsider, schemer, and threat was the one holding the list of what would meet them when they arrived.

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Guys, I’m sleepy as hell so forgive me if I repeat some of the scenes again. I’m fighting with all of my energy, but my eyes kept closing on their own LMAO! Anyway, please point the mistakes to me and I’ll fix it as soon as possible.