Chapter 118: Buffet Hospital
Bai Yu didn’t want to have anything to do with Lu Liangting anymore, mainly because his identity was too sensitive. She had worried before that Lu Liangting’s status would affect Zhao Mingyue, the female protagonist, but now that was certainly no longer an issue. However, another problem reared its head.
Considering the other game participants, she had to do her best to avoid contact with Lu Liangting.
To the other players, Lu Liangting was like a reverse scale—an absolute no-go. He was their only hope to clear the game.
They probably all knew by now that she had Zhao Mingyue under her thumb, so while they might not go after Zhao Mingyue directly, they absolutely wouldn’t tolerate her getting too cozy with Lu Liangting.
Better safe than sorry, right?
If even just a hint appeared, these players would jump at the chance to take Zhao Mingyue down, even if it meant turning against her.
Though Bai Yu knew that Lu Liangting’s thoughts were currently not focused on Zhao Mingyue; it seemed the male protagonist might have wandered off course a bit.
What she didn’t know was that Lu Liangting had arrived at the Fourth Hospital long before her.
Meanwhile, inside the hospital…
“Be careful, there are a lot of ghosts hiding around here.” Shen Shuyun advanced cautiously, scrutinizing the surrounding environment.
They were on the first floor of Hospital Building No. 1, right in front of the main entrance.
The visibility inside the hospital was nearly non-existent; it was shadowy and foreboding.
According to the intel that Lu Liangting had gathered, this hospital had been abandoned for ten years. It was originally a psychiatric hospital that had been transformed into a regular hospital after some renovations. Ever since then, strange incidents had been reported.
Patients would inexplicably vanish from their rooms, even those with locked windows.
Surveillance footage didn’t capture these patients leaving. Only a black shadow was left behind on the wall, and the other three patients refused to say a word, panicked as they muttered about something coming to get them, but couldn’t explain what it was.
After the hospital tried to brush the incident under the rug, it took less than a week for another occurrence: another patient vanished into thin air, leaving behind an unremovable black shadow on the wall.
The hospital checked the security footage only to see the door of the patient’s room turn the handle by itself at 1 AM, but the patient never walked out.
There was another bizarre incident involving a nurse. The hospital had elevators for transporting corpses since there were three floors up and three down. One night, this nurse went down to the third basement floor to retrieve something, which happened to be the morgue.
However, when she entered the elevator and pressed the button for the third floor, the display showed she was going to the fourth basement.
Freaked out by the strange floor, she pressed buttons frantically, but the elevator wouldn’t stop.
When the elevator finally came to a halt, she found that the so-called fourth floor looked almost exactly like the third-floor morgue, except for some slight differences she couldn’t quite place. She assumed it was just a malfunction.
But when she stepped out, she soon realized what the problem was.
All the corpses in the morgue were missing…
Even the drawers had been opened, and the bodies were nowhere to be found.
There were clear footprints on the floor, and items had been knocked over; even the white sheet on the morgue table had been tossed to the ground.
Everything was stimulating the nurse’s senses, and she let out a sharp scream as the lights suddenly went out, leaving only the dim glow of emergency lights.
She wanted to leave, but the elevator doors had closed. To make matters worse, the previously silent hallway began to echo with heavy footsteps approaching.
Terrified, the nurse barricaded the door with a morgue cabinet, and soon the outside thing started banging on the door.
Fortunately, the elevator doors finally opened, allowing the nurse to escape just before the door was breached. Otherwise, Lu Liangting wouldn’t have been able to hear this story.
There’s a little detail: when the nurse left, the elevator had appeared full even though she was the only one inside.
Similar incidents piled up, ultimately leading to the hospital’s closure.
In the hospital, Lu Liangting and his two companions armed with flashlights found that most of the hospital equipment had been cleared out, leaving behind only a few tables, chairs, patient gowns, and some bedding.
They barely explored the first floor before heading right up to the second, primarily because of a medical record.
“206, this is it.”
