Translator: Reina Editor: Killian
“Look, I knew there was more behind it.” Lu Xia said proudly, then turned his head, only to find that Sun Zheng’s face was already flushed from suffocation.
“It seems like there’s really a fire…” Sun Zheng covered his mouth in embarrassment and straightened up.
Lu Xia wondered how Sun Zheng was going to continue putting up a strong front and refusing to face reality. He covered his mouth and nose too, then said, “Was the baby that Liu Qunfang heard at the beginning alive?”
“What are you saying?!” Sun Zheng yelled. After a slight pause, he immediately continued, “Of course it’s alive. What other possibility is there?”
Lu Xia suppressed his laughter. He flipped back several pages in the record, and pushed it towards Sun Zheng who was still coughing non-stop. “I was fooled by the stories told by the nurses at first, and started complicating it in my mind as a result.”
Sun Zheng raised his gaze, waiting for Lu Xia to continue.
Lu Xia’s muffled voice came from between his fingers. “Assuming there is such a girl in this story, she came from a faraway village to the city. On one hand, she was bombarded by all the confusing new technology, and on the other, she was being ridiculed and looked down upon all day long. Such a person probably wished she could forget her origin, hide her identity, and pretend to be someone from the city.”
Sun Zheng nodded, motioning for him to continue.
“However, this girl got married in her hometown and gave birth to a child. Her husband was a farmer while she left her child to her old mother at home and ran to the city to work. She seemed determined to start her life anew. For this purpose, she even refused to contact her family and didn’t know that her husband had died of illness. Her old mother had no one else to rely on and had no other choice but to take her granddaughter to the city to find her daughter.”
Sun Zheng understood what he meant. “So, the aunt Li Ting met at the door is this woman’s old mother and her granddaughter?”
Lu Xia smiled bitterly and shook his head: “I’m afraid the person she met then was no longer human… As for what it was, I don’t know either.”
Sun Zheng raised his brows, as if he was waiting for a more logical and scientific explanation.
Coughing, Lu Xia averted his gaze. “In short, this girl was frightened by the sudden appearance of her old mother and her baby daughter. The image she’d painstakingly created was about to be completely destroyed by their appearance. She would become the object of ridicule again. Besides, she is working as a mere cleaner here, how would she be able to find a house for her mother and child? So, she secretly arranged for them to live in the hospital.”
Sun Zheng’s eyes widened in realisation. “You mean, she hid it from others, and told them to sleep in the Department of Traditional Chinese Medicine on the fourth floor? Oh, that was still the Department of General Internal Medicine at that time, so there were diagnostic beds they used to examine patients.”
Lu Xia casted him a look of approval. “They could sleep in there at night and use the women’s bathroom to take a bath at night. But this extremely vain woman was living in fear every day, because a rumour gradually spread in the hospital, that there was a baby crying at night on the fourth floor…”
“So, the sound of water in the women’s toilet on the fourth floor was because her mother and her child might be taking a bath or washing their clothes. In this way, It’s normal to hear babies crying in the women’s bathroom at night, because her baby is there,” Sun Zheng added.
“And that night, when Liu Qunfang went to the bathroom on the fourth floor, she heard the baby again. She was so terrified she ran back to the nurse’s station and in turn, frightened the woman too, so that is the reason why her reaction that night was even bigger than Liu Qunfang’s.”
“Wait a minute,” Sun Zheng interrupted Lu Xia. “Is it possible that this Liu Qunfang found out the truth that night, but didn’t write it down in the record?”
“You mean, she was defending this woman? Lu Xia glanced at him, and laughed. “Such a woman is not worthy of anyone lying for her! The old mother may have encountered some electrical appliances that she was not very good with using that night and the old circuits caught fire. But this vicious woman probably wanted to let it all be over once and for all, so she cruelly locked the door and let her mother and child burn to death inside!”
