Translator: Reina Editor: Killian
“There is another injured person here, hurry!
“This is still considered a minor injury, the ones over there are much worse…”
“Thank god the hospital wasn’t busy today… This patient has a fracture on their right leg, send him to the third floor to stop his bleeding and bone setting, quick!”
……
“I’ll be putting you on anaesthesia, take a deep breath.”
“What’s the patient’s condition?”
“Blood pressure 110/70, heart rate 80, vitals are stable.”
“Doctor, this is his x-ray. The patient has a fracture on his right femur.”
“Scalpel.”
……
“Doctor, the fractured femur ruptured his femoral artery! The patient’s breathing is unstable and his heart rate is increasing…”
“He has a respiratory infection? Do a chest x-ray!”
“Doctor, the patient is coughing up blood!”
……
“Doctor… this is…”
“Let me see his Colour Doppler ultrasound!”
“The right atrium and right ventricle are enlarged, and the movement of the right ventricle is weak. Doctor…”
……
“This isn’t an infection, it’s a pulmonary embolism caused by the femur piercing into his femoral artery…”
“Pulmonary embolism?”
“…It’s already too late…too late… Prepare to inform the patient’s family…”
……
“Which one of you is his family member?”
“Who is his next-of-kin? Where are they?!”
“What happened to him… No, I’m not his next-of-kin. He has no close family… Pulmonary embolism? Wait, let me make a call…”
“D-Dean Lu? This is a pulmonary embolism, it was already too late when we discovered it. You should know it better than anyone else, you worked in the emergency department…”
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.
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……
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“Dean Lu, you forgot…”
“I haven’t forgotten. If Chen Zhiwen could get into his position with that method, then I, Lu Xiang, can naturally also do the same. This patient is going to die soon and he doesn’t even have any prolific relatives, so it’s the same no matter where he is sent to… ”
……
“Mr. Sun, I will send you to Ward 315A of the inpatient department now. Don’t worry, the director and everyone else will be waiting for you to come out.”
“Everything will be alright. Take your time to recuperate. Think of it as giving the director and everyone else a piece of mind.”
Creak.
The door cracked open.
A dark room, a fishy scent.
No. Nononono.
Let me go.
I want to go.
Go out. Get out getoutgetout.
Get out!!
.
Sun Zheng’s eyes snapped open. A huge surgical lamp shrouded in the darkness came towards him.
His whole body was limp and powerless. He moved his hands, but his legs were too weak. He tried supporting himself with his hands and sat up.
Since when was he lying on this operating table?
Wasn’t he in 315A earlier…… earlier? No, that was not right.
He pursed his lips tightly, supported himself up from the edge of the bed, and lowered his feet on the ground.
Standing up, he squinted his eyes and surveyed the dark operating room. He patted his sleeves, as if he wanted to pat away that stale rotting scent, then walked towards the door.
When closing the door, he casually tossed the flashlight in through the crack, only to hear a few clatters before it went silent.
He wanted to find someone. He wanted to find Lu Xia.
.
Lu Xia glanced around, his body covered with a layer of sticky sweet.
He didn’t know where Liu Qin went. He ran after her, coming out here and circled around the third floor. He was already sweating profusely, yet he still hadn’t found anything.
Someone barged in.
At that time, who came in? What did Lu Xiaoyun do?
He wasn’t Lu Xiaoyun. He didn’t know how to detect changes in the air of the chasm. He didn’t know what was the appropriate action to take now.
The third floor was deathly silent, and the flashlight swept across in an arc, illuminating several tightly shut doors. They were akin to the closed mouth of a lurking lion, once the light moved away, it would open its jaws and pounce.
He felt something moving in the entire building, moving silently. Ever since ‘it’ came out, this feeling hasn’t dissipated.
Lu Xia paid close attention to the movement in his surroundings. His eyes, nose and ears were all in their hyper alert state, to detect the even slightest change. He even took his brother’s advice, closing his eyes and just trying to feel with his skin.
This highly attentive state of his lasted for nearly an hour. It has been more than ten hours since he had entered the chasm and was on guard.
His body couldn’t take it anymore. The changes which had started from his feet had already crawled up his lower body, and even began to spread to his upper body. He felt like he was now akin to a fragrant bait. Since he was about to turn into one of those creatures, he would inevitably attract his own kind.
Furthermore, he was unarmed and here fighting alone.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
There was the sound of footsteps.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
It was the sound of slow and dull footsteps on the stairs.
The footsteps seemed to jog a distant memory. Lu Xia furrowed his brows and listened to it for a long while, then suddenly realised: these were the same footsteps he’d carefully studied: Lao Zhang’s footsteps! He was coming towards the third floor!
No matter what, he cannot allow himself to come into contact with those things anymore. Besides, who knew what changes these things underwent after ‘it’ came out? He glanced around, making a split second decision, and hid inside the archives.
They had left the door to the archives ajar. Hearing the footsteps approaching the third floor step by step, Lu Xia turned his body sideways and slipped in.
