Un vent glacial souffle, une aura fantomatique imprègne les lieux, des lys araignées fleurissent dans le monde souterrain, et l'on reste assis, seul

Chapitre 3

Duan Lin looked at his younger brother without saying a word.

At this point, most people would say something to show their friendliness, right? I should probably say something, like, "Please feel free to ask any questions, and I'll do my best to help."

But that doesn't seem right... If my brother's problem is work-related, there's nothing I can do to help. Or, to put it another way, "If you're too busy, take a break!"

However, it didn't seem to make sense to say that. For a student in an internship, the experience gained during the internship is very important. It seemed a bit unfair of him to say that... Duan Lin hesitated and ultimately said nothing.

"Little Nuo!"

Just as the atmosphere was getting awkward, a sweet female voice suddenly broke in.

"May I sit here?" The woman carrying the tray was of medium height, slender, with an oval face and delicate, elegant features. She was the kind of woman who made a very likable impression.

"Ah...please, senior, let me introduce you. This is my brother Duan Lin and his friend Mu Zi. Brother, this is my senior from university, Bo Xiaoxue. She's already a full-fledged doctor at this hospital." Xin Nuo hurriedly moved over to a seat.

"Oh? You have an older brother? I've never heard of him... How come he's different from you..." The woman instinctively noticed that the two brothers had different surnames, but then realized it was a family matter, and quickly stopped herself, "Hello, both of you."

The woman's sweet smile made the brief awkwardness disappear.

With another person present, the dinner table wasn't as quiet as before. Bo Xiaoxue, as if remembering something, bit her lip and finally spoke, "Xin Nuo, how is Xu Yao now?"

Duan Lin had heard his younger brother mention the name Xu Yao once before. Xu Yao was the actual owner of the house where they were currently staying. Hearing the name mentioned again, Duan Lin couldn't help but take it to heart.

"My senior... he's still not doing well." Han Xin Nuo said, her chopsticks unconsciously poking at the food in her bowl. "He finally woke up this morning, but his condition is still not good..."

"Still spouting that nonsense?"

"...Yes, the doctor who treated him was Senior Cheng Rui. They've been friends for many years, but Senior Cheng said that even so, he still wouldn't let anyone get close to him, wouldn't let the nurses give him injections, and wouldn't let the doctor examine him. Senior Cheng still wouldn't let anyone into his ward. He's just recovered and still needs IV fluids for nutrition, so at noon we had no choice but to give him a sedative. Senior Cheng said it's a psychological problem."

"Psychological problems...? It seems I discovered it at his house last time..."

"Ahem!" Xin Nu coughed, stopping Bo Xiaoxue from saying what she was about to say.

"It's just finding a dead child in the drainpipe, there's nothing to hide." Just as Duan Lin was wondering, Mu Zi suddenly spoke up.

"Huh?! How did you know?" Her expression changed drastically, and Xin Nuo shifted her gaze to Mu Zi, who had been standing beside her. "Could it be that you saw...saw something?"

Xin Nuo's tone was strange, as if she was expecting something...

"Yes, of course I saw it..." Mu Zi's lips twitched slightly, and she revealed a strange smile.

As Xin Nuo felt her heart beating faster and faster, the boy opposite her suddenly spoke up, "I saw the newspaper, huh? Was that incident a big deal?"

"Is...is that so?" Her shoulders slumped heavily, and Xin Nuo's expression remained strange.

"Is this why you called your brother here? But this isn't a good idea. If there's nothing wrong, that's fine, but if someone who wasn't aware of the situation sees something bad, they'll be forced to get involved. It's hard to say what might happen; they could even lose their life, you know?" Mu Zi said calmly, elegantly cutting the steak on her plate.

The tone was casual, but Han Xinnuo's heart skipped a beat.

"I'm sorry, brother..." Han Xinnuo said, her head bowed.

Duan Lin frowned. "It's alright, you should eat your food."

Duan Lin said this aloud, but he felt strange. Why would his younger brother contact him? He hadn't told his brother about this ability. Besides, he only recently learned about it, so how could this be...?

Although this issue bothered Duan Lin, there was something even more pressing to consider right now, and that was...

"Mu Zi, did you see that?" Duan Lin whispered to Mu Zi as the four of them walked out of the restaurant.

Mu Zi was lying. There were no recent newspapers in that room, and Mu Zi slept almost all day. Her younger brother might not have noticed, but Duan Lin had.

"No." Mu Zi looked ahead without turning around. "There's nothing strange about that house so far. Your brother is overthinking it, but he'd better be careful."

