Chapter 320: Chapter 320: Borrowing a Phone
The wooden cabin was not small, roughly thirty or forty square meters in size. This space was partitioned into six small stalls, and on the wooden bed in each stall lay a person. They were all bound to the beds with ropes and gagged. Some lay completely still, while others writhed and struggled in agony.
Without exception, every single one of them was sallow and emaciated. Their skin, to varying degrees, was festering and rotting, with stark white bone even showing through in some places.
Looking at this scene, which could only be described as a living hell, Su Qing couldn’t help but grit her teeth. She had thought that after surviving the apocalypse, her heart had become incomparably hard. She even knew that the people captured and brought here to be used as test subjects would surely be subjected to endless torture. But seeing it with her own eyes, she couldn’t stop the rage that flared up from the bottom of her heart.
’These evildoers truly deserve to be drawn and quartered!’
Gritting her teeth, Su Qing once again directed her vines to scout the other wooden cabins. Most of them held more captives, but one or two were filled with all sorts of test tubes, distillers, and other laboratory equipment. Clearly, this was where those people conducted their research.
In one of the cabins, there were several small vials containing either powders or capsules. Su Qing quietly took a few samples before silently departing the area.
Since she no longer had to avoid people and it was the dead of night with no one around, Su Qing made her way out of the mountains very quickly. When she reached the outskirts of the mountain range, she took a deep breath. The scenes she had witnessed inside flashed through her mind, and she squeezed her eyes shut.
She hadn’t found Wang Xuehong in any of those cabins.
’Or perhaps... I did see her, but all of them were so tortured they were barely human anymore. Maybe I just didn’t recognize her?’
But no matter what, this place had to be dismantled as soon as possible. If their experiments succeeded, there was no telling how many more people would fall victim to them.
The only question was, who should she report this to now?
Su Qing remembered Qiao Wensong saying that the Yun Province police and the Guang City police were currently conducting a joint investigation into this case. With that in mind, Su Qing traveled through the night to the nearest town and went straight to the local police station.
"Comrade, do you need help with something?" Seeing Su Qing arrive at the station so late at night, the officer on duty asked immediately.
"Could I borrow your station’s telephone? I have something extremely important to report over the phone as soon as possible," Su Qing asked urgently.
Su Qing had no other choice. In this era, telephones were far too rare. There were no cell phones. Only post offices and some of the larger guesthouses had phones, and besides them, the police station. This town was so small that its guesthouse didn’t have one. Besides, the police station’s phone was safer; after all, they were part of the same system.
Hearing Su Qing’s request, the on-duty officer couldn’t help but frown slightly. He never would have imagined that the young woman before him had come to borrow their phone. This had never happened before. Moreover, how could they just lend out the station’s phone? If they did, wouldn’t it lead to chaos?
"Comrade, our station’s telephone is for internal use. It is not available for public use," the officer said.
"I’m here to report a crime."
"Report a crime?" Hearing this, the officer quickly said, "If you need to report a crime, you can do it right here with me. Did you lose something, or did something else happen?"
As he spoke, the officer quickly opened his notebook and said to Su Qing, "Comrade, please tell me about the case you wish to report."
Su Qing quickly replied, "Officer, the case I need to report is huge. You won’t be able to handle it here."
"What!" The officer looked up at Su Qing in surprise. "What kind of case is it?"
The officer had assumed Su Qing was going to report some petty theft or a neighborhood dispute. Their town was small; in his years of work, he had never encountered a major case. But hearing Su Qing’s words, his heart skipped a beat. Looking into her eyes, he had a strange feeling she wasn’t lying.
"I have to say it over the phone," Su Qing said, not explaining further. She wasn’t sure if the people from Xiangcheng who set up the lab in the nearby mountains had bribed anyone locally, like someone to act as a lookout for them.
"Where do you need to call?" the officer asked quickly.
"Chuncheng," Su Qing replied without hiding anything.
"Well, I’ll have to ask my superior about this." It was the first time he had encountered such a situation, so the on-duty officer didn’t dare make the decision himself.
"Officer, this is extremely urgent. Please just let me use the phone first. I’m not going to run away. After you hear what I have to say, it won’t be too late to tell your superior," Su Qing urged.
"That’s against regulations," the officer said with a frown.
’In the middle of the night, a young woman suddenly bursts in, says she wants to report a crime by phone, but refuses to report it to our station... What if she uses our phone to pass on some kind of secret message?’
’You have to remember, spies are rampant these days. What if one decided to act contrary to expectations, hiding in plain sight right under our noses?’
The on-duty officer spoke to Su Qing with a serious expression, "Comrade, if you want to report a crime, you must first make a record with me. If we are unable to handle it, we will naturally report it to a higher authority."
"Then you leave me no choice." Su Qing waved a hand toward the officer, and a puff of gray mist shot toward his face. Of course, the gray mist was mixed with some powder to avoid having to explain things later.
"You!" The officer was aghast, never dreaming that Su Qing would suddenly make a move. He only managed to say a single word before he slumped forward, unconscious, onto the desk.
"What are you doing!" Just then, another officer walked in from outside. Seeing Su Qing attack his colleague, he immediately reached for his back hip.
’My God, someone’s openly attacking a police officer in a police station in the middle of the night!’
’This is outrageous!’
However, before he could even act, Su Qing took him down as well.
Su Qing quietly apologized to the two unconscious officers, then helped the second one onto the desk as well. After confirming there was no one else in the station, she went to make the call. She had already identified the room with the telephone when she first entered.
Soon, Su Qing had connected to the Chuncheng Public Security Bureau. Only an officer on duty was there; Qiao Wensong was not present. Su Qing gave her name and asked the officer to find Qiao Wensong and have him return to take the call as soon as possible.
Su Qing was quite famous at the Chuncheng Public Security Bureau. The moment the officer on the other end heard her name, he immediately went to Qiao Wensong’s home to find him.
About twenty minutes later, the police station’s phone rang. Qiao Wensong’s voice came from the other side. "Su Qing, you were looking for me. What happened?"
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