CH 10

In the end, they decided to stock up on bags of different blood components before leaving; inventory space was the least of their worries.

“I still think fresh blood would work better,” sulked Dr Lu.

“Don’t even think about it!” QiLeren glared at him out of the corner of his eye. There was no way he’d volunteer to be drained of his blood.

“We should test out how effective plasma is,” SuHe interjected calmly, pointing ahead. “Perhaps on the white shadow over there.”

The three looked in the direction of SuHe’s finger; a white flash could be seen across the atrium space, disappearing as quickly as it came. But it wasn’t the only one – all around them were shapes that squirmed and shifted with the shadows, some melting into themselves and others peering at them eerily from their crevice.

When had they grown so dizzying in number?

A chill went down QiLeren’s spine but he resisted the urge to look behind him.

The screen on the first floor lobby came into view as they walked halfway around the open space. “Hold on,” said QiLeren, halting in his tracks as he looked at the numbers displayed in bewilderment. “What time is it right now?”

Dr Lu pulled out his phone; there was no signal, but the phone itself could still keep the time. “It’s six thirty. Why?”

QiLeren didn’t reply. SuHe stood next to him, looking at the screen as well:

–Welcome to The People’s Hospital of X City

–The time is 04:13

“Maybe their clock is off?” said XueYingying.

“That’s impossible,” Dr Lu rebuked, “there wouldn’t be a clock that’s off for no reason in a horror movie. They always present some kind of clue, or…”

Foreshadow death. Dr Lu’s couldn’t bring himself to finish the sentence, but everyone heard the two words loud and clear.

“Perhaps there’ll be an event that’ll be triggered at four thirteen,” SuHe said softly.

The four stood around, waiting for a change that never came. It was as if the board was frozen in time.

“Four thirteen…” QiLeren muttered to himself. A million possibilities presented themselves to him, but which one was correct?

XueYingying’s sharp intake of breath startled the party out of their fruitless mulling. She instinctively latched onto SuHe’s arm and pointed a trembling finger at the first floor lobby below them. QiLeren shifted to look.

A blood-covered figure was walking across the lobby towards the opposite corridor, chainsaw in hand.

SuHe quickly waved them back, retreating towards the hallway behind them until they were unable to be seen. Theoretically, the murderer shouldn’t be able to see the four perched on higher ground unless he suddenly turned around to look up, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

There was a fishbowl on the nearby information desk, XueYingying noticed. The goldfish inside swam around leisurely without a care in the world.

XueYingying’s gaze flickered back to it.

The fish leapt out of the water with an agonising scream. It was not a sound fish were able to emit, scraping against the inside of their ears like fish hooks. They writhed on the ground.

One of the fish slapped against XueYingying’s stockinged calf as it fell out of the bowl. She started violently, sickly green hue rising to her complexion as she brushed off her calf repeatedly and backed away.

“Are you okay?” SuHe asked.

XueYingying shivered, staring at the four fish with unbridled fear. “It was really cold…”

“Fish are cold-blooded creatures, so it’s normal for them to feel icy.” Dr Lu considered the way in which they came with suspicion. “I think we should get as far as we can from here. I wouldn’t be surprised if the murderer heard that, considering how quiet this place is.”

His worry was not unfounded in the least. The hospital was deathly silent – the murderer would definitely come to seek out the source of that ear-splitting scream. The four considered this, fleeing from the danger immediately.

The floors of the two buildings were rather immense in terms of surface area, so it’s quite unlikely to bump into the murderer except in the cases of terrible luck. It was still hard to not feel unagitated in a hospital teeming with ghosts that watched their every move, however, despite Dr Lu’s familiarity with the hospital taking the party around many potentially dangerous areas.

“Wait,” QiLeren called, “I think…”

The floors were all similar in layout, but his occupational sensitivity alerted him to the familiarity of this particular place. Too familiar, in fact.

He stared at the office door he knows will creak when opened. “There should be a corpse around here,” he warned softly.

“Oh, you mean…” The pieces clicked in Dr Lu’s mind – this was where QiLeren managed to escape the murderer. He had been saved in the nick of time by a scream that lured the murderer away, but not much can be said about the screamer’s fate.

What they found in the near vicinity answered their doubts.

