Chapter 615: How Did They Die? (1)

Chen Mo and Zhang Heng were dumbfounded. "Kicking the door down? What kind of place is this? Are you out of your fucking mind?!"

The sound echoed through the abandoned hospital. The hallway rang with the reverberations of that kick, leaving their ears ringing so loudly it took them a full second or two to react.

They flicked on the flashlight and followed close behind me as I entered the basement of the Third Ward.

Normally, a hospital basement housed storage rooms, parking garages, or the morgue. But Jianghu Cancer Research Hospital was different. There were no directories, and the winding subterranean corridors felt like a maze.

"Do you think that monster will follow us in?" Zhang Heng asked nervously. Without realizing it, he had shoved Chen Mo to the back of the group and wedged himself right beside me, looking deeply unsettled.

"The echoes are pretty loud, masking the sound of the dripping water. I don't know if it's following us yet," I said, glancing back at him. "Be ready to run for your life. With all that noise, the monster is bound to notice. We need to hurry. Chen Mo, come here."

I waved Chen Mo over, positioning him between Zhang Heng and myself. "Where are hospital morgues usually built? Are there any specific rules?"

Chen Mo thought for a moment before shaking his head. "I don't really know, but I heard a professor at the medical college mention that the place they keep corpses is never built on the very bottom floor of a building."

"What do you mean?"

"It means the bodies don't go at the very bottom. No matter how many underground levels a building has, the lowest one will never be the morgue." Chen Mo shook his head. He couldn't explain the exact reason; he just told us it was what his professor had said.

"That works. It at least narrows things down—we can skip the bottom floor." I nodded. In this dangerous environment, time was critical; every second saved increased our chances of escape.

"Do you know what these symbols on the wall mean?" Zhang Heng held up his DV and pointed at some strange marks on the walls. If he hadn't pointed them out, neither Chen Mo nor I would have noticed them.

"No idea. I don't think these have anything to do with medicine, do they?" Chen Mo looked at me. I stared at the characters on the wall, my gaze heavy.

"I feel like I've seen them somewhere before. They look familiar." I stopped and studied the wall. Every few meters, strange white symbols appeared. Because they were drawn on an already pale wall, they were hard to spot. If Zhang Heng hadn't pointed them out, I would have missed them entirely.

"White symbols on a white wall, but they're two different shades of white." The wall was coated in white paint, but the symbols were drawn in something else. It was also white, but cloudier than the paint, mixed with small, granular specks that looked like fine gravel.

I stepped closer to the wall and caught a faint stench. It didn't smell like paint; it was the odor of biological decay.

"The smell seems to be coming from the white symbols. What do they mean?" I racked my brain but couldn't place them. Worried that the monster might catch up to us, I set the thought aside for now and led Zhang Heng and Chen Mo deeper down.

The pitch-black basement, the cramped corridors, and the eerie white symbols on the pale walls—everything seemed to hint that this place was incredibly dangerous.

The hospital's basement was much larger than we had imagined. The underground levels of all three buildings had been knocked through, forming a single, massive complex. Unfortunately, we didn't have a map. As we navigated the maze-like corridors, we didn't dare leave markers behind, afraid the monster would track us by them.

Luckily, I was used to situations like this. At every intersection, I memorized the surrounding layout, slowly forming a rough map in my head.

The basement of the Third Ward was completely sealed off. Our only light source was the flashlight in Chen Mo's hand. Light could travel very far in absolute darkness, making this extremely risky. We were essentially dragging ourselves out of the shadows and putting a massive target on our backs.

But I had already mentally prepared myself when I kicked the door down. Tonight's broadcast had gone on for so long without a single clue, and I wasn't willing to drag it out any further.

The dark passages twisted and turned. Every time we thought we had reached a dead end, another intersection would appear. I had no idea who designed this hellhole, but it felt like an air raid shelter dug out during a war.

"The Real Death Game Live Broadcast took place in an air raid shelter. Jiangcheng's underground really isn't peaceful. This hospital's morgue might just be built out of those messy tunnels." After walking a few dozen meters, we had memorized the layout of the first basement level. Many of the rooms were locked, sealed with paper strips, and hung with 'No Entry' signs. Most of the seals were perfectly intact, meaning no one had been inside for years. I had no intention of asking for trouble.

According to Chen Mo, a morgue's doors would be much wider than normal doors to accommodate the transport of bodies. After a quick glance, if a room wasn't the morgue, we didn't bother investigating it further and just moved on.

