Chapter 1

The first coherent thought Shen Mingyue had in this body was that starving to death was a remarkably inefficient way to die. It was certainly not covered in her extensive medical training.

Her last coherent thought in her previous life had involved a faulty vending machine, a 72-hour shift in the ER, and the distinctly unprofessional desire to mainline caffeine through a central line. She’d been five seconds away from punching a broken latte machine when—well. Lights out. Poof.

This was worse. Considerably worse.

This was a gnawing, organ-devouring emptiness in a body so frail it felt like a pile of loosely assembled twigs. Cold rain drummed down with merciless persistence, plastering thin rags to her skin. Her limbs trembled with exhaustion, her stomach a hollow void. She was an orphan, a beggar, a piece of human refuse left to rot in the ruins of a forgotten temple.

And apparently—very apparently—alive. Somehow. The universe, it seemed, had a twisted sense of humor.

A gust of wind sliced through a collapsed archway, bringing with it the sharp, metallic scent of blood. Her instincts, dulled by starvation but never dead, jolted to life. Medical instincts, not “run for your life” instincts, unfortunately.

She turned her head, slow as molasses, toward the scent.

Fresh blood. Not the old, dusty kind. The “someone just got thoroughly redecorated” kind.

Her body moved before her mind fully caught up. Slipping through the rubble, barefoot and shivering, she followed the trail across moss-slick stone until she found him—half-sheltered by a crumbling wall.

A man.

Or what was left of one. A very, very pretty one, even when actively dying in a puddle.

He lay sprawled in the mud, his ink-dark robes shredded and soaked in a mix of blood and rain. His face—ghastly pale, streaked with grime—was still unfairly beautiful. The kind of face that could launch a thousand ships or, more likely, a thousand cultivation sects battling over him. But it wasn’t his beauty that held her attention.

It was the gaping wound in his chest.

A jagged tear, unnaturally black at the edges, seeped thick blood laced with corruption. Dark veins snaked outward from the wound like fractured lightning, pulsing with something malevolent. It looked less like a stab wound and more like a very aggressive, magical black mold infection.

Her survival instincts screamed. Walk away. This is not your problem. He’s dead, or worse—bait for someone who made him this way. He probably has more enemies than she had overdue student loan payments.

But the doctor in her shoved that voice aside. The Hippocratic Oath, apparently, transcended dimensions. Or maybe it was just a morbid curiosity to see what kind of fantastical medical anomaly this was.

She dropped to her knees beside him, skeletal fingers reaching for his neck.

Faint. Thready. But still alive. Damn it.

“Don’t you dare die on me,” she muttered hoarsely, her voice rough from disuse. “I’ve had enough paperwork for one lifetime. Or two. Especially if I have to fill out a death certificate for ‘Unknown Pretty Boy, Cause of Death: Magical Gunk.’”

She stripped the cleaner part of her own rags—a truly pathetic sliver of fabric—and pressed it against the wound, trying to slow the bleeding, but her hands were trembling with more than just cold now. The sheer wrongness of the wound was unsettling.

She knew that smell. That look. That terrifying, spreading corruption. Not from any textbook, but from something primal.

“Necrotic agent,” she murmured. “Or maybe some kind of septicemia. Could be a toxin. Perhaps a parasitic compound… dear heavens, is that sentient sludge? Damn it, I need—”

She broke off as her hand brushed something strange at her waist.

A pouch? A completely unexpected, decidedly un-rag-like pouch.

It hadn’t been there before. She was certain of it. The moment her fingers closed around it, the world stuttered.

Everything around her vanished.

She wasn’t in the ruined temple anymore.

She stood barefoot on a gleaming white floor, surrounded by sterile, seamless walls that seemed to stretch into infinity. Floating shelves hummed softly. One pulsed brighter than the rest.

EMERGENCY FIELD TRAUMA KIT — CLASS IV

Access: Dr. S. Mingyue

She blinked.

Then blinked again, pinching herself. Ow. Not a dream.

“Nope,” she said aloud, her voice echoing oddly in the pristine space. “Nope nope nope. Either I’m hallucinating from starvation and exposure, or the vending machine finally gave me the isekai special. Complete with a cheat code.”

She cautiously opened the cabinet.

