Whether an investigation log should really be written by an intern on his very first day at work would have to be set aside for now, because Shang Lu had barely driven out of the alley when he received a call from Anxin Hospital.
When Shang Lu had gone to the hospital the day before, the student had not yet fully regained consciousness, so he had only spoken with the doctor about his condition and left his contact number. At the time, the student’s vital signs had been stable, but now the doctor was asking him to come over as quickly as possible. The student had regained consciousness, but the situation was becoming difficult.
Some things were simply more effective to discuss face-to-face than over the phone, and the hospital wasn’t far from their current location anyway.
Shang Lu didn’t have time to take the kid back to the Anomalous Case Department first, so he simply brought him along.
“Congratulations. You’ve seamlessly rolled straight into your second field assignment since joining the Anomalous Case Department.” After hanging up, Shang Lu found an intersection and turned the car around. “You’ve broken the intern record.”
Fang Huan Xing couldn’t care less about the record. He had heard the conversation and asked, “Where are we going?”
“The hospital.” Shang Lu’s expression tightened. “There’s a second ‘monster’ we need to face today.”
On the way, Shang Lu briefly explained what had happened to the Chengchuan Middle School bus, including its connection to Xianlu Hot Spring Hotel in Xueping.
Fang Huan Xing had been one of the people directly involved at the hotel, and the two of them had just visited the family of another person involved in the same incident. He hadn’t expected the place they had stumbled into while fleeing for their lives to turn out to be connected to another anomalous case.
Fang Huan Xing also found it strange. “How did a hotel vehicle become a school bus?”
“We’ve already found a few clues. Zhou Jia Ying is following up on them. We may have an answer later.”
The white pickup sped into the hospital parking lot. The two of them hurried into the building, and Shang Lu did not forget to warn the unpredictable element beside him, “Stay close to me in the hospital. Don’t enter a patient’s room without permission, don’t touch anything, and most importantly, don’t run around.”
Fang Huan Xing: “…”
His ears were going to get calluses from hearing this.
Shang Lu’s concern turned out to be unnecessary. The moment Fang Huan Xing stepped inside the hospital and saw the white ceilings, walls, and floors, with the smell of disinfectant rushing toward him, he suddenly seemed reluctant to move at all.
He apparently hadn’t spent much time in hospitals before. Shang Lu called him several times before he finally followed, his entire body stiff.
Outside the intensive care unit, Shang Lu met the doctor who had been waiting for him. The doctor’s surname was Qin, and he had met Shang Lu the day before. He immediately asked Shang Lu to come to his office first.
“And this is…?”
Before entering the office, Dr. Qin looked at Fang Huan Xing.
Fang Huan Xing had no expression on his face and seemed not to know what he was supposed to say to someone he was meeting for the first time.
He looked exactly like a young person who had only just entered the working world.
“He’s an intern,” Shang Lu said. “He’s only here to observe.”
He looks awfully young, Dr. Qin thought. Maybe the internet is right. The world really has gotten so strange that even the Anomalous Case Department and the police together can barely keep up.
Once inside the office, Dr. Qin switched on a display and brought up several medical scans. “Team Leader Shang, these compare yesterday’s examination results with this morning’s. What we can say for certain is that the patient’s overall condition is still relatively stable, and no new anomalous structures have appeared.”
“What about the two sets of blood vessels?”
“They’re both still there.”
The doctor enlarged one of the images.
“Look. As we discussed yesterday, the two vascular systems follow different paths through Tao Ran’s abdominal and thoracic cavities. Some portions operate independently, while other portions connect at places where they shouldn’t. There’s obvious edema and bleeding around those junctions, and the direction of blood flow is extremely chaotic. This morning, now that he’s conscious, we can observe the situation more clearly. As his heart rate and metabolism recover, the two sets of readings that were originally quite similar are beginning to diverge.”
Put simply, blood-flow velocity in one system continued to rise while the other continued to fall.
With both circulatory systems supplying blood to the same organs at the same time, the possible consequences were easy to imagine.
Shang Lu watched the two curves on the display, one climbing while the other fell. “Worst-case scenario?”
Fang Huan Xing moved closer to examine the scans as well, the light from the screen reflected in his pupils.
“Blood clots, internal bleeding, acute ischemia of the cardiopulmonary system or brain—any of those are possible,” Dr. Qin said. “We don’t know which circulatory system will destabilize first. We’re still working out a surgical plan.”
Dr. Qin was putting it mildly.
