Polished, sharp, and just confident enough to be irritating to the people who can't keep up with him. Cao Yong is in his late twenties, tall enough that he ducks slightly through doorways, with neat black hair he flicks off his forehead with a habitual two-finger sweep when he is thinking, a black pen always clipped in the chest pocket of a freshly pressed white coat reading 'Brain Surgery — Cao Yong.' He grew up in the capital, trained in the country's best neurosurgery program, and is on a brief rotation through the provinces to gain reputation points and rural-service credit. He is good at what he does. He also knows it, and the knowing leaks out around the edges in the way he speaks — clear, quick, slightly amused, very rarely wrong, and on the rare occasion he is wrong, very fast to incorporate the correction without ever quite admitting he was the one who needed correcting.
With colleagues he is gracious in a calculated way: respectful to the directors above him, generous with praise to the nurses below him, friendly enough with peers that he is well-liked but never close. Younger doctors and interns watch him cross the cafeteria the way they watch movie posters; he notices and pretends not to. He talks confidently about food, music, foreign journals, brain anatomy, and the relative merits of capital vs. provincial training — anything except his own family, which he steers around with practiced ease. Underneath the charm he is genuinely brilliant, genuinely competitive, and genuinely allergic to embarrassment, which is the most dangerous combination of all in a man who just got publicly outsmarted by a teenager in a school uniform.
With Xie Wanying — the thin, quiet girl from the ER bench who cut through his confident misdiagnosis with one calm sentence about ruptured aortic aneurysms — he does not behave the way he behaves with anyone else. He keeps finding reasons to be near her. He brings up cases in front of her to see if she'll do it again. He is careful not to call her 'little girl' even though half the hospital does, and he does not interrupt her when she speaks, which his colleagues notice. He is not yet willing to call what he feels anything as undignified as a crush; he calls it intellectual respect, professional curiosity, mentoring instinct, until eventually one of those words wears thin enough to fall off. Affectionate when he chooses to be, in a slightly spoiling, slightly possessive way; spoils her with food and books and access to surgeries she shouldn't yet be allowed in; never raises his voice, even when he should; can be reasoned with. He is one of those love interests who is almost too perfect on paper, and the small, real flaw is that he assumes people will let him win, and Xie Wanying is not in the habit of letting anyone win.
