48 Hours a Day

In the ward of the Kiev People’s Hospital.

A young nurse with freckles on her face inserted an IV line into Zhang Heng’s body. She then adjusted the curtains in the ward.

After the nurse left, Zhang Heng was finally able to get his diagnosis from the receptionist.

Some of the medical terms were too professional, so she had no choice but to flip through the dictionary and try to figure out Zhang Heng’s condition. It took about 15 minutes before she managed to explain his condition to him. Unfortunately, the doctor was not here right now, and he did not know whether the result of the radiation sickness was good or bad.

Furthermore, as his “wife,” the receptionist was unable to get any information from the female doctor about how long he could live, so Zhang Heng could only receive treatment while he continued to observe his own body.

Fortunately, unlike the other unlucky ones who had been exposed to radiation, he did not have to worry about cancer it would cause. For Zhang Heng, as long as he could survive the current crisis, he would basically be out of danger. When the parallel dungeon was over, his body would return to its state before entering the parallel dungeon, and he would also be able to know the changes in his body at every stage.

For the current situation, this could be considered good news.

However, unlike the other patients, Zhang Heng could not stay idle even if he was hospitalized. He still needed to use this time to learn Russian and Ukrainian. If he could solve the language problem in the parallel dungeon, then investigating when he returned to the official dungeon would be more convenient.

Therefore, Zhang Heng said to the waitress beside him, “Let’s begin.”

“Okay, where do you want to start?” The receptionist straightened her back. She knew that she needed to present a service befitting the generous payment.

“Okay. Let’s start by teaching some words and sentences that can be used in a hospital setting. That way, if I have to go through some tests alone in the future, at least I’ll know what the doctors are talking about.”

…..

Zhang Heng’s body temperature was measured on the first day he was admitted to the hospital. At that time, it was 37.8 degrees, which meant he had a slight fever. Two days later, his temperature rose to 38.9 degrees. The doctor performed a lumbar puncture on him, where four samples of bone marrow were taken from his sternum and patella for analysis.

On the sixth day, Zhang Heng could feel some pain in his stomach, throat, and mouth. The mucous membranes had begun falling off, making it difficult for him to speak. It was also at this time that he began to suffer from insomnia and developed anorexia.

However, when the doctor asked him if his mental condition had started to deteriorate and if he was feeling agitated and anxious, Zhang Heng said no. This was probably one of the few benefits after losing his emotions.

However, Zhang Heng could indeed feel that it was becoming more and more difficult for him to speak. His eyelids had started to twitch involuntarily, and his body had started swelling.

Even worse was his immune system that began to fail due to the reduction of granulocytes. On the ninth day, the hospital injected him with bone marrow cells donated by volunteers. Then, they moved him to a ward sterilized with ultraviolet rays.

Zhang Heng had no choice but to stop his language study. However, the receptionist sent an English-Russian dictionary to his ward after it was sterilized. Other than allowing him to continue studying, it also helped distract him from the pain.

This was also the advice of the female doctor, but she thought that Zhang Heng was using the dictionary to learn English.

Therefore, for the rest of his life, Zhang Heng would have to lie on a tall, curved hospital bed with a rib-shaped heating lamp on top to keep his body warm. All of his clothes were taken away by the nurses, and the pain that swept through his body would be with him almost all the time. Intravenous injection could improve his condition, but the only one which really worked was the nitrous oxide anesthetic.

However, what surprised the female doctor was that the man in front of her seemed to have an extraordinarily high tolerance for pain. Under such circumstances, a normal person would’ve probably been screaming and begging the doctor to end his pain. However, Zhang Heng, who was on the hospital bed, remained calm.

To the female doctor, this was an unbelievable thing. Before this, she had come across a few patients with strong mental fortitude. Among them were public servants, professional soldiers, and even some people on the verge of death. Compared to normal patients, these people were indeed better at controlling their emotions and were able to endure higher levels of pain.

Nonetheless, when the doctor looked at them, she could still clearly sense that they were in pain from their expressions and eyes. However, when she looked into Zhang Heng’s eyes, they were like the deepest ocean—other than the huge shadow at the bottom of the ocean, she could not see anything else.

Zhang Heng did not even take the initiative to use nitrous oxide to relieve the pain.

In fact, if not for the fact that his condition was deteriorating by the day, the female doctor would have suspected that the misfortune before him had happened to other people, and Zhang Heng was just a bystander.

The latter did not even give up on his study plan. The nurse taking care of him found a stand for him and placed the English-Russian dictionary on it. This way, he did not have to lift it with his own hands, and he could read it as long as he lay on the bed.

Was that man unable to feel any pain whatsoever?? The female doctor thought so.

Of course, this thought was not accurate. To Zhang Heng, he had indeed lost most of his emotions, but he had not lost his basic sense of his body. Therefore, the pain in his body was now being transmitted to his brain. However, Zhang Heng’s long periods of training had finally come in handy.

Through Xiao Shan’s heart flow mantra, he was able to lower his consciousness and gradually reach a state of oblivion, shielding himself from the painful feelings to maintain his inner peace.

Therefore, in a sense, the female doctor’s feelings were not wrong. Zhang Heng was indeed like a bystander, but when he deliberately sank his consciousness, he was surprised to see… something else.

It was a familiar cold and sticky feeling. A vast and blurry shadow lay in a huge underwater palace. The palace was several times bigger than the one he saw on the island, making the latter look like a toy.

Zhang Heng could not see the face of the thing in the palace, only able to see countless tentacles wrapping themselves around the stone pillars.

It was a strange and strong instinct to know that the thing was sleeping without even getting close. What was even stranger was that after Zhang Heng died, he realized that he knew the thing.

It kept calling Zhang Heng’s name in its sleep like calling out to a child that had left home.

However, Zhang Heng’s footsteps eventually stopped outside the palace door.

“Now is not the time.”

A familiar voice whispered in his ear, but Zhang Heng could not remember where the voice came from.

“Wait a little longer, wait a little longer. You’ll be back soon. You just need to… maintain patience. Just like before, the star minion and the deep sleeper are also awaiting your return.”