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
Sun Zheng furrowed his brows and asked after hearing Lu Xia’s words. “How can you be sure that she trapped her mother and child inside? If she did, then where is the child’s body? They never did find her body.”
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“Vicious enough to burn her own mother and child to death?” Sun Zheng was still arguing. “Even if she lost herself, don’t you always believe that people’s hearts are always fundamentally good?”
Lu Xia lifted the corner of his lips. “Even if she never had such an idea normally, the thought might have crossed her mind when she saw the fire…”
Sun Zheng didn’t continue to argue for Chen Juan. He merely stared at Lu Xia with a contemplative look, as if asking, do you really think so?
Lu Xia didn’t stop explaining. “As for the child and the woman herself… I think they probably were dragged into the chasm. The corpse which was carried out was probably the mother who was burned alive by her. And being trapped in the chasm, trapped in that darkness forever with no way to escape, would be the best punishment for that woman.”
Sun Zheng suddenly felt a little fear for the concept of ‘eternal darkness with no escape’. He had never really come to terms with his current situation, never thought that there would be a day where he might be trapped somewhere with no escape. In this swelteringly hot environment, his heart suddenly froze, and he looked at Lu Xia in a daze. “The people who are trapped in this place, this chasm, are they the people who should be punished?
Lu Xia was taken aback, and immediately answered. “Of course not. A lot of these are mere coincidences. You can think of it as two parallel worlds. In this world, everything that had happened previously is being replayed everyday, and those who are trapped in the chasm here are repeating the actions they made before their disappearance. Most of the time these two worlds wouldn’t meet at all, but there would be points where the two converge. Still, even if they converged, it doesn’t mean that you’d naturally encounter every incident that’d happened. For example, Li Ting and Liu Qunfang encountering the reappearance of the fire in the hospital, that was a coincidence.”
Sun Zheng sunk into heavy contemplation. The steadfast light in his eyes gradually dimmed.
Lu Xia couldn’t pretend he didn’t notice the shift in Sun Zheng’s expression. It was human nature to slowly progress to the stage of acceptance, then struggle desperately, before finally sinking into despair. However, if Sun Zheng is at the stage of despair right now, then they might never get out of here. So, Lu XIa had no choice but to loudly cough twice to draw Sun Zheng’s attention, distracting him, then raise his voice to speak. “But it was also this incident in the record that might give us a chance to escape.”
Sun Zheng raised his head and looked at him. His face was completely flushed red. Lu Xia felt like he could see a mirror of his own pathetic self from Sun Zheng’s posture, but he quickly hid all traces of his distress and energetically continued, “We still have a chance. Look at this record. They reached the fourth floor and Ma Yu went into the women’s bathroom, but never came out again. The one that came out was not Ma Yu, but a reenactment of the events of the night of the fire.”
……
Drip, drip.
Someone drenched in water was walking towards us.
……
The baby was laughing.
In this pitch-black darkness where you couldn’t even see your five fingers, there was the sound of dripping water and an infant’s giggles.
……
“Look, at this time, that aunt finished taking a bath and was taking the child out with her from the toilet. Maybe the child was teased by the aunt, so she started giggling.” Lu Xia said evenly and turned to Sun Zheng. “Does it seem less scary after having a logical explanation for everything?”
Sun Zheng glared at him: “Only you would find this kind of story scary!”
Lu Xia shrugged helplessly, and continued flipping through the records.
But gradually, the giggling became softer, and the dripping sound also drew further away, deeper into the corridor.
Click. There was the sound of a door opening.
“Here was probably when she took the child into Room 3 of the Department of Internal Medicine, which later became the Department of Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Thump. Thump. There seemed to be someone coming upstairs.
The sound of the person coming up is getting louder and louder. They have almost reached the fourth floor.
“It’s Chen Juan!” Qunfang-jie exclaimed.
