Death Timeline

Chapter 2

Li Hui's right hand trembled slightly as she held the letter. It was a chart designed on a computer and printed with a laser printer; the crisp, white A4 paper was glaringly stiff and almost blinding under the light. The chart was meticulously drawn, even the font was carefully designed, revealing the rigorous and meticulous style of its creator.

The table's large title caught her eye: "Death Timeline".

Below the title are several lines of descriptive text:

Deceased: Li Hui, female, obstetrician at the Maternal and Child Health Hospital.

Cause of death: Due to violating the laws of nature, retribution and punishment were incurred. (Direct cause of death: abnormalities in the body parts listed in the table or accidents.)

The timeframe is one month, with a daily ordeal in which death could occur at any moment. The final day is the last day of life.

Li Hui's heart started pounding wildly. A series of intense sounds surged through her like a raging storm. Her breathing became heavy, as if she were being chased by a ghost, and cold sweat poured out in layers.

It took her a lot of effort to finish reading the form. The form listed the time period for one month, and in chronological order, every part of Li Hui's body, from head to toe, including her breasts, uterus, and ovaries, was listed. The entire form looked like a person dissected into pieces, bloody chunks, laid out before her—it was practically a live anatomical diagram of Li Hui herself!

She felt as if she had been forcibly pressed onto the dissection table of a medical school, and was being dissected with a sharp scalpel, piece by piece, from head to toe. Each part was still alive and pulsating, and then coldly thrown into forms, making "ping-pong" and "ding-dong" sounds, like being thrown into a white porcelain plate.

Her good right hand trembled as if it were grasping a hot coal, and the form fluttered to the ground.

She collapsed on the sofa, unable to move, on the verge of a breakdown.

She had only experienced a similar atmosphere of terror in the horror novels of Stephen King and Peter James, and now, she had suddenly become the protagonist of such a story.

Li Hui couldn't process what was happening. She thought she was having a nightmare, so she pinched her thigh hard, only to be met with excruciating pain.

The blindingly white form lay on the floor. Li Hui looked at it like it was a monster, wanting to look at it but not daring to, yet forced to stare at it.

She thought, maybe my eyes are playing tricks on me, it's just an illusion. Let me look again, maybe there are no words on it at all!

When she picked up the form, the words "Death Schedule" in large letters stung her eyes once again, and this time she noticed a note at the bottom of the form:

Please keep this form safe. You will be responsible for any consequences if it is lost!

From now on, you will see a related notification every morning when you open your email.

Calling the police will hasten the death process.

Li Hui is now certain that what she saw was true.

Cold sweat trickled silently down her forehead and back.

She tried to recall when she might have made an enemy, but as time passed, she still couldn't figure it out.

Li Hui was the kind of "good child" who perfectly fit all the standards and rules set by Chinese parents and schools. She excelled academically and morally at school, and was an outstanding worker every year after starting work at the hospital. She had excellent relationships with everyone around her. Li Hui felt that apart from being too beautiful and attracting too much attention wherever she went, she had no other flaws.

She was an only child at home, and apart from her parents who lived far away in Nanjing, she had no relatives with whom she could have any conflict of interest. There was no way she could have any enemies!

The more Li Hui thought about it, the more she felt that the incident was both terrifying and somewhat ridiculous.

This is probably a joke being played on her! She got up and flipped through the calendar; April Fool's Day was long gone. Who could be so bored?

She tried to convince herself to just forget about it. But some of the words on the form disgusted and angered her: "You will bear the consequences yourself," "Calling the police will hasten your death"! No matter who made this joke, she couldn't forgive them! Li Hui felt that the contents of the form seriously violated her right to privacy and were a brutal trampling on her personal freedom.

This boring thing must not be seen by a third person! Li Hui made up her mind to ignore it for now and put the form into the drawer of the dressing table.

She wanted to wait and see how things would develop.

Li Hui couldn't sleep that night.

This "death schedule" was like a giant meteorite falling from the sky, suddenly and heavily crashing down on her head, completely disrupting everything.

She let her mind wander, making wild guesses, and then suddenly remembered her husband who was about to return to China.

Did Wang Yang offend someone outside? But she was confident that she knew Wang Yang well. Apart from pursuing her in college, all his passion was in his medical device research. He devoted more effort to this than he put into her.

He couldn't possibly have any enemies with whom he harbored deep hatred; he didn't have the energy or the opportunity.

So, it's a woman?

But Wang Yang went abroad not long after getting married and has been gone for two years. How could a woman suddenly appear?

Li Hui stared blankly at the ceiling, unable to fall asleep. Her mind was racing like a wound-up machine.

The bold headline on the form, "Death Timeline," kept flashing before her eyes. Suddenly, she felt that this apartment wasn't safe anymore. She decided to reinforce the windows and doors tomorrow. Even though her apartment was on the sixth floor, the top floor, she figured she should still install a security grille to put an end to her worries.