Lu Liangting shone his flashlight into the room, and just as they stepped inside, the door slammed shut behind them. From under the bed, a pale arm shot out and grabbed Lu Liangting’s ankle, sending a chilling sensation straight to his core. Startled, he quickly shook off the icy grip and took a few steps back.
Shen Shuyun and Zhizi turned to look, as Lu Liangting pointed his flashlight under the bed, frowning as he caught a glimpse of his ankle and then slowly bent down to take a closer look.
Something was under the bed.
As soon as he leaned down, he spotted a ghostly figure, its decomposed skin crawling in a curled-up position.
Their eyes met, and the ghost reacted even more dramatically than Lu Liangting; his face turned to sheer terror, frantically shaking his head. His lips moved, but no sound came out, and in the blink of an eye, a withered hand, gnarled like a dried branch, shot out from behind the ghost and covered its mouth. In a heartbeat, the ghost was dragged into the darkness.
Lu Liangting’s pupils dilated; that ghost seemed to be saying, “Run. They’re coming.”
“Who are they referring to?” Lu Liangting recalled something, glancing at the time. “It’s seven o’clock…”
Seven o’clock meant it was time for the nurses to distribute medication.
No sooner had he voiced this than footsteps echoed from outside, and to make matters worse, those footsteps were quickly approaching their location.
Three seconds later, bang! The door to the ward shook, and a distorted face with features too jumbled to recognize pressed against the small window, its milky-white eyes scanning the room.
Lu Liangting and his crew pressed against the wall beside the door, perfectly avoiding its gaze.
Lu Liangting’s expression hardened; he was certain the thing outside was wearing a red dress.
How much time had passed? Gradually, the black smoke seeping through the door dwindled away, and the footsteps receded.
Lu Liangting let out a sigh of relief, stood up, and leaned toward the small window to peer out. The next moment, he nearly gasped as a rotting, twisted face was just inches away from his own, separated only by a thin pane of glass.
“Darn it.”
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Zhao Mingyue entered the hospital building, her backpack slung over one shoulder, flashlight in one hand, and her magical girl’s wand in the other.
“This hospital used to collaborate with the criminal police. Some corpses from cases or unclaimed remains were supposedly stored here. According to what I found online, it seems there used to be mass graves here, which were then covered by the construction of a psychiatric hospital.”
“Ultimately, they turned that psychiatric hospital into a proper hospital.”
“Some online reports say that this psychiatric hospital abused patients, and many were even tortured to d*ath. The spirits of these poor souls then transformed into evil ghosts, roaming the halls of this hospital.”
Zhao Mingyue explained all this to Bai Yu in her head, mainly because talking to someone, even mentally, gave her some courage.
She couldn’t hold on to the Rabbit Plush Toy all the time; besides, she felt she shouldn’t overly rely on the toy for bravery. Only by honing her own courage could she truly grow stronger. Furthermore, once she built up her own courage, embracing the Rabbit Plush Toy would surely amplify the effects.
The lobby of the hospital was eerily spacious; a brief glance revealed only a few chairs, a hospital bed, and a wheelchair.
Dust and cobwebs clung to everything. The portraits of doctors hanging on the walls looked particularly sinister; without their color, they loomed like wide-eyed post-mortem photos, glaring at you as you entered.
After stepping in, Zhao Mingyue didn’t find anything useful.
Most of the medical files or patient records on the ground had turned yellow and decayed with time, rendering them unreadable, leaving barely recognizable names and faces.
Reaching the center of the lobby, she stopped in front of the wheelchair. Shining her flashlight on it, she lightly brushed her fingers across the armrest, her expression twisting into a frown.
The wheelchair was surprisingly clean—at least compared to the rest of the dilapidated lobby. It had only a thin layer of dust on it, as if someone had just used it a few days ago.
“What’s this?”
Zhao Mingyue picked up a note from the wheelchair that looked far older, already yellowing but still readable. It seemed to have been torn from a notebook.
“Dr. Sun is looking for me again. He said I better cooperate with the treatment, or he would take me to that place.”
