Translator: Reina Editor: Killian
“Today is August 24, 2001,” Yan Yang cleared his throat, his voice was unexpectedly steady and serious. “Lu Xiaoyun wandered around the hospital for two months, we waited for two months, and according to his words, we have finally figured out the law of the flow of the chasm in this hospital. Of course I don’t know what those flows and laws are, but in short, he said that its breath is very close…”
Sun Zheng pressed the play button on the recorder.
Lively background noises came from the tape, outlining the busy scene of the hospital in the past: nurses pushing trolley carts back and forth, patients pacing impatiently at the door, doctors yelling for nurses, and Yan Yang In one corner, with the running tape in the recorder whirring. Lu Xiaoyun stood beside the wall expressionlessly, as if he was looking at a certain place, and yet also seemed to be looking at something else through that place.
Everything sounded like the daily movements of a hospital. What was so unusual with this seemingly normal day that they had to record it? Why did they wait for two months? What exactly is ‘it’?
“According to what you said, the entry point is very close to the dean. I secretly made some checks, and there is indeed an operation at Operating Room (4) at 7 in the evening today. This operation was arranged by the dean. I didn’t manage to get the details on what operation it is, but I heard that the patient is someone prolific. Why they’d choose this hospital is something I can’t comprehend.” Yan Yang seemed to be explaining to the tape, but also seemed to be talking to the silent person next to him.
“My intuition tells me, Lu Xiaoyun…” Yan Yang lowered his voice, “They are doing something very, very dangerous…”
There was a familiar voice sounding only after a long time, penetrating the layers of noise coldly, “That’s right.”
“That… that,” Yan Yang faltered, startling when he suddenly came to a realisation. “Are you planning to sabotage Dean Chen’s operation?!”
Lu Xiaoyun was silent for a while. Just when Sun Zheng and Lu Xia thought he was not going to answer again, he suddenly asked, “Do you still remember who entered the chasm in June? ”
” Qun-Qunfang-jie… What’s wrong?”
“And in August?”
“No, No one, why would anyone enter the chasm with us around…”
“Then who entered the chasm this month?”
“Of course no one did this month either. Why are you asking this?”
Lu Xiaoyun fell into a period of silence again.
(Hearing this, Lu Xia slapped a hand against his head and said, “Could it be that he means, since no one has entered the chasm for half a year, why did ‘it’ still appear?”
Sun Zheng looked at him pensively, frowning a little.)
“How many entrances do you remember us finding in June?”
“Only the one in the Traditional Chinese Medicine room. Lu Xiaoyun, what do you want to say?”
“How many in August?”
“The one in my office… and the one downstairs… And if we also count in the one in the building opposite, there were 3 in total.”
“And in this month?”
There was a rattling sound heard in the tape, it should be Yan Yang impatiently scratching and scraping something with his fingers. “Why are you asking me…Shouldn’t you know best? Fine, fine, we found 5 entrances, but nothing really happened anyway… Though I guess we did find a little too many this month…”
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.
The sound of scraping suddenly dragged on sharply then came to a stop.
“Jbeiv la yf, Oe Wljbsec, vb sbe wfjc ab rjs atja fcagjcmfr jgf jqqfjglcu wbgf jcv wbgf ogfdefcais?”
(Lfjglcu atlr, atf fzqgfrrlbcr bo Oe Wlj jcv Vec Itfcu mtjcufv ja atf rjwf alwf.
Ktfs mjc qgbyjyis uefrr ktja Oe Wljbsec wfjca lc atflg tfjgar: cb bcf kjr fcafglcu atf mtjrw, yea ‘la’ kjr jqqgbjmtlcu, jcv rb, atf fcagjcmf jqqfjgfv wbgf jcv wbgf ogfdefcais…)
Yan Yang’s next sentence voiced the question in their hearts. “Do you mean—these are all man-made?”
(“Although we don’t know what ‘it’ refers to, but now it seems that my brother is speculating that Liu Qin and the others seem to be trying to draw ‘it’ out, and Chen Zhiwen actually knows what is going on with the hospital too…what the hell are they trying to do?!” Lu Xia felt his breathing quicken.
What they were planning to do would definitely not be anything good.
‘That’s not good’, ‘Its breath is very close’…
What did they bring out in the hospital?)
Perhaps Lu Xiaoyun nodded to Yan Yang at the other end of the tape, or maybe he didn’t answer Yan Yang’s question, all they could hear from this end was seemingly cold and emotionless words, “You just need to record everything they do… …Follow me and don’t run around.”
As soon as these words fell, the tape suddenly hissed, like a sudden heartbeat, and the sound didn’t seem to come from the recording, but from the tape and the machine itself.
Like a tremble.
Lu Xia and Sun Zheng looked around nervously almost at the same time. The tape was cut off then too, plunging the entire room into absolute silence for an instant.
It seemed that something had been moving quietly in the dark, but stopped at the moment when they suddenly turned around.
With fear lingering in their hearts, the two turned their heads back. The tape hissed again.
At this time, the loud background noise in the tape seemed to have gotten quieter, and the busy buzzing of the people was like whispering from across a wall. Only the walking footsteps of the two people carrying the tape recorder could still be clearly distinguished.
“They are coming over,” Yan Yang said in a very low and suppressed voice. The footsteps of the two people suddenly softened, as if they had walked to a corner.
The sound of wheels rolling in the empty corridor sounded in the tape, accompanied by the hurried footsteps of several people. It seemed that nurses were pushing a stretcher over.
“The dean will be there in 10 minutes, Xiao Sun, go down and inform the family.” There was a fuzzy woman’s voice. “Have all the irrelevant personnel left?”
“There are still some emergency patients, but they are downstairs.” A young voice replied.
