One, two, huff

He tried to lift her up again – harder this time, but with her full weight on him, Fei Huangjin could only manage to stand up and take two grudging steps forward before his legs buckled up beneath him and he had to put Ying Yue down.

He was frustrated, angry, tired, and in pain. Every fiber of his being was screaming with exhaustion. But he couldn't give up now. He might be able to survive this ordeal, but Ying Yue's case was a different story. Fei Huangjin stood up and pulled her up against him. If he couldn't carry her, he'd rather drag her out then leave her here.

One. Two.

Huff.

He slowly made his way forward, gritting his teeth.

One. Two.

Huff.

"Sh*t," he groaned.

Beads of sweat dripped down his face and the sweat that dampened his chest intermingled with the blood seeping out of his wound. He managed to haul her inside the elevator. But when the doors opened to the ground floor, his senses became dull and the arm on his bad shoulder started getting numb. Moreover, his right leg was getting weaker, too. By moving around, he was losing more blood than he could handle.

Fei Huangjin was only able to pick up Ying Yue's body out of the elevator before he stumbled with her, and he fell first on one knee as he tried to keep her up, before they both fell on a smack to the floor.

The only sound in the corridor was that of his labored breathing and the sound of his arms trying to feel the tiled floor as he reached out to the woman beside him. Blood poured out faster from both his shoulder and thigh, and pools of blood dripped to the floor from both his body and hers. His vision became blurry, and he felt himself slipping from his consciousness.

"Ying Yue…"

***

"Ying Yue!" Fei Huangjin woke up with a start, and he opened and blinked his eyes to the familiar sight of the Dragon Club medical facility inside their base. He breathed a sigh of relief. Guan Ting and the rest must have pulled them out of there.

He attempted to sit up right away – until a searing pain coursed through his thigh as well as a numbing sensation on his left arm. The cardiac monitors connected to him beeped crazily.

He glanced down at his shoulder and realized that his wound there was dressed and his arm was bandaged. His brows furrowed. He didn't recall getting his arm lacerated or anything. On a whim, he removed the bandage and found stitches on his upper arm, like someone had cut into it purposely. "What the f*ck?" His face turned ugly, and when a subtle throat-clearing was heard on the other side of the room, he whipped his head to that direction and spotted Li Hsiung watching him with wary eyes. Fei Huangjin didn't bother with pleasantries and went straight to what he wanted to know, "Where's my wife?"

She should be in the room with him, so where was she?

Li Hsiung looked at him with hesitation, but then looked away without a reply.

Fei Huangjin stilled, and his hand clutched at the sheets of his bed. Was she… No. She couldn't be, right? "Where's Ying Yue?" He repeated.

There was a long pause before Li Hsiung turned back to him with somber eyes. "Huangjin… She's alive—" The man on the bed closed his eyes and muttered words of thanks, but his relief was short-lived as Dr. Li continued, "—but she's not doing too well."

"What… what do you mean?" Fei Huangjin was almost afraid to ask.

The doctor sighed. "We transfused a couple of bags of blood into her circulation and we've stabilized her vitals, but I had to put her on vasopressors to keep her blood pressure from dipping…" Vasopressors like norepinephrine were given when someone's blood pressure was too low for the person to survive. "She got help too late and... earlier, she went into shock. We had to revive her for a while, so…"

Li Hsiung didn't need to finish what he was about to say – Fei Huangjin understood perfectly. Ying Yue was in a really bad shape, and there was a chance she wasn't going to recover.