The sight before Fang Huan Xing was disgusting, and because he was starving, it somehow felt even more disgusting.
Fang Huan Xing had no idea whether anyone else would understand.
Just then, a soft cry came from the patient room behind him.
Captain Xie and Xiao Huang had finished discussing what to do and gone inside. Captain Xie stood behind the faceless nurse with the wooden pole in hand, ready to act at any moment, while Xiao Huang trembled as she reached for the IV bag on the stand.
Perhaps she was too nervous. As Xiao Huang removed the IV bag, her arm accidentally brushed against the faceless nurse’s cap.
The faceless nurse stopped moving.
It turned its head, its blurred face pointing toward Xiao Huang. The hand holding the syringe drew back, then abruptly clamped around Xiao Huang’s wrist.
Agonizing pain shot through Xiao Huang’s arm. “Aaaaah!!!”
Captain Xie brought the wooden pole down on the faceless nurse’s head. Unexpectedly, it couldn’t take much of a hit and staggered backward, dragging the already weak-kneed Xiao Huang to the floor with it.
That only made it easier for the faceless nurse to attack. It pinned Xiao Huang tightly beneath it as the skin of its palms, face, and neck distorted, stretching toward her and sticking fast. Even the flesh beneath its clothes seemed to melt, continuously spreading over Xiao Huang’s body like a pool of molten wax.
Captain Xie struck it several more times, but the monster didn’t react at all. Unable to stop himself from swearing, he grabbed the faceless nurse and hauled backward with all his strength. “Xiao Huang, let go!”
Xiao Huang cried out in pain. “I can’t! It’s stuck to me! Help!”
Once the strange things in this place latched onto someone, they were almost impossible to separate. Captain Xie had already experienced that firsthand. Even brute force couldn’t pull them apart, and amid the struggle, they knocked over the medication cart, sending bottles rolling all over the floor.
Suddenly, a bloodstained steel pipe wedged itself between the monster and Xiao Huang and levered upward with force.
The pipe was long enough to provide plenty of leverage. With a rrrip, flesh separated with a sound like thick paper being torn apart.
Fang Huan Xing kicked the faceless nurse hard in the shoulder, sending it flying away. He immediately grabbed Xiao Huang by the hand and dragged her clear in one clean motion.
The steel pipe in his hand was merciless. He swung it like a baseball bat and struck the monster squarely in the head with a bang.
“Get up!”
Captain Xie hurriedly helped Xiao Huang to her feet. Fortunately, she wasn’t seriously injured, only badly frightened. Her wrist, like Captain Xie’s, had been sucked purple-red. If they had separated her even a little later, a layer of skin would probably have been torn off.
Half of the faceless nurse’s head had caved in, blood steadily spilling out, and it stopped moving.
To everyone’s surprise, however, it actually picked up the medicine bottles from the floor and righted the little cart. As though the three of them didn’t exist, it arranged everything neatly again, then repeated the same motions as before, preparing medication and injecting it into an IV bag that existed only in empty air.
The monster was even more conscientious than Xiao Huang was. She was almost touched.
Captain Xie had already read the name badge on the monster’s chest. “Wang Qing Mei. Xiao Huang, do you know her?”
Xiao Huang nodded, tears of pain still gathered in her eyes. “Yeah. She was one of the hospital’s exemplary employees this year and has worked in this department for several years. Did she turn into a monster? Even as a monster she’s still this dedicated. She really is the model employee herself.”
“No,” Fang Huan Xing said.
He didn’t explain any further. Instead, he warned the two of them.
“As long as you don’t touch it or interfere with its route, it won’t attack.”
Judging from what they had just seen, Fang Huan Xing really did seem to be right.
Captain Xie trusted people from the Anomalous Case Department and immediately pressed him. “Then what exactly is it?”
Fang Huan Xing pressed his lips together and turned out of the room.
He couldn’t answer.
Captain Xie: “…”
Was this young man looking down on him?
Looks like I really need to learn more about anomalous cases.
Clearly, there was something new outside the room that needed dealing with, so Xiao Fang didn’t have time to explain much to them. When Captain Xie and Xiao Huang came out, both of them were stunned. The monster Fang Huan Xing had beaten to death earlier had reappeared in the corridor and was crawling toward the intensive care unit again.
“Wasn’t it dead?”
Captain Xie supported Xiao Huang, staring in astonishment. For a moment, he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him.
“What’s going on?”