“The time chosen was not optimal this time. Last year, they did it in the middle of the night and there were very few people, but the dean said it was inconvenient at night,” the woman paused, “Xiao Sun, you are still young… after notifying the family, just leave work first.”
There was a series of rushed footsteps and the female nurse obediently went downstairs.
The sound of small metal wheels rolling on the ground sounded slowly again, cold and crisp, and the footsteps of the woman pushing the gurney followed coldly after.
They could practically visualise the scene of her pushing the gurney slowly down the corridor towards the operating room.
(Why is there only one nurse for the operation? Lu Xia thought suspiciously, and from the corner of his eyes, he saw that Sun Zheng had his brows tightly furrowed. His expression had never relaxed since they’d started this tape.)
“I can’t record clearly with this door in the way,” Yan Yang whispered close and softly. “I’ll open just a little crack…”
Someone seemed to have stopped him
“Don’t worry, Lao Liu knocked off a long time ago. They all think that the archives are empty.”
It turned out that the two of them were hiding in the archives. It was indeed only a few steps away from the operating room.
The sound of the door opening was so soft that even Sun Zheng and Lu Xia could hardly hear it.
But they clearly heard Yan Yang gasping for air.
“Impossible!!” Yan Yang gasped in an almost hoarse voice, “That person…that person!!”
In the distance, the sound of the door of the operating room swinging open came from the tape. The sound of the wheels sliding almost disappeared, but the cold footsteps of that female nurse had penetrated and remained in their memory.
The device vibrated again with a hiss.
(Lu Xia and Sun Zheng clenched their fists almost at the same time.
“Is there…something outside the door?” Lu Xia had an inexplicable urge to lower his voice.
Sun Zheng didn’t make a sound.
The two subconsciously moved a little further into the room.
They had switched off the flashlights to save power. It was so dark that they could only guess the direction of the door from their memory, let alone try to make out what might be outside through the glass panel on the door.
It was just that the black shadow that passed by earlier was still casting a shadow over them.)
The recording started again. Probably because the recording this time was relatively long, it was interrupted several times in the middle, omitting some content.
It took Sun Zheng and Lu Xia a while to notice that the tape had jumped again.
There was the sound of the two people rushing, and the device was being bumped back and forth.
“You saw it, Lu Xiaoyun. Tell me you saw it too,” Yan Yang panted, his voice trembling violently. Perhaps it was from the exertion of running, or maybe it was from fear.
There were faint footsteps in the distance. The two men should still be close to the third floor.
“The person she pushed into the operating room was a dead person, right?! Lu Xiaoyun, Lu Xiaoyun!” Yan Yang’s entire voice became flustered.
“Come over. Liu Qin is still downstairs, follow me.” Lu Xiaoyun’s voice still sounded calm.
“You should still remember, Lu Xiaoyun,” Yan Yang slowed down, his voice becoming more and more emotional. “I told you that of the eight people who entered the ICU last night, five of them died. Last night, Lu Xiang just sent me a text message saying that the son of the famous whatever-his-name-was had died in our hospital yesterday, and wanted me to keep it a secret. Did you see that person clearly just now? That was the son!!”
(The person who underwent the operation was a dead person?
Sun Zheng and Lu Xia suddenly felt a surge of cold air.
The hospital pushed a corpse into Operating Room (4) at this time. What exactly did they want to do…
Lu Xia vaguely had an extremely absurd and extremely terrifying guess in his mind, but he didn’t have the courage to continue pondering about this conjecture of his..
Impossible.
In any era, in any time and space, it was absolutely impossible.)
“Lu Xiaoyun, do you really understand the severity of what I’m saying?!”
“Where is Lu Xiang?”
“If there are still emergency patients, he should still be in the emergency room on the first floor.”
The running speed of the two people suddenly accelerated, and the noise of the tape hitting the repeater almost drowned out all the other sounds in the hospital.
“What should we do, Lu Xiaoyun? Are they provoking something they shouldn’t?” Yan Yang panted, but was calming down a little after Lu Xiaoyun spoke up. “Shouldn’t we do something to stop them?”
“If my guess is correct, Lu Xiang and the others in the emergency room should have another person in their hands. Liu Qin and the others are in urgent need of such a person.”
The sound suddenly disappeared.
(Both Sun Zheng and Lu Xia stared blankly at the device, their brains still waiting for more information from the other end.
Yet within the span of that short two seconds, or perhaps even one second, all the sounds have completely disappeared from the other end.
The tape was still spinning. There was no sound of the recording being interrupted. There was no sound of the stop button being pressed either.
But the sounds in that one moment seemed to have been sucked out of the air.
Still, it was just the span of a second, a mere instant, and would have been imperceptible.
It was only because the two of them were listening so intently that it made this moment seem all the more abrupt.)
The footsteps of the two people in the tape also stopped suddenly.
“Lu, Lu Xiaoyun…”
“Did you hear it…” Lu Xiaoyun’s voice seemed to float from far away. “Its breath… it is coming out soon.”
Its breath?
They heard nothing. They had no way of knowing what the other two men heard on the other end of the tape.
No, maybe its breath was basically that split second where all sounds disappeared. Maybe its breath was that of sucking everything away.
“Using ‘it’ to change life and death…it is a taboo they will regret very much.”
They are doing something very, very dangerous…
Tonghua Hospital had provoked ‘it’ who had been asleep in the chasm. Tonghua Hospital had touched the taboo of manipulating life and death.
….Dang this is seriously intense!!!! I just finished binge-reading all your translated chapters for this novel so far and I have to say you’re a really talented translator Reina!!!
Thank you for the amazing work & I really can’t wait to see what happens next!!! This is such a twisty and suspenseful story that I’m constantly on the edge of my seat wondering what will happen next lol
😱😱😱