She was a young woman, wearing a white dress that was crusted with brown bloodstains. The inside of her neck stared at them, a mess of flesh exposed to the open air and attached to her head by a thin thread of skin. Off to the side was a careless pile of severed limbs, leaving only her bare torso on the ground.

There was a bloody “4” slashed into her face.

Not a single person could deny feeling some degree of nausea at the pungent smell of iron that invaded their senses. Dr Lu examined the body, making sure to block his nose, before silently shaking his head.

The four left solemnly to rest and discuss in a secluded location.

Despite their significant increase in numbers since daytime, the ghosts did not actively attack them, forcing SuHe and QiLeren to approach the ghosts in order to test out the effectiveness of each blood component. Plasma yielded much better results compared to red cell concentrate, but, as expected, none worked as well as XueYingying’s bloody pad from before.

SuHe’s theory on fresh blood was most likely correct.

Beyond the form of weaponry they now possessed, Dr Lu was also very concerned about the time of four thirty, convinced that it was a clue of some sort. “Based on my extensive experience from many years of movie-watching and gameplay, that time is definitely hiding some big secret. Have you considered how weird our setting is? If we exclude the player anomaly that is the murderer, this is a survival game where a bunch of normal people are tossed into a sealed environment. A survival game would obviously have elements that deter our survival – in our case, the ghosts – and a way to overcome those elements for the players to figure out – again, in our case, blood.”

He downed some water before continuing. “I reckon something’s big is going to happen at four thirty, like a wave of sudden ghost attacks or something. I personally think that this hospital holds some clue that might help us avoid the danger at four thirty but that’s about all we know for now.”

QiLeren and XueYingying nodded along with the points raised, finding them to be very plausible.

SuHe’s gentle gaze rested upon them from his position on the chair. “Have you thought about what the goal of this game is?” he prompted in a measured tone.

The three stared back blankly.

“The first notification told us that these quests were ‘tutorial quests’,” he continued, “which leads me to believe that this is rather similar to an MMO. Thus, it’s not unreasonable for us to assume that this place is the tutorial village, created to provide challenges with only minimal difficulty. What reason would the game have for placing a group of normal civilians in this so-called tutorial village?”

“Uhhhh… Maybe as an experiment?” Dr Lu guessed. “Like a “battle royale”-esque kind of situation?”

“Perhaps. It would certainly explain the presence of a serial killer. However, it could just have easily dispatched ghost NPCs to actively hunt us down, or even just issue quests that require us to kill each other. To gamble that a player would lose all senses of cooperation and slaughter fellow players is a significant risk that they don’t necessarily need to take.”

“Wait, but,” interjected XueYingying, “what if the murderer’s quest isn’t the same as ours? What if his quest is to kill other players?”

SuHe smiled softly. “Ah, then Dr Lu’s theory wouldn’t work – it can’t be an fair test if all players are not treated as equal. I myself am rather inclined to believe that the murderer was an unexpected anomaly, for both players and the game itself.”

The four discussed this newfound theory, unable to come to a conclusion. They’d have to work it out as they went.

Dr Lu stood up. “I want to go back and have another look at that fishbowl,” he said with a frown. “I still think there’s something we missed.”

“I agree,” said SuHe.

QiLeren didn’t mind either way, but XueYingying was hesitant. “The goldfish were ice-cold for some reason, and knew how to scream. They’re really gross…” She gingerly bent down and touched the place that the fish had flung itself against, face pale.

“We’ll just a look,” reassured Dr Lu.

“You can stand a little further away if you’d like,” SuHe suggested. “We’ll do the examining.”

XueYingying bit her lip and nodded reluctantly.

The four were carefully attempting to avoid any possible confrontation with the murder on the way to the fishbowl, but it seems that luck was on their side. The fish, however, were reduced to little more than trodden, gruesome puddles of flesh and liquid when they arrived.

“Disgusting psycho,” Dr Lu spat under his breath.

Something felt off to QiLeren. “Were there always three fish?”

SuHe considered this, frowning. “I think there were four.”

“Yeah, I think there were four as well,” said Dr Lu.

“What about you, XueYingying?” QiLeren asked, turning to the bleakly-lit corridor to XueYingying, who had been standing off to the side while they examined the fishbowl.

But there was nobody there.