“Chen Juan went upstairs too. Liu Qunfang’s hearing was very acute, and she could immediately recognise the sound of Chen Juan’s footsteps. Even after Chen Juan went missing for so long, she could still remember and recognise it immediately,” Lu Xia picked the record apart sentence by sentence, word by word, analysing it.
Sun Zheng was already gasping for breath. “Then, then there was a fire, and then… and then Liu Qunfang said that she heard Chen Juan’s crying… Haah… no, we really have to get out of here. It feels like the fire has burned all the way over to the bottoms of our feet, Lu Xia…”
Lu Xia was also choking, he dragged his fingers across the record while coughing loudly, and stopped on the last few lines.
The baby’s face, the black beady eyes, the pitch-black soot-covered hands…
She’s crying…
Knocks on the door…
Mom… Child… Chen Juan…
She managed to push the door open and a wave of heat rushed out from behind it…
Sun Zheng seemed to have seen the light all of a sudden, and his eyes brightened.
“Liu Qunfang! Although the door was locked on the night of the fire, Liu Qunfang managed to push the door open! She went in!”
Lu Xia nodded vigorously. He grabbed onto Sun Zheng’s arm with one hand and stood up. A wave of dizziness from suffocation overwhelmed him instantly.
They immediately crouched down on their bellies. They glanced at each other, feeling both anxious yet amused at their predicament.
The rational part of Sun Zheng’s brain told him that he was doing something crazy that he’d never thought he would experience: crawling forward in an invisible fire.
If he were still as stoic and unbelieving as before, he would definitely choose to remain here to see if this inexplicable burning sensation had anything to do with the fire.
However, his instincts and the guy next to him left him with no choice but to crawl towards the door.
“As long as… we wait until the moment Liu Qunfang pushes open the door… then we can go out!” Lu Xia was so choked that he couldn’t make a sound, and could only desperately mouth his words at Sun Zheng.
Sun Zheng nodded. He could understand what Lu Xia wanted to say without reading the latter’s lips.
But he suddenly realised something, and froze.
Lu Xia turned back, puzzled.
Sun Zheng spoke with difficulty, “Then, when we open the door… what will we see?”
Would they see Liu Qunfang who pushed the door and entered?
Lu Xia was taken aback for a moment, then immediately mouthed, “You won’t see anything…just close your eyes…and rush out.”
Sun Zheng bit down his lower lip. He continued following Lu Xia towards the door, but he now felt a sense of trepidation in his heart.
He couldn’t put it to words, but he felt an irrational fear.
People are always afraid of the unknown.
When they were just one step away from the door, they heard a click, and a cool breeze swirled in.
Lu Xia’s expression froze. He yanked Sun Zheng to his feet.
Sun Zheng staggered, too dazed to fully realise what had happened yet.
“Close your eyes!” A hand covered his eyes, and before he had time to react, he felt an incomparably strong force shoving him from behind, and that pressure disappeared.
The door was already open, and Sun Zheng blindly stumbled out of it.
At that moment, a bone-chilling chill passed through his whole body.
He convulsed involuntarily and almost fell to the ground.
There was a loud bang behind him.
Sun Zheng immediately came to his senses. He pressed a hand against the wall and spun around.
He froze, completely motionless, stunned.
The door shut behind him, and Lu Xia was still inside.
reina: qunfang-jie is whipped
AAAHHHH LU XIA WAS STILL INSIDE HOW WILL HE GET OUT!?? Qunfang-jie can you open the door again? 😭😭😭😭
Wether this theory is true or not, I just don’t want people to assume the worst about others due to dubious circumstances.
Also, I just don’t quite like Lu Xia. He comes across as a social bull.
I feel Lu Xia has no right to judge Chen Juan when he himself is a man and has not experienced any of these things. It is peculiar thought that without Sun Zheng questioning if that really was what Lu Xia thought happened and Lu Xia’s subsequent dialogue I would not feel this way. So is it intentional then? The author writing Lu Xia this way?