As the smell of disinfectant seeped into her bones, Yun Cangyue counted the falling leaves of the phoenix tree outside the window.

This was the sixth method of keeping time she had learned——

When the twelfth yellow leaf spun down to the lawn, the nurse would push the gleaming metal treatment cart to her bedside.

“Xiao Yue, it’s time for your injection.”

The nurse connected the pale yellow medication to the indwelling needle, and the plastic tube refracted tiny fragments of light under the sunlight.

Yun Cangyue quietly curled up in the blanket printed with cartoon patterns. Her seventeen-year-old body was as thin as a crumpled lab report.

She no longer trembled when the needle tip pierced her skin.
The bluish needle marks scattered across her hand like annual rings,
recording over six thousand mornings and evenings trapped in the hospital room.

Hasty footsteps echoed down the corridor.
Her mother entered the room, holding a thermos, her hair tips damp with the early winter drizzle.

“I made yam and rib soup today, the doctor said you need to replenish…”

Her words abruptly stopped when she saw the new tourniquet tied around her daughter’s wrist.

Yun Cangyue looked at the dark circles under her mother’s eyes, and the vague conversation from the previous night echoed once again——

Her father had whispered in the hallway, pleading,
“Can we arrange another bone marrow aspiration? We’ll find a way to get the money…”

“Mom, the phoenix tree is almost bare.”

She interrupted her mother’s words, her pale fingertips pressing against the cold window glass.

The old tree downstairs in the hospital ward had spent seven springs and autumns with her.
Now, the last few withered leaves hanging between the branches were like her gradually fading vitality.

The hum of the monitor’s current was unusually clear in the dead of night.

Yun Cangyue counted the pulsations of the green wave, another method she had invented.

Every time the interval between heartbeats lengthened by 0.2 seconds, it felt like the sand in an hourglass was becoming hesitant.

On the bedside table was a faded arithmetic book, its yellowed pages recording the time lost over the years——

She missed her elementary school graduation ceremony during her third round of chemotherapy,
was receiving a blood transfusion when her first period came,
and her sixteenth birthday wish was to have the nasogastric tube removed so she could have a bite of cake.

“Are you looking at the stars again?”

The nurse on night shift quietly changed the pain pump.

Yun Cangyue shook her head, the medical tape leaving a red mark on her collarbone.

She was actually observing the lights from the opposite floor.
In the flickering light spots shaped like squares, lived the patients who shared the dark night with her.

The leukemia girl who had moved in last week hadn’t appeared today,
just like the boy who loved folding paper cranes last spring, who, one early morning, left for the faraway with the long beep of the monitor.

Her mother curled up on the companion chair, sleeping lightly, with half of a critical condition notice peeking out from beneath her down jacket.

Yun Cangyue remembered the weight of that paper,
light as a feather, yet it crushed her father’s straight back.

The image of him kneeling in the director’s office suddenly resurfaced,
his graying hair against the cold hard floor tiles,
while she lay inside the CT machine, watching the circular chamber wall, like a tunnel leading to another world.

As the moonlight of Christmas Eve spread across the windowsill, Yun Cangyue smelled the scent of snow.

The monitor suddenly emitted a sharp alarm, and the flurry of footsteps shattered the silence.

She saw countless hands moving in front of her, the breathing mask fogging up, but the searing pain in her chest became strangely distant.

Her mother’s cries pierced through the beeping of the monitor, and her father’s palm clenched tightly onto the bed rail, his knuckles turning a deathly pale.

“Blood pressure continues to drop! Prepare the adrenaline!”

“Family members, please wait outside!”

In the moment before consciousness sank into the darkness, Yun Cangyue finally saw the shape of the tree branches clearly——

They stretched out in a crisscross pattern, like a staircase leading to the stars, with the last dead leaf unfolding into the wings of a butterfly under the moonlight.

She thought of the stuffed bunny she lost during her first round of chemotherapy,
the bitter medicine she secretly poured away,
and the sobs her mother tried to hide in the bathroom every time she was in critical condition.

It turned out all pain was like a cicada shedding its shell, now spreading its wings and flying out of her seventeen-year-old body.

The beeping of the monitor turned into the melody of a Christmas carol, and in the end, Yun Cangyue heard the soft rustling of snow falling on the phoenix tree.

The guilt and longing accumulated over the years finally shattered gently into starlight, as the ECG flattened into a straight green line, amidst the falling snow.