Duan Lin looked at him, puzzled.

"You know what? When it comes to this kind of thing, the most dangerous people are often not those who don't believe in it, nor those who completely believe in it, but rather people like your brother, who are skeptical, somewhat believing it exists, yet also feeling it doesn't..."

"Why did he bring you here? Naturally, it's because he knows you can see these things. This behavior shows that he has doubts about what others have told him: 'There's something here.'"

"But he himself can't see it. The consequence of having this doubt in his mind for a long time is that the person's mind is under constant tension, and his brainwaves are easily synchronized with that thing. Later on, he might actually be able to see that thing. And even if he can't see it... he's prone to mental problems, isn't he?"

"These days, more and more people are being admitted to psychiatric wards for this reason," Mu Zi said with a smile, pointing to her head.

The joking tone stirred something in Duan Lin's heart. Looking at his younger brother's figure ahead, he suddenly felt a little anxious.

Xin Nuo asked him to wait on the first floor for a while. Duan Lin waited in the lobby on the first floor as instructed. What he saw was a bustling crowd; what he heard was crying and the sound of carts rolling; what he smelled was the pungent smell of disinfectant... He felt a little strange.

"Brother, I'm sorry, I'll have to wait a little longer. I'm waiting for the director. By the way, why don't you sit down?" Xin Nuo, who rushed out of the department, was a little surprised to see the two people standing in front of the chairs but not sitting down.

"It's clearly there..."

Before Duan Lin could finish his sentence, "There are people here," Mu Zi answered first, "We just finished eating, it's better for us to stand for a while."

Seeing Mu Zi turn around and glance at him with ulterior motives, Duan Lin suddenly understood.

It's that kind of thing again... My gaze involuntarily drifted behind me. The man sitting in the chair seemed no different from anyone else, except that his expression was a little more blank than the average person.

"Ah, let's make a bet?" Mu Zi's voice suddenly rang out again.

Following the direction Mu Zi pointed, Duan Lin saw a cart being rapidly pushed in from a distance, with a woman groaning on it. Her protruding belly told everyone that she was in labor.

"Shall we bet on whether the baby we have will be a boy or a girl? I bet it'll be a boy. What about you?" Mu Zi asked the other two with a smile.

"Then... I'll bet it's a boy too," Duan Lin said casually, somewhat bewildered by the bet.

"Then I'll bet on the girl. Someone has to bet on something different, right?" Xin Nuo seemed quite pleased with Mu Zi's idea.

Duan Lin followed Mu Zi's gaze to the room where the woman in labor had just been pushed into. What he saw made his eyes widen in shock!

So many people! Even family members couldn't...

A large crowd had gathered in front of the white door, jostling and pushing each other as they formed a circle and gradually approached the operating room…

Is nobody going to do anything about this? Just as he was wondering, suddenly... Duan Lin saw the person at the very back, who was none other than the man who had been sitting in the chair behind him earlier. At that moment, Duan Lin finally understood.

These people were originally...

Duan Lin watched coldly as the "people" crowded together more and more densely...

Suddenly, a shout came from afar, "Miss in front, you haven't paid yet! Miss in front! You haven't paid yet..."

A panting man came running towards them, yelling. Han Xinnuo hesitated for a moment, then stopped him. "Sir, this is a hospital. Shouting is prohibited here. And please don't run around..."

"It's not that I wanted to run away or yell, I'm a taxi driver. Someone just got in my car and got out without paying! Damn it, were they in such a hurry to die?"

The man who claimed to be a taxi driver gazed into the distance for a long time. Finally, realizing that he had made a wasted trip, he cursed and turned back the way he came. Duan Lin, however, had a sudden thought and looked ahead.

The corridor, which was originally empty except for the circle of people crowding in front of the door, suddenly had a woman appear. The woman was running quickly in the corridor in high heels, and the sound of her sharp heels scraping against the marble floor was extremely jarring, but it seemed that no one around heard her and no one stopped her.

"Da! Da! Da! Da!"

The woman ran quickly, pushing aside the men who had been huddled in front of the door, and the next second...

The woman disappeared! She vanished through that door!

Shortly after, the light outside indicating that surgery was in progress went out, and a loud baby's cry came from inside.

When the door opened, the "people" outside retreated listlessly, and a man rushed over from outside. As soon as he saw the door open, he ran forward anxiously to hear the news.

:

"She gave birth? Is my wife alright? Is it a boy or a girl? Does she look like my wife...?"

"Hehe, she's born! It's a beautiful girl, and both mother and daughter are doing well. Just wait a little while, and you can go in and see for yourself who she looks like..."

