Chapter 178: Gross Anatomy

The room was dead silent. I stared at the pool in front of me, unable to speak for a long time.

The girl had the flashlight on her phone turned on. Its beam pierced the surface of the water, illuminating the entire pool.

Ripples washed through the pale-yellow liquid as faces stared up at us from bizarre angles.

"Where are we?" It took me about ten seconds to find the words and calm myself down.

The girl's face was taut as she stared at the tank. Her phone had landed right on top of an old man's corpse. The old man was nothing but skin and bones, his arms twisted and his mouth half-open, looking like a fish gasping for air.

She bent over, clearly trying to figure out how to fish her phone out. She tried various methods, even using a rope to tug at the old man's corpse. But the moment she jolted it, the phone slipped off the body and sank to the bottom of the tank.

"Fuck!" she cursed, throwing the rope aside before marching over to me. "I thought you didn't want to come in here. Why do you keep following me?"

The girl's chest heaved with anger, her ample bosom threatening to spill out. I had only ever met one person her age with a figure like that—Zhang Jiaqi.

"Don't panic just yet." I took out the selfie stick I always carried with me, extended it to its maximum length, and stood by the tank, dragging her phone toward the edge of the pool. Just as I reached down to grab it, she caught my arm.

"Don't touch it with your bare hands! This pool is full of formalin." Seeing that I was actually about to grab it, Zhang Jiaqi quickly stopped me. "How are you even more ruthless than I am? Can't you see this entire pool of gross anatomy cadavers?"

"Gross anatomy?"

"It means corpses. We medical students are used to calling them gross anatomy, or gross anatomy teachers. Without their contributions, what would us students practice on? A doctor's life-saving skills are all tested on the dead." Zhang Jiaqi spoke with clear logic, then shot a pained look at the water. "Forget it, it fell in and it's gone. But you have to come with me. After all, it's pitch-black in here and a girl like me doesn't even have a light. Doesn't that make you worry?"

"If it were anyone else, maybe. But you should be perfectly fine." I handed my phone to Zhang Jiaqi. "Now can you answer my questions? Where is this place? Why are you here?"

She toyed with my phone for a moment, then quietly stepped back. "How about this: you answer a few of my questions first, and then I'll answer yours."

"Go ahead," I said calmly, though my mind was racing. On the surface, this girl seemed bold and careless, but in reality, she paid attention to the finer details. She would be very difficult to deal with.

"Only the school's teachers and graduated seniors know about the old campus's west gate. Where did you hear about it?"

"A senior who graduated from your school five years ago told me."

"Then what are you doing here? You didn't even blink when faced with these corpses. An ordinary person wouldn't be able to do that." Zhang Jiaqi's tone was aggressive, but with every question she asked, she naturally edged half a step toward the door. It looked like she was ready to bolt at the first sign of trouble.

"I'm not afraid of corpses because I used to work at a crematorium. And the reason I came here is this." I held up the Large-Screen Phone in my hand. "Have you ever watched paranormal outdoor streamers?"

"You're an internet celebrity?" Zhang Jiaqi was dumbfounded. This was completely different from what she had imagined.

She walked over to my side and looked at the Underworld Live Show Phone in my hand, which was currently broadcasting. This girl had a very prominent figure, so the moment she appeared on screen, she sparked a heated discussion among the livestream viewers.

"Holy shit, it's blinding! So dazzling!"

"Caught off guard by the sudden fan service, good job Streamer!"

"I can't take it! Support, quickly give me a heal!"

"Halt! You large-chested fiend, eat my staff!"

I pointed at the bullet comments flying across the screen. "Sorry, although my livestream viewers have no morals, talk dirty, and love to make lewd jokes, they are my supporters after all. Because of that, I fulfill most of their requests. Coming here to stream tonight was suggested by one of my livestream viewers."

"That senior you mentioned, the one who graduated from our school five years ago, is one of your livestream viewers?"

"Yeah." I gave a firm nod. "He was the one who told me about the old campus's west gate."

Zhang Jiaqi revealed a look of realization. "No wonder."