Her scalded left hand burned with pain, and her eyelids twitched again. Lost in thought, Li Hui tossed and turned; it was almost midnight.

Li Hui was afraid that not sleeping well would affect her surgery the next day, so she forced herself to fall asleep quickly, but the more she tried, the less she could sleep.

She panicked and got up to look for sleeping pills, but when she found them, she was afraid to take them, worried she wouldn't be able to get up the next morning. Besides, if she slept too soundly, she wouldn't be able to detect any trouble or danger that might happen, which would be even more dangerous.

Lost in thought, Li Hui went over the contents of the "death timetable" again. She couldn't understand why even her reproductive system was listed on it. Was this person a sexual pervert trying to vent some kind of emotion in this way?

Who is most likely to do this around her?

A face appeared before Li Hui's eyes. It was Ning Kun, the pharmacist at the hospital. She had run into him this morning when she went up the stairs; he exuded an eerie aura.

Ning Kun is thirty-five or thirty-six years old and still unmarried. Many people have tried to introduce him to potential partners, and he has had several girlfriends, but it is said that the relationships all ended because the other women thought he was a bit strange.

He and Zhang Lili, Li Hui's college classmate, became two major problems for the maternity and infant hospital. Zhang Lili was different from him; she was simply too picky and couldn't stand any man, while Ning Kun was the one who was always looked down upon by others.

Li Hui discovered Ning Kun's "strangeness" during one of her night shifts.

That night, Li Hui was busy with an emergency surgery until after 1 a.m. before returning to the rest room on the third and a half floor. She really wanted to lie down and get some sleep as soon as possible, but she had a habit of not being able to sleep without taking a shower, and besides, she had just finished surgery and felt that the smell of blood from the patient had seeped into every pore of her body.

Li Hui picked up the toiletries and went into the shower room next to the rest room.

These public bathrooms are usually left unlocked. In addition, the rest area for medical staff is located on the third and a half floor between the third and fourth floors, and there is a sign at the entrance of the stairs that says "No entry for non-hospital staff". Outsiders generally do not trespass.

Li Hui habitually walked into one of the rooms. The small door closed automatically, and she took off her clothes and turned on the tap.

As the warm water poured over her head, Li Hui suddenly felt the urge to urinate.

She felt it was impolite to stand there and expel the fluid from her body; she was a lady. So she squatted down, and the feeling of relaxation was wonderful.

Suddenly, her eyes caught sight of a pair of bare feet through a gap about a foot high under the sliding door! They were enormous, rough, and man's feet. Judging from the position of the toes, the man was standing facing her in front of the bathroom door.

Li Hui's urine, which had already partially leaked out, was suddenly forced back in, causing her to scream in fright, "Ah!"

She couldn't help but recall the frequent "ghostly" incidents in the university's bathrooms. In the dead of night, female students would often be heard screaming and howling in the bathrooms, supposedly because they had encountered ghosts.

The ghosts, both male and female, would hide outside the bathroom door to peep at naked people bathing, and some would even reach in and grope the bodies that were completely relaxed in the water. Once, a female student's lower abdomen was scratched raw and bleeding by a hand that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. Another female student's breasts were scratched raw with fingernails.

However, due to superstition or other mysterious reasons, the impact of these events is often swallowed and absorbed by the parties involved. Li Hui heard her roommates telling these stories as "ghost tales" when they couldn't sleep at night. At the time, she didn't take it seriously at all. She didn't believe in those heretical and misleading doctrines and had never encountered anything like it before.

But now...!

Li Hui stared wide-eyed in terror at the pair of dark, grimy feet, momentarily disoriented. Had she really encountered a "hungry ghost in the bathroom"?

To her surprise, her shout startled the "ghost," who immediately turned and ran away when she saw it under the door.

Suddenly, Li Hui seemed to understand something. This was a person! No matter who he was, this person was truly despicable!

Her anger instantly overwhelmed her terror, and drawing courage from who-knows-where, she mustered all her strength to shout, "Who?!"

She fully expected the man to be scared away. Unexpectedly, a calm male voice rang out from the bathroom doorway: "It's me." It was as if he was doing something perfectly normal, and Li Hui was the one making a fuss over nothing.

The voice sounded somewhat familiar, but she couldn't immediately recall which man it belonged to.

"I am Ning Kun." Unable to hear Li Hui's voice, the man introduced himself further. Then he said, "I came to the wrong door."

A wave of disgust surged from the bottom of Li Hui's heart. Could it be that Ning Kun really "went to the wrong door" as he said? The men's bathroom was clearly on the other side of the corridor. She walked there often, so how could she have gone to the wrong door? Besides, it was already past four in the morning. Doctors who didn't have any special circumstances would have been asleep long ago. Why did he have to come and join the fun at this time of year?

