Translated by Dust Bunny
Edited by Crooked
Gu Xizhou was a little confused. After the old man laid down flat, he didn’t budge. After a long moment, Gu Xizhou was certain that the door wasn’t attached to a person’s soul but a bed.
The bed was alive, meaning that the door was attached to it.
The old man’s body was paralyzed. He lay on the bed everyday, doing and thinking nothing. Gu Xizhou could feel that this person’s mind and emotions were blank.
After the man’s family sent him to the sanatorium, they would visit him every week. It was apparent that the man worked hard. Every time they came there were dark circles under his eyes. He tried to talk to the old man even if he never answered him.
“Ka cha.”
It was the man’s son coming to visit him again.
The man dragged his weary body into the room, took a deep breath, and walked up to the old man with a smile. “Dad, how is your health these days?”
The man’s eyes were cracked open. Since he was unable to speak, he could only hook the corners of his mouth to convey that he was very well and that his son didn’t need to worry.
The man was silent for a moment before picking up an apple and peeling it with a knife. He cut it into small pieces and placed them in the old man’s mouth. “Dad, in a few days I’ll be going on a business trip. It’ll be about a month. I won’t be able to come and see you this month.”
The old man seemed to acknowledge it with a nod, but because of the paralysis all the muscles in his body had atrophied and he couldn’t move.
Gu Xizhou silently watched the man and the old man before him interact. The man stayed in the sanatorium all afternoon before leaving.
The ward sunk once again into deathly silence. Usually the man stayed in a silent daze. It was only when the man came that he would think. Gu Xizhou wasn’t sure why the bed was capable of perceiving what the old man was thinking.
“My paralysis is dragging my son down and now he can’t marry…”
In the scene before him Gu Xizhou saw a middle-aged man. When he was paralyzed unexpectedly, his son had just graduated college. The young man took care of his father while working. He was originally from the countryside and didn’t have a lot of money. With the old man, no girl wanted to marry him.
Even now, he was thirty-four or five years old and still hadn’t married or had children. It wasn’t until a few years ago that the man’s life had changed. He got a promotion and had to travel frequently. With no other options, he sent the old man to the sanatorium.
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.
As the old man reminisced, Gu Xizhou felt something wet. The bed sheets were soaked with tears.
Ynfg atf cfza ofk vjsr… atf biv wjc kfca bc j tecufg raglxf.
Ktf wjc rajgfv ja atf mflilcu lc j vjhf, tlr ybvs jr atlc jr j wjamtralmx. Cc PN ofv uiembrf atgbeut tlr tjcv. Dfmjerf bo atf tecufg raglxf, atf rjcjabglew kjr jogjlv atfs kbeiv yf tfiv gfrqbcrlyif jcv obgmfv tlw ab gfqifclrt tlr ceaglfcar atgbeut jc PN.
Why am I not dead yet?
A man rushed in screaming and crying as he begged his father to eat. “Dad, you can eat, okay? I’m begging you!”
“Dad, I’ve told you this before, I don’t want you to die because you feel like you’re burdening me. I want to take care of you, just like you took care of me when I was little.”
“Please, I still have to work so don’t make trouble for me. If you’re like this, then I won’t be able to do a good job. When I get promoted again I’ll have more money and it will be easy for me to find a wife. Dad…what good is carrying on like this? Don’t you want to see me get married?”
Gu Xizhou watched as the man knelt on the ground and begged. He really did look pitiful.
At the sound of his son’s weeping, the old man finally opened his mouth and began eating. As time passed one day the man really did bring a woman to the hospital.
“Dad, this is Wen Hua. We are already talking about getting married. She came to meet you today!”
When the old man heard this, his gaze fell on the woman and his eyes instantly crinkled into a smile.
The scent of death spread through the room and the old man finally closed his eyes in peace. As the old man’s hospital bed, Gu Xizhou could feel the joy in his heart.
A few days after the old man’s death, Gu Xizhou saw the son again. Yi…? The man’s wife didn’t come along?
After the man came in he began to pack up his things. One by one he placed the old man’s things into a bag. After a while he seemed a little tired and sat down on the bed. His head drooped and he let out a long breath.
After a while Gu Xizhou realized the man sitting on the bed wasn’t moving. After a long time a sanatorium nurse came in.
“Kong Xiansheng, the sanatorium is closing. Are… are you okay?” the woman asked.
The man didn’t answer. The nurse furrowed her brows and walked in patting the man on the shoulder. With one pat the man’s body collapsed to the ground!
His body had already grown cold.
“S-somone’s dead!” The woman let out an alarmed cry.
But Gu Xizhou wasn’t surprised. Just before the man sat down Gu Xizhou had discovered that the bed had ‘thoughts,’ and he finally found the owner of the door.