She eyed me as if observing a rare creature. "At first I thought you were here to steal the gross anatomy cadavers, but it turns out you're just an outdoor streamer."

"Steal corpses? Are these bodies worth a lot of money?" I looked at the pool illuminated by the phone. Just one glance at those soaked specimens made my skin crawl.

"Did you think you could just soak any random corpse in formalin and make a specimen out of it?" Zhang Jiaqi pursed her lips toward the tank. "Most of the corpses in the medical school are physically intact, with no obvious signs of violent trauma, and they've undergone professional embalming. Even the cheap ones cost over five thousand."

"I heard your corpses are all death row inmates from prisons or homeless people. How could they sell for so much?" For some reason, my thoughts drifted to the Xinhu High School Incineration Trench, which was filled with a pile of charred corpses.

"You're an amateur. Before lethal injection was implemented, it was all firing squads. Who would want a body with its head blown to pieces?" Zhang Jiaqi's attitude toward the corpses was strange; she didn't fear them and didn't mock them, maintaining a unique sense of respect. "Most of the corpses were bought by the school's teachers from remote mountain villages, and a portion of them are donated. In short, every single gross anatomy cadaver here was hard to come by."

I nodded in deep agreement. "You're done asking your questions. Isn't it time to answer mine? Why didn't you return to your dorm for the night, and instead run over here alone to fish for bodies?"

Her demeanor completely changed. Zhang Jiaqi hesitated for a long while before finally speaking up. "The West Campus used to be the underground corpse repository for the entire school. You definitely won't believe me if I say I came here looking for someone, but that's the truth."

"Coming to an underground corpse repository? Looking for someone?!" I repeated her words. The statement itself was inherently contradictory.

"Don't be so quick to doubt me, let me explain it to you slowly." Zhang Jiaqi signaled for me to leave the room with her. The smell of formalin inside was simply too pungent.

"I'm the only student majoring in human anatomy at this school. How should I describe our major? Anyway, it's just really unpopular." She walked out into the corridor with me. "My mentor is Liu Xuan. She is thirty-five years old this year, a professor of anatomy and bio-engineering. She is beautiful and gentle, and her professional skills are the best in the entire school. Pay attention to my wording—the best. Compared to her, the other teachers are at least a few levels lower."

"Listening to your tone, she must have been in some kind of accident," I said, interrupting Zhang Jiaqi's attempt at a long speech to get her straight to the point.

"Yeah. Starting last month, Teacher Liu became extremely strange. She stopped teaching her classes properly, and most of the time, she wouldn't even speak."

"And then what?" I vaguely felt like I had grasped something and couldn't wait to ask.

"A week ago, Teacher Liu went missing. At the time, it seemed that Jiangcheng had a shortage of police officers, so they only sent two young cops over to take some basic notes and conduct a preliminary scene investigation. Afterward, the matter was just left unsettled, and there's been no news of her to this day."

"Then her family should be the ones worrying the most. It shouldn't fall to a student like you, right?"

Zhang Jiaqi spread her hands helplessly. "If Teacher Liu had family, the police probably wouldn't have brushed it off so easily. Teacher Liu Xuan is an orphan, and her husband disappeared even before she did."

"Disappeared?"

"Yeah, you could say that the couple went missing one after the other."

Hearing this, I narrowed my eyes. It seemed that the prompts from the Underworld Live Show Phone could be connected to this livestream venue.

'If that's the case, the task for this livestream is very likely to find the missing female teacher,' I pondered carefully, piecing together the fragmented information in my mind.

"Teacher has no family, and the police aren't willing to step in, so her student has to take action personally." Zhang Jiaqi walked ahead holding the phone, then revealed another very important piece of information. "In the few days before Teacher Liu went missing, she stopped teaching class. Whenever she had free time, she would head to the sealed-off West Campus. She even told me to keep it a secret and not to tell anyone."

"I didn't think it was strange at the time, because the best-preserved gross anatomy cadavers in our school are kept in the West Campus. I thought she was just doing experiments. But who would have known, she went out one night and never came back."