Another half month passed.
One evening, after dinner, Han Zhiqi came to the backyard laboratory. Shinobu Kocho was busy at the workbench in a white lab coat.
The laboratory door was open. Han Zhiqi knocked twice, and after hearing "Come in," he entered.
Shinobu Kocho straightened up and let out a long breath, offering Han Zhiqi a gentle smile. Other than the occasional mission, she spent most of her days in the laboratory.
"You're here. You're practically a regular now, so I don't need to tell you what to do, right? Go sit by the bed yourself."
Hearing Shinobu Kocho's cheerful tone, Han Zhiqi somehow felt that something was off. An inexplicable unease rose in him as he sat by the bed and began undoing his shirt buttons.
Today was the day his stitches were to be removed.
His left wrist was fractured and still wrapped in a cast. After struggling for quite a while, he still could not undo the buttons, and instead ended up drenched in sweat.
When Shinobu Kocho turned around and saw his awkward state, she giggled and stepped forward, bending down to help him unbutton his shirt.
His sturdy chest still bore the softness of youth. Old wounds overlapped with new ones, making him look like a rag doll someone could not bear to throw away, stitched up again and again, with crisscrossing black threads densely woven across him.
A trace of sorrow mingled with Shinobu Kocho's gentle smile. The red marks from his previous stitch removal had yet to fade, and barely over a month later, new scars had been added. The boy before her looked no older than eighteen or nineteen.
After running the Butterfly Mansion for so long, she had never encountered such a peculiar patient—within less than two months, he had