“No, I absolutely cannot agree to this demon’s demands. He wants to k*ll me; he must be plotting to get rid of me and be with my wife. My child is the product of his affair with my wife; I know, I’ve known all along. Don’t try to trick me!”
“Wait, who is my wife?”
“My wife…”
“I don’t seem to have a wife.”
“No, it’s all an illusion. I have a lovely wife who loves me dearly!”
“Am I supposed to take the medication from those demons? What will I become after taking it?”
“But I’m even more afraid of going to that place. Chen Hua went and never returned, neither did Wang Xian.”
“……”
“I will not compromise!”
“Dr. Sun wants me to take my medication by seven, have dinner in my room by 7:30, read from eight to nine-thirty, and then go out to exercise until eleven. At eleven, he’ll check back on me to supervise my medication…”
“After 11:30, it’s time for freedom, I must seize the opportunity to escape.”
“12 o’clock is when there are the fewest people outside. The nurses aren’t in the rooms then.”
“d*mn it, they must have guessed my intentions! It’s too dark outside to find my way out.”
“They’re all evil ghosts in human skin. I’m going to d*e here.”
“Dr. Sun is in the office at the end of the first floor, I must make the first move; otherwise, he will team up with that damned woman to k*ll me. I’ve uncovered their affair!”
“I have no wife; who are you? Don’t talk to me!”
The words on this paper seemed a bit mad; Zhao Mingyue couldn’t fathom what mental state the writer was in when they penned this. But despite its madness, the handwriting was impressively clear and organized, showing no signs of mental chaos.
Particularly towards the end, Zhao Mingyue began to question this timetable: was it day or night?
At first glance, it seemed like the normal daytime routine: taking medications, washing up, having meals, reading, and exercising, then resuming medication until lunch.
Yet, this person also mentioned that the fewest staff would be around at midnight—if it referred to midday, there would be plenty of people, and only at midnight would there be a lack of staff.
Then, the claim that once outside, the world was too dark to see the means of escape only confirmed her suspicion it was nighttime.
In this literary puzzle, Zhao Mingyue had a strong feeling the patient was completely turned around about the night-and-day cycle, but how could that be? Staying in a hospital isn’t a total lockdown—surely, they wouldn’t have been entirely cut off from the outside world?
Were the doctors just bored, deeming their conditions too mild, thinking that putting them through such arduous tasks would be productive?
“Dr. Sun, first-floor office…”
Zhao Mingyue tucked away the yellowed paper and looked towards the hallways stretching out to the left and right of the lobby.
Left or right?
“This hospital is too strange. Let’s go left—process of elimination.”
Making up her mind, Zhao Mingyue stood and walked down the left hallway, checking her watch; it was already 7:20. According to that patient’s schedule, it should be around the time when the hospital staff delivered meals.
No sooner had that thought crossed her mind than she reached the end of the left hallway to see something wobbling toward her.
It was a little cart carrying who-knows-what, and the cart’s operator? A bloated figure in a white uniform, head lowered, flesh seemingly fused with the fabric, was pushing the cart.
There were eight rooms in total, and the ghostly figure pushed the cart, creaking and groaning as it moved through the silent hospital. It moved at a slow, steady pace, placing a plate of some unidentifiable object at each room’s entrance. Mere seconds after it set down a dish, a dark arm would reach out and snatch it back inside the room.
Zhao Mingyue stood frozen, waiting for the cart to creak closer, gripping her magic wand tightly.
Her heart raced. This hospital was being far from accommodating, throwing her for a loop right at the start.
She wondered if this place was similar to Ping Shan village.
The rooms all contained some lurking dread, like a ghost domain where spirits were bred like cattle for slaughter.
If that was the case, how many ghosts would they have to battle?
That was certainly terrifically terrifying…
Bai Yu would probably never eat all of that.
“Bai Yu, how’s your appetite right now?”
“Pretty okay.”
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At five o’clock, same old story.
And then the campaign for votes continued, letting out little whines~
P.S. This took slightly longer to write; I’ll do my best to make up for it with updates!
