Chapter 467: The Fate of Kim Go-soon
“You must leave this place at once,” Mendoza warned, her voice urgent. “The Australian Elder who bid for you harbors a special hatred for white people. He will not let this go.”
“Of course,” Marina said breathlessly. “I want to go to Manila immediately! But I have no money, and no idea how to get there…”
“Let Signor Lando take you,” Mendoza said with a sigh. “Because he purchased you, he can no longer stay here either.”
A pang of guilt struck Marina. “Thank you,” she whispered. “I am so grateful.”
“Think nothing of it. To preserve the honor of a Spanish noblewoman is my privilege,” Lando said, stroking his mustache. “I have grown weary of this place anyway. A change of scenery will be welcome. We shall depart in a week’s time. There is a Chinese merchant ship bound for Manila.”
“And what of my two maids?”
Miss Mendoza lowered her head, her voice tinged with sadness. “They were sold several days ago. Señora de Tolosa was sold to an Australian nobleman to be a Spanish tutor. The two maids were likely sold to noblemen as well.”
“Can they be ransomed? I will repay everything once I reach Manila.”
“I’m afraid it will be very difficult,” Miss Mendoza said. “The Australians are fond of white female slaves.”
Marina knew Mendoza spoke the truth. She could only resolve to try and ransom them later. The most important thing now was to escape this dreadful place. She wished she could sprout wings and fly away this very instant.
“This noble lady has some conscience after all, to still be thinking of her maids,” commented Li Yan, head of the Ming Division of the Intelligence Bureau. He was in a secret room next door, listening to their conversation.
Landi’s “temporary residence” was, in fact, a luxury suite in the Dongmen Market Guesthouse, fully equipped with listening devices and a dedicated monitoring room. The External Intelligence Bureau’s plan to infiltrate Manila was proceeding smoothly, orchestrated from this very nerve center.
“You don’t understand,” said Jiang Shan, sipping a mint-flavored ramune. He listened intently to the conversation, a smile playing on his lips. “This young lady is traveling thousands of miles to marry a stranger. Her maids are like her own family. How could she not care for them? Besides, what about Señora de Tolosa?”
“She intentionally left her out?”
“Perhaps,” said Wang Ding. “The elite always consider themselves a breed apart, and everyone else as mere grass. Señora de Tolosa was clearly not to her liking.”
“And what of Señora de Tolosa?” Li Yan asked. “Did someone really buy her as a tutor?”
“She is, of course, still in the quarantine camp, under the administration of the General Office,” Jiang Shan said, savoring the new soda flavor as if it were a fine wine. “Señora de Tolosa merely dresses to look like an old woman.”
“Miss Mendoza and Lando are truly talented actors,” Li Yan said, full of admiration. “I knew Lando was capable, but I never expected Miss Mendoza to be so professional. Her performance was utterly convincing.”
“It’s not a performance. It’s a genuine expression of her feelings,” Jiang Shan said with a faint smile. “When the false becomes true, the true also becomes false. Miss Mendoza is in that state now. Which is good. It makes her all the more believable.”
“With this little bird paving the way, Landi’s work will be much easier,” Li Yan remarked. Though he was the head of the Ming Division, their work often overlapped. He had contributed significantly to the Manila infiltration plan. “But now, I must go and calm Xiao Bailang’s nerves.”
“He was deliberately causing trouble,” Jiang Shan said, displeased. “We explicitly told them all to exercise restraint when bidding on the Spanish girl…”
“I think it turned out for the best,” Wang Ding said with satisfaction. The idea of putting Marina up for auction had been his. “Now, the charade has become real. The effect is perfect! It was like watching a movie!”
“The next move is Landi’s,” Jiang Shan said. “Let’s see what secrets the Spaniards in Manila are hiding.”
Shi Niaoren returned from the auction to his office at the General Hospital and lit a cigar. On his desk lay several thick volumes—the medical examination reports for the new batch of female slaves. He decided to look at them later. They gave him a headache. He needed to train a few graduate students to handle this sort of thing for him. Speaking of which, He Ma had sent a letter, asking him to take on Guo Fu as a graduate student.
A graduate student! Shi Niaoren thought. At best, Guo Fu is at the level of a vocational school student, and a fast-tracked one at that! Still, he knew that among the current cadre of medical staff, Guo Fu was easily in the top five. If he didn’t train her, there was no one else.
The atmosphere at the auction had shown him the “ambition” of the Elders, and it filled him with anxiety about the future of maternal and child healthcare at the Lingao General Hospital. He opened the latest report on the Elders’ sperm vitality. The overall vitality had increased by several percentage points since the last quarter.
