Volume 1. Let the Game Begin
Someone died in the hospital...
Logically speaking, death in a hospital was nothing unusual.
Our country has about nine million deaths each year.
Even as you read this, someone might be dying from natural causes or accidents.
Especially in hospitals, where many elderly people passed away naturally.
But... the effects brought by this game, from this morning until now, I had not received any news at all.
Now Aunt Zhao suddenly came back, her face pale, her body trembling slightly, looking as if she had been terribly frightened.
Probably... it was the deaths caused by the game that led to some unexpected event in this hospital, right?
Even though I understood a bit internally, I still had to pretend not to know anything.
I looked at the panic-stricken Aunt Zhao with a confused expression.
"What's wrong? Someone dying in a hospital, isn’t that just part of the natural cycle of life and death?"
"No... no, it’s not someone dying from illness. I... I just came back and saw, there were a lot of police cars at the hospital entrance."
"Police cars?"
When I heard Aunt Zhao say these two words, I was momentarily stunned.
Police cars?
How could that be?
Based on my previous encounter with the S-level mission, death should have been twisted into various kinds of accidents by some force, right?
Oh~ right, police cars made sense too.
Accidents would still require police intervention.
I was overthinking it.
"Yes..."
Aunt Zhao, face pale, put the groceries she bought aside, not even daring to return to her own bed.
Instead, she sat directly beside me.
Probably because sitting on my bed and being closer to me made her feel a bit safer.
"What exactly happened?"
Seeing Aunt Zhao so terrified, I really became a little curious.
During that half-hour or so last night, I barely managed to survive, and I had no time to care about others.
Anyway, in my opinion, at least three people had already died.
No... four people.
Three men and one woman.
I heard the screams of two men and one woman.
I saw the corpse of one man.
I had eaten Fang Zheng.
So from what I knew, three men and one woman were already dead.
As for the others, I really had no energy to pay attention to them anymore.
The moment my nerves loosened after being tense all night, I felt that nothing else mattered.
I just wanted to lie down and sleep.
"I, I heard people say that... someone smelled the scent of blood in the ventilation duct... and, there were also some traces of blood... so, so..."
"Aunt Zhao, don’t worry. Even though those people have already died, even if they were killed by someone, I still believe that our police officers can ensure that these criminals are caught, so you don't have to be afraid. Come, follow me, deep breath... yes, yes, that’s it, how do you feel?"
Although the one possessing this body was a fifteen-year-old girl, ultimately, my mind was still that of an adult.
I knew that the words I just spoke were difficult for an average fifteen-year-old to express naturally.
But it didn’t matter now.
Aunt Zhao was so flustered that she wouldn't notice such a small detail.
Even if she got curious and asked about it later, it wouldn't amount to anything.
After all... there were too many excuses available.
Moreover, modern people grew up faster than those decades ago.
Besides, "Liu Yunyan" had also experienced a brush with death, so it was natural for her to mature a bit without feeling too out of place.
"Much... much better, thank you."
"Mm, as long as you’re better..."
Aunt Zhao followed me in taking a deep breath.
Gradually, she calmed down, thanked me again, and then, still looking frightened, recalled the events that had just happened.
Actually... it wasn’t anything much.
She just happened to witness a corpse being transported away when she came back.
At first, Aunt Zhao was a little curious and talked with a nearby nurse.
Then the nurse told her what had happened.
A young nurse had discovered this morning that a duty doctor was missing and searched around.
She even called the doctor’s home, only to find out he hadn't returned.
This frightened the nurse.
After all, there had been ghost rumors on the nineteenth floor recently.
Now the doctor was missing for several hours without a trace, which naturally made people panic.
The nurse quickly posted a message in the hospital’s internal chat group, saying the doctor had gone missing and asking if anyone had seen him.
Most of the nurses working the night shift were usually quite idle.
Once they heard this news, they immediately became alert and started searching.
Their search soon led them to the fifteenth floor, where they found blood stains at a ventilation duct in a patient's room.
The reason it was found there was because... a patient in that room was also missing.
Gathering their courage, the nurses opened the ventilation duct.
They discovered blood and some human tissue inside.
Many of the nurses panicked and someone quickly called the police.
Just then, they also noticed that two more nurses and several patients were missing.
The entire hospital’s staff fell into chaos.
