chapter 5

“Blood bag?” You Hua, who had been staring at his teacup, suddenly looked up at me.

I picked up my cup and took a small sip of tea. “Yes, a blood bag.

“Cheng Hui started with experiments on monkeys. He discovered that when older monkeys were infused with the blood of younger ones, their average lifespan increased by three to five years.

“So, starting from the age of thirty-five, he replaced his entire body’s plasma with that of someone under twenty every two years to ensure his bodily functions remained youthful.

“The people who provide young plasma for him and his clients are called blood bags. As it happened, I have the same blood type as him, with a 99.9% compatibility rate.

“I used the money from selling my blood to pay for my father’s dialysis and my own tuition.

“About three years later, my father completely lost his ability to work. He lay in his hospital bed every day like a wax figure, kept alive by Ibuprofen and weekly dialysis. I also became severely anemic from selling blood and could no longer serve as a ‘blood bag’.

“Under those circumstances, I was accepted into the medical school of a local 985 university. It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought about applying for student loans, but given my family’s situation, loans alone were far from enough.

“My relatives, who usually ignored me, called one after another to persuade me to give up. They told me to find a job that could support my father and me, or to just get married. Not a single one offered to lend me money.

“The more they acted like that, the more unwilling I became to accept it. I refused to just sink to the bottom and live such a hopeless life.

“So, I contacted Cheng Hui again.”

Just then, the timer went off; the pufferfish meat was finished rinsing.

I noticed that during the half-hour I spent unilaterally sharing my sob story, I had drunk three cups of tea.

Yet, You Hua hadn’t touched a single drop of the tea in front of him.

If he didn’t even dare to drink the tea, how could he possibly eat the pufferfish I prepared?

My upbringing and experiences had shaped my paranoid and sensitive personality.

Once I set my mind on something, I would complete it at any cost, overcoming all obstacles.

So, I decided to tell him something he would find even more interesting.