Mu Ke’s memory was not exaggerated to that extent.
Having him read through an entire bookshelf and remember it flawlessly within fifteen minutes was impossible. Even with a photographic memory, he could not turn pages that quickly, much less memorize them at that speed.
To locate all the notes and clues hidden throughout so many books, even with Mu Ke’s memory—which was already exceptional among ordinary people—he had told Bai Liu he would need at least one full night.
But how could Mu Ke safely remain in the ICU for an entire night?
Thinking back to the plan Bai Liu had discussed with him, Mu Ke looked at Miao Feichi with sincere, earnest pleading in his eyes.
“I can’t break into the ICU alone, but I can memorize the contents inside in a very short amount of time. You can break in, so wouldn’t bringing me along make the perfect combination? You provide the force, and I provide the memory. There’s no better pairing than that.”
Miao Feichi stared at Mu Ke for a moment, expression unreadable.
Then he suddenly let out a cold snort.
“You didn’t come crawling to us just for this, did you?”
Mu Ke lowered his head without answering. He fidgeted with his fingers, looking timid and shrunken.
“You say you can speed-read and memorize, and we’re just supposed to believe you?” Miao Feichi glanced at Miao Gaojiang, his tone carrying a faint trace of displeasure. “An ordinary player actually dares think of using us... Fine. Dad, test his speed-memorization ability. If he really can remember, we’ll take him when we storm the ICU at nine tonight.”
Miao Gaojiang glanced at Mu Ke and waved a hand.
“Come with me.”
Mu Ke drew in a deep breath, nodded, and followed.
—
8:30 p.m.
First floor of the hospital.
Miao Feichi and Miao Gaojiang’s confinement lasted until six in the evening. After six, the nurses permitted the two of them to leave their rooms for activities.
Mu Ke passed Miao Gaojiang’s memory test.
He could even remember the page numbers and footnotes of every page he had read. To a ❀ Nоvеlігht ❀ (Don’t copy, read here) certain extent, this shocked Miao Gaojiang. He had never encountered a natural-born genius like Mu Ke before.
After all, Miao Feichi had been an academic failure since childhood—the kind who could not even have entered high school without money being thrown at the problem.
Miao Gaojiang had never known children like Mu Ke existed in the world.
At 7:30, the two of them came downstairs for dinner and began discussing how to attack the ICU.
The discussion was extremely simple.
Miao Feichi: “I’ll attack.”
Miao Gaojiang: “You’ll kite?”
Miao Feichi: “Same old rules. How many phases do you open with?”
Miao Gaojiang: “Same as you. With Bai Liu and that ICU monster together, if we’re fast, it should be over in about three minutes.”
Their tacit cooperation, built over countless games, meant there was no need to explain the specific offensive process in detail.
Moreover, they had farmed this type of Level 2 instance monster countless times before. A few casual sentences were enough for them to determine each other’s positions.
Mu Ke listened nearby with his ears practically stretched to their limit, but he still could not understand what the two were actually communicating.
He was so angry his teeth nearly cracked.
Could these two not speak normal human language for once?
When he thought of Bai Liu, severely injured yet still forcing himself to remain conscious enough to give him mission instructions through keycaps, Mu Ke’s anger was mixed with a faint, sour envy toward the father and son’s seamless understanding.
If only he and Bai Liu had that kind of father-son-like rapport too...
Mu Ke thought this with a trace of melancholy.
8:55 p.m.
The nurses on the first floor began leaving the wards and corridors one after another, heading toward the nurses’ station. They had to conduct a fifteen-minute shift handover report.
Miao Feichi and Miao Gaojiang exchanged a look of tacit understanding, picked up their weapons, and began moving inconspicuously toward the ICU.
There was still one nurse inside the ICU checking the patients’ ventilators.
After taking Bai Liu’s temperature and the other patient’s temperature one final time, the last nurse also left the ICU under the urging of the others.
She closed the ICU door behind her.
8:57 p.m.
The moment the nurse entered the nurses’ station and shut the door, Miao Feichi flicked out his twin blades, his voice dropping.
“I’ll pick the lock. You two follow me in.”
Miao Feichi’s twin blades were a pair of long, sharply curved knives. They arced almost like crescent moons, so they had a rather elegant name:
Crescent Moon Twin Blades.
However, Bai Liu had grown up in a welfare home. He and Lu Yizhan sometimes had to do farm work, whether as so-called experiential activities or simply out of necessity—such as cutting pig fodder.
So Bai Liu had no poetic associations with weapons shaped like that.
Whenever he saw this type of knife, he called it by only one name:
Pig-Fodder Knife.
And when Bai Liu had discussed the plan with Mu Ke, that was exactly what he called them.
Miao Feichi’s Pig-Fodder Knives.
His tone had been so matter-of-fact that Mu Ke genuinely believed that was the weapon’s actual name.
So when Mu Ke saw Miao Feichi crouching by the door, carefully inserting the tip of one curved blade into the keyhole and trying to pick the lock without alerting the nurses, he could not help asking in confusion:
“Why are you using a Pig-Fodder Knife to pick the lock? Couldn’t you buy a lock-picking item from the system?”
The moment that name came out, both Miao Feichi and Miao Gaojiang’s expressions twisted.
Miao Feichi had always been proud of the high attack power of his twin curved blades. Now, hearing Mu Ke describe them as Pig-Fodder Knives, he was so furious he could barely speak properly.
“Who the fuck said these are pig-fucking knives?!”
Mu Ke was shocked.
