Eden was born on December 23, 215, in a mining city on the Empire’s northern frontier.
Her mother died of postpartum hemorrhage. Blaming the attending obstetrician for her death, her father murdered the doctor and was himself sentenced to death. Left an orphan, Eden was sent to a privately contracted orphanage.
It is not difficult to imagine what kind of place it was. Funds intended for the children were routinely embezzled; abuse was commonplace; the children received only the bare minimum of food and care needed to keep them from dying outright. By the time she was five, chronic malnutrition had left Eden noticeably smaller and thinner than other children her age. Life in the orphanage had also taught her to regard beatings, hunger, and death as ordinary facts of existence.
In early 221, she fell victim to a human-trafficking scheme. Gang members took her from the orphanage and trained her to beg, forcing her to bring in whatever money she could for the gang.
By the end of that same year, a major outbreak of poliomyelitispoliomyelitis — The epidemic of late 221, which left Eden paralysed in both legs. had swept through the city, extinguishing Eden’s hope of saving enough money to escape. Shops closed. Food and medicine grew scarce. Hospitals were overwhelmed, and the child beggars began to fall ill one after another.
Drawing on the little medical knowledge she had picked up while working at an apothecary, Eden tried to care for them. Yet she could do little more than delay death. In the end, she too contracted the disease.
The epidemic also shattered what remained of the gang’s internal order. With nowhere left to turn, one of its enforcers, drunk and desperate, broke into the dilapidated shack where the children lived and tried to kill them in a fit of rage.
Disease, bitter cold, starvation, and violence destroyed everything within that shack. The children who fought back were beaten to death by the enforcer. Unassuming as she was, Eden in turn stabbed him to death with a knife.
And Eden herself—
she sat among the corpses and the snow, waiting to die.
Winterreise: Die Krähe
Eine Krähe war mit mirAus der Stadt gezogen,Ist bis heute für und fürUm mein Haupt geflogen.
Krähe, wunderliches Thier,Willst mich nicht verlassen?Meinst wohl bald als Beute hierMeinen Leib zu fassen?
Nun, es wird nicht weit mehr gehnAn dem Wanderstabe.Krähe, laß mich endlich sehnTreue bis zum Grabe!
Eden eventually came under the protection of Doctors Without Borders. Luo ZeLuo Ze — Leader of a Doctors Without Borders team; Eden’s adoptive father and teacher., the physician leading the team, found her barely alive while clearing out a gang hideout alongside the military police.
Sir, kind sir… please, kill me…
Luo Ze refused her plea. Instead, he chose to save a child already deemed “no longer worth treating.”
At night, the weary crow rested by the bed, waiting for the nightingale lying there to die.
At night, the dying nightingale lay sleepless, watching the crow by her bed until dawn.
Who was watching over whom? And who was saving whom?
Luo Ze kept Eden alive through measures that verged on recklessness. In the end, he resolved to do more than secure her immediate survival: he would take responsibility for the life that lay ahead of her.
He adopted her as his daughter, brought her back with him to his homeland in the East, and began teaching her how to heal the sick and save lives.