CH 21

Midnight brought with it a drastic increase in the volume of ghosts, all of whom were shielded behind a smoky veil of fog. This left the party, who had quickly found themselves unable to see past a small radius, completely at the mercy of the silent assassins lurking unseen around them.

It was not an ideal situation, to say the least.

“Good thing we got rid of that murderer already or we’d have another thing to worry about,” Dr Lu sighed with residual trepidation.

“How unlucky do you have to be to run into a murderer during the tutorial?” XueYingying muttered. Without so much as a pause she swung her axe into a ghost that had appeared out of nowhere, sending splatters of yellow fluid across the pristine walls around them. It did absolutely nothing to help the already eerie atmosphere.

The three males shuddered and looked at her with conflicting feelings. XueYingying offered a chilling giggle in response. “I can’t wait till we leave this stupid place,” she sighed happily. “I bet the feeling of my scum of an ex’s face against my knuckles would be divine with this new strength I got from the skill card.”

Looks like SuHe’s face alone wasn’t enough to erase all thoughts of her ex, QiLeren thought.

Lead by Dr Lu, the four weaved their way through the foggy corridors towards the records room as ghosts pounced from all directions. By the end of it all, QiLeren had grown numb to the panic these surprise encounters used to bring. With Dr Lu’s mildly annoying voice rambling in the background, QiLeren wielded his crowbar like an extension of his arm and disposed of their resident supernatural population with no more than a few swings each, dully impassive all the while.

“Don’t lose yourself in your thirst for blood, QiLeren,” Dr Lu advised unhelpfully with a trace of awe.

QiLeren rolled his eyes so far back he swore he could see his brain. Out of all of them, Dr Lu was probably the weakest one by far, everything about his pathetic physique pointing to his presence as half dead weight and the other half even deader weight. He probably hasn’t even set foot in a gym before in his life. Compared to XueYingying – who was most likely bleeding at any given moment yet standing strong as steel as their front-line fighter, steadily growing strength in her arms suggesting that she had plenty more where that came from – Dr Lu was undoubtedly the class dunce.

SuHe was likely the most idle. He had the dagger gripped in his hand, but its delicate craftsmanship and elegant adornments suggested that it was unfit for even small skirmishes. Perhaps it’ll become more useful after its final ability becomes unlocked; it was, after all, an item from a chest.

Upon their arrival at the records room, Dr Lu rummaged around for the key, eventually locating it in a nearby draw. The heavy doors opened to release the thick, musty air within, flickering overhead lights illuminating the rows upon rows of documents resting in their metal coffins.

There was too much material and not enough time.

Dr Lu circled around the shelves. “This can’t be all of them. Where are the earlier ones?” he muttered to himself quizzically, opening some archive racks peering into them.

“What happened?” QiLeren asked.

“I can’t find anything from twenty years ago,” Dr Lu replied and pointed to the open shelf before him. “See, this is the earliest I could find.”

“Could they perhaps be kept somewhere else?” SuHe said.

“I can go check the medical records and prescription files,” Dr Lu offered. He pocketed the keys and headed towards the neighbouring room.

Something was wrong. QiLeren took in the shelves that towered over them menacingly in the cold lighting, each held closed by their own handle. There must be a reason as to why the documents were nowhere to be found.

It wasn’t long before Dr Lu returned with disappointing news. “I couldn’t find anything,” he reported, shaking his head in mystification.

SuHe frowned. “Did the hospital by any chance relocate twenty years ago?”

“No, we’ve been here for fifty years already,” Dr Lu replied with the confidence of a true local. “Even if we did it wouldn’t have just erased the records as cleanly as this.”

SuHe considered this. “This hospital underwent a name change, yes?” he asked after a pause.

“Yeah it did.”

“If I recall correctly, I believe you said that the ‘first’ was added after its reconstruction twenty years ago.” SuHe said, standing beside a filing cabinet. Under the light, something danced within his eyes.

Dr Lu froze for a few seconds before slowly, ever so slowly, opening his mouth into a soundless gasp.

How could QiLeren describe his expression? It was the raw emotions of a lost man who had finally found light after trudging endlessly through the dark, only to find that the world he had dreamt of so longingly was no more hell on earth. It was twisted, sickening and unbelievably cruel. The others found themselves unable to respond and opted to watch silently.

Dr Lu remained frozen to the ground where he stood. “…Did it ever occur to you,” he rasped finally, “that there’s been two earthquakes since we first arrived?”

Two earthquakes? The realisation hit QiLeren like a bus; yes, there’d indeed been two earthquakes! The first was when they took shelter in Director Li’s office, which caused the murderer to drop his chainsaw and subsequently offer the party precious seconds in which they fled. The second was the incident that exposed them to the fog outside not long ago in the charred ward. The fact that none of them had stopped to think about this would be puzzling had both occurrences not been immediately followed by life-threatening danger.

Of course there’d be earthquakes. After all, X City itself had been the host to a particularly large one twenty years ago!

The earthquake had been no more than a vague memory by the time QiLeren’s family moved here, the city having rebuilt itself, so it was small wonder that it slipped his mind. Even so, the severity of the disaster had made itself known to all.

“I see. So at four-thirteen on a certain day more than twenty years ago, a large earthquake in X City caused the hospital to undergo reconstruction, which led to the loss of all records up to that point,” SuHe concluded. “If we are to survive until dawn, we’ll need to find shelter.”

QiLeren’s heartbeat thundered in his ears. Finding shelter meant leaving the building for an open area, but who knew what the mist outside held?

“We can’t go outside,” he said resolutely, shaking his head. “We musn’t. Ever.”

“But we’ll die if we stay here!” XueYingying argued. “Wouldn’t it be better to try our luck outside?”

QiLeren brought a trembling hand to his face. “You wouldn’t be saying that if you saw what I did.” In fact, he’d rather die a slow and painful death, crushed under the debris of an earthquake, than to face that horrifying scene again. It was not something anyone’d understand unless they had seen it for themselves. His dour words and demeanour left the atmosphere grim.

It was Dr Lu who finally broke the silence. “Wait!” he exclaimed suddenly. “I think I know how we can survive the earthquake without leaving the building!”