Chapter 118

Chapter 118

All of the dead were orphans.

It wasn’t as if Nan Mu had never considered that possibility before. Back in the hospital room, for instance, when he had wanted to look into Su Yu’s background, the thought had crossed his mind.

But too much had happened the next day, and then Wang Pandi had appeared. So when he learned that Zhaodi was Wang Pandi’s older sister, there was no way he could have expected that Zhaodi had actually been adopted.

And to him at the time, as long as even one of them wasn’t an orphan, that proved the theory that “all the dead were orphans” was wrong. Naturally, he abandoned the idea, and he also gave up investigating Su Yu’s background. It was only now that he discovered Su Yu had also been an orphan from Happiness Orphanage.

But the truth went far beyond anything he had imagined.

These people were not merely all orphans. They had all come from Happiness Orphanage, and they were all part of the same group of children abandoned at the Orphanage gates.

Even if there really was a criminal organ-trafficking group called the Organization, there was no way it could have just happened to pick exactly them, right? If anyone tried to claim that was a coincidence, even a dog wouldn’t buy it.

If Gu Zhishu, Zhaodi, and Su Yu had never been adopted, then one could barely argue that the criminal group, the Organization, had targeted parentless orphans to avoid the risk of anyone coming looking for them.

But clearly, among the three of them, only Su Yu’s adoptive parents had died early enough for that explanation to hold. The other two both had parents and siblings. Zhaodi’s younger sister, Wang Pandi, had even spent ten years hunting down the killer in order to find her sister. No matter how Nan Mu looked at it, they did not fit the profile of “convenient” criminal targets.

Nan Mu lifted his head and looked at Wen Miao, who was walking ahead with the Director, his brow faintly furrowed.

He remembered the first time he had gone to Happiness Orphanage. Back then, the Director had described to him how they had found Wen Miao and the others.

“…There were six of them, all lined up neatly. It was freezing that day, but the children were only wearing thin white clothes. The clothes looked a little like hospital gowns, and their little faces were purple from the cold…”

“…Even if someone abandons a child, they’ll at least wrap the child up warmly. They might even leave some of the child’s usual belongings beside them. But Wen Miao and the others were different. They had nothing. They were only wearing those thin clothes, and they didn’t even have shoes on…”

“…Only infants can be coaxed to sleep and then left at the Orphanage gate. Older children are different. They remember things, at least a little. Usually, someone has to coax them or trick them into staying there-say they’re going to buy something, or make up some excuse…”

“…Because those children were all wearing the same white clothes, it felt like they’d been abandoned by the same family… Of course, that was just a wild guess. Those children weren’t related by blood at all…”

Thin white clothes that looked like hospital gowns, yet all six children were healthy and had no major illnesses.

Six of them, lined up neatly. They looked as if they had been abandoned by the same family, yet there was no blood relation between them.

What could any of that prove?

Maybe they really had come from the same place…

And when they were abandoned, they had been left in nothing but thin clothes, without even shoes. Whoever abandoned them was either cold-blooded, or the situation had been urgent enough that they were forced to leave them behind…

They had still been wearing thin white clothes in late autumn, which meant that before they arrived, the place they had been staying in had at least been temperature-controlled.

Did it have underfloor heating?

White clothes, similar to hospital gowns, but the children weren’t sick…

Had they all been dressed the same way for convenience? After all, a place that could maintain a constant temperature year-round couldn’t possibly have been so poor that it couldn’t afford clothes…

But even with uniforms, under normal circumstances, wouldn’t boys’ and girls’ clothes at least be separated? Otherwise, after everything went tumbling around in the washing machine, who could tell which piece of clothing belonged to whom?
No, no, no. Or perhaps this proved exactly that the people caring for them were indifferent toward them. Those people didn’t care whether they were boys or girls, healthy or not.

Put that way, it did seem to make sense. Why would anyone buy white hospital gowns-clothes that were so terribly unlucky? At the very least, it didn’t seem like something parents would do. Otherwise, for the same price, any other color would have been better than white, and it wouldn’t get dirty as easily.

But what kind of place could raise so many children at once? Six five- or six-year-old kids-if they had been cared for since infancy, wouldn’t that require at least six people?

Doubt surged up in his heart, growing larger and larger until it spread into clouds and mist that filled the sky, trapping him inside, unable to break free.

===

The Director walked them all the way to the entrance of Happiness Orphanage before turning back.

Only after watching the Director leave did Wen Miao turn to look at Nan Mu. “What were you thinking about just now?”

Nan Mu was a little irritated. Out of habit, he reached for his cufflink, only to come up empty. He’d forgotten that the shirt he was wearing today was just a T-shirt.

He sighed. “I was thinking about what kind of place would have a lot of children, and would raise them from an age when they couldn’t even take care of themselves yet.”

Wen Miao looked puzzled. She turned back and pointed at the Orphanage. “Isn’t that exactly what this is?”

Nan Mu looked back, then couldn’t help laughing.

It really was.

After thinking for a moment, Nan Mu added a new condition. “But that place probably doesn’t like children very much.”

“They don’t like children, but they still raise them? Are they trying to make trouble for themselves?” Wen Miao gestured with her hands. “Like… training themselves in child-care skills?”

Nan Mu shrugged. “I think if they didn’t like children, they probably wouldn’t want to train that particular skill.”

Wen Miao asked, “Then why do you think they’d raise children?”

Nan Mu pondered for a moment. “To sell their organs?”

Wen Miao was startled by how wildly his mind had leapt. “Raise a bunch of kids just to harvest their organs? Like livestock?”

She felt it wasn’t entirely impossible, but if that really was the case, it would be far too horrifying.

Nan Mu didn’t speak. He seemed to be thinking with the same intensity as if he were silently calculating a math problem, first giving himself an answer, then rejecting it himself.

“It probably wasn’t to sell organs… At least, in the beginning, they probably weren’t doing it to sell organs.”

Wen Miao was curious. “You figured it out? Why do you say that?”

Nan Mu gave a bitter smile. “It’s not that I figured it out. It’s that from an economic standpoint, it doesn’t make sense.”

Wen Miao looked at him with an expression of eager instruction.

“For tissue matching in organ transplantation, you not only have to pass blood type matching, the HLA human leukocyte antigen system, and the PRA panel reactive antibody, you also have to perform a complement-dependent cytotoxicity crossmatch test. The requirements are too strict. If they raise people, how can they guarantee that the organs of the children they raise will definitely sell? What if they can’t sell them? Are they supposed to keep raising them for life? From a market economics perspective, operating like that costs too much, takes too long to convert into cash, and has a high inventory backlog rate… If it were me, I would never do it that way. It’d be faster to just pick up homeless people or drunks off the street.”

When Nan Mu finished and turned his head, he saw Wen Miao tilting her head as she looked at him, watching him with great interest, her eyes carrying a smile that wasn’t quite a smile.

Her gaze made him uncomfortable. He lowered his head and looked himself over. “What are you looking at?”

“You, obviously.” Wen Miao smiled. “I just realized you’re pretty business-minded… Oh, right. Where did you go to work after graduation?”

Nan Mu glanced at her. “Classified.”