One month ago.
01:20 AM.
The phone on the bedside table suddenly vibrated.
In this quiet old house in the countryside, the sound was as piercing as a death warrant.
Qian Dai, who had been sleeping lightly, snapped her eyes open.
She fumbled for the phone, and on the screen, her son Shoichi’s name flashed.
She stared at the name, then glanced at the time, and couldn’t help but feel a tightness in her chest.
Shoichi was the type to only share good news, never bad.
He almost never called her on his own.
If he did, ninety percent of the time it was about her precious granddaughter, Hoshino Haruka.
“…Hello, Shoichi?” she answered, her voice carrying a hint of just-woken-up hoarseness.
“Ah… Mom, Mom?”
The voice on the other end was trembling, with obvious panting and panic.
“Um… sorry, I accidentally pressed the wrong button. Did I wake you? It’s nothing, nothing. Go back to sleep, I’ll hang up now—”
“Shoichi.”
Qian Dai directly cut off his clumsy lie.
As the mother who had raised him since childhood, she knew all too well that Shoichi’s voice would tighten when he lied.
But what instantly sobered her up was the extremely faint ambient sound coming from the other end of the line.
“Ding-dong—Emergency Department… Please proceed immediately…”
A slightly distorted electronic broadcast.
To an ordinary person, it was just noisy background sound.
But for the former chief physician who had stood at the operating table in that general hospital in Shibuya Ward for thirty years, the synthetic chime before the broadcast was like DNA code carved into her bones.
She could never mistake it.
“Are you at the hospital? In the ER?”
Qian Dai’s voice instantly turned cold.
“What happened to Haruka?”
“No, no! Haruka is fine, sleeping at home. It’s me… I have a stomach flu, came to the ER myself. It’s nothing serious, Mom, don’t overthink! The doctor is calling me, gotta go!”
With that, the call was hastily ended, leaving only a long dial tone.
Qian Dai tried calling back, but it didn’t connect.
She sat in the darkness, holding the cooling phone.
An indescribable unease slowly settled in.
Stomach flu?
Running to the busiest general hospital in all of Tokyo at 2 AM for an ER visit?
Without any hesitation, she immediately scrolled through her contacts and dialed the number of Dr. Higashi, her former protégé and now a key figure in the ER surgery department.
“Beep… Beep… The number you dialed is temporarily unavailable.”
Dr. Higashi didn’t answer, which meant he was most likely in the middle of work that he absolutely couldn’t leave.
Qian Dai took a deep breath, forced herself to calm down, and instead called another old colleague from the ER who hadn’t retired yet, the current vice president.
This time, the call was quickly picked up.
“Dr. Qian Dai?”
The voice on the other end sounded surprised and tense.
“Why aren’t you resting at this hour?”
“Sorry to disturb you so late, I only have one question.”
Qian Dai cut straight to the point.
“Was Haruka brought to the ER?”
A brief, suffocating silence fell on the other end of the line.
After a moment, that old colleague spoke evasively, with obvious cover-up in his tone: “Dr. Qian Dai, don’t overthink… It’s true that an artist from a car accident was brought in. But that kid Higashi is already in the OR performing the surgery. It’s nothing serious. You should hurry and rest, don’t stay up late and hurt your health…”
Before the other party could finish, Qian Dai directly hung up.
“Nothing serious?”
If it really were nothing serious, Shoichi wouldn’t have been unable to speak properly, and this vice president, who was usually so respectful to her, wouldn’t have used such an evasive tone to placate her.
They were all afraid that this old lady would find out something.
Qian Dai groped her way to the living room, collapsed onto the sofa, and with trembling hands picked up the remote and turned on the TV.
At 3 AM, the midnight news channel was broadcasting an urgent breaking news alert.
On the screen was a minibus that was almost completely wrecked, the cabin severely deformed, with broken glass shards and glaring bloodstains all over the ground.
At the bottom of the screen, a bold striking line of text appeared:
[Idol Hoshino Haruka involved in a serious multi-car accident, scene horrific, suspected dead on the spot—]
“Dead on the spot…”
Qian Dai stared fixedly at the screen, not blinking for a long time.
She sat quietly on the sofa until the first light of dawn broke.
—-
Seven o’clock in the morning.
The phone rang again, this time it was Dr. Higashi calling.
“Dr. Qian Dai…”
The voice on the phone carried an extreme exhaustion and an unbelievable sense of absurdity.
“She… was saved. A miracle… really happened.”
“What did you say?”
Then, Dr. Higashi respectfully sent an electronic copy of the preliminary injury report and postoperative physiological indicators to her phone.
