Chapter 329: The Color of Strawberries

The mattress was severely crumpled, marred by irregular hard lumps. The cotton wadding inside seemed to have congealed.

I tore the mattress open and found large, pale bloodstains on the cotton wadding.

"Someone went out of their way to wash it, but blood-soaked cotton isn't that easy to scrub clean." The space beneath the mattress wasn't just a bare bedboard; a short stick wrapped in several sheets of white paper was hidden there.

I unfolded the paper. The back was completely blank, but the front bore a drawing of a plate piled high with strawberries.

"Realism?" Even though it was drawn with ordinary colored pens, the artist had rendered them so vividly they looked real.

I paid the drawings little mind and tossed them aside. The object wrapped inside the paper was a rubber baton.

"Why would a rubber baton be hidden in the toddler psychological counseling room? It should be in the security room." Gripping the short baton, I pondered. Rubber batons were made of a special material that gave them a utility other clubs lacked.

Beating someone with a rubber baton wouldn't leave deep marks, but it hurt like hell. The police sometimes used them during interrogations, so I knew a fair bit about them.

"Children's skin is tender, but if you wrap a wet towel around a rubber baton, striking them won't leave a single mark. Even if their bones snap inside, there won't be any bruising on the surface." As I stood by the bed, my eyes drifted to the railings at the head and foot of the frame. They were clearly built for someone to grip.

"The children sent here have psychological and intellectual issues. There's nothing wrong with their bodies, and they have no trouble standing. So what's the point of these railings?"

Gripping the rubber baton, I stared at the railings on both sides, a slow chill creeping over me.

When beating someone with a club, how do you inflict the most intense pain without damaging bones or leaving obvious marks?

The answer was simple: strike the muscles on the inner thighs.

The nerve density there is five times higher than in the buttocks. The location is hidden, avoids bones and joints, and heals easily.

Only then did I understand why those handrails had been installed. If the inner thighs were beaten with a short club, severe cases could temporarily rob a person of their ability to walk. These handrails had been specially built to help the beaten children stand back up.

"Is this how they treat children with intellectual defects and psychological barriers?" Avoiding pain was a fundamental instinct for humans and animals alike. The very purpose of pain receptors was to tell the body that an action was harmful.

The doctors at Qicun Maternity and Children’s Health Center weren't psychological experts at all. They were just using pet-training methods to train toddlers. The so-called 'successful cures'—patients who could understand and execute commands from their parents and the medical staff—weren't acting out of genuine willingness at all. They were just coerced.

Violence couldn't save autistic patients. It would only worsen their condition and force them to close themselves off even further.

"Only two children participated in the fourth stage of treatment: Xu Qin and Wang Yu. Both had congenital defects and couldn't communicate with others. Even if they were abused, they couldn't tell their parents." I sighed. For every good person in this world, there was a bad one. You could know a good person's kindness, but you could never fathom just how evil someone could be.

Tucking the rubber baton away, I left the child healthcare department and headed to the other clinics.

The Forensic Evidence and Judicial Appraisal office was the closest department to child healthcare. They had a very professional-sounding name, but I held deep doubts about this hospital's forensic capabilities.

Pushing the door open, I found a narrow room about the size of the director's office. Equipment and glass filing cabinets lined both sides.

The room was tidy. There was nothing extra on the workbench, and the glass cabinet doors were all locked.

"What a hassle."

Closing the door, I smashed the glass and quickly flipped through the files inside. Amidst a massive pile of routine reports and meeting guidelines, I dug out a paternity test report.

This document caught my eye because the column for the subject's parents was completely blank, unlike all the other paternity test reports.

"Conducting a paternity test without parental signatures? No matter how unreliable a doctor is, they wouldn't do something like this, would they?" I read the report carefully.

The child's name was Wang Yulan. She was a girl.

The test results clearly stated that the single-strand DNA alleles did not match. It was a non-paternity relationship.

"Wang Yu, Wang Yulan, Wang Xiusen... there are sure a lot of people surnamed Wang in this hospital." The names Wang Yu and Wang Yulan differed by only a single character. It felt strange, instinctively compelling me to link the three names together in my mind.