The door wasn’t attached to the bed, it was attached to the man.
Gu Xizhou knew the man’s cause of death. He’d died of exhaustion.
The hospital bed ushered in a new elderly person. This one wasn’t paralyzed and had four children, but none of the four children wanted the elderly person to live at home, so they pooled their money to send the elderly person to a sanatorium.
From that day onward, the elderly person’s children never came to visit.
At night, the elderly person sat on the bed in a daze.
The elderly person was like this day after day, sitting quietly alone, not talking, not chatting, sitting on the bed and not going out.
Until one day, the elderly person died.
One elderly person after another appeared in the hospital bed and everyday Gu Xizhou felt the lifelessness of his surroundings.
As time went on, the nursing home slowly began to change. The people there started being rude to the elderly people whose relatives didn’t visit them. Instead of attending to them carefully, they had bad attitudes and sometimes even went so far as to say cruel things to provoke these patients.
“Tch, what do you mean I’m slow? Do you really still believe your family is going to come visit you? They’ve all gone abroad and paid for ten years upfront. They probably aren’t coming back. Isn’t that a little too slow? Won’t you be dead by then, ah?”
“The blood is flowing back into the IV. I-I… You…” The elderly person lying on the bed panted with rage as they argued with the nurse, their face flushed.
“Why? Tch, I don’t want to take care of you! Tomorrow I’ll find someone else to take care of you. Whoever loves taking care of you, they can do it. There are so many things to do!”
The elderly person’s body was inconvenient, and they could only move their mouth. Faced with the nurse, there was really nothing they could do.
Another night, due to his poor health, the elderly person had just returned from the hospital so he was still on an IV. Just like the other day, the nurse didn’t come on time. Watching the blood flow backwards, Gu Xizhou couldn’t help frowning.
At this moment, the bed, or more accurately, the sheet moved as if the bed had come to life. At night the sheet was like a pair of hands, helping the elderly person who couldn’t move turn off the IV.
“I forgot to turn off that old thing’s IV!”
The nurse hurried in to discover that the IV had already been shut off and that the elderly person was still asleep. The nurse rubbed his eyes. Did he come in last night?
Forget it, it’s off now anyways.
Everyone who entered the ward was taken care of by the bed. At night the IV is taken care of, the blanket is pulled up, and water is delivered… It seemed as though this very same bed was the one who fixed the covers for Song Nainai.
Gu Xizhou discovered that the bed had slowly begun to establish a strange connection with that young man who had died suddenly. Although he couldn’t see the man’s soul, this bed was the man, and the man was the bed.
After all, a sanitorium was a place brimming with negative energy. Compared with the happiness of the first old man, more and more patients had their own misfortunes.
The bed began to have its own emotions, and it was not so happy.
“Clang.”
The sliding sound of chains made Gu Xizhou certain that the man’s chains had broken.
As the attitudes of the nursing home staff worsened, the chains attaching the man to the bed broke and strange things began to occur in the hospital. People died everyday.
The bed caused panic and all the staff in the sanatorium died. No one dared to work there. All the patients left and the sanatorium filed for bankruptcy. The bed was left alone in that room forever.
Scene after scene passed before his eyes and Gu Xizhou’s mind suddenly sank into emptiness. Harsh sunlight streamed in through the curtains onto his eyes, turning his vision red.
“Hey—Wake up.”
Gu Xizhou heard someone whispering in his ear. Opening his eyes, he saw Si Yu looking at him tenderly. He gently touched Gu Xizhou’s hair and asked, “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Gu Xizhou smiled. He heard a heavy gasp and turned his head to see Fang Zhi sweating like he’d just run a kilometer.
“Gu Ge, did you see that? The door is on the bed!” Fang Zhi said.
Gu Xizhou nodded. “When he died suddenly, Kong Xiansheng’s soul was attached to the bed. Before, the bed couldn’t think and could only perceive the patient’s emotions, but after the death of Kong Xiansheng, it began to develop emotions.
Fang Zhi thought for a moment before saying in a low voice, “But I feel like something’s not right. Before when those ghosts possessed something we could always see them, but this time we couldn’t. From beginning to end all we could see was the bed.”
Gu Xizhou’s brows furrowed a little when he heard Fang Zhi’s words. It really wasn’t the same, was it?
He wanted to ask Si Yu for his opinion, but Si Yu only smiled and wouldn’t participate in the conversation or give any of his opinions.
Sus indeed, thank you for the chapter !
Huh, weird.
The bed was really sweet though, very nice of it to take care of the patients 🙂
Thank you for the chapter!
Thx for the ch ٩( >ヮ<)۶