Qian Dai put on her reading glasses and stared intently at the data on the screen.
If any medical student had seen that initial report, they would have concluded that death was certain, let alone someone like her, a department head.
But on the postoperative monitoring report below, heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation… all indicators were forcibly pulled back from the brink of death to safe levels at a speed that defied medical common sense.
Looking at those cold data, she only felt a strong dizziness.
As a family member, she was so grateful she wanted to kneel down and thank the gods, thank heaven for not taking away her only granddaughter.
But as a former chief surgeon, her rationality was telling her: This doesn’t make sense.
Qian Dai understood very well that in this world, all “miracles” come with a hidden price tag.
So, what was the price of forcibly dragging someone who should have died back from the gates of hell?
—-
In the following month, she didn’t call her son Shoichi even once.
Shoichi, seeing that Haruka was out of danger, would definitely want to hide the whole thing to prevent his old mother from worrying.
If she called proactively, it would only alert him.
She chose to observe secretly, periodically contacting Dr. Higashi privately to learn about Haruka’s recovery progress.
“Professor, her recovery speed is astonishing. This child’s cell regeneration ability completely exceeds our understanding…”
“Professor, she woke up. But it seems she has partial amnesia, and…”
A week before Haruka’s discharge, Dr. Higashi reported somewhat hesitantly over the phone:
“And, her personality seems to have changed somewhat, and she’s lost part of her memory. According to her family, Miss Hoshino used to be very lively in private, but now… how should I put it, she’s become a bit quiet, or rather, very ‘gentle.’”
Qian Dai sat in the courtyard, watching the fallen leaves, and responded half-jokingly:
“Injured that badly and still able to bounce back, amnesia, even a personality change—from what you’re saying, could it be that another soul has taken over this body?”
Dr. Higashi gave a dry laugh on the other end.
“Professor, you’re teasing me again. Personality changes from brain trauma are a common clinical phenomenon, and amnesia is even more normal. I’m a firm materialist; I only trust medical data.”
Qian Dai didn’t argue, just hung up.
Medical data could explain muscle healing, could explain bone growth.
But complete amnesia plus a personality change—that clearly couldn’t be forcibly explained by brain damage alone.
She still needed to personally confirm one thing.
—-
The day before Haruka’s discharge, her son Shoichi’s call finally came.
“Mom, um… Haruka was in a small car accident a while ago, just some scraped skin, and was hospitalized for a bit. She’s completely fine now. Don’t read those news articles; they’re all exaggerated by the media for attention.”
Listening to her son’s outright lies and forced calm report, Qian Dai put on a show of just finding out and being extremely distressed, playing along with her son’s act.
The next evening, Haruka was discharged.
Qian Dai dialed the number she hadn’t dared to call for a month.
“Hello, Waipo?”
The moment the call connected, that iconic genki girl voice came through, even fuller and more energetic than before.
Listening to Haruka chatter nonstop about how she was “completely fine,” “praised by the producer,” and “not tired at all,” Qian Dai’s heart sank bit by bit.
She sat on the sofa, listening to that almost perfect, considerate reply that pained her heart.
“Haruka, you silly child.”
If it were really the old Hoshino Haruka, who grew up in a honey pot and was carefree, after going through such a life-and-death ordeal, even if she had just scraped a bit of skin, her first reaction to receiving her grandmother’s call would definitely be to burst into tears.
But as the grandmother who had watched Haruka grow up, she knew very well: brain damage could be repaired, but the “texture” of the soul would not be completely reorganized by a physical impact.
She would have held the phone and cried about how much it hurt in the hospital, how scary the injections were, how fierce the manager was.
She would have kept her on the phone for an hour, wanting to pour out all her grievances.
But the person on the other end of the line was like an adult wearing a perfect mask, swallowing all the pain without a leak, just to soothe an old woman with repeated “I’m fine.”
At that moment, Qian Dai understood the “price of the miracle.”
The price was that the Hoshino Haruka who used to love to act spoiled had probably left forever in that car accident.
After hanging up, Qian Dai looked at the photo of Hoshino Haruka as a child on the coffee table.
So, who was this child who was considerate and trying hard to play the role of “Hoshino Haruka”?
Was it a messenger sent by the gods, or a lost strange spirit?
She didn’t know what exactly had happened that night of the car accident.
She only knew that inside that miraculously surviving body now lived a new soul, bearing a huge burden and living carefully in a lie.
“Are you coming back this weekend…”
Qian Dai touched the old charm she had prayed for Haruka at her chest, and closed her eyes.
“Then let this old woman see with her own eyes.”
“At least let me know… if you are a good child.”