Why it never ends

Chapter 311
Ava's operation lasted seven hours, and Chiba sat outside the operating room and waited anxiously.

Severely overdue surgeries are a bad sign—usually the procedure only takes one to two hours, and a late procedure could mean something unexpected happened.

The longer the delay, the less hope of survival.

Qianye kept rubbing her palms, while her eyes were fixed on the indicator light showing "in operation" in front of her.

Nearly ten o'clock at night, the exhausted doctor came out of the operating room and announced the result to Chiba in a low voice.

Chiba didn't react much and accepted it calmly.

In all fairness, this result was completely within Chiba’s expectations—Ava is 72 years old. In her decades of mercury injection career, Ava has never replaced any organs or prosthetics. Completely aged people.

Missing the window period of her youth, her aging body can no longer accept the most effective and radical treatment methods—and even if her physical condition allows, Ava will refuse any transformation of her physical body.

Whether it's prosthetics, artificial organs, or chips... Ava hates everything that blurs the boundary between machines and humans.

"Where is she now?" Chiba asked in a low voice, "I... want to see her again."

"In the ward."

In the middle of the night, Chiba returned to Ava's ward alone.

After leaving the operating room, Ava was lying in the sterile cabin. The transparent sterile cabin was like a coffin prepared in advance, glowing with bright green light.

The lights were not turned on in the ward, and Chiba sat down beside Ava.

Doctors said Ava was in a coma, but she also looked like she was asleep—she was still wearing a light blue surgical cap, her thin cheeks were sunken, and her eyes were always closed.

Ava in the sterile cabin was quieter than ever before, Qianye could see some faint rise and fall of her chest, and on the monitor beside her, Ava's electrocardiogram was beating regularly and weakly.

Across the sterile cabin, Chiba stared at the old man's eyelashes.

In the countless days and nights that have passed, there were many afternoons when Chiba took advantage of Ava's nap time to sneak into her office, and then quietly squatted next to the sleeping Ava, observing the old man s face.

Ava was quiet when she was asleep, and she was not as fierce as when she was awake. Sometimes, her eyelashes would flutter slightly-a phenomenon that Valenti said usually means that people are dreaming.

Qianye stretched out her five fingers and stuck them to the place closest to Ava's hand. Tonight, she expected to see Ava's eyelashes flutter again, but nothing happened.

……

On the third day, Aya, Ava's housekeeper, appeared in front of Chiba.

Aya's eyes were already swollen, so she took out a manuscript and handed it to Chiba, which contained Ava's arrangements for her afterlife, Chiba flipped through it casually, and saw Ava wrote on a certain page, she He refused to be buried in a cemetery after death, but only hoped to be cremated as soon as possible and his ashes scattered into the sea.

"Very well, let's arrange it like this...Why do you want to show it to me?"

"Because there is no point in procrastinating," Aya said in a low voice, "I asked the doctor, and you must sign."

"...What do you sign?"

"Ventilator," Aya looked at her, "stop it."

Chiba didn't respond.

"Ava's lungs are still shrinking, and the infection caused by the operation has not stopped... Do you really want to let her suffer like this until she dies?" Aya opened a page in the manuscript again, "Look here , Ava is strongly opposed to excessive medical treatment, she will not want us to forcefully keep her like this."

Chiba's eyes focused on Aya's fingers again, and then looked at the sterile cabin again, the last bit of blood on his face gradually faded.

……

At night, Chiba boarded the train back to Tan Yi.

There has been no news from Valenti, but no news is the best news.After getting off the train, Chiba returned to the reserve base.

After arriving, she did not immediately take the elevator to the ward where Hesta was located, but went to the woods behind the base apartment alone.

The forest path in the middle of the night is empty, only the moonlight shines from the bony branches.She has walked this path countless times, with Valenti, and Ava, and others... Those days have passed like quicksand through the fingers, and they will never return.

Before a certain bench, Qianye stopped. She vaguely remembered that the only photo of herself and Ava was taken near here. All have strong hostility.

Chiba sat down alone.

It was also in this place that a violent quarrel broke out between her and Ava.

She was very impressed with the content of that quarrel, because Ava seldom got so angry—it was the second time she encountered aberrants in a non-critical operation, and this sudden change directly caused the command post to order the mission to be advanced When it's over, all mercury needles retreat immediately.

Chiba was reluctant to give up this once-in-a-lifetime chance to fight. At that time, she had just put on a new bionic prosthesis and was short of a comparable opponent. So she pretended that the signal failed and did not receive the order, and tracked the deformer to the depths of the wasteland by herself.

That operation was dangerous, but fortunately there were no casualties in the end.

Qianye raised her head. She was sitting here at the beginning, and Ava was standing opposite her, pointing at her nose angrily:

"Are you so indifferent to your own life!?"

Qianye frowned, what bastard did he say at that time?She thought about it carefully for a while, but she really couldn't recall it, but it was probably just some nonsense like "I'm happy that I was caught by chelate", "I don't care about the outside world if I die alone".

Ava was really very angry, Qianye still remembers her trembling hands waving in the air——

"The more real the freedom you feel from the prosthesis, the more thoroughly you are imprisoned. Do you understand? What is there to cherish about this kind of freedom!?"

The night wind blew from far away, blowing Qianye from one memory to another, she slowly lowered her head and covered her face with her hands.

When signing in the morning, the doctor said that after getting off the ventilator, Ava would completely lose her vital signs within 10 minutes.

She sat beside Ava with Aya, waiting quietly.

10 minutes, 10 minutes, half an hour, an hour...

Ava's heart rate has always been maintained at a weak value, just unwilling to fall to death.

The two waited for a total of five hours and 49 minutes, during which Aya kept crying, but Chiba did not.

……

A dead leaf whirled and fell to Qianye's feet, she bent down, picked up the leaf by pinching the stem, and then, she heard a few hot tears hitting the leaf, making a short and weak sound.

In the midwinter night, Qianye was alone, crying silently on the boulevard.

(End of this chapter)