“These knives can even fuck pigs?!”
What exactly did these people usually do to pigs?
Mu Ke was a truly sheltered young shàoyé. He knew nothing about farm work. So when others told him the names and functions of farm tools or knives, he believed them.
He genuinely thought perhaps Miao Feichi really did use knives to fuck pigs.
After all, this person ate human flesh. What other perverted things could he possibly be incapable of?
Seeing Miao Feichi about to explode with rage, Miao Gaojiang quickly held him back.
But Miao Gaojiang had actually done farm work before.
Now that Mu Ke had pointed it out, he realized that the blades really did look a bit like pig-fodder knives.
Of course, he absolutely could not say that aloud, or Miao Feichi would explode on the spot. His son clearly only accepted the name Crescent Moon Twin Blades.
Miao Gaojiang patted the trembling, enraged Miao Feichi on the back and gave Mu Ke a stern warning look.
But because his mind had also been filled with the image of pig-fodder knives, what came out of his mouth was:
“These aren’t Pig-Fodder Knives. These are the Pig-Riding Twin Blades.”
Miao Gaojiang, realizing he had also misspoken: “...”
Mu Ke’s pupils trembled.
“You people even do it with two at once?!”
For a brief instant, an image nearly formed in his mind.
Miao Feichi’s hand jerked violently from rage, and the curved blade stabbed straight through the lock, forcing the door open.
He lowered his voice and roared, “These are not Pig-Fodder Knives! These are my Fu— Crescent Moon Twin Blades! The damage on these blades is extremely high. They’re my skill-derived weapon, rated A+, and when fully unleashed they can reach S- rank. Killing you would take seconds. Using them to pick a lock is much faster than buying some lock-picking item, dumbass!”
Miao Feichi glared fiercely at Mu Ke, gritting his teeth as he continued, “Pig-Fodder Knife? You actually dared say that. Weapons with this level of damage and judgment value are rare in the entire game. Among you newbies, only Mu Shicheng’s skill judgment can block a single strike from these blades.”
With a cold laugh, Miao Feichi pushed open the ICU door and turned to give Mu Ke a vicious middle finger.
“Your brain had better be as useful as you claimed. Otherwise, Lao Zi will kill you later.”
Mu Ke tactfully fell silent and stopped provoking him.
The ICU door slowly opened into the hospital’s misty night.
There seemed to be even more humidifiers inside the ICU than in the ordinary wards. White vapor sprayed everywhere, turning the entire room into a foggy realm where visibility did not extend beyond one meter.
Two hospital beds loomed through the white mist.
The people lying on them were covered with white sheets. Even the rise and fall of their breathing was faint.
Long, thin, emaciated limbs protruded from beneath the sheets, hanging down beside the beds.
Two people with identical faces lay quietly on the beds.
Their faces were elongated and deathly pale. The bags beneath their eyes sagged all the way to their cheekbones. Small mushroom-like patches of decay dotted their skin, making them look like corpses laid out in a morgue.
The soundproofing in the ICU was excellent.
Miao Feichi closed the door behind them to prevent any sound from leaking out. Then he kicked Mu Ke with an overbearing air.
“Get over to the bookshelf and read.”
Mu Ke lowered his head and answered quietly.
Gritting his teeth, he moved to the bookshelf and began frantically flipping through books beneath the dim light.
His heart was trembling.
The plan was about to begin.
His gaze swept very faintly over the hands of the two patients hanging outside the white sheets.
One of them seemed to have something caught between his fingers.
Mu Ke withdrew his gaze and made a swift judgment.
The patient lying on the outer bed was Bai Liu.
But he remembered that when Bai Liu had been pushed in, he had been placed on the inner bed of the ICU.
Had Bai Liu done something while he was alone in this room?
Miao Gaojiang leaned forward slightly to observe the two patients.
He frowned.
“The monsters haven’t been triggered by us. Then there’s no need to fight them.”
“Even if we don’t fight the monsters, Bai Liu still has to die.” Miao Feichi narrowed his eyes, his malicious gaze sweeping between the two beds.
But soon, he frowned.
“Which one is Bai Liu? These two look exactly the same. I remember when Bai Liu was wheeled in, there was still a difference. He was shorter than the patient on the other bed.”
“And Bai Liu didn’t have these spots on his skin before,” Miao Gaojiang added after observing for a moment.
But very quickly, this experienced veteran player reached a conclusion.
“Bai Liu must have begun alienating. It was probably caused by spending the whole day in the ICU with this critically ill monster. After losing so much blood, his HP is extremely low, and his resistance from Mental Value must have weakened. He was most likely alienated by the patient monster.”
“He already looks like this.” Miao Gaojiang pointed at the two skeletal figures on the hospital beds. “Do you still want to eat Bai Liu’s flesh?”
Miao Feichi frowned in disgust.
“Forget it. I’ll eat Bai Six instead. This one is too disgusting. He reminds me of the woman who gave birth to me. She was a critically ill patient too, and she tasted awful.”
Miao Gaojiang was silent for a moment.
Then he asked, “So which patient do we kill?”
“Both.”
Miao Feichi’s gaze darkened.
The twin blades settled into his hands. He weighed them lightly and smiled with sinister amusement.
“Killing one extra won’t take much effort. Better to kill the wrong one than let him get away.”
[System Notification: Player Miao Feichi has used his personal skill weapon: Crescent Moon Twin Blades.]
[Rating: A+ potential, S-rank skill weapon. Average attack: 3100. One-hit kill against players below B rank.]
