My Four Miraculous Treasures

He averted his gaze, his face contorting with the effort of suppressing these urges -not to mention his rage at this woman.

He grabbed her by the chin, squeezing forcefully until her lips pursed and her mouth popped open. "Stop squirming, right now!" he snarled. "Otherwise, I'll skin you and devour you whole!"

Willow's moist eyes went blank with sudden terror, and she backed away from him hurriedly, hugging herself. "That's no good at all, mister!" she whined piteously.

There was something particularly frustrating about her apparently not being able to recognize him, or remember his name. Right at that moment, Jasper wanted nothing more than to give her a sound beating she wouldn't soon forget.

But she was hallucinating from food poisoning... he couldn't bear to do anything bad to her, in this condition.

Dr. Morgan arrived before long and, after being informed of the situation, immediately injected Willow with something, and then held a foul-smelling substance up to her nose to induce vomiting.

In this way, the undigested bits of mushroom still in her stomach would be purged from her system.

Willow lay upon the bed, her hand sprouting a needle for an intravenous drip. One of the maids held the smelling salts to her nose. There was a large basin nearby, ready to receive the expelled contents of her stomach.

She was in extreme discomfort, her mind lost in delirium, wavering between reality and fantasy. She was smelling something downright awful, which caused her already deflated stomach to churn, and roil... and then she vomited.

She retched, again and again, but nothing came out. This perplexed Dr. Morgan, until Leon informed her about how Willow hadn't had any food or water for the past two days.

With nothing in her stomach, it was no surprise that all this dry heaving from Willow wasn't actually bringing anything up. Dr Morgan immediately summoned for some drinking water to be supplied to the patient.noveldrama

The doctor felt a pang of sympathy for this young woman. What sort of grudge could Jasper Hughes possibly hold against her, that he would be willing to let her starve to death like this?

Three days was the limit for a person to survive without water. This girl was mere hours away from death by dehydration.

The servants force-fed to Willow a generous measure of water, and then held the smelling salts up to her nose once more. At last, Willow was able to throw up the mushrooms she'd eaten.

However, much of those had already been digested, so there remained the problem of toxins in her bloodstream, keeping her under.

The IV drip could provide her with some sustenance-however, after two days and nights of thirst and starvation, it wouldn't be enough.

"Given the circumstances, there's a very real likelihood that her gastric acids might damage her stomach lining," the doctor declared. "She should be fed some liquid food immediately, in order to prevent that happening."

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Jasper forwarded these instructions to his servants, who soon returned with some rice porridge.

Willow was propped up against the headboard of the bed, her eyes shut and her head spinning. It felt as though she might slip away from this world at any moment. She swayed in place, feeble and unsteady.

A servant stooped down beside her with the bowl of porridge in one hand, and a spoon in the other, and tried to feed her. However, Willow's head was a moving target, bobbing and weaving, her lips pursed firmly shut.

Earlier, she'd been fed water using a syringe inserted between her lips.

This time however, feeding porridge to her was an entirely different matter. The servant tried repeatedly, and failed repeatedly.

Jasper, sharp and cold, stepped

forward and snatched the bowl away, then slurped down some of the porridge himself. Holding in that mouthful of hot stuff, he leaned in towards Willow, prying her teeth open to deliver his life-giving payload directly into her mouth...