Chapter 109
Chapter 109
“Huh? Why are the lights on in this room?”
Just then, an unfamiliar voice came from outside the door.
A rapid patter of footsteps followed right after, as if someone were jogging over.
Qiao Yu was a little baffled. Who would come to the seventh floor at this hour?
Knock, knock, knock. Three polite raps sounded at the door.
The person outside asked softly, “Director Zhou, is that you?”
No, the person who had come wasn’t a streamer…
Then who was it?
Neither Qiao Yu nor Shang Yan said a word.
“Did Director Zhou forget to turn off the lights when he left work?”
The person outside seemed to be talking to himself.
As he spoke, there was a click, and the doorknob turned.
The next second, a bright beam from a flashlight shone in.
Immediately after, the person outside saw Qiao Yu and his eyes suddenly widened. The flashlight clattered to the floor. “Aaaah! A ghost-”
The man in the security uniform at the doorway dropped to the floor with a thud, then turned and fled, scrambling and crawling away. His terrified screams echoed endlessly down the corridor.
Holding the Eyebrow Pencil, Qiao Yu blinked. “Could the Eyebrow Pencil Painted Skin gave me be expired?”
Shang Yan looked at the unfamiliar middle-aged man’s face in front of him and clutched his forehead in agony. “What weird stuff did they even give you?”
Qiao Yu turned his head and looked at the person reflected in the glass.
That was right. It was the same person from the photo, wasn’t it?
Could this person already be dead?
Then who was the Director Zhou that guard had called out to?
“Let’s get out of here first.” Shang Yan grabbed Qiao Yu by the arm and pulled him out of Director Zhou’s office.
The two ran to the elevator. The red numbers on the display were dropping continuously, so Qiao Yu grabbed Shang Yan in return and pulled him toward the stairwell.
But it was already too late.
Through the gaps in the railing, they could see quite a few people in security uniforms rushing up this way.
With no other choice, Qiao Yu took out the Small Wire and picked the nearest door.
Maybe his luck was bad, because he had just happened to choose an Iron Door. Picking the lock went smoothly, but opening the door did not.
Qiao Yu pulled with all his strength and still couldn’t budge it. In the end, Shang Yan couldn’t stand watching anymore and reached out to pull the door open himself.
The instant the door opened, a heavy blast of cold air rushed into their faces. Overhead, the refrigeration unit was humming away.
What came into view were rows of white hospital beds, each displaying a body covered with a white sheet.
“That’s not right. Isn’t the morgue on basement level one?”
Qiao Yu really didn’t want to go in, but it was already too late. Those people were about to come up.
With no other choice, the two slipped inside and shut the door.
The thick Iron Door had excellent soundproofing. In the silent room, Qiao Yu immediately spotted the row of tiny engraved words on the hospital bed rails: Ningping County First Private Hospital.
Fuck. What People’s Hospital?
It was all a smokescreen. He had said it before-how could a public hospital charge so much?
So in reality, it was called Ningping County First Private Hospital.
Qiao Yu had clearly pieced it together. They were no longer in the original hospital Instance, but in the newly merged space.
Or rather, this place had been the real hospital all along.
With that thought, he raised his hand and pulled back the white sheet covering the hospital bed beside him.
The body beneath was covered in knife wounds and needle marks. It looked utterly pitiful.
Seeing this, Shang Yan suddenly interjected, “This should be a cadaver the hospital provides for interns to practice on. When it’s not in use, it needs to be kept refrigerated.”
“No wonder.” Qiao Yu suddenly understood. “I was wondering why there was a formalin smell.”
Out of respect for the dead, Qiao Yu covered the body with the white sheet again. But the moment he finished covering the person’s head, his movements froze, his gaze locking onto the label at the head of the bed.
Diao Deyi.
He had seen that name on the computer in the director’s office.
Qiao Yu immediately abandoned this corpse and began checking the labels on the beds one by one. As expected, he found the bodies of Lu Shanshan and Xu Jingqi.
