Chapter 1

Chapter 1

With the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month coming up, I hadn’t been planning to take any driving jobs lately.

But Peng You, who ran a logistics company, suddenly came to me and said an old abandoned hospital was being demolished, and they urgently needed truck drivers.

The pay was high, and the work wasn’t heavy. A few of my old friends-Dashun, Wang Cheng, and Old Zhang-had already agreed to do it.

I wasn’t particularly interested at first, but when I heard the name of that hospital, I hesitated.

It was the oldest maternal and child hospital in the neighboring city. Locals all called it Maternal and Child Hospital No. 3.

More than twenty years ago, its pediatrics department had been famous far and wide.

If a child from the nearby villages or towns fell seriously ill, the family would sell everything they had if that was what it took to get the child admitted to Hospital No. 3.

But that hospital was also a place my parents and I later refused to even mention.

I agreed to Peng You’s job. That very night, I had a strange dream.

I was walking down a silent, deserted hospital corridor when, all of a sudden, I heard the cry of a baby.

In the dream, it seemed like I had come there specifically to find that child.

Following the sound of the crying, I hurried toward a ward.

But the door to the ward was shut tight. No matter how hard I pushed, it wouldn’t budge.

I peered inside through the narrow window in the door and saw a crib placed right in the middle of the room.

Through the dimness, I could just make out a chubby little hand lifting up, waving back and forth in the air.

Panic rose in me. I desperately wanted to slam the ward door open.

But no matter how much strength I used, the tightly shut door didn’t move an inch.

Just then, I saw a pitch-black shadow slowly approach the crib.

“Your sister was taken by someone-”

A familiar voice rang out abruptly from behind me.

I spun around. This was no longer the hospital corridor. Somehow, I seemed to have returned to the old house back in my hometown.

My mother was sitting on that worn wooden bed, her eyes red as she stared at me, an empty swaddling blanket clutched in her arms.

“Changdong, we can’t find your sister.”

My dream was a jumble. In the blink of an eye, my mother vanished, and my father was standing in front of the bed instead.

There was a trace of panic in his expression as he looked at me, but what he said left me baffled.

Hadn’t my sister gone to the hospital for treatment? How could she be missing?

The next second, it was Uncle Ye, the village chief, standing outside the threshold of our house. “Changdong, your dad called. Your sister might not be doing too well. Come with me to the hospital, and make sure you comfort your mom.”

I stumbled after Uncle Ye out of the house, only to hear my parents’ voices behind me once again.

I whipped around and saw my parents standing together outside the door of our home.

The old couple stared straight at me, their eyes fixed and unblinking, still holding that empty swaddling blanket in their arms-

“Changdong, we can’t find your sister. Go find your sister!”