"Searching blindly like this isn't going to work. Take out those notes," I said. "If they're really as evil as you say, they should react somehow in a place like this." I could faintly hear the deadly sound of dripping water again. My heart hammered against my ribs. Searching for a morgue in the abandoned Jianghu Cancer Research Hospital, flanked by teammates harboring their own dark motives, with a terrifying monster slowly closing in from behind—the pressure of this broadcast was unlike anything I had ever faced.

Hearing this, Chen Mo immediately pulled his note from his backpack. Zhang Heng hesitated for a moment before following suit.

The two slips of paper, which looked as if they had been casually torn from a medical record, showed no reaction in the corridor. They remained exactly the same.

"That shouldn't be right. We're already in this hellhole. Do we really have to enter the morgue and get the birth certificates before they change?" According to what Chen Mo had said earlier, the notes were a critical item used by a malicious spirit to kill—which meant they acted as a medium.

Holding the notes, the three of us scoured the entire first basement level.

The underground layout of the hospital was incredibly complex. On the surface, there was one entrance on the left and another on the right, corresponding to the two emergency stairwells of the Third Ward.

In reality, aside from those two paths, we also found four hidden passages inside the structure.

We had no idea where these four hidden passages led. After testing two of them and finding that they stretched on endlessly with no end in sight, we didn't bother trying the rest.

"So many exits. What were the doctors so busy doing down here?" I muttered to myself. The dripping sound in my ears was growing more rapid. The monster was closing the distance.

"Stop looking. We're going down to the second level." After completing our circuit and returning to the emergency stairwell, I activated my Judging Eye and immediately spotted the residual water stains on the ground. "Move faster. That monster is down here too."

Realizing they were on the exact same floor as the monster threw both Chen Mo and Zhang Heng into a panic.

The three of us descended to the second basement level. The rooms here were noticeably different from the ones above.

The first floor consisted of standard storage rooms, while the second floor felt more like individual, self-contained warehouses.

"Equipment Department?" After scratching off the white paint on a door plaque with my fingernail, three blurry black characters appeared.

"It's the department responsible for purchasing, supplying, managing, and repairing all the medical equipment for the hospital. Every hospital has one," Chen Mo explained, panting heavily. His broken leg dragged across the floor, seemingly having gone numb from the pain.

"Are normal hospitals' equipment departments usually in the basement too?"

"I think so."

Chen Mo's answer was ambiguous, and I wasn't entirely sure either. To avoid getting caught by the monster, we didn't linger and walked right in.

The walls on this floor were also marked with those white, incomprehensible symbols. They looked like ghostly talismans; staring at them for too long made my skin crawl.

Though this floor was labeled the Equipment Department, it was essentially just made up of various-sized warehouses. The doors to these rooms looked somewhat similar to the morgue doors Chen Mo had described, so we had no choice but to search them one by one.

At first, I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary. But as we delved deeper, I gradually realized a problem. Someone had been to this second basement floor, and they had been here recently!

The evidence was simple: I found a fresh blade of grass in the corner of the wall, mixed with damp soil. When I brought it close to my eyes, I could see regular indentations crushed into the leaf.

"This grass was stepped on and brought in on the sole of someone's shoe. The flat, regular indentations mean the person's sole was very hard. This tread pattern looks like a leather shoe. Of the few people who could be in the hospital tonight, Chen Jiuge is wearing Taoist boots, and the kidnappers wouldn't wear leather shoes for a kidnapping since they're bad for running. Come to think of it, there's only one person left—Gu Bei! He's been here? How did he get in? Was it through those hidden passages on the first basement floor?"

The small blade of grass in my hand gave me two vital pieces of information: first, Gu Bei and the kidnappers might be right here; second, at least one of those hidden passages on the first level led outside.

"If the kidnappers told Gu Bei to come inside, then these kidnappers know way too much about Jianghu Cancer Research Hospital, don't they?" I was already eighty percent sure: 'The kidnapper is highly likely the Female Infant herself.'

"Morgue, morgue..." While I was thinking, someone beside me kept muttering. I turned around to see Chen Mo looking as if he were possessed, leaning on his branch and continuously peering inside through the window of a door.

"What are you muttering about? Don't you find that creepy?" Before I could finish my sentence, Chen Mo suddenly stopped moving, freezing in place like a stone statue. His mouth hung half-open, swallowing back whatever he was about to say.

"What's wrong?" Zhang Heng and I quickly squeezed into the doorway of the room he was staring into and looked inside.

This room was different from the other warehouses and hospital wards. It looked like a place specifically designed for washing things, somewhat resembling an old-fashioned bathhouse.

"Chen Mo, what are those pools used for?" Zhang Heng asked repeatedly, but got no answer. He looked at me, and my expression was just as shocked.

"Bro, what's wrong with you two?"