Xu Jingqi was the dead streamer from Ward 612.
So all the bodies here belonged to the patients who had originally fallen ill?
Qiao Yu had always been the type to dig until he got to the bottom of things. Curious, he lifted the white sheet covering Xu Jingqi’s body.
Sure enough, where her eyes should have been were two bloody holes, and her abdomen had been cut open, as if her kidneys had been removed.
He lifted the white sheet over Lu Shanshan’s body as well, wanting to confirm it again.
But in the next second, the fingers gripping the edge of the sheet abruptly tightened. His dark pupils trembled, and a faint layer of anger spilled into his eyes.
The woman lying on the hospital bed wore a filthy white dress. The exposed skin of her arms was covered in bruises and red marks, and the white dress was stained with filth… Every sign was telling him exactly what kind of abuse this woman had suffered before she died.
At the sight of it, Qiao Yu seemed to think of something. The fury in his eyes almost took physical form.
Suddenly, his hand was caught by another, one with long, well-defined fingers. Those slender fingers slowly slid between his, prying open the palm he had clenched with all his strength.
The other man’s clean, soft fingertips gently rubbed the crescent marks pressed into his palm. “The dead are already gone.”
Qiao Yu obediently let him do as he pleased, his probing gaze falling on the faint smile at the corner of Shang Yan’s lips.
Right. Shang Yan had always been so gentle with him that Qiao Yu had almost forgotten just how arrogant and indifferent he was toward everyone and everything else.
He really could not understand how someone like this had become the director of the Security Bureau.
It was honestly baffling…
“Let’s go. The people outside should be gone by now.” Shang Yan looked at Qiao Yu’s beautiful face, which had already returned to its original appearance, and led him toward the door.
Still a little dazed, Qiao Yu followed him out of the refrigerated room. The people searching for them had long since vanished, and the silent corridor had returned to the way it was before.
“Where to now?”
Inside the Instance, Shang Yan had always centered everything around Qiao Yu. That indulgence felt like… like back in high school, when he used to supervise him while he did his homework.
Just thinking of that painful memory made Qiao Yu’s whole head hurt!
He looked away and sighed. “Let’s go to the first floor.”
Before they entered the elevator, Shang Yan once again used some unknown superpower to kill the surveillance camera.
The sight suddenly gave Qiao Yu a flash of inspiration. “Have you ever thought about robbing a bank with me?”
Shang Yan: ??
“With that ability of yours, not taking a stroll through a bank would be a tragic waste of talent.”
Shang Yan’s eyelid twitched. “…Qiao Xiaoyu, has it been so long since we last met that the values I worked so hard to instill in you have already collapsed?”
Qiao Yu shrugged. “Relax. It was just a little joke.”
It was not funny. Not even a little.
Shang Yan turned his head away, no longer wanting to look at this headache of a partner.
The two of them walked out of the elevator, outwardly together but inwardly at odds. The hospital lobby was full of people here for treatment, a complete reversal from the empty state it had been in earlier in the Instance.
The television mounted on the lobby wall was broadcasting financial news.
“According to reliable sources, Mr. Zhong Hongyuan, chairman of Dongzhou Solid Wood, has now been transferred to the ICU. Yesterday, senior executives of Yuanyang Consortium stated that their cooperation with Dongzhou Solid Wood is about to be terminated. Dongzhou Solid Wood’s stock market may very well face turbulence in the near future…”
Zhong Hongyuan?
Wasn’t that one of the names on Director Zhou’s patient roster?
He looked out over the hospital lobby, where people came and went, then walked to the entrance, casually pulled a hospital brochure from a stand, and tossed it outside.
A flash of white light passed. As expected, the brochure was annihilated into fine dust…
Yet everyone around him acted as if they were blind. It did not cause the slightest panic.
Qiao Yu withdrew his gaze and stared at the remaining brochures with a cold laugh.
Ningping County First Private Hospital. No terminal illness we can’t cure.
What a load of bullshit. A black-hearted hospital. Fuck you and your smug little slogan.