Chapter 679: Chapter 534: Hospital_2
"Please make sure to confirm that the door is closed before leaving."
Yang Xiao sensed the whiff of danger.
What did this mean?
Was there a real lunatic locked in the room, and this person was very dangerous?
The wooden door didn’t look very sturdy. A piece of cardboard was taped to it. Lifting the cardboard revealed an observation window. Looking through the window into the dimly lit interior, he could only see the faint glow of a cell phone screen.
Being new here, Yang Xiao was completely ignorant of this world. He urgently needed to find clues about his current mission, and this phone was extremely important.
Although he knew that opening the door would pose a certain danger, if he didn’t, who knew if the ringing of the phone would attract something from outside? That would put him in an even more passive position.
The options left for Yang Xiao were miserable: Enter the room to get the phone, stay in the room to wait for death, or open the iron door to take his chances outside.
"Creak—"
Pressing down on the door handle, he gently pushed the door open. The sharp screech of the door hinge made the hairs on the back of Yang Xiao’s neck stand up—this was definitely a negligence on the part of the institution!
Once the door was opened and light spilled in, Yang Xiao quickly entered, snatched the cell phone from the small wooden table with the utmost speed, and to his surprise, the phone was oddly light. The moment he picked it up, the ringing stopped.
On closer inspection, Yang Xiao realized it wasn’t a cell phone at all but a plastic toy phone with a very crude design. The color had peeled off in many places, but it still had a screen and number buttons.
After dealing with the "phone" that made the sound, Yang Xiao’s eyes gradually adjusted to the darkness around him, and now he noticed that not far behind him was an iron bed with someone lying on it, seemingly ill, with an IV stand beside it, several IV tubes hanging in disarray, appearing to be connected to IV bags.
But weirdly enough, the person didn’t move at all, entirely covered by a blanket, with a human-shaped bulge under the white blanket.
With such a commotion failing to awaken this person, Yang Xiao felt increasingly strange. Adhering to the principle of since I’m already here, he tiptoed forward, meanwhile flipping his wrist to take out the Human Bone Staff, and came to the side of the IV stand. Now Yang Xiao could barely make out that none of the IV bottles showed any bubbles rising, meaning no liquid was entering the patient’s body.
"Is this a dead person?" Everybody knows that after a person dies, their blood coagulates, and at that point, the IV can’t be administered anymore.
A cold sweat broke out on Yang Xiao in an instant. Now, he faced two choices: one, to leave immediately, two, to lift the blanket and take a look.
Lifting the blanket could lead to two outcomes: first, underneath would be a dead body, and he could obtain some crucial information from it.
Second, and the point Yang Xiao feared most, underneath the blanket... might be a ghost.
Now was not the time to be outside where he had his good sister and a dedicated "bodyguard" to protect him. If something went wrong, he would have to pay with his life.
After a mental struggle lasting a full ten seconds, Yang Xiao decided to play it safe. He dared not lift the blanket but instead reached out and felt the body through the blanket.
But he got quite a surprise when he touched it, and after a few pats, he simply flipped the blanket open. Indeed, there was no ghost or dead body underneath, but rather a bunch of hospital gowns curled up and arranged in the shape of a person.
At the "person’s" abdomen was a crudely made rag doll, dirty and covered in wounds—some cut by sharp tools, others pierced with needles or burned. Additionally, four needle heads punctured the thin wrists of the rag doll, corresponding to the IV needles.
Yang Xiao was baffled by this scene—giving a rag doll injections, had the patient gone mad, or was it the doctor?
Moreover, behind the rag doll’s chest and several washed-out hospital gowns, he found a string of numbers: 113769.
Besides that, he found nothing here and was very disappointed. It seemed he had no choice but to venture out and take his chances with the iron door.
Time waits for no one; he had to quickly find Qu Muzhi. After hastily restoring the scene, he turned to leave. But before he could walk out of the room, the screen of the toy phone, which had gone dark, suddenly flickered.
"Don’t leave me behind."
After seeing the five words on the screen, Yang Xiao went numb. Almost reflexively, he jumped up and did a 180-degree turn on the spot, facing the hospital bed, "Who? Who’s talking?"
Inside the ward, all was silent—you could hear a pin drop. Yang Xiao waited for a full half-minute, but no sound came.
Taking a deep breath, Yang Xiao stepped forward and slowly lifted the blanket. The rag doll was still lying there quietly, but his pupils involuntarily trembled when he saw that the needles originally stabbed into the rag doll’s wrists had been pulled out and tossed aside.
"Did you... send me the message just now?" Yang Xiao raised the toy phone in his hand and probed the filthy doll.
The doll remained unresponsive, so Yang Xiao began to wonder if there was something wrong with his mode of communication. He picked up the phone and, while staying alert to his surroundings, pressed the buttons to quickly send a message back: Are you the doll on the bed?
Indeed, almost immediately, he received a reply: It’s me. Please don’t leave me. Take me with you!
"Who are you?" Yang Xiao calmed his heart and continued to ask.
"I don’t know. They’ve trapped me here, in this rag doll. They’re the mad ones, they’re devils. They tortured me, treated me, all to find my body. I’ve hidden it."
