Chapter 33
Chapter 33
The layout of the ward on the fourth floor was different from the second and third floors. On one side, there was a special treatment room, while the wards were on the other side. Since all the patients in the ward were highly aggressive, there would also be security guards apart from all the nurses and doctors.
Something had happened in the surveillance room. The door closed with a loud rattle when she went upstairs. However, both ends of the corridor remained quiet. No one came out to check, and even the nurses’ station was silent. It was an unusual situation.
Song Qingxiao’s guard was at an all-time high. She forced herself to slow her footsteps and had her back against the wall as she walked. When she walked past the door of ward one, the door was locked shut. The light was not switched on inside. Through the light of the corridor, Song Qingxiao could see everything in the room in one glance. Except for the medical equipment, there was not a single person on the beds. There was no one inside.
Merely seeing the scene made Song Qingxiao’s entire body tense up. Once she had confirmed that no one was there, she swiftly darted to a treatment room on the other side. The treatment room was still closed. She tried the door handle, but the door was locked. There was no way to enter.
She checked three patient rooms in succession, and they were all empty. She reached the fourth room through the light of the corridor. She prepared to reach for the keys on her. However, out of the corner of her eye, she spotted that the lights in the room across the first treatment room had been switched on. The door still seemed to be ajar, not fully closed.
The old television on the wall silently replayed a boring loop of specified content. Song Qingxiao slowly let out her breath. She formed a seal with her hands and slowly moved in the direction of that room.
The door turned out to be unlocked. The deadbolt was pressed against the latch, leaving the door open a tiny slit. The light from the corridor shone into the room through the small slit, and it landed directly on the bed.
The bed was a little messy. Song Qingxiao held her breath as she rested a hand on the dagger behind her waist. At the same time, she reached out her left hand and touched the door with her fingertip, pushing it lightly.
The door opened slowly, and the light entering the room increased. There was no one on the bed. The straps of the restraints on both sides of the headboard were strewn to the side of the bed. It seemed like they had been torn off by someone in a hurry.
A nurse lay motionless on the ground. A shiny silver medicine platter lay overturned on the floor, and all the medication was strewn over the floor. The situation proved that someone had been held in the intensive care unit, and the nurse was ambushed in the process of delivering the medication.
Song Qingxiao slowly stepped inside. She held her breath from the fear of breathing too loud, which would cause her to miss the slightest movement or even miss someone lurking in the shadows.
As soon as she released her hand, the door lost its ability to stay in place. It slowly shut and hid her figure.The room smelled of drugs and disinfectant. There was no stench of blood. She reached out her hand to check the neck of the nurse on the floor. Her body was still warm, and she could still feel the jumping of her pulse. It meant that she had merely fainted after she had been ambushed.
The door bolt knocked against the door latch, making a soft clacking sound. The sound made all the hairs on Song Qingxiao’s body stand on end. She immediately stood up as she touched the dagger at the side of her waist. In the next moment, all the lights in the corridor went out.
The room suddenly descended into darkness. The darkness was so deep that she would not be able to see her own fingers even if they were in front of her. Song Qingxiao darted to the side of the door. She did not dare to make any rash movements.
Someone hid in the darkness on the fourth floor. Perhaps that person already knew about her presence. Since 100 credits had been lost earlier, she feared that the person was luring her into a trap.
The door was half-closed. After the lights went out, that person was likely to have found a good position and was waiting in ambush. They were probably patiently waiting for Song Qingxiao to appear and would end her life with one fatal blow at the right moment.
It was not possible for her to stay hidden inside the room. Her mission was to protect the people. On the fourth floor alone, two patients have been brought in on the same day. In addition to that, there were three nurses on duty, security guards, and care workers. Not to mention all the other patients. As soon as something happened to all those people, the consequences would be too devastating to imagine.
Two people were killed that night, causing Song Qingxiao’s credits to be deducted so that she was left with only 850 credits. If it continued, her life would be in danger.
Song Qingxiao gripped the door handle. She calmed her breathing down before she pushed the door open. It was incomparably silent outside. It was like there was no living being on the entire fourth floor.