The reality was far crueler. They knew what was wrong with Tao Ran’s body, but they still had not found a reliable solution. Any surgery would carry extremely high risks.
“How much does the injured student know?” Shang Lu asked. “And how is he reacting now?”
That was precisely why the hospital had called Shang Lu over.
Tao Ran already knew that his legs could not be saved. He had suffered an emotional breakdown over it, and no one dared tell him yet that there were two complete vascular systems inside his body. It was like carrying a time bomb inside him that could explode at any moment.
While Tao Ran was still capable of answering questions, the Anomalous Case Department needed to seize the opportunity to learn what had happened.
“Is he willing to see us?”
The doctor nodded. “His father is with him now. After his emotions stabilized, he actually asked when the investigators would be coming. I recommend keeping the interview short.”
Shang Lu wasted no time and immediately followed a nurse to put on protective clothing. When Fang Huan Xing was halfway through putting his on as well, Shang Lu suddenly stopped him. “Kid, don’t go in.”
“Why?”
“Wait for me outside. Be good.” Shang Lu’s voice was gentle.
Fang Huan Xing stripped off the protective clothing and tossed it aside. He was clearly unhappy, but he didn’t insist.
After Shang Lu entered the intensive care unit, the nurse said to Fang Huan Xing, “Your team leader is very thoughtful. He even considered how the patient might feel.”
Fang Huan Xing didn’t understand.
Only after the nurse tactfully explained did he notice his own clothes and the backpack on his shoulders.
He might not be exactly the same age as the injured student, but appearing in front of Tao Ran looking like this really could evoke painful associations. Fang Huan Xing began to waver, his brows drawing tightly together.
Next time, I won’t bring the backpack.
I’m not running away anyway.
Probably… not anytime soon.
Equipment surrounded the hospital bed, and IV lines and monitoring leads extended beneath the blankets. Tao Ran looked extremely weak, without a trace of color in his face. To make talking easier, he had been switched to oxygen through a nasal cannula.
Below his knees, the blanket lay completely flat. Shang Lu’s gaze never once went there. “Hello, Tao Ran. I’m Shang Lu, a team leader with the Anomalous Case Department’s Investigation Action Groups.”
At that, Tao Ran’s father hurriedly stood and greeted him.
Tao Ran only nodded. “I know you. I saw you online investigating the Crispy Fried Hand case.”
Shang Lu gave a faint smile. “That was me.”
It had been a case from two years earlier, and it was fairly gruesome.
The owner of a fried-dough-stick stall had been reported for murder and dismemberment after a customer personally saw him lift a human hand, fried crisp, out of the boiling oil and even recorded it on video. The police initially took over the case. Because public discussion had already spread widely, an official investigation notice was later released.
After carefully investigating the stall and reviewing surveillance footage from the surrounding streets, the police confirmed that everything had been completely normal before the hand appeared. Never mind a human hand—there hadn’t even been an extra fried dough stick in the fryer.
The case was eventually handed over to the Anomalous Case Department, with Shang Lu in charge. His investigation determined that the hand belonged to the victim of a missing-person case from five years earlier, and they successfully located the victim’s remains. The strange part was that the body had already been reduced to a skeleton.
The Crispy Fried Hand case was one of the Anomalous Case Department’s relatively public cases. People online claimed it had been caused by spacetime folding, so it was perfectly normal for Tao Ran to have heard about it.
“Do you usually like bizarre stories, mysteries, or crime-solving?” Shang Lu asked.
“All of them.” Tao Ran looked at him. “Team Leader Shang, did I experience spacetime folding too? My legs… could they be somewhere else? Or in another time and space?”
“All we can say right now is that we don’t know.”
Tao Ran said sadly, “I can still feel my feet. My right foot feels a little itchy, and I want to rub it with my left foot, but… neither of them is there.”
The room fell silent. The only sound was Tao Ran’s father, unable to suppress his crying.
Shang Lu held Tao Ran’s hand to comfort him, then asked, “The police have already spoken with you. They said you took the school bus on time every day and always sat in the same seat. Can you tell me whether anything felt different recently? Sleepwalking, zoning out, feeling like you were behaving unlike yourself, or bleeding gums?”
Tao Ran shook his head, then began to cry. “Yes. Lately, I kept feeling like I wasn’t myself. I felt like I had another name. I didn’t like crime stories or mysteries—I liked drawing. I smoked. I would remember things that had never happened as if they were real. And I kept feeling like I didn’t have lower legs, like I should be using a wheelchair… but nobody believed me.”
