Chapter 621: Clothes Wear People

"Careful, don't touch the White Fur on the doorframe." I put down Chen Mo, lowered my voice, and led the way. My Judging Eye stared intently at the humanoid outlines in the inner room, afraid they would suddenly spring up.

"This is a normal morgue. That iron bed is for securing corpses. The tray in front is to catch water when washing a body. The large scissors under the basin are to cut a deceased's clothes, and the small ones are for trimming their hair. The hospital has strict requirements for the specific procedures." Looking at the furnishings, Chen Mo began to explain their uses to us.

"When a corpse is brought in, it's first placed on the film on the floor, which should be right here." He pointed to the left side of the main door, where the floor tiles were the only ones in the entire morgue not painted white. "Whether the corpse is brought in from outside or taken out of a freezer, it has to be put here first. Oh, right, if bodies are frozen for too long, they'll stick together... Why are you all looking at me like that? Did I say something wrong?"

Leaning on a tree branch, Chen Mo had been talking for a good while before he realized we were looking at him strangely. He quickly stopped, somewhat confused.

"It just doesn't sound very pleasant. It's fine, keep going." Zhang Heng held his dV and got a close-up of Chen Mo. "A medical student leaking the secrets of the morgue—if I manage to get out of here alive and post this online, it'll definitely hit the trending searches!"

Thanks to Chen Mo's introduction, I gained some understanding of the hospital morgue. This place was far more complex than I had imagined.

The four of us stopped and started as we moved through Mortuary No. 2, carrying a contradictory mix of curiosity and dread as we entered the inner room.

"Gu Bei, the kidnapper's text message asked you to put the letter of commitment and the cash in a freezer drawer. Is this the place they were talking about?" Zhang Heng was the first one to find Gu Bei's phone, and he vaguely remembered the text left on the screen.

"I can't be sure either." Gu Bei stepped out from our group, carefully avoiding the White Fur on the doorframe. He took out his phone and read it closely. "They want me to put the things in the second freezer drawer."

Looking up, Gu Bei used his phone for illumination. The freezers were lined up against the wall in a long row, with countless drawers.

"The second drawer?" The kidnapper's wording was incredibly vague. Gu Bei worked up the courage to walk up to the row of freezers.

The white paint on the freezers was peeling and covered in rust. Some of the doors had been ripped off. The place looked like something had gone on a rampage here; it was a total mess.

"It should be this one, right?" Gu Bei stopped in front of the second drawer from the left. He grabbed the handle on the drawer bed and yanked hard a few times, but something seemed jammed inside, preventing it from opening at all. "Give me a hand!"

Zhang Heng and I each grabbed a side. The three of us pulled at the same time, but instead of the drawer sliding out, the entire freezer unit started shaking.

"Stop!" Afraid we would tip the freezer over, I quickly halted them both. "This drawer is jammed tight. Let's try the one next to it and see if we can pry it open from the sides."

"The drawer beds aren't connected, how are we supposed to pry it? Why don't we go further inside and take a look? Maybe the kidnapper meant the second one from the right?" Zhang Heng patted Gu Bei on the shoulder and jutted his chin toward the depths of the morgue. His meaning was clear: he wanted Gu Bei to scout ahead first.

Gu Bei stood rooted in place. His lips twitched. "Let's go in together. There's safety in numbers."

Some of the freezer drawers deeper in the morgue were already open, their beds jutting out. Placed on top of them were things that resembled the shapes of living humans, an utterly terrifying sight.

"I'll go in with you." While Gu Bei and Zhang Heng were bickering, I held up my flashlight and was the first to step forward. "We've stayed here too long; we can't waste any more time. Chen Mo, Zhang Heng, you two go look for the birth certificate. Gu Bei, you come with me to check the very back. If the second drawer from the right opens, put the things in there. If it doesn't, we aren't staying here any longer. We leave immediately."

Even though my ears hadn't picked up any dripping sounds, my thoughts went a bit further. If those monsters had crawled out of the water tank, they would definitely be soaked at first, but as time passed, the water dripping from their bodies would diminish. In that case, relying on the sound of dripping water to gauge their location had a massive flaw.

"Maybe that monster is already close to us..." Glancing back at the silent, pitch-black hallway, I hesitated no longer and headed straight toward the deepest part of the room.

"Wait for me." Gu Bei followed behind me, playing it smart by deliberately staying a step behind, maintaining a distance of two or three meters.

I couldn't be bothered to argue with him about it. Sweeping the flashlight around, I first focused on the things that resembled living humans.

They lay on the cold, rusted drawer beds, their eyes hollow. Only when I drew closer did I get a clear look.

These weren't corpses, nor were they mannequins. They were human skins stretched taut.

I stopped in my tracks and reached out to gently touch one. The skin had been treated with preservatives, and a very faint trace of elasticity still lingered under my touch.

"Move aside." I pushed Gu Bei out of the way, picked up a piece of broken floor tile from the ground, and used its sharp edge to slice open the human skin.

