Translator: Reina Editor: Killian
The flashlight flickered and almost went out.
Sun Zheng’s skin under his touch was so cold that it felt as if it had melted into the air of the hospital. He was trembling so badly that he seemed unable to even make a sound.
They needed to run! But where could they escape to?
Their eyes darted left and right, scanning the empty rows of seats and the pale and blue walls. But there was nowhere for them to hide, not in this place which was as quiet as a funeral.
There was nowhere they could escape to.
The unknown things surging in the darkness could very well devour this fragile room at any time.
Hiss.
Hiss.
All of a sudden, the tape started spinning again.
Did it switch sides automatically? Or did someone switch sides for it?
“‘It’ will be able to find us… soon enough, right away…” Sun Zheng buried his face in his hands. “I can feel it… Lu Xia…”
As long as they… before the tape finishes…
As long as Lu Xiaoyun and Yan Yang won the race against time and ended everything before the tape finishes…
Lu Xia didn’t speak. All he did was hold Sun Zheng’s hand tightly in his.
“Xiao Qin! Xiao Qin!”
The sudden voice made both of them flinch in shock.
The voice of the man yelling in the tape was echoing emptily.
Where was it from? Was it the corridor on the third floor?
“Xiao Qin! Xiao Qin! Come quickly!”
His panicked footsteps came from the corridor at the same time as his voice. “Come and help me, hurry! I did everything as you said…”
Hiss.
Hiss.
“Zhiwen! Zhiwen!”
Liu Qin responded to his voice. From the tape, it sounded very close to Yan Yang and the others. Yan Yang and the others should have caught up with Liu Qin and were following her closely.
“Everyone disappeared! Xiao Qin! It will take me away too! It will take me away too…” The man’s voice suddenly became louder, and he stumbled over.
Hiss.
Unstable electrical sounds buzzed, interfering with the recording.
There was the faint sound of someone running.
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.
“She ran towards the operating room!” This was Yan Yang’s voice.
Ktf qfgrbc cfza ab tlw rajgafv gecclcu.
Ktf qfgrbc tbivlcu atf ajqf rajgafv mtjrlcu.
Dea revvfcis rabqqfv.
“Qtja jgf sbe rabqqlcu wf obg! Vtf kfca lc!” Tjc Tjcu mglfv.
Oe Wljbsec kjr atf bcf ktb rabqqfv tlw.
“Tbe ub ab atf olgra oibbg ab olcv Oe Wljcu. P’ii ub joafg tfg.”
“What are you planning to do, Lu Xiaoyun!”
“Listen, bring Lu Xiang away. Do not let anyone come up to the third and second floors. Before dark, leave this hospital.” The person who spoke still didn’t seem to have any change in tone, but there was a flicker of something in his voice, an emotion. “If…”
Hiss.
Hiss.
The electrical sound buzzed again.
It wasn’t clear if the lull in sound was due to Lu Xiaoyun’s hesitation or the tape jumping.
“The longest time I have seen someone stay in the chasm is only 24 hours. In the chasm, do not stay in the corridors, go to the southeast corner of the rooms. Do not touch anything reflective or has a sound like a bell. Use your skin to feel, you will feel the difference.
(“So there were so many things to pay attention to in the chasm…” Lu Xia muttered. He couldn’t help being frightened when he recalled just how he’d been blindly running around in the chasm all this while.
Yet neither Lu Xia nor Sun Zheng mentioned the ‘twenty-four hours’.
It was as if they hadn’t heard it at all.
Or perhaps the time limit was so close now that they didn’t dare to think about it.
Lu Xia shifted, touching his leg and back from time to time. He silently estimated the time, then scrutinised the person next to him, checking if the other man had been infected.
Fortunately, until now, apart from those bouts of dizziness, Sun Zheng had no other reaction to the black handprint on his wrist.
Sun Zheng would be able to last longer than him, at least longer than just twenty-four hours. Sun Zheng will be able to last until he gets out.
Whenever this thought surfaced in Lu Xia’s mind, he felt a sense of relief wash over him.)