Fang Huan Xing slipped one hand into his pocket. The wristband he had taken from the monster earlier had been there, marked Bed 26, Tao Ran. But now it was gone, leaving his pocket completely empty.
The identical wristband had also disappeared from the printer, only to reappear on the monster in front of them.
He had guessed correctly. This place really was positional overlap caught in the act.
It was a fixed, unchangeable state. The positional-overlap process would repeat again and again, even incorporating the residual data left behind by the previous cycle.
Bang! Bang!
The monster started throwing itself against the door again.
The cart squeaked as the faceless nurse, half its head caved in, pushed it back out. Ignoring them completely, it continued toward the next patient room.
“You two keep going. Just don’t block its path again.”
With that, Fang Huan Xing walked straight toward the monster slamming itself against the door.
Captain Xie didn’t even have time to call after him.
Once Fang Huan Xing had settled on a plan, he hated changing it. Everything had to continue according to the original plan.
The first thing he needed to determine was whether the door the monster was trying to break through really was an exit.
The bloodstains in the corridor had disappeared as well, leaving everything spotless. The faceless Tao Ran noticed Fang Huan Xing approaching. It crawled back slightly, then gathered itself to leap.
Bang—!
Fang Huan Xing’s first strike landed. The monster flew nearly two meters, brain matter bursting out as it collapsed limply to the floor.
Fang Huan Xing had waited outside this room for Shang Lu earlier, so he knew Tao Ran was inside. The monster hadn’t been able to break the door open despite all its efforts, yet when Fang Huan Xing reached out and pushed, it opened immediately.
There was a sterile preparation area inside the room. The shelves should have held sterile gowns, masks, and other supplies, but they were empty. A basket beside them contained the ones that had just been worn, as though the scene had been preserved exactly as it was after Shang Lu came out earlier.
Fang Huan Xing walked straight inside with the steel pipe in hand and pushed open another door. The hospital bed was empty too.
The various machines beside the bed shifted faintly. Like the equipment in the staff room, their screens flickered, and two changing curves could just barely be made out.
The card at the foot of the bed contained the same information as the wristband, but the writing was blurred.
Every indistinct trace in the room seemed stretched into filaments with a clear direction of pull, all of them pointing toward the empty hospital bed.
Captain Xie was worried and had followed with Xiao Huang. “Xiao Fang, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Fang Huan Xing answered briefly.
Captain Xie worked out the reason. “This is Tao Ran’s bed. That monster was trying to come in here for positional overlap?”
“Yes.”
“Then we definitely can’t let it get inside. But it keeps dying and coming back. We can’t kill it for good. Did you come to the hospital alone today, or are there other coworkers here? Does Team Leader Shang know we’re trapped?”
Fang Huan Xing only said, “It can’t get in by itself right now. I’ll look for another exit first.”
Then he handed the steel pipe to Xiao Huang. “Take this.”
Xiao Huang accepted it. “M-me?”
The teenager looked cold, and his methods were ruthless, yet he still instructed her, “Ignore the monster. If it tries to latch onto you, hit it.”
The three left the room and closed the door again.
The new corpse of the faceless Tao Ran lay not far away.
Click-clack, click-clack.
The printer at the nurses’ station started again.
＊
With police assistance, the hospital floor was quickly sealed off. An examination of the scene showed that the invisible fluctuation had affected only a localized area of that floor, but to be safe, the hospital still transferred every patient who could be moved to safer floors.
The disturbance had been significant, and Shang Lu soon received a call from the Dispatch Center. He could only tell them that yes, the unlucky bastards from Group Seven had once again happened to be right at the scene.
This was the first time the Anomalous Case Department had ever encountered an interference space that appeared suddenly, with no detectable interference source and the reality baseline already returned to normal. There was no precedent for it.
Shang Lu acted immediately and requested a spatial phase regulator.
Zheng Xiao Yu had studied the device before. It was a large piece of equipment, essentially an oversized calibration anchor. It could detect minute changes in reality-baseline deviation and be used to adjust or open interference structures.
Only then did Zheng Xiao Yu learn that the new intern, Fang Huan Xing, had been pulled into the interference space.
After they counted the missing people, they confirmed that Captain Xie, one nurse, and several unconscious patients had disappeared along with him.
The day before, Zheng Xiao Yu had still been worrying that the new intern might steal his position. Now he couldn’t care less. Worried, he asked, “Team Leader, what do we do? We can’t locate the interference source, and even the phase regulator can’t detect anything abnormal. Can we still save them?”