"Wang Xiusen was the hospital director. Wang Yulan's paternity test lacked signatures from both parents, yet the doctor still performed the appraisal. This was highly suspicious. It was likely because the person conducting the test was a hospital insider. Wang Xiusen was the director and also surnamed Wang, and he went missing about three or four weeks ago."

I looked at the paternity test report again. The date approved at the bottom was from a month ago.

All signs suggested that Wang Yulan might be Director Wang Xiusen's daughter. Of course, this was just a guess; I didn't have any solid evidence to stand on.

Tucking the paternity test report away, I checked the time and was just about to explore the other rooms when a woman's scream suddenly erupted from downstairs.

"It's that female streamer!" I'd taken her money, so it was my job to keep her safe. Since I'd accepted her Great Divine Mantra of the Big Dipper, I naturally couldn't just ignore her.

I threw the door open and sprinted toward the source of the sound. "She's on the second floor!"

After that single scream, the female streamer hadn't made another sound. I hurried as fast as I could, but by the time I reached the second floor, the corridor was calm once more.

It was dead silent, consumed by oppressive darkness.

"Did the mutilator show up?" Gripping the short rubber baton in one hand, I pressed my body flat against the wall and slowly advanced down the hallway.

As I walked, the sound of operating machinery reached my ears. I pinpointed the direction of the noise and finally stopped at the door of a clinic labeled "Prenatal Diagnostic Testing Center." The sound was coming from inside.

I gave the door an experimental push. It wasn't locked. Holding my breath, I pushed it wide open and stood outside, sweeping the room with my Chasing Eye.

The noise was coming from a 3D color ultrasound machine at the very back. Aside from this running machine, there wasn't a single person inside.

"The female streamer isn't here? Then who turned the machine on? Or was she originally here and has now been moved somewhere else?" I walked toward the color ultrasound machine. Its pale green light illuminated the corner of the wall, looking incredibly eerie.

"What is this thing?" The ultrasound probe was stuffed behind the machine. Just looking at the image displayed on the screen, it was impossible to guess what was on the other end of the probe.

Bright red. Amidst a crushed, pulverized mess, there were several bulging, red, lumpy masses.

Seeing this ultrasound image, many gruesome scenes flashed through my mind—dismemberment, murder, and almost every twisted act a psychopathic killer would enjoy doing.

"It's a bit sickening, but it doesn't quite look right. Blood coagulates, and the liquid concentration in the ultrasound image is clearly lower than blood." I lifted the dust cover behind the ultrasound machine, grabbed it with both hands, and dragged it outward. The moment the machine shifted, something oozed out from a crack in the wall.

I crouched down and looked inside. Dark red liquid, rotting pulp that was so red it bordered on black... Behind the ultrasound machine, the probe was merely scanning a pile of strawberries.

"So when strawberries are piled together, they can project such a terrifying image on an ultrasound machine... It looks like a bunch of sliced-up people..." At this thought, I suddenly felt something was amiss. Setting aside why these strawberries were in the hospital to begin with, it wasn't strawberry harvesting season at all. Furthermore, although these strawberries had rotted and spoiled, most were still red, which meant they had been brought into the hospital quite recently.

"Who would go out of their way to buy strawberries? And specifically place them in a hospital? Does 'strawberry' have some other meaning?" I stared at the image on the ultrasound machine. The bloody, chaotic mess on the screen rivaled a murder scene.

"Earlier in the child psychological healthcare department, the drawing paper wrapped around the rubber baton also had strawberries drawn on it. Could the artist have been hinting at something?" Turning off the machine, I walked out of the testing center, riddled with doubts. This livestream felt a little different to me. "The female streamer screamed just now. Maybe I'll discover something if I find her."

I tore off a wad of paper from the appraisal report and wedged it in the gap of the door before finally turning to leave. "If the other party realizes the machine was turned off, they might come over. If the wad of paper falls out, it means someone went inside."