Li Hui was both angry and resentful. She stopped answering and just waited for Ning Kun to leave on his own. But she couldn't hear the door open or any sound from Ning Kun.

She couldn't tell if he had already left or was still standing inside the women's bathroom.

Then, Li Hui quickly dismissed her wild thoughts. She thought that Ning Kun, having been in such an embarrassing situation, must have already run away.

Although she felt very uncomfortable, she finally calmed down a bit. She hurriedly rubbed her whole body with thick shower gel, rinsed herself repeatedly, and then quickly tidied her hair.

My whole mood for taking a bath was ruined by that damned Ning Kun!

Li Hui quickly slipped on her tube-style nightgown, fearing that something even more unacceptable would happen next, and wanted to leave this place of trouble as soon as possible.

After getting dressed, Li Hui pushed open the small door of the shower room and stepped out. A dark figure immediately came into view: Ning Kun was standing inside the women's bathroom door with his back to the light, like a real exhibitionist, completely naked with his legs spread apart, displaying his ugly organ high in front of her.

What's even stranger is that his expression was completely nonchalant, as if everything his body was doing had nothing to do with this head with its rigid, big face!

Li Hui's heart pounded wildly with fear; she had a premonition that she was in for a bad night. Who knew what terrible things this woman-craving old bachelor would do in the dead of night, in a deserted bathroom!

Just as she secretly reached into the basin at her waist to retrieve the large bottle of "Johnson & Johnson Milk Bath Liquid" to use as a weapon, Ning Kun suddenly gave her a strange smile, then turned around, pushed open the door, and walked out as if nothing had happened.

Unaccustomed to letting her emotions fluctuate wildly, Li Hui could no longer contain herself. She glared at the slowly closing wooden door behind Ning Kun and screamed, her voice trembling with barely concealed hysteria, "Bastard!"

She wanted to cry.

She wanted to find someone to confide in about her grievances and resentment.

But it seemed she was the only female doctor staying in the dormitory tonight, as there hadn't been a second person there yet. Besides, she didn't want anyone to know about it; it wasn't honorable and would give some bored people something to gossip about.

Li Hui buried the matter in what she considered a proper way, never mentioning it to anyone afterward. At the time, she simply locked the door tightly and spent the entire night in extreme anger and anxiety.

From then on, whenever she saw Ning Kun, she would get goosebumps all over her body, as if she were seeing a toad.

The second time I found Ning Kun terrifying was when she went to the window to get medicine for a friend one day.

That day, Ning Kun, whom she didn't want to see, was on duty. When he saw Li Hui, he smiled at her like a romantic, and then kept looking out the window where she was standing while preparing the medicine.

Li Hui felt as if countless caterpillars were crawling on her face and body. She hid behind a pillar next to the window, hoping to get the medicine quickly so she could escape this place of trouble.

However, after waiting and waiting without any movement from the window, she anxiously peeked out to check, only to unexpectedly meet Ning Kun's disgusting big face. The two faces were less than two centimeters apart!

She knew this guy was up to no good again, so she grabbed the medicine and left. As she walked, she could feel Ning Kun's dark face behind her, revealing an indescribable satisfaction or hunger. She didn't dare to turn around, as if she were being chased by a vicious dog.

This pervert must have sensed Li Hui's deep disgust and hatred for him! Is he going to use this "death timetable" to take revenge on her?

At this moment, Li Hui felt a loneliness and helplessness she had never experienced before.

She really wanted to make an international call to Wang Yang and tell him about the extreme anxiety and physical discomfort this terrible news had caused her. But she was also afraid that Wang Yang, who was about to return to China, would become anxious and upset upon hearing this terrible news, thus affecting his ability to handle the last important matters at work.

Li Hui tried desperately to calm herself down, saying, "It's okay, it's okay! Actually, this is probably just a huge misunderstanding. Tomorrow at dawn, all the terrible things will disappear."

She rolled over, trying to shake these unpleasant thoughts off her mind.

At that moment, her face was turned toward the dressing table drawer in the living room, where the "death timetable" that had triggered all this unpleasantness lay.

Li Hui suddenly felt impulsive again. She got up from the bed and involuntarily opened the drawer. With her right hand, she picked up the pale white printed paper as if she were holding a poisonous scorpion. When she looked at the form on it, the first thing she saw was the content for the next day: "Your hands will bring new disaster!"

Don't forget, Li Hui is a doctor! Her life hangs in the balance with every movement of her hands, yet this despicable guy is fixated on them, is he trying to kill her?

She felt a chill run down her spine and involuntarily loosened her grip, causing the piece of paper to slip down.

Li Hui looked up; the clock on the wall was pointing exactly to midnight, and the dramatic chime immediately rang out: "Ding! Ding! Ding!..."

An unexpected incident in the operating room