At this rate, it wouldn’t be long before their sperm vitality returned to normal levels. Considering that most of the Elders were young, with a few in their prime, and that they had been living exceptionally healthy lives since D-Day, their sperm quality would inevitably surpass that of the old world. Their hormone levels were high, their libidos strong, and with nearly all of them now possessing maids, the second baby boom would arrive sooner and be more explosive than the first.
He vividly remembered the numbers in the “Register of Elder Offspring”: fifty-one children, with thirty-five registered pregnancies. So many children and expectant mothers were already overwhelming the hospital’s maternal and child health services, which also had to handle outpatient clinics and deliveries for the general population. Antenatal care and in-hospital births were incredibly labor-intensive.
No matter how he calculated it, the current number of medical staff in training was insufficient. They had to expand enrollment.
“What a headache,” the Director sighed, thinking of the groveling he would have to do before the Planning Commission for additional funding and personnel. It seemed Deng Bojun’s plan for a self-funding branch in Guangzhou had some merit after all. At least then, they could be self-sufficient in this area and not have to beg for every little thing.
As he was pondering this, a nurse knocked on the door. “Dr. Ning requests a consultation.”
“Which patient?” Shi Niaoren asked.
“A special care patient from the burn unit, sent from Jeju Island.”
“I know. I’ll be right there.”
The patient was Kim Go-soon. Feng Zongze, determined to save her life, had moved heaven and earth. The Executive Committee, upon hearing of her heroic act, had instructed the General Hospital to spare no effort in saving her, to let her live on as a symbol, a banner of their cause.
With a directive from the Committee, no expense was spared. A Type 901 gunboat was dispatched from Hong Kong, sailing at full speed to Jeju. Onboard were medical personnel and essential supplies, including an Elder doctor, Ning Jinghai. He had been scheduled for a medical tour of Taiwan but was rerouted to Jeju.
Upon the gunboat’s arrival, Kim Go-soon was swiftly transferred aboard. Under the guidance of staff from the Lingao General Hospital, a specialized isolation cabin had been set up on the ship, rigorously sterilized. For the next few weeks of the voyage, the medical team would care for the Senate’s hero, stabilizing her condition so she could safely reach Lingao and receive the god-like healing of the Australian Chiefs.
According to Ning Jinghai’s diagnosis, Kim Go-soon’s second-degree burns, though severe, had not damaged the underlying tendons. However, based on his medical school knowledge, there was still a risk of further tissue necrosis. For now, skin grafts or flap repairs were not an immediate concern—and in any case, the only place in this era with the capability for such procedures was the Lingao General Hospital. But during the long journey, she would require continuous debridement and dressing changes, waiting for fresh granulation tissue to grow before a split-thickness skin graft could be performed.
Although Feng Zongze had already excised the burned skin, and in theory, new skin could grow back on its own, anyone with a modicum of medical knowledge knew that her wounds, stripped of their natural protection, were wide open to all manner of pathogens. She needed a substitute for her lost skin.
Thus, before his departure, Ning Jinghai had devised a plan: a xenograft using specially treated deep-sea fish skin to protect the wounds. As Kim Go-soon’s own skin regenerated, the fish skin, having served its purpose, would naturally slough off.
In the 1970s of the original timeline, before the advent of more advanced medicine, using animal skin to treat burn patients was a common technique. In the new nation under the Senate’s leadership, where industrial safety standards were a far cry from those of the old world and accidents were frequent, the Elders had revived this method out of necessity. The Ministry of Health’s pharmaceutical factory used fresh, large deep-sea fish. The skins were descaled, sterilized, and soaked in glutaraldehyde—a substance used for both sterilization and leather tanning—to remove their antigenicity. They were then stored in a cold facility, to be cut and used as needed. The gunboat had been specially loaded with ice from the cold storage in Hong Kong as ballast, to keep the fish skins refrigerated.
The Type 901 gunboat set sail, and the trial for the rescue team began. According to Ning Jinghai’s medical textbooks, a severe burn patient had to pass three critical stages: shock, infection, and grafting. In the first two to three days after the burn, surviving the shock phase was paramount, as the wounds would lose a massive amount of body fluid.
Kim Go-soon had already passed this stage on Jeju, thanks to Feng Zongze’s meticulous care and his willingness to use his personal stash of advanced supplies. During those crucial days, besides closely monitoring her blood pressure, pulse, and respiration, the Elder and the local, fledgling cadre health workers, guided by their rudimentary physiological knowledge, had advocated for aggressive fluid and blood transfusions, breaking from conventional wisdom.