Fortunately, the head nurse remained calm.
She firmly ordered everyone to stay composed and not to spread the news, while immediately calling the police.
They called the police at about 6:30 in the morning.
In fact, they only reported it after counting the number of missing people.
By the time the police arrived, it was already 7:30 a.m., and dawn had broken.
Then... the police found a body at the first-floor ventilation duct.
The body was almost smashed into a pulp, its abdomen ripped open, and pieces of internal organs were scattered throughout the ventilation system from the fifteenth floor downward.
It was obvious the body had been thrown down from the fifteenth floor ventilation duct.
However, what puzzled everyone was... the interception iron nets between the first and fifteenth floors were all perfectly intact.
How could this body have fallen to the first floor without breaking the nets?
And what had smashed the body into such an unrecognizable mess?
The iron nets were covered in blood, but none of them were broken.
From a physics standpoint, there was no way the body should have ended up on the first floor without damaging the nets.
Nevertheless, they had found the body.
The next step was to find the murderer.
The investigation was simple.
The doctor had been thrown from the ventilation duct of a room at the northeast corner of the fifteenth floor.
Blood traces were also first discovered at the fifteenth-floor ventilation entrance.
Moreover, a patient from that room had mysteriously disappeared.
Naturally, the police started looking for this patient.
Within less than five minutes of identifying the suspect, the police discovered him.
The suspect, the missing patient from the fifteenth floor, was found in a locked men’s restroom on the eleventh floor.
His intestines were stuffed into a toilet bowl, and his body was sitting on the toilet, the abdomen ripped open.
Judging by the marks on the body, it was torn apart like prey by a beast.
But... who had done it?
In less than ten minutes, the police discovered seven more bodies.
All had died with their abdomens ripped open.
Some were found in a long-unused storage room, some in restrooms.
One body was even lying under someone else's hospital bed, with the intestines neatly arranged around it, forming a circle.
It was said... the patient lying on that bed was the one who discovered the corpse.
That patient had a broken leg and jumped out of bed in terror.
While fleeing, he even tore off his leg cast.
Supposedly, he was a professional hospital scammer who often faked injuries to get hospitalized.
Thus, when Aunt Zhao came back, she happened to witness a corpse being transported out.
The scene was indeed so gruesome that it completely terrified her.
Then, something even more unbelievable happened.
Someone found a patient who had only been in for an appendicitis surgery, brain dead in a seventeenth-floor ward.
Not only that, next to the brain-dead patient was a "suicide note".
The note was filled with confessions of killing seven people and then committing suicide by poisoning.
From filing the case to solving it, such a major criminal case took less than twenty minutes.
Every floor of the hospital had surveillance cameras.
The police pulled the footage.
Logically speaking, someone who just had an appendectomy shouldn't have been able to move vigorously within five hours.
Moreover, the hospital had night staff on duty, and people occasionally passed through the corridors.
How could this patient move freely around the building, carrying bodies and tossing them into ventilation ducts, killing again and again?
The reason?
The surveillance footage clearly showed this person walking out of his ward, with a creepy, chilling smile on his face.
Every time he walked through a corridor, there happened to be no one around.
Even when carrying a doctor’s corpse, the corridors were eerily empty.
Under bright lights, in deserted hallways, a young man with a horrifying smile carried corpses to the fifteenth-floor ward, then another body to the eleventh-floor restroom...
People watched this unbelievable scene.
This young man seemed to have limitless strength.
Between midnight and one o'clock, he killed seven people.
Each one died with their abdomen ripped open.
Amazingly... within that one hour, he never encountered a single living person.
Every time he passed by a nurse station, the nurses either had their eyes closed sleeping or turned away at just the right moment.
Not a single person noticed.
This criminal suspect carried a small knife and, from the nineteenth floor to the third floor, murdered seven people.
Such eerie coincidences left no explanation in a world dominated by science.
But... everyone felt a chilling fear deep inside.
Especially... when the young man, after finishing the last murder and returning to his ward, smiled directly at the surveillance camera.
That horrifying smile instantly spread a freezing terror through everyone watching the video.
The nurse who told Aunt Zhao all this was so scared that she decided to resign on the spot.
There was no way to stay.
Even though they had all studied medicine and were used to cadavers, this situation was just too creepy.
In an instant, the whole hospital fell into a state of panic.