“Lu Xiaoyun, what do you mean by that?!” Yan Yang sounded furious.
“I will put a mirror at every entrance found in the cave. If you see ‘it’ in the mirror…which is a person that isn’t beside you, but is reflected only in the mirror, you must remember to not move around randomly. Close your eyes at once, and use your skin to feel your surroundings and slowly walk towards the side where it is warmer.”
This was the first time Lu Xiaoyun spoke so much in the recording.
“You, you want to enter the chasm?!”
“Perhaps.”
The man seemed unwilling to say anything further. His footsteps quickened.
Yan Yang followed closely after him again. “Lu Xiaoyun, how could you just run away like this after causing me so much trouble?!”
There was a loud ‘ding’ sound from the tape. It was the sound of something hitting the device.
“What did you throw at me?”
“Something made from a giant clam. I took it from Liu Qin. It’s very valuable. You take it out of the hospital and sell it for some money. Treat it as compensation money.”
The sound of the man’s running footsteps further accelerated
Hiss.
Hiss.
“What the fuck?!”
At the end of the tape, anyone could hear that Yan Yang and Lu Xiaoyun separated.
“Brother, he…” Lu Xia was still a little worried about Lu Xiaoyun acting alone, and was just about to say something, but he heard Sun Zheng muttering to himself.
“Mirror…”
Because of this word, Lu Xia’s thoughts took a big detour. He was suddenly reminded of something and hurriedly tugged on Sun Zheng, asking, “When you first entered the chasm… didn’t you say, yes, you asked me, didn’t you ask me if there was a mirror opposite the elevator?”
“I saw a mirror opposite the elevator on the sixth floor.” Sun Zheng looked at Lu Xia with a confused expression. “Could this be the mirror your brother installed in the chasm?”
“Yes, so only you saw it… What did you see in the mirror?” Even if it was a clue he’d previously considered insignificant and tossed to the back of his mind, at least in this moment, Lu Xia felt that they could discover something new.
“I saw…” A fuzzy shadow appeared vaguely in Sun Zheng’s mind. When the green elevator doors parted bit by bit, he saw a mirror on the opposite side. He thought that it was ridiculous that a hospital would hang a mirror right there, and the figure he saw then… Who was the figure he saw? Who else did he see?
He couldn’t remember the face which had disappeared in a flash.
It might have been someone who appeared in the tape, or it might have been ‘it’.
What if, what if he’d walked in another direction when he got out of the elevator? Then he would not have met Lu Xia, and probably wouldn’t have been trapped here, in this dense darkness where he would never see the sun.
Lu Xia didn’t manage to inquire about the specifics from Sun Zheng. He sighed in disappointment then suddenly, sat up suddenly again. “My brother gave the giant clam key to Yan Yang…”
Sun Zheng took out the sweat-soaked key.
“This key originally belonged to Liu Qin, but was passed from Lu Xiaoyun to Yan Yang, who sent it to me now?” Lu Xia stared at the key pensively.
Was the one who sent it to him Lu Xiaoyun, or Yan Yang?
One of the two had to have survived.
Or maybe the two of them disappeared forever after this tape…was taken away by ‘it’… but Yan Yang managed to hand this key over to someone else, and after a long detour, it was finally sent to him…
And now, ‘it’ was upstairs.
No, maybe ‘it’ is already downstairs, near the emergency room. The door of the emergency room had opened earlier. Maybe ‘it’ was now heading towards the observation room opposite it now, moving like a cloud of erratic black mist in the darkness, slipping in towards them from the door cracks.
Everything was like an inescapable abyss, be it the chasm, ‘it’, or the tapes.
The tapes gave them more information to work with, but the doubts and confusion they had, piled up instead.
The noise in the whirring tape did not stop. It kept buzzing in a low and rhythmic manner. Yan Yang was sprinting down the stairs alone. Because he was too anxious and too fast, he had already forgotten to turn it off. The device was still recording.