Tao Ran’s father was overcome with guilt. “His mother and I divorced this year. When he started acting like this, we thought it was psychological, something caused by the divorce. We didn’t pay enough attention. We were only planning to take him to see a psychologist soon.”
Shang Lu immediately caught the important part. “Before the accident happened, you already felt that your lower legs were gone and that you used a wheelchair?”
Tao Ran nodded. He was crying so hard his breathing had become rapid. “Yes. S-sometimes I could even feel the wheels of the wheelchair. Now my legs really are gone. T-Team Leader Shang… am I turning into that version of myself I imagined?”
His emotions surged, and the monitors began sounding alarms.
Tao Ran’s father hurriedly tried to calm him while Shang Lu immediately pressed the call button.
Tao Ran cried out, “I don’t want to be replaced! I don’t want to become someone else! I don’t—”
＊
Fang Huan Xing leaned against the wall, reading the bilingual medical information posted there. The English words were more complicated than any he had ever encountered and harder than the Russian he knew. He couldn’t pronounce a single one properly.
But he still read every letter.
The moment he saw Shang Lu emerge from the intensive care unit and the nurse hurry back inside, Fang Huan Xing immediately asked, “How is he?”
He magnanimously decided not to hold it against Shang Lu for refusing to let him enter earlier.
Shang Lu’s mood was heavy. He answered simply, “He got agitated, and his body is too weak. Based on what we know right now, these are early-stage symptoms of fusion disease.”
“Bodily positional overlap,” Fang Huan Xing said.
He had already begun putting what he learned into practice, quickly adopting the Anomalous Case Department’s professional terminology.
Both of them had personally witnessed the progression of fusion disease and knew how horrifying it could become by the final stage.
But the Stabilizer was still only an unfinished prototype and could not yet be used clinically. There was still a long road ahead before it could truly serve its intended purpose.
Fang Huan Xing glanced through the glass. The nurse was fitting Tao Ran with an oxygen mask.
“Will he die?”
There was very little emotion in Fang Huan Xing’s voice.
Shang Lu shook his head. “Tao Ran’s situation is different from Lin Rui’s. He’s already away from the interference source, and it’s still early-stage, so it shouldn’t continue getting worse. What we need to worry about now is whether the doctors can successfully separate the extra blood vessels inside him.”
Tao Ran’s condition actually reminded Shang Lu of Li Bei Shan.
Both of them had fusion disease, and both were directly or indirectly connected to Xianlu Hotel in Xueping County. Zheng Xiao Yu had mentioned that Li Bei Shan’s girlfriend reported sleepwalking and blurred vision, and the investigation log stated clearly that there had indeed been times when Li Bei Shan seemed unlike himself.
Shang Lu had a feeling that the connection between these two people ran deeper than what they could currently see.
“Let’s go. We’ll head back and see what Zheng Xiao Yu has found at the Analysis Center.”
Fang Huan Xing didn’t want to stay in the hospital any longer either, so the two left one after the other.
When they reached the elevators, however, Fang Huan Xing, who was walking behind Shang Lu, suddenly stopped and looked back down the corridor.
“What is it?” Shang Lu asked.
The teenager motioned for him to be quiet. His pale profile was tense as he stared fixedly toward the room they had just left.
The corridor became silent in an instant.
A barely perceptible ripple appeared in Fang Huan Xing’s vision, cutting across the snow-white ceiling and walls. For a split second, they shifted out of alignment before returning to reality.
Just like the displaced threads of rain above the construction site that day.
A few seconds later, a nurse rushed out of the intensive care unit. “Prepare for resuscitation—”
The medical staff immediately sprang into action, and Dr. Qin strode quickly into the intensive care unit.
Shang Lu and Fang Huan Xing exchanged a look, then hurried back.
Through the glass, they saw Tao Ran’s chest suddenly arch off the bed as his entire body began convulsing. On the monitor, the two blood-flow curves rapidly pulled apart—one shooting sharply upward while the other plunged straight down.
Tao Ran’s convulsions were so violent they almost produced afterimages. His chest began deforming around a horrifying bulge.
Inside the room, a piercing alarm shrieked.
Shang Lu suddenly realized there was no one beside him.
He turned.
Fang Huan Xing was standing a short distance away, staring at the ceiling. In a low voice, he asked, “Did you bring your gun today?”
Next
Leave a Reply