Chapter 5: Destiny's Divergence

Meimu couldn’t tell if the world itself had changed or if something else was at play, but as long as he could see the Stark Tower from his apartment, he’d keep bluffing. “Christine, isn’t there a saying, ‘When God closes a door, He opens a window’?”

“Mm.”

“I know, what I’m about to say and do next will sound utterly absurd. But I hope you stay calm and listen to me to the end.” As Meimu spoke, he leaned in close to Christine’s face, the intimacy making her heart race.

Christine was the kind of strong woman whose reason outweighed her emotions. She was kind-hearted and perhaps easily swayed by feelings for a moment, but she preferred to judge everything rationally.

She bit her lip and agreed, “Alright.”

“Just as no one could have predicted a few years ago that aliens would turn New York upside down, or that a group of superheroes called the Avengers would exist, you probably never imagined there were supernatural beings in this world.” Meimu spoke slowly, each word heavy with significance. For some reason, his voice was imbued with convincing power.

He continued, “I wish I could tell you a comforting lie—that I’m going to China to stimulate the nerves in my hand with miraculous acupuncture so they’ll grow back and reconnect. But I can’t. Christine, I can’t bear to deceive you, do you understand?”

Meimu’s words struck Christine like lightning. She felt something deep inside her begin to melt.

“Damn it, for God’s sake, don’t do anything foolish.”

“No! It’s not foolish, I’m simply called by destiny.”

“Oh God! Don’t tell me you’re thinking of believing in some kind of sorcery?” Christine grew anxious.

Meimu realized he was pushing too fast, so he changed tactics. “There was a man, injured at work, paralyzed, one leg completely ruined. He sat in a wheelchair, his shoulders aching. He went to physical therapy three times a week, but later stopped. Even the therapist thought he was dead. But years later, he walked past the therapist…”

“That’s impossible!” Christine, a well-informed nurse, retorted immediately. “Nonsense! You’re lying! Would you dare show me his medical records?”

Meimu was secretly delighted—she’d taken the bait. “You think it’s so easy to access medical records? But if it could reassure the only person in this world who cares about me… it’d be worth it.”

Christine pressed her lips together. Though she still doubted Meimu’s next move, her reason told her what he said might actually be true.

“Tell me his name!” Her eyes shone with determination.

“Jonathan Pangborn. Complete damage to the C7 and C8 vertebrae, paralyzed hands and chest. I found him yesterday at the basketball court under the Seventeenth Street viaduct—he’d just made a beautiful three-pointer. He gave me a place name, in Nepal. Of course, it has nothing to do with medicine.”

“Nepal!?” Christine still looked as if he were teasing her.

“I’m not lying. With our connections, accessing medical records is easy, isn’t it?”

Christine was every bit the strong, decisive woman—quick and direct. She shook off Meimu’s hands, turned her back to him. “I’m going to check right now. If you’re lying, I’ll hate you forever!”

“Go ahead!” Meimu wasn’t afraid. After all, this was part of the ‘history’ he knew. He really had followed the storyline and met Jonathan yesterday.

Christine left, and it didn’t take her long to find Jonathan, along with his recent medical records.

Unwilling to accept it, she sped off and found Jonathan.

But Jonathan wouldn’t pay any attention to someone healthy. Yesterday, Meimu had shown him his own nerve-damaged hands, and only then had Jonathan revealed the most crucial location from the Doctor Strange storyline—Kamar-Taj.

Nevertheless, seeing before her a man who, according to modern medicine, should be impossible to recover, alive and well, was enough to leave Christine utterly astounded.

When she hurried back to Meimu’s Manhattan apartment, she was shocked to find it empty.

Only a note remained:

“My dear Christine, please forgive my abrupt departure. I know you’ll always think what I’m doing is unreliable. But I firmly believe this is part of my destiny. My medical career has reached its end; I’ll never have another chance to be a doctor again.”

“And the Battle of New York during the alien invasion taught me that medicine can’t save the world. So I hope I can become one of those superheroes. But even heroes can’t guarantee they won’t get hurt. So, I hope that when heroes are injured, there’ll be a place to heal them, a nurse dedicated to caring for heroes.”

“Christine, could you help me with this? Even if one day I’m injured, and fall into the hell of pain in the dark night, will you be the one to rescue me from hell—the Night Shift Nurse?”

After reading the note, Christine instinctively flipped it over and found a postscript: “Oh, Manhattan rent is pretty expensive. I don’t want to rent my apartment to random people. You can live here, or help me take care of it when you have time. I’ll come back.”

“Pfft!” Christine laughed, showing her long-lost charming dimples. “Night Shift Nurse, huh? And he even underlined it… Well, that’s not so bad!”

Two streets away, Meimu was nervously watching Christine’s reaction through his laptop, using the camera he’d secretly installed in his home.

Finally, he heard a familiar ‘click’ in his mental world.

The long-absent scales of fate moved again, tilting half a degree to the left.

A mechanical voice sounded in his ear: “Fate alteration triggered. Night Shift Nurse Christine Palmer appears ahead of schedule. You have gained 1 point of Fate Shift Value.”

Fate Shift Value?

What on earth was that?

Meimu kept calling out to the scales of fate in his mind, but his calls vanished like stones dropped into water, with no response.

He stroked his chin, muttering to himself, “Damn it, why is this blasted scale so stubborn?”

But the scales of fate were slowly beginning to reveal their mysterious veil to him.