Thankfully, the prompt in her consciousness had not changed. The remaining credits were stuck at 850 credits and had not been altered. It was clear that while she had been filled with dread, her opponent was not without scruples.
She carefully took out the keys that Zhang Xiaoyu had given her to lock the door from the outside. In the silence of the darkness, the clattering sound made by the keys as they moved against each other rang out clearly. Song Qingxiao remained silent as she did that before she moved forwards along the wall.
For something like that to happen on the fourth floor, she could not understand why the third floor was still not alerted about it. In the darkness, she constantly felt as though eyes were staring intently at her. However, each time that she turned her head back, she never saw anyone there.
In that environment, all her senses were magnified to the extreme. Her heart pounded rapidly, and the increased speed of her blood flow caused her hands and feet to go cold. She also felt her mouth go dry.
She had one hand on the wall and the other hand on her waist. She managed to find the door frame quickly. Song Qingxiao moved forwards along the door frame until her hand reached the heavy door. Her vest stuck to it, but before she had used any force, the door opened with a creak. It was not locked!
The room smelt a little strange. Since she had a close encounter with death before, she was susceptible to the smell. Something terrible must have happened. She leaned against the door with her back to keep it open. Once her eyes became accustomed to the darkness, she could dimly see that a person was lying on the bed.
She stood on the spot momentarily. There were no other signs of life in the room. She cautiously approached the bed and reached out to touch the edge of the patient bed. She felt a pair of feet.
The feet had not gone completely cold, and their dimensions were not small. It did not seem like it was one of the two female patients who had been sent up for fighting.
She took two steps forwards along the bed and lowered her head to take a good look. Even though she could not see clearly, she could still recognize that it was the large chap with the gun from the heights, size, and hair.
Both of his hands had been tied up with restraining straps, limiting his ability to move. His head had been pulled in an unnatural angle towards the left side of his shoulders. It was clear that his neck had been snapped by someone, and he was dead.
Song Qingxiao was surprised to find that the large chap with the gun turned out to be the first person among the six participants to be out of the game. If he was one of the two people who died that night, was he an ally, or was he already a patient by default when he first entered the test space?
Number five was right under Song Qingxiao’s nose when everything broke out tonight. The person who killed the large chap could be the bespectacled guy, number four, or even number six. There was enmity between all those people and the large chap.
When the mission started, since the large chap had lost his weapon and was in a subdued condition, it made sense for everyone to pick him and eliminate him from the trial in the first instance.
If it were not for the fact that someone had beat her to it, Song Qingxiao would have done the same. However, who was the one who killed the large chap?
She speedily left the ward and left the door ajar. In the few seconds that it took her to do that, a change occurred in the prompt in her consciousness once again. She was about to continue to check out the other areas ahead of her when something happened.
‘Protect the people, obliterate failure.’
‘Upon completion of task: 800 credits.’
Another 50 credits were lost. It proved that right at that moment, someone was still out there killing people.
Hidden by the darkness, someone was hunting wantonly, harvesting human life.
Song Qingxiao bit her lip. She did not dare to hold back any longer. She sped up as she moved against the wall. She finished checking the left side and did not even leave out the toilets at the very end of the corridor before she swapped to search in the wards on the other side.
Each time she touched the door of a patient room and pushed it open, all the rooms were either empty, or there were people inside. In the rooms with patients, all the patients were fast asleep after taking the sedative. They were all blissfully unaware of everything happening in the outside world.
It carried on until she reached patient room 23 that was close to the nurses’ station. Song Qingxiao discovered another one of the deceased. The door to room 23 had already been locked. However, she could still see a person draped across the edge of the bed through the glass windows. Their waist was pressed against the iron bar of the specialized hospital bed, and their upper body was draped over it, forming an upside-down posture.
The person’s hair had fallen to cover their face. Even without seeing her face, Song Qingxiao could tell from her hairstyle that it was one of the two women involved in the fight in room nineteen earlier.
She was the second deceased person that Song Qingxiao had found that night! From the credits in the prompt, there was another dead body. Song Qingxiao had nearly finished searching the entirety of the fourth floor, yet she had not found the person who had done it, nor had she found the other dead body. The only place that she had not searched was the nurses’ station.