At the efficient speed he’d mastered while in the chasm, he quickly scanned the archives with the flashlight, screening from floor to ceiling, and only let out a sigh of relief after ascertaining there were no irregularities.
The things in the chasm were becoming more and more active. That was the conclusion he had come to after walking around the third floor alone, and that was also the reason why he still couldn’t break out of the third floor to go downstairs to search for Sun Zheng’s traces. There was Lao Zhang’s wandering shadow on the stairs on the left while the stairs on the right was within the range of activities of that child.
It was as if something had purposefully trapped him on the third floor.
The sound of footsteps seemed to be fading away. He pushed open a crack in the door and carefully shone outside with a flashlight. Surveying the area using a flashlight in this incomparable darkness was the moment when his nerves was the most tense. The more the light illuminated each area, the more it seemed as if there were many unspeakable things still lurking within the darkness, and every newly constructed shadow seemed to be hiding something which might jump out at any moment.
The light swept across the wall and door frame opposite, temporarily confirming that this small area was safe. Lu Xia took a small step forward, squeezing out through the crack of the door.
Just as he was about to go downstairs, he noticed that something was wrong.
There was a long bloodstain on the stairs, stretching into the void. He didn’t know where it led to.
It was definitely not Sun Zheng’s blood.
He swore. He’d fucked up.
He could almost hear the eerie rustling, no, not almost, he’d heard it!
The flashlight changed direction, revealing a distorted body in the corridor in front of him. He couldn’t see its face, but its body was wriggling at an extremely slow speed. Blood was oozing out from somewhere on it, pooling out over the floor.
He clenched his fists tightly.
Sure enough, this thing was also coming at him. What should he do?!
He’d already given the only viable item he had, the giant clam key, to Sun Zheng, and there was nothing in the corridor he could use to defend himself.
And more importantly—he seemed to have heard more of that dangerous rustling echoing from downstairs up here. There were more than one of these darn things?
What should he do? What can he do?!
A place surfaced in his mind.
He could toss away this leg but he needed to keep his life!
Lu Xia gritted his teeth, lifted his foot and stomped on the wriggling thing, full of hatred. There was only a cracking sound, like the sound of a broken spine, and a big pool of blood gushed out from under the thing immediately.
Lu Xia couldn’t help but curse again. He swiftly jumped over the thing and dashed straight for the third room not far away.
The third room at the general surgery department was the last shelter Lu Xiaoyun left for him. Without the slightest hesitation, he scrambled and rushed in, then immediately turned around and closed the door tightly.
His heart was beating wildly.
If it was already so difficult and dangerous for him here, what about for Sun Zheng?
He hoped that all the monsters here were only coming towards him.
Lu Xia leaned his back against the door, panting while waiting to calm down.
This short sliver of time spent panting was enough for him to gather his thoughts: If, if Lu Xiaoyun really became ‘it’, no, no, he must have used some other better method to solve this problem, then according to the last record he read, the hospital entered a period of calm since Liu Qi’s death. At that time, ‘it’ was no longer active, so the problem should have been resolved.
However, at the end of 2005, the chasm began to devour the living again. This could only mean one thing: someone restarted Liu Qin’s sacrificial rituals, and the ‘it’ has also become another new ‘it’.
Who would restart it?
Listening to the tapes, both Liu Qin and Chen Zhiwen had told anyone about the ritual in detail. Their accomplices were merely following orders, all while being aware that something about those instructions were unusual.
That being said, there were a few nurses who were in charge of preparing the items needed for those rituals. Right, there was one more person… Lu Xiang from the emergency department back then.
The current Dean Lu whom he had met not long ago.
He was in a position of power and had the freedom to act, which made him more suspicious than anyone else. Wasn’t this exactly why he asked someone to hide the data in the archives as soon as he heard that Lu Xia was here to look for someone (although he didn’t have the time to clean it all up)? After all, Yan Yang went looking for him during the incident, and he should have heard a lot about the incident from Yan Yang (Yan Yang seemed to trust him).
But to think he would be bold enough to breach a taboo… Though, if he had set his mind to it, then why was he still keeping Yan Yang and Liu Qunfang’s information, and even found people to write entries in the record book like Chen Zhiwen…
That was why!
Lu Xia came to a sudden realisation. Without Liu Qin’s guidance, Lu Xiang must have inevitably made some mistakes during the implementation process, causing a huge problem in the hospital, and all these materials and records were to find a solution to this problem.
It turned out that Lu Xiang was just like them. Although he was outside the chasm, he was entrenched so deeply in the matters of the chasm too and was also desperately finding a way to escape from it.
Chen Zhiwen, Lu Xiang, everyone who’d tried to take advantage of the chasm all ended up with the same ending as those innocent lives they’d indirectly implicated.
Lu Xia smiled. He clearly heard the dense rustling gathering outside the door, yet he grinned at this moment, showing his white teeth.
Just imagining those wriggling masses give me the heebie jeebies 😭😭