EM CH1

Chapter 1: Leaving Basement Level 1 of This Building

At exactly midnight, a faint, muffled thumping sound echoed from within a morgue corpse cabinet.

The latch on the corpse drawer came loose, and with a loud clang, it was pushed open from the inside. A young man crawled out from the depths of the drawer, planting himself heavily onto the ground.

Wearing only a thin, blue and white striped hospital gown, he was so frozen by the cold air inside the drawer that he had nearly lost all sensation. A full half minute passed before he felt he had regained a bit of strength and half-opened his eyes.

Entering his vision was an expanse of terrazzo flooring that had long fallen into disrepair. The tiled walls of the room were yellowing, covered in rust spots and mildew stains, and the air was permeated with a damp smell.

A card was discarded on the floor not too far away. He struggled to crawl over, pried the card up, and slowly felt the texture on its surface.

It was an ID card. The young man with short black hair in the ID photo had an exceptionally cold and stern expression, staring at the camera with a gaze that looked as if he wanted to murder the photographer.

The name column read “Yu An,” born in the year L999.

He compared the name on the ID with the wristband tied to his right hand, confirming his own identity.

Yu An. That was his name.

He managed to sit up, trying hard to recall something, but the only response he got was a wave of dizziness and nausea.

While thinking bitterly, he unconsciously touched his face and realized that his left eye was wrapped in bandages. He tried pressing it, then suddenly froze, petrified for nearly ten seconds.

His eye socket was empty. He couldn’t feel an eyeball.

He quickly patted himself down all over. Fortunately, there were no other wounds, and his kidneys and other organs were still there.

Other than being kidnapped, Yu An couldn’t think of any other reason why he would wake up in such a place. Being abducted and having his organs harvested… these speculations gradually coalesced into the truth in his mind.

He reluctantly accepted this reality. Lifting his fingers, he grabbed the edge of the mortuary table placed in the center of the room, wanting to stand up.

Suddenly, his palm slipped, and the mortuary table was pushed slightly. Only then did Yu An realize it wasn’t a fixed mortuary table, but a stretcher bed with wheels on all four legs.

There was also a person lying on it, covered from head to toe in a white cloth.

Yu An sheepishly withdrew his hand and retreated to a distance to examine the massive guy. The towering belly propped up the white cloth like a small hill, while the exposed arms and thighs looked like fermented dough that had not yet been kneaded.

Yu An couldn’t help but swallow nervously. His back accidentally brushed against the icy sliding door of a corpse drawer, and the rusted hinges squeaked. He hurriedly looked behind him to see an entire wall of morgue cabinet doors, some left ajar and others swung wide open.

He calmed his breathing and looked around, confirming that the only exit in the whole room was an iron door directly facing the stretcher bed. Outside the iron door was nothing but pitch darkness.

The temperature in the morgue was too low. Staying any longer carried the risk of hypothermia, so there was no more time to delay.

Yu An breathed a few mouthfuls of hot air into his frozen hands and rubbed them together. He quietly crept over to the iron door, checked through the slightly open gap to ensure no one was guarding outside, and then pushed the door open to step out.

Rubbing his arms, he moved forward in the dark. The bone-chilling corridor was pitch black, with only a faint green glow illuminating the far end. Amidst the dead silence, the sound of a rusted hinge swinging suddenly echoed from behind him.

Yu An stopped in his tracks and strained his ears to listen, but noticed nothing unusual.

Not far ahead, a safe exit sign glowed with a faint green light, and an escape route map hung on the wall above it.

The “Guxian Hospital Floor Plan” clearly labeled the layout and room functions of the entire hospital. Yu An was currently on basement level one.

Basement level one had three exits in total. After investigating, he found that the underground driveway entrance was locked from the outside, and the sloped corpse transport corridor was also closed off.

The only way to leave this eerie underground area was the ordinary elevator at the end of the corridor.

At this moment, heavy footsteps came from the ceiling above. It seemed someone was standing guard on the first floor, and a big guy at that. The kidnapping gang most likely hadn’t left yet. Not wanting to run into that person, Yu An hurriedly pressed the elevator’s up button.

