Chapter 190: The Lover's Head (1)

The woman in the white coat's offhand remark perfectly matched the story the boy had told me earlier. On that night when the boy was home alone, the thing he had turned around to see wasn't a cat at all, but this woman sneaking into his room.

'The disappearance of pet cats and dogs, followed closely by missing children—this is exactly what that man said on the phone when the Underworld Live Show Mission started,' I thought. I cracked my eyelids open just a sliver and looked at the back of the white coat. Short and petite, it had to be a woman.

'Before the broadcast started, the man gave plenty of clues over the phone. A wife acting out of character, the faint smell of blood, animal hair, and formalin.' Piecing it all together, I conjured the image of a madwoman in my mind: perfectly normal in public, but cruel and twisted in the shadows.

After the woman in the white coat walked out, the child quickly stopped crying. I could faintly hear the conversation between them.

"The cat is dead! Even after soaking in the bottle, it's still dead! You lied to me!"

The boy kicked and punched the woman in the white coat, but she didn't fight back. Once he calmed down, she gently stroked his hair. "It isn't dead. It just fell asleep. As long as you learn the right method, you can wake it up."

The woman pulled the boy into the room, then used a Scalpel to slice open her own skin. Not a single drop of blood flowed out. Instead, several thin white threads crawled from the wound and burrowed into the dead cat's body.

A moment later, the deceased black cat slowly rose to its feet and darted out of the laboratory.

The boy's tears turned into a smile. He naively chased after it, shouting as he ran, "Red Tongue! Red Tongue!"

"Professor, why go to such lengths? Keeping that child around and spoiling him like this... one day he's going to escape and ruin the experimental results you've worked so hard for." Zhang Jiaqi watched the boy disappear, a worried look on her face.

"I know what I'm doing. I don't need you telling me how to handle things," the woman in the white coat replied, her voice turning cold again. "Just do your job. Once I succeed, the next one to be resurrected will be your grandmother."

Zhang Jiaqi didn't dare say another word, meekly nodding in agreement.

"Bai Wang's organs are failing again. They only lasted a week this time. Come with me right now to prep for surgery. We'll use the tall Security Guard's spare organs first. The blood types match, though I'm afraid the rejection period will be drawn out again."

"Professor, what do we do with these two?"

"They've been infected by the Thread-Pulling Gu. They won't die anytime soon. We'll come back and extract the Gu from them after the surgery is done." The woman in the white coat looked at Zhang Jiaqi. "Do you have any other questions?"

"No, it's just... every time I see those white threads inside your body, I find it terrifying."

"You'll get used to it. I was panicked too when I first discovered these things on a corpse, but the more you interact with them, the more you realize they are simply another form of life."

The woman in the white coat and Zhang Jiaqi left the room together, heading deep down the hallway. Shadowless operating lights flicked on, their glare piercing the corridor. Far away, the cadavers huddled together in the dark corners. There was a staggering number of them.

'Are they gone?' I flexed the fingers I had clamped around my Scalpel. There were several moments just now where I nearly lost control. Playing dead wasn't easy, especially under such extreme tension.

'The woman in the white coat has to be Zhang Jiaqi's professor—Liu Xuan.' She was the mastermind behind the sealed campus, the one orchestrating all the horrors of this night.

'The two of them are going to perform surgery on someone else. Hunting living people is all for the sake of replacing that person's organs with fresh ones.' I had gleaned a lot of information from their brief exchange. The reason this teacher and student were so obsessed with resurrecting the dead seemed rooted in their own unspeakable hardships.

'Zhang Jiaqi is likely trying to extend her grandmother's life, and Liu Xuan is probably doing this for the person she called Bai Wang.' The woman in the white coat had mentioned an unfamiliar name in their conversation—Bai Wang. Judging purely by the name, it had to be a man.

'Liu Xuan's husband vanished before she went missing, and she had no family other than him. Zhang Jiaqi told me all this when we first met, and she had absolutely no reason to lie back then.' After turning it over in my head, I arrived at a somewhat contradictory conclusion: Liu Xuan was doing all this entirely for her husband, Bai Wang.

But if that was true, it directly contradicted the phone call from before the broadcast started. The man's voice on the line had been full of panic and suspicion.

Based on that man's description, his wife sounded like an absolute psychopath.