There seemed to be no other voices in the hospital. The voices of patients, doctors, and nurses, have all completely disappeared from these two floors.
Even the footsteps which had been following Yan Yang all this while, had disappeared, the loss making them feel uncomfortable.
Yan Yang seemed to have finally reached the first floor. There were some voices here, but they sounded soft and distant when compared with Yan Yang’s loud panting and heavy footsteps. Maybe the nurses and hospital staff here were sorting out the mess left by the chaos just now, and they didn’t notice any changes upstairs.
“Where is Lu Xiang?” Yan Yang seemed to have found a nurse at random.
“Lu, Dr. Lu? I don’t know…” the nurse faltered.
Yan Yang rushed to the next person.
He just ran back and forth, looking, searching. The buzzing sound continued, with occasional jumps.
“He can’t even find Lu Xiang. To think my brother actually left the recorder with this unreliable doctor…” Lu Xia’s panic and anxiety was showing. He began impatiently flipping through all the materials he could get his hands on. “‘It’ came out… We have to think of a way…”
Sun Zheng mirrored him, spreading the map open, trying to find clues on it.
The map only showed the main building. They fled all the way from the sixth floor to the first floor, and almost went through all the safe rooms. Now that ‘it’ was wandering somewhere in the hospital, along with the countless ‘ghosts’ formed from people who entered the chasm floating around in the dark, they would meet their end as soon as they left the observation room.
Lu Xiang… Lu Xiang… Lu Xiang was the current dean, so was he the one who removed the information on Yan Yang and Liu Qunfang?
What did he know?
No, maybe he didn’t know anything at that time. Maybe at that time, the dean and Liu Qin merely asked him to send the emergency patient to Ward 315A…
Snap.
It felt as though there was a sudden burst of current from the tape rushing into his head. It felt as though he’d been struck hard, and the pain made him break out in cold sweat.
Both Sun Zheng and Lu Xia simultaneously realised where they could go next: Ward 315A.
“Which ward is 315A?” Lu Xia seemed to be talking to himself, not noticing Sun Zheng’s fleeting expression of pain. “Why was Yan Yang a little surprised when he heard about this ward? At that time, the new surgery building wasn’t built yet, so that ward should be in the Internal Medicine Inpatient building opposite. What’s so strange there?”
He was about to add another few words when he suddenly heard a loud noise in the tape. The sound screeched through the entire observation room.
What happened?!
“This, this is…”
Yan Yang’s voice suddenly sounded further, smaller.
Sun Zheng and Lu Xia immediately understood that the recorder had fallen to the ground… Was it because of shock? What did Yan Yang see?
“Lu Xiang!!!” Yan Yang roared angrily. “What the fuck is this?!”
There was the sound of pushing and shoving in the tape, and several nurses rushed over immediately, trying to break up the fight.
“Tell me… who did you just roll out of there?” It was the first time they heard Yan Yang use such a cold and murderous voice.
Lu Xiang seemed to have been shoved violently by Yan Yang again. Even the gurney was pushed, and the wheels rolled twice on the ground, making a crisp and cold sound.
“It’s Dr. Liu, Liu Qin from the laboratory. When she came downstairs just now, she was so startled by us shouting that she suddenly passed out. She was sent to the emergency room immediately, but it was too late…” Lu Xiang was initially shocked by Yan Yang’s aggressiveness and his speech was a little unsteady at the beginning, but it quickly subsided and his voice gradually became louder with each word. “Yan Yang, the hospital is already chaotic enough today…”
“It’s too late? What do you mean?” Yan Yang froze, or perhaps he reached out to touch the body on the gurney. “She’s dead?”
Liu Qin died?
Even Sun Zheng and Lu Xia at the other end were stunned.
Liu Qin just passed out on the first floor, was sent to the emergency room, and died?
What about the Liu Qin who was chased into the operating room by Lu Xiaoyun upstairs then?
“Lu Xiaoyun!!” Yan Yang yelled. The voice approached from far away, and the sound of his running footsteps also became closer.
He picked up the device from the floor and dashed off.
