After being separated from my family, I became a darling of the military region thanks to my medical

Zhao Lanlan turned to a new page of the registration form and said to Lin Wan without looking up, "I'll keep an eye on the phone here. You go and help Gu Yue open the letter first."

His tone wasn't harsh, not even cold. It was just how you'd assign tasks.

Lin Wan held the blank ballpoint pen, and as she stood up, the chair leg scraped against the cement floor with a screeching sound. She didn't say a word, but carried the pen and a stack of blank registration forms to Gu Yue's table.

Gu Yue was engrossed in opening the letter.

There were already three stacks on the table. The left stack contained items that had been opened and read, with labels attached according to province; the middle stack was being processed; and the right stack was unopened. The right stack alone was about half a foot high when stacked.

"Have a seat." Gu Yue pulled a paper cutter from the drawer and handed it to her. "Use this to cut along the edge of the envelope, don't tear it. Some letters are stuck to the envelope, and if you tear them, they'll fall apart and the words won't be legible."

Lin Wan took the paper cutter. She knew how to do this, right? It's just opening letters, isn't it?

She picked up the top letter. The envelope was the most ordinary kind, white with a red border, and had two four-cent stamps on it. The postmark was so blurry that the place name was almost illegible. The recipient's name was written crookedly as "Dr. Ye, General Hospital of Beicheng Military Region (recipient)", and the sender's address was smeared with ink.

Lin Wan carefully cut open the seal with a paper cutter and squeezed out the letter inside.

A piece of paper torn from an exercise book, with rough edges, was folded twice. Unfolded, it was covered with pencil writing, some strokes so dark they seemed to pierce the paper, others so light they were almost invisible.

Lin Wan leaned closer to take a look.

The first line was still legible: "Hello doctor, we are from Gansu."

The problem started from the second line. The person's handwriting was crooked and messy, and several characters used homophones from the local dialect. "Heart" was written as "心张" and "examination" as "间查," with several other characters she didn't recognize mixed in, as if they were self-created simplified forms.

Lin Wan frowned and looked at the letter over and over again, still not understanding how many children in the family were sick.

She wrote the words "Gansu" on the blank registration form, then stopped with the pen hovering above the second field, "Child's Name".

The name written in the letter had a first character that looked like both "Qiang" and "Jiang," and the second character was a structure she didn't recognize at all.

"What's the pronunciation of this character?" Lin Wan handed the letter to Gu Yue.

Gu Yue glanced at it: "Goudan."

"What?"

"He wrote his nickname, Gou Dan. Look at the third line below. Gou Dan's father's name is Ma Zhanshan. I guess even the parents themselves can't write his full name on the household registration. Fill in the nickname first, and note that the full name will be verified later."

Lin Wan's pen tip left a dot on the paper. She had never seen this kind of registration method before. In her understanding of the past eighteen years, a person's name was the few words printed in black and white on their ID card. Who would fill in "Gou Dan" on an official form?

She forced herself to continue writing.

The next letter was even worse. The letter was a small piece torn from the lining of a cigarette pack, about the size of a palm, with only two lines of text: "My child has chest pain and can't breathe, please help him. Wang Erzhu, Xinyang, Henan."

No age, no description of symptoms, no contact address, just the name of a county.

Lin Wan lingered on the registration form for a long time. The "Age of the Child" section was blank, the "Cyanosis" section was blank, and she didn't know how to fill in the "Level of Urgency". She could only write "Incomplete Information" in the remarks column, put the letter back in the envelope, and place it on the table.

The third letter. There was a grayish-brown stain on the envelope, as if it had been splashed with mud. When Lin Wan opened it, a musty smell hit her nose. The letter paper was damp, and the ink of a few lines had bluish-purple smudges.

"The words are waterlogged, I can't see them clearly." Lin Wan handed over the letter.

Gu Yue put down what she was doing, took the letter, and looked at it, turning it over to the back. "This wasn't soaked in water. Look at this piece, the paper around the writing is wrinkled, but the ink hasn't spread evenly. It's from the tears the person who wrote the letter shed, the teardrops hitting the paper."

She pointed to the words that had seeped through, "It says 'Please, please.' It was written three times."

Lin Wan withdrew her hand.

Gu Yue placed the letter on the table and pointed to a passage below the blurred words that could barely be made out: "His wife passed away last year, leaving me to raise him alone. The village doctor said there's no cure. Look down from here, there's another sentence—" She turned the letter up to the light coming in from the window, "I can't read, so I asked the village primary school teacher to write it for me."

Gu Yue raised her head and looked at Lin Wan.

"You categorized it under the pile with incomplete information?"

Lin Wan opened her mouth.