Recalling the way Liu Xuan had just treated the little boy, my confusion only grew. This was someone who couldn't be easily defined as good or bad. She was like something hidden inside a thick cocoon—you would never know until you peeled away the outer layer whether you'd find a beautiful butterfly or a hideous, venomous bug.

Liu Xuan and Zhang Jiaqi were working frantically to prepare for the surgery. Once they dove into their task, they quickly forgot about me and the short Security Guard. Turning my head to look at him now, I saw large patches of red swelling already surfacing on his skin. His face had taken on a deathly gray pallor. The longer this dragged on, the greater the contrast between his condition and mine would become.

'I can't play dead anymore. I'll be exposed sooner or later.' I drew my Scalpel, sat up from the operating table, and pressed myself against the wall as I moved toward the door.

Driven away by the glare of the shadowless operating lights, the cadavers had retreated into the corners. The moment the bright light hit them, they became incredibly sluggish.

With my path blocked, and terrified of being discovered, I didn't dare step outside. Instead, I activated my Chasing Eye to peer into the room deep down the hallway.

The stench of disinfectant mixed with the fresh scent of blood. I covered my nose and mouth, staring silently ahead.

The door to the room wasn't completely shut. Inside, two men lay on parallel operating tables. One was Old Song. He had been injected with anesthesia; his eyes were glassy and vacant, and a massive gash had been opened across his stomach.

The other man was pale and haggard, his body emaciated. The blood vessels bulging beneath his skin were visible to a terrifying degree.

His condition was far more horrific than Old Song's. Several tubes were hooked into his body, his head was shaved bare, and a few intertwined red and blue wires were attached tight against his scalp.

The surgical scars weren't just on his chest and stomach—they covered his neck and limbs, too. From a distance, the sutured wounds looked like a bunch of twisting centipedes.

'He's still not dead after all that?' What shocked me most was the faint movement of something flowing through his bruised, purple veins. His pupils still twitched slightly from time to time. Inside his half-open, unconscious mouth, his tongue—though an unhealthy color—wasn't a dead white. Clearly, he wasn't being controlled by the Thread-Pulling Gu.

The surgery proceeded methodically. They removed the man's failing organs and replaced them with Old Song's.

I had seen surgeons operate in major hospitals before, but their proficiency didn't even come close to this teacher-student duo's. A normal organ transplant required a team of four to five people, yet these two women were not only handling it perfectly, but working far faster than any major hospital team.

I couldn't imagine how many times they had practiced this beforehand. I couldn't even guess how long they had rehearsed on cadavers, or perhaps even living people. They moved in flawless sync throughout the ongoing surgery. Every action had likely been repeated countless times, executed with the precision of a ticking clock. They elevated a bloody, gruesome dissection into something tragically akin to art.

'Is that man Bai Wang?' I tightened my grip on the Scalpel, fighting the urge to charge in and slaughter them. Logic told me there was a better way to resolve everything happening tonight.

The surgery wrapped up after a little more than two hours. Liu Xuan could handle the finishing touches on her own, so she told Zhang Jiaqi to go outside and rest while she stayed behind in the room.

I watched Zhang Jiaqi walk out, then grabbed a syringe loaded with a heavy dose of anesthesia and waited by the door.

Footsteps echoed out, each one feeling like it was stepping directly on my heart. There was no room for error in what I was about to do.

Zhang Jiaqi strolled to the door without an ounce of caution. She suddenly noticed someone was missing from the operating table and realized something was wrong. She opened her mouth to shout—

"Shut up!" I lunged forward, clapping a hand over her mouth as I plunged the syringe into the jugular vein in her neck. Injecting her like this could potentially kill her, but I couldn't afford to worry about that right now. The vein in the neck was simply the easiest target.

I took Zhang Jiaqi down quickly, but her final struggles still managed to catch Liu Xuan's attention. The throng of cadavers cramming the hallway also began to drift closer.

The sheer number of cadavers was downright despair-inducing. Running away directly was still a dead end.

'What do I do?' I set Zhang Jiaqi down by the door, chucked the syringe toward the exit blocked by the cadavers down the hall, and retreated back into the room.

'Buddy, you're going to have to suffer a bit longer.' The only place in the room big enough to hide a person was the freezer used for storing medicine. I yanked the door open and shoved the short Security Guard inside, quickly staging the scene to look like he had escaped. Then, I lay back down on the operating table in my original position.

'Time for a gamble!'