The stuffing inside the skin surprised me; it was actually clothing reeking of strong disinfectant. They weren't hospital lab coats or patient gowns, but all sorts of everyday clothes.

"Interesting. Usually, people wear clothes, but today I've seen clothes wear people." I pressed down harder, wanting to widen the slit to pull out the clothes stuffed inside the skin, but right then, someone yanked my arm.

I turned my head to see Gu Bei pointing nervously at the skin's head.

Following his pointing finger, I looked over and saw that the pitch-black eye sockets on the skin's face seemed to be staring right back at me.

"You aren't afraid of the living, so why are you scared of a piece of skin?" I shook off Gu Bei's grip, slashed open the skin's belly, and dragged the clothes out from inside.

"Are you not scared at all?"

"Of course I am, but just being scared doesn't solve any problems." I threw the clothes on the ground, spread them out, and inspected them thoroughly. "The skin was specially stitched up with professional technique. Whoever sewed this was either a tailor or a professional surgeon. The inside of the skin is a sealed environment, and since the clothes have been sterilized, they haven't rotted. I've never heard of this method of preservation."

I bent down, flared my nostrils, and lightly sniffed the medicinal scent on the clothes. "It's different from the smell of normal disinfectant; it must be mixed with other chemicals. Why did the culprit do this? Does sewing clothes into human skin have some kind of hidden meaning?"

Seeing me lean down to sniff the clothes, Gu Bei's face turned green. Standing behind me, he held it in for a long time before managing to force out a single sentence, "This is utterly deranged."

I wasn't sure if he was talking about me or the mastermind behind making these skins, but of course, none of that mattered.

Comparing the skin and the clothes, the sizes matched almost perfectly. It was safe to deduce that the clothes stuffed inside the skin likely belonged to the deceased themselves.

"Very ordinary men's clothes. What was this person's identity? A doctor? A caretaker? Or an outsider like Chen Mo and Zhang Heng?" The underground environment of the hospital was extremely peculiar. I had walked so far without seeing a single rat or insect. This place seemed like a natural corpse stash.

"The monsters in the hospital are wrapped in bandages. You can see through the gaps that they have massive wounds, almost as if they've been flayed. Going by this, could this skin and these clothes belong to those monsters?" My eyes narrowed. "They were once human. After coming here and going through some horrific ordeal, they were twisted into these inhuman abominations."

I still hadn't figured out exactly how those monsters mutated. I only knew there were two key elements: first, they had to be skinned, and second, it seemed connected to the water tank.

"What role did the Writer play in all this?" I shoved the clothes back into the skin, an inexplicable surge of panic gripping my chest. "I need to move faster."

I continued forward with Gu Bei, reaching the deepest part of Mortuary No. 2. The plaster here was peeling, and hideous cracks sprawled across the walls like a massive, disfigured face.

"Try this drawer."

I gave Gu Bei a shove. He jumped aside like a cat whose tail had been stepped on. "Don't touch me with hands that just felt up a human skin!"

"You're still worried about that now?" I let out a dry laugh. "Don't worry, when you're facing a life-or-death situation, I absolutely won't reach out to help you."

"We'll see who ends up helping who. If you just don't get me killed, I'll burn incense in thanks." Gu Bei walked over to the second drawer bed from the right, grabbed the handle, and yanked it backward with all his might.

"Clang!"

The bearings slid open, rolling over the tracks on both sides of the drawer. Flakes of rust shook loose as a pungent stench wafted from inside.

"What is that?" Gu Bei hadn't expected it to open so easily. His eyes went wide, and only two or three seconds later did he instinctively cover his nose and mouth, staring at the fully extended bed.

A tattered bundle lay on the cold metal surface. The foul odor was coming directly from it.

"Be careful." I took a step back, the memory of this specific stench burned into my mind. "That's the smell of a rotting corpse."

"A corpse?" Gu Bei looked at the bundle, his hands suddenly beginning to tremble. "That looks like the baby's coat..."

He dashed to the bundle, entirely ignoring the vile stench, and tore it open layer by layer.

As the bundle grew smaller and smaller, my heart leaped into my throat. 'Could Gu Bei's daughter's corpse be inside? She might be the only innocent one here. The reward for saving her wouldn't be any less than killing a live show streamer.'

When the final layer of cloth was torn away, a massive lump of blood-stained, old clothes was revealed before us.

These clothes were quite old and highly decomposed, sticking together so tightly you could only vaguely make out their shape.

"Scared the hell out of me, it's not my daughter." Gu Bei breathed a sigh of relief. Leaning back against the wall, he casually tossed the clothes aside.

"Don't celebrate just yet." I picked up the clothing Gu Bei had thrown away. "The fact that they put your daughter's coat into this bundle was to send a message: they can kill your daughter at any time. Aside from that, there's one thing I need to ask you straight. Do you still remember what your sister was wearing during her final surgery twenty years ago?"

I shook out the sticky, rotting clothes in my hands and quickly made a new discovery.