419: Chapter 419 Live Demonstration (Part 1)

The door to the passageway on the left side of Hall No. 1 opened.

Ten people were guided in by staff members.

Walking at the very front was a middle-aged woman, extremely thin, with prominent cheekbones and a bloodless complexion.

She wore a light blue hospital gown with a gray cardigan over it, and as she walked, she held onto the arm of the nurse beside her, taking slow steps.

The nine people following behind were in similar conditions.

Some were in wheelchairs, some used crutches, and some needed two people to support them as they walked.

One elderly person was helped up from a wheelchair by their son, but after standing for two seconds, they sat back down again, their legs lacking strength.

Over seven hundred people watched these ten individuals walk from the passageway to the front row, a walk that took about three and a half minutes.

No one in the conference hall was speaking anymore.

Those who had been laughing just moments ago had all fallen silent—not because they were moved, but because the appearance of these ten people was too real.

That look of someone at the end of their illness could not be faked.

The skin-and-bone arms, the wheezing breath after taking a few steps, the blue and purple needle marks from IV drips—with these things laid out in front of them, no one could laugh.

The ten people sat down one by one in the white seats in the front row.

Some of their family members stood nearby, bending over to help them adjust their clothes and steadying their shoulders.

Director Li Wenbo waited until everyone was seated before continuing to speak.

"The ten individuals before you are all stage four cancer patients diagnosed by Grade-A tertiary hospitals in Daxia. There are two cases of pancreatic cancer, three of lung cancer, two of liver cancer, one of brain glioma, and two of advanced lymphoma. All conventional treatment methods have been declared ineffective, and their attending physicians have issued a final diagnosis."

He paused for a moment.

"Please play the pre-treatment imaging."

The large LED screen behind him switched images.

The imaging data for the ten people was displayed one by one—CT scans, MRIs, PET-CTs, pathology reports, and blood test results.

Each person's data remained on screen for thirty seconds, with the imaging on the left and key data on the right.

The first was the thirty-four-year-old elementary school teacher Zhou Yutong, who had stage four lung cancer.

On the CT scan, both lung lobes were full of white shadows; there was a four-centimeter mass in the upper right lobe, mediastinal lymph node enlargement, and bone scans showed multiple metastases in the thoracic spine and pelvis.

The screen cut to her pathology report, where the degree of differentiation was listed as "poorly differentiated adenocarcinoma," with a Ki-67 proliferation index of 78 percent.

Someone in the expert section gasped.

A Ki-67 of 78 percent meant that the tumor cells were proliferating extremely rapidly; under such circumstances, the effectiveness of conventional chemotherapy was less than 10 percent.

Zhao Deming leaned forward, squinting his eyes to look at the CT scan on the large screen.

He had worked in the Oncology Department for thirty years; he could tell at a glance whether such scans were real.

They were real.

The distribution, density, and boundaries of the shadows on the scans all matched the typical presentation of advanced lung adenocarcinoma.

They were not Photoshopped, nor were they someone else's scans being passed off as her own.

The imaging data for all ten people finished playing, and the large screen returned to a blank state.

Director Li Wenbo faced the audience.

"Next, these ten patients will take the rejuvenation pill on-site, under the witness of everyone here."

Staff members pushed a stainless steel cart out from backstage, on which sat an incubator.

After the incubator was opened, inside were ten small white jade bottles, neatly arranged in a row.

The jade bottles were taken out, each with a numbered label from 01 to 10, corresponding to the ten volunteers.

A staff member in a white coat walked up to the first volunteer—the elementary school teacher, Zhou Yutong.

He unscrewed the cap of the jade bottle, poured out a Medicinal Pill, placed it on a white porcelain dish, and handed it to her.

The light green Medicinal Pill rolled once in the dish, and then, a medicinal fragrance spread out, which the people in the front row all smelled.

Zhou Yutong looked down at the Medicinal Pill, then looked up at the nurse standing beside her.

The nurse nodded at her.

She reached out, picked up the Medicinal Pill, put it in her mouth, and swallowed it with the warm water handed over by the staff member.

Then came the second person, the third, the fourth.

All ten people finished taking the medication within three minutes.

The atmosphere in Hall No. 1 was very strange.

No one clapped, no one cheered, and no one even spoke.

Everyone was watching those ten people, as if waiting for a miracle to happen.

But nothing happened.

The ten people sat in their chairs, no different from before they took the medicine.

Zhou Yutong was still just as thin, the elderly person in the wheelchair next to her was still leaning against the backrest panting, and the liver cancer patient being supported by their son still could not stand up.

Thirty seconds passed.

One minute passed.

People in the back started whispering.

"No reaction?"

"Didn't you say the effect of this medicine would be immediate?"

An American reporter stood up, not waiting for the Q&A session, and shouted directly while holding a microphone.

"Director Li, may I ask if you have conducted clinical trials? Is there double-blind control data? Has it been approved by the FDA or any national drug regulatory agency? You are letting terminal cancer patients take an unknown drug in public without any clinical data support; is this a medical press conference or a Jianghu street performance?"

He was speaking English, and the simultaneous interpretation headphones translated every word clearly.

Director Li Wenbo looked at him, not taking the bait.

After waiting for two seconds, he spoke.

"I will answer this reporter's question. We are willing to disclose all efficacy data, pharmacological analyses, and component testing reports of the rejuvenation pill to any authoritative medical institution in the world. Verification is welcome."

The American reporter wanted to press further, but his colleague tugged on his sleeve, and he sat back down.

The audience went quiet again.

It was quiet for about ten seconds.

Then there was movement in the expert section.

On the side with the foreign experts on the right, in the third row by the aisle, a person stood up.

The movement of standing up was very slow because he was wearing a brace on his right leg, wrapped in a grayish-white fixation splint from knee to ankle; when he walked, his right leg was straight and could not bend, causing him to limp.

Su Mingyuan saw this person on the monitoring screen backstage.

James Brennan.

Sixty-three years old. A fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, a tenured professor of surgery at University College London, and one of the top five global authorities in the orthopedic Domain.

Three months ago, he suffered a comminuted fracture of his right knee in a mountaineering accident, with a tibial plateau collapse, anterior and posterior cruciate ligament tears, and a meniscus tear.

He had undergone two surgeries and had three steel plates inserted, but the damage to the joint surface was too severe, and his attending physician's conclusion was that the "possibility of functional recovery was less than 5 percent."

This man's reputation in the English medical community was not built on a pile of papers.

Twenty years ago, the English royal family invited him to serve as the chief royal surgical consultant, offering a seven-figure pound annual salary, but he refused.

His reason was, "My scalpel does not distinguish between high and low status."

Later, several private hospitals tried to poach him with high salaries, offering conditions that were more outrageous than the last, but he turned them all down.

In his entire life, he only performed surgeries at NHS public hospitals, and the number of patients queuing up to register was on a completely different scale compared to other doctors' patients.

When a person like this spoke, the global medical community would listen.

Precisely because of this, when he said he would come to this press conference, people in London advised him not to go, saying that Daxia's current international situation was sensitive and that going might be interpreted by the outside world as taking a political stance.

Brennan's reply was, "I am a doctor, not a dirty, base politician."