Inside: field sutures, a compact diagnostic pad, sterile gloves, injectable antivirals, even a tube of medgel that looked like it could knit bones back together, and probably cost more than her med school tuition and her entire life savings combined.

She stared at it for one long, absurd moment, then laughed weakly, a bubble of hysterical relief escaping her.

“Oh my god. I’ve transmigrated. I’m in a damn cultivation novel. This is just like those webtoons I used to binge when I was too sleep-deprived to care about realism! Is there a hot immortal master? A demonic rival? Please tell me there’s at least decent Wi-Fi.”

The space didn’t wait for her to get sentimental or finish her genre analysis. The second she grabbed what she needed—gloves, scalpel, antiseptic, medgel—and turned, the entire pristine room blinked out of existence—and she was back in the mud and rain, the bitter cold a shocking slap after the temperature-controlled dimension.

The man hadn’t moved.

Still dying. Still beautiful. Still bleeding. Still very much her problem.

But now she had a scalpel. And hope. Albeit a very weird, pocket-dimension-induced hope.

“Alright, mystery man,” she said grimly, yanking on gloves with half-frozen fingers. “Let’s see if modern medicine—or rather, my very stolen and very futuristic modern medicine—can fix whatever magical nonsense you got stabbed with.”

She sliced the wound open along the blackened edges. Viscous fluid bubbled up—dark, thick, and hissing like an angry viper as it hit the open air. It definitely wasn’t pus. More like liquid shadow.

“Yep,” she muttered. “Definitely magical septicemia. With extra evil. Fantastic. And here I thought MRSA was bad.”

She irrigated the site with a diluted antiseptic from the medkit, the chemical sizzle barely audible over the drumming rain. The liquid shimmered and seemed to fight the corruption, boiling away the blackness at the edges. Then came the medgel, a shimmering blue paste smeared directly over muscle and torn vessels. The tissue twitched, and the ominous pulsing of the dark veins slowed, then faded.

A sharp hiss escaped his lips, a sound of agony and surprise.

Mingyue looked up—and froze.

His eyes were open. Just barely. Dark and deep, not the glassy stare of a dying man, but something ancient and aware. Focused. They bore into her, a silent, intense question. He stared at her like she was… unexpected. Like a particularly baffling cosmic anomaly that had just performed an impossible trick.

“Jiang Feng…” he whispered.

“Your name?”

And for a moment, she wasn’t a doctor. She was just a girl in the rain, kneeling beside a fallen god, caught in the unnerving stillness of his gaze. His scrutiny made her feel less like a rescuer and more like a bug under a microscope.

“Hey,” she said softly, breaking the spell. “No talking. You’re in no state to give speeches or summon vengeful spirits. Just focus on not dying, yeah? My malpractice insurance doesn’t cover interdimensional travel.”

A faint, almost imperceptible nod. Or maybe it was just a spasm. Either way, progress.

She finished stitching the gash as best she could, the self-sealing sutures from the kit doing most of the work, stabilizing the worst of it. His pulse was stronger now, a steady thrum beneath her fingers, but still uneven. Not out of danger yet, but no longer circling the drain. The medgel now glowed faintly, a beacon of healing.

She sat back on her heels, her whole body buzzing from cold and effort. The pouch—the space—was still there, still warm against her skin like a battery-pack of miracles.

A cultivation world. A dying pretty-boy demigod. A magical poison that hissed. A personal pocket dimension filled with her trauma kit.

She looked down at her bloodied hands, then up at the man whose robes looked like they cost more than the average hospital wing, even in tatters.

“Great,” she muttered, more to herself than him. “I just tied my fate to someone with the face of a war god and the blood trail of a murder scene. And I’m still freezing.”

Her stomach growled, a loud, embarrassing rumble that broke the tense silence.

“Perfect,” she sighed, rubbing her temples. “Welcome to the genre, Mingyue. You’re broke, barefoot, soaking wet, you probably smell like wet dog, and your first patient probably has assassins still looking for him. And you have no food.”

She looked at his wound, now sealed and faintly glowing under the medgel.

“…Still better than triage on a Saturday night.”

Then the wind shifted—and somewhere in the ruins behind her, something moved. Something that didn’t sound like a stray rat. Something big.