Staring blankly at the man's joy, Duan Lin suddenly remembered what the middle-aged taxi driver had said earlier: "He's in a hurry to be reincarnated."

After the head doctor, whom the senior student had mentioned, finally finished the surgery and gave the interns a day's guidance, Xin Nuo finally said she could leave. As she walked out the door, Duan Lin saw another pregnant woman being wheeled in. Then, the people who had been sitting numbly in the corridor, like starving people seeing meat, surrounded the obstetrics department again.

Is this the deceased's longing for life?

How many ghosts in the world sit in corridors and walk through streets and alleys unseen by anyone?

Without looking back, Duan Lin followed his younger brother forward.

"Dr. Cheng, are you on night duty today?" The nurse, pushing a cart of equipment that needed to be sterilized, greeted Cheng Rui with a smile as he walked into the elevator.

"I'm mainly in charge of Dr. Xu today, and I'm a little worried about his current condition." With a wry smile, Cheng Rui rubbed his aching shoulders.

Seeing the man's seemingly unintentional little gesture, the nurse said sympathetically, "That's right, Dr. Xu is the hospital director's son."

"It's not because of that. Dr. Xu is also my classmate. We've been classmates for many years, interned together, and then stayed on to work at this hospital together. After all these years together, seeing someone who was perfectly fine suddenly become like that, I'm really worried."

"I didn't know Dr. Xu and you had such a relationship. That's really rare."

Faced with the nurse's smirk, Cheng Rui simply smiled slightly. After arriving at his floor, he nodded slightly to the woman in the elevator and then left.

Without going through many turns, Cheng Rui walked straight to ward 4103, which was a private ward where Xu Yao lived alone.

Cheng Rui knew about the news a while ago about a man finding a dead baby in the drainpipe of his bathroom, and he knew that the man was Xu Yao. At the time, he just marveled at how strange things could happen in the world and didn't take it too seriously.

That's the truth. With the increasing number of unmarried mothers, children who can't be born are abandoned everywhere. Hospitals are also places where many cases of abandoned babies occur. Many girls don't want children and even throw their newborn babies directly into the hospital toilet and leave. Many nurses have discovered this, but none of them have turned out like Xu Yao.

When Xu Yao was brought in, Cheng Rui was indeed a little startled.

Cheng Rui had heard about Xu Yao's leave of absence two weeks ago, but since they were not in the same department, he didn't pay much attention to it. The last time he saw him was when Xu Yao returned from a seminar in the United States. That night, the group of them drank together, relaxed for a while, and then took separate taxis home.

I didn’t think too much about it at the time. Who knew that Xu Yao would be like this the next time I saw her?

The man was so thin he was skin and bones, with deeply sunken eye sockets. Xu Yao had to be carried in.

He fainted from malnutrition – that's the initial diagnosis. It's astonishing that a modern person could faint from hunger. It's one thing for a homeless person, but Xu Yao is the heir to a major hospital!

After questioning Xu Yao's neighbors, the police discovered that the man hadn't left the house at all. The family's food supplies quickly ran out, and the man hadn't gone out. If it weren't for the running water in the apartment, Xu Yao might have become the first wealthy person to starve to death in their luxurious apartment.

Why would someone rather starve than leave their home? This question became a common one in the minds of everyone who knew about it.

I thought this was the worst-case scenario, but then Xu Yao woke up this morning, and the worst thing finally happened.

"Get out! Close the door! Close the door!" A grown man was yelling like a shrew, shoving everyone who approached him away.

Xu Yao just huddled in the hospital bed, wrapped tightly in the blankets and shivering.

This is so bizarre! Xu Yao's appearance is just too strange!

Even the fury of his father, the dean, which he feared most, couldn't make him open the locked door. In the end, it was the dean who gave the order to force the door open and inject Xu Yao with sleeping pills.

Xu Yao's wide-eyed stare at the door sent a chill down Cheng Rui's spine. As if possessed, Cheng Rui even turned to look at the door again…

Nothing...

Amid the dean's anger, the nurses' fear, and Cheng Rui's suspicion, Xu Yao's erratic behavior ended with a sedative that forced her into a deep sleep.

"You two are good friends, so I feel at ease leaving him in your care. Please keep a close eye on him and talk to him. Maybe he'll tell you what's on his mind," the old director sighed as he left work.

Cheng Rui agreed.

Cheng Rui gripped the key tightly in his hand, then decided to open the door. When he visited Xu Yao before dinner, he was still fast asleep; that dose of injection would keep him awake for several hours. Now… he'd probably wake up soon, right?