"My sister-in-law said that incomplete information can't be ignored." Gu Yue pulled out a mimeographed booklet from the drawer, turned to page four, and pointed to the process marked in red pen. "Letters with missing information should be categorized separately as 'pending follow-up.' Fill in all the information that can be confirmed on the registration form, mark any blank spaces with a question mark, and then write 'requires a reply' in red pen on the back of the envelope. Later, when the long-distance phone lines are less busy, Zhao Lanlan will contact the local post office or commune based on the address on the letter, eventually finding the person and filling in the missing information."

"If you just throw it into a pile of incomplete junk, the letter is dead. If the letter is dead, there's no hope for the next kid."

Lin Wan's palms were sweaty.

She pulled the letter out of the stack of "incomplete information".

An hour passed.

There were more than twenty letters that Gu Yue had finished processing on her desk. Each envelope had the province abbreviation, urgency level rating, and processing number marked on the back in pencil. They were neatly stacked into three piles.

The table in front of Lin Wan looked like a market that had been swept away by a gust of wind.

The opened envelopes lay scattered on the edge of the table, two of them torn at the corners by a paper cutter. The registration form had several corrections; some boxes were filled in and then crossed out repeatedly. The cap of the ballpoint pen was nowhere to be found.

The worst part was that she mixed up three letters from different provinces—one from Gansu was stuffed into the envelope from Henan, and by the time she realized it, she couldn't tell which page belonged to which envelope.

She tried to match the letter paper and envelope back together from memory. The letter from "Gou Dan" in Gansu was on exercise book paper, and the letter from "Wang Erzhu" in Henan was on cigarette box lining paper—but what about the third letter, which was damp? She couldn't remember whether there was one or two stamps on the original envelope.

Gu Yue turned her head and saw this scene, then put the paper cutter on the table.

"Lin Wan".

Gu Yue's voice turned somber. She stood up, walked to Lin Wan's desk, picked up the three mixed-up letters, and read them over and over again.

His expression changed.

"You slipped this letter from Gansu into the envelope in Henan." Gu Yue pulled out the letter and envelope, comparing them one by one. "Do you know what this means? The address on the envelope is the only basis for our future replies and visits. If the letter and envelope don't match, we can't contact this person. If we can't contact this person, his son, Gou Dan, won't get a reply."

Lin Wan stood in front of the table, her face flushed red.

"I just wasn't paying attention..."

"Didn't notice for a moment?" Gu Yue's voice rose as she slammed the mixed-up letters onto the table. "Look at your table! Envelopes and letters are separated, and the registration form is covered in scribbles. The first rule I told you was to open one letter, register one letter, and put them back together, but you completely ignored it!"

Lin Wan pursed her lips into a thin line.

"But I don't recognize all those characters."

"Why didn't you ask me if you couldn't recognize them all? You sat there blindly fiddling with them for an hour, and only admitted you couldn't recognize them after making a mistake?" Gu Yue grabbed the triage manual on the table and flipped to page six of the appendix—a handwritten "Comparison Table of Common Dialect Characters in Various Provinces" by Zhao Lanlan. "Have you even looked at this?"

Lin Wan didn't speak.

Gu Yue slammed the manual on the table.

"You think opening a letter is just about cutting open the seal with a knife and pulling out the paper? Behind every letter is a living person! You put someone's letter in the wrong envelope, so when we write back, the family in Gansu receives a reply from Henan. They were hoping a big hospital in the north of the city would take care of them, but instead they get a completely irrelevant reply. How are they supposed to feel?"

Lin Wan's eyes began to redden. She bit her lip, standing next to the pile of messed-up letters, her hands gripping the ballpoint pen.

"Why are you yelling at me? This is my first day doing this. Who can do it perfectly right away? You're not the boss, so what right do you have to lecture me?"

"Based on this." Gu Yue picked up the damp letter on the table, unfolded it, and held up the three words "Please, please" towards Lin Wan's face.

The office fell silent.

Zhao Lanlan didn't turn her head. She stared at the phone and registration form in front of her, her left index finger resting on the dial. The phone still hadn't rung.

Gu Yue gently placed the letter back on the table, her fingers pressing on the edge of the paper.

"I'm not a leader. But I arrived five days earlier than you. In those five days, I opened more than two hundred letters, and I remember the province, the paper, and the color of the envelope for each one. Because my sister-in-law said something."

Gu Yue looked at Lin Wan.

"These letters are the last hand reached out by those in the abyss."

Lin Wan gripped the pen, tears welling up in her eyes, but she stubbornly refused to let them fall.

"Ye Zhen is deliberately trying to make things difficult for me, intentionally making you two ostracize me in the office! You think I'm not doing a good job, huh? Then you two do it yourselves!"

After saying that, Lin Wan grabbed the canvas handbag draped over the back of the chair, burst open the wooden door of the office, and rushed into the corridor in her high-heeled leather shoes, her figure disappearing around the corner of the stairs.

Gu Yue stared at the mess of letters scattered across the table, then kicked an empty chair in anger. "What is this?! Does the Heart of China really think it's some kind of inn that shelters pampered young ladies like her?!"