Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Manager Liu came out with his men. When he saw me, he seemed to freeze for a second, then smiled and stepped forward to shake my hand. “Just call me Liu Wu. We’ll be troubling you for the next few days.”

He was dressed very respectably, with white silk gloves on, and he spoke with polished courtesy. He really didn’t look like someone from a construction site.

Most of the men he brought with him wore blue work uniforms, their faces expressionless.

They carried more than twenty heavy wooden crates out of that building. Each one was covered with canvas, so I couldn’t tell what was inside.

“The trip is a bit far, but there’s only one run today. Thanks for your hard work, everyone.”

Only then did Liu Wu hand me the exact delivery address.

Before this, Peng You had only told me it would be a five-hour round trip and that the job wasn’t difficult, so I hadn’t asked much.

When I saw the address, I was a little surprised. It wasn’t some construction materials processing center or a junkyard. It was another hospital.

While we were loading the truck, I quietly looked up the hospital.

It was a private hospital near a resort area. From the photos, it looked extremely luxurious, clearly not the kind of place that served ordinary people.

Could Wang Cheng really have guessed it? Had these people bought some kind of medical equipment from Maternal and Child Hospital No. 3?

But Maternal and Child Hospital No. 3 was an old hospital, and it had been abandoned for so long. What equipment could it possibly have that was still worth buying?

Those heavy crates were loaded onto our trucks with the utmost care.

Liu Wu repeatedly reminded us to drive slowly and be careful on the road.

I thought that would be the end of it, but after the men in blue work uniforms withdrew, several men in black jackets showed up.

With a faint smile, Liu Wu explained to us that these men would be riding along to escort the cargo.

That was basically saying he didn’t trust us. The delivery was only a little over two hours one way. Was an escort really necessary?

“What’s with all the secrecy? Who even cares about your pile of junk?” Wang Cheng muttered off to the side again, and Old Zhang secretly elbowed him.

The young man who got into my truck was named Shi Kang. His face was wooden, and he showed almost no expression the whole time.

I tried to strike up a conversation with him, hoping I might get something out of him, but he wouldn’t answer at all. He acted as if everyone around him was beneath his notice.

The trip went smoothly. When we reached the area near the hospital, we could see stretches of golf courses, as well as villas built along the hillside. The environment was really quite nice.

The hospital was called Ruihe. It was a general hospital, but not many locals seemed to know about it. It occupied a large area and was surrounded by vast greenery.

Our truck drove in through the back gate. Unlike the gleaming, impressive hospital buildings at the front, this entrance was much more understated.

Shi Kang had me stop in front of a laboratory building. It was an extremely unremarkable four-story structure.

It stood alone at the foot of a slope, set some distance away from the other buildings in the hospital complex.

Liu Wu’s workers were already waiting there. As soon as our truck stopped, they gathered around and began carefully unloading the crates.

I got out and went under a tree to smoke and rest for a bit. Wang Cheng and the others’ trucks arrived one after another as well.

After getting out, several of them were cursing under their breath. Clearly, the people Liu Wu had sent along were all the same-arrogant and unwilling to talk to anyone.

I was wondering just how expensive a hospital like this had to be when, out of the corner of my eye, a fleeting shadow caught my attention.

I walked around the front of the truck and looked to the side. There, I saw a thin, bony little leg slip toward the back of the vehicle.

I hurried after it. Before I could even get a clear look at the person, I heard Shi Kang let out an extremely sharp shout: “What are you doing? Get lost-”

I walked over and saw, to my surprise, a little boy in a hospital gown!