The hulking, cold machine being brought to the scene had already alerted the senior leadership of the Anomalous Case Department.
Director Chen called and gave Shang Lu, as the person temporarily responsible for Fang Huan Xing, a thorough scolding. He ordered Shang Lu to get the kid back no matter what and said he had temporarily kept the matter hidden from the Academy of Sciences, telling him to resolve it as quickly as possible.
Shang Lu cursed inwardly. Next time I’m getting him one of those anti-lost wrist tethers.
Even Shang Lu, usually calm no matter what happened, couldn’t help becoming anxious now. The kid had asked whether he had brought a gun, which meant he had noticed something was wrong even before Shang Lu did. When he realized interference was appearing in the surrounding space, the kid probably hadn’t even considered acting together with him.
Lecturing someone is useless. One lesson from experience is all it takes.
Just look at what happened. Maybe now that kid would finally learn to worry.
But the fact that their instruments could no longer detect anything abnormal did not mean there was no way to save them.
Because Shang Lu had already realized that everything was connected to Tao Ran.
Inside the intensive care unit, Tao Ran breathed weakly. The proliferating tissue produced by fusion disease had appeared inside his body, leaving him at risk of stopping breathing at any moment.
“Pull up the detailed analysis of that module you mentioned.”
Zheng Xiao Yu immediately agreed.
They logged into the internal network, where the module’s origin, recorded information, and residual interference traces were displayed one by one.
It turned out that the device was neither a vehicle component nor any kind of commercially available recorder. It had clearly been custom-made and deliberately planted inside the bus.
The module had read and recorded the school bus’s complete route, the amount of time it remained at each stop, passenger counts, and regular riders. Every passenger had been assigned an anonymous identification number. Based on seat number, date, and ride duration, the person recorded most frequently aside from the driver was Tao Ran.
The Analysis Center believed the module had been performing positional-overlap matching.
Shang Lu immediately remembered the question Zheng Xiao Yu had raised earlier: why hadn’t the driver been affected? For some reason, the driver could not be matched for positional overlap, and the reason itself genuinely could not be verified.
What they could confirm was that the only remaining match target was Tao Ran.
Even more bizarrely, analysis of the residual interference on the module showed that it had retained Xianlu Hotel’s reality-baseline deviation reference.
In the fusion event triggered by this interference, Tao Ran was the one who had been selected.
Even Shang Lu felt a chill at the analysis result.
If a calibration anchor measured deviation from the reality baseline, then this module had been continuously strengthening and stabilizing that deviation.
The uniqueness of the selected target’s current reality would be weakened again and again until positional overlap began.
Zheng Xiao Yu asked, “But the module has already been taken away. Tao Ran has been separated from it, so why is he still getting worse?”
“Positional overlap didn’t suddenly begin when the incident happened. It must have already been going on for a long time. Tao Ran himself said that he could feel another version of himself before this.”
Shang Lu said.
“If I’m right, there was probably an amplification surge at the time of the incident that caused irreversible worsening of the positional overlap. But we still need to wait for further testing from the Analysis Center.”
“Who did it? Why would anyone do this?”
“I don’t know why they did it. As for who did it—”
Shang Lu took out his phone and made a call.
“Jia Ying, how’s the investigation into where the school bus came from?”
Zhou Jia Ying was still out investigating and didn’t yet know what had happened at the hospital. “I have a lead now. Team Leader, Chengchuan Middle School really did purchase the bus directly without a bidding process. It came from the shuttle fleet at Xianlu Hot Spring Hotel. The hotel was undergoing renovations and upgrades, and the shuttle buses were going to be upgraded as well, so they sold the old vehicles. An eighth-grade teacher at Chengchuan acted as the intermediary. Since the vehicle was in good condition, the school bought it directly.”
It all sounded perfectly normal. Shang Lu asked, “What’s the connection between this teacher and Xianlu Hotel?”
“She heard about it through her boyfriend. I just spoke with her. Her boyfriend was a regular at Xianlu Hotel and liked staying there for short vacations. Some time ago, he also worked as the hotel’s water-supply and drainage design engineer.”
A name was already on the tip of Shang Lu’s tongue.
Sure enough, Zhou Jia Ying also understood how unbelievable the connection was. “Her boyfriend’s name is Li Bei Shan—the fusion-disease victim from the Beiduo Bay cruise case.”
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