The elevator was currently resting at the first basement level. After he pressed the button, the iron doors, covered in hospital advertisements, immediately parted with a creak. The ceiling light inside flickered on and off.

Yu An walked inside. The cramped elevator space was filled with a faint smell of disinfectant. Although the elevator wasn’t wide, it was very deep, designed to transport patients who couldn’t walk on stretcher beds.

The car only had four buttons with faded, peeling paint. Basement level one was the morgue where Yu An had just been, the first floor was the billing hall, the second floor contained the clinics and operating rooms, and the third floor was for the inpatient wards.

Since someone was guarding the first floor, the elevator going up would very likely alert them. The second floor was too close to the first; if the kidnapper saw the elevator move and chased up the stairs, it would cut off all his escape routes.

Looking at it this way, climbing down a drainage pipe from a third-floor window was the safest way to escape.

Yu An thought for a brief moment and pressed the button for the third floor.

The elevator began to ascend from the basement, and the temperature rose slightly with it. With a “ding,” the red electronic light indicated they had reached the third floor.

The elevator doors slid open to the sides, revealing an old corridor directly facing Yu An. Most of the ward doors on the left and right were tightly shut, looking like two rows of faces staring silently at each other.

A peculiar smell permeated his nasal cavity, like faint blood mixed with the scent of fermenting hay.

Yu An lightened his footsteps and walked out.

The ceiling lights were quite old, their covers accumulating a thick layer of dust and the corpses of moths, making the light flicker erratically.

The storage room door closest to the elevator was unlocked. Yu An quietly pushed it open and entered, but was disappointed to find that it was completely enclosed without a single window.

There were only numerous cardboard boxes stacked inside. They were piled so high that the top edge was slightly taller than Yu An’s head. He wondered if something inside one of the boxes had gone moldy, as it seemed the strange smell in the corridor was wafting out from here.

Yu An casually flipped open a box sitting on the floor. Inside, brand-new, sealed glass bottles were neatly arranged in holders. They were likely wholesale bottles of rubbing alcohol.

An outer box had been scraped, tearing open a gash. Yu An merely caught a glimpse inside out of the corner of his eye and abruptly froze.

A pair of hollow eyes was hiding in the box, staring right back at him.

After steadying his nerves, Yu An finally made out the “Fragile” label pasted on the torn box. It turned out to be a cheap skeleton model purchased by the hospital, and a skull just happened to be facing outwards, pressed against the tear.

On top of these cardboard boxes sat a complete goat skull model, its two horns polished to a shine.

Fake eyeballs were embedded on both sides of the goat’s head, replicating a goat’s rectangular pupils so vividly that it felt as though they would turn to watch a person.

This thing felt somewhat out of place. It was usually hung in the studies of wealthy families as a decoration, so he didn’t know why it would appear in a hospital storage room.

Yu An had no choice but to back out and look for another way.

A minute later, he finally found a ward door that could be pushed open. He quickly ducked inside and dashed to the window in a single stride, only to find the window completely sealed off by security bars. Yu An heavily punched the windowsill.

The ward was surrounded by white walls with a pale green wainscoting. Some of the paint was peeling and flaking off. The digital clock on the wall read 00:20 AM, January 22, Year M022.

The broken air conditioner hanging on the wall had stopped blowing hot air who knew how long ago, and the insulation in this old building was abysmal. In the dead of winter, the indoor temperature didn’t even reach ten degrees.

However, his luck wasn’t bad. Inside the bedside cabinet, he found a windbreaker suit and a single-shoulder backpack. Beneath the cabinet sat a pair of lace-up mid-calf boots that matched the clothes.

Yu An quickly searched around the ward and felt a plastic lighter with half a tube of fuel left under the pillow of an adjacent bed.

Without a second thought, he shook out the thick, warm clothes and put them on, pulling the collar zipper to the very top to cover his neck. Then he struck the lighter, cradled the tiny flame in his palms for warmth, and stared blankly at the black shoulder bag he had tossed aside.

Looking at it for a while, it felt incredibly familiar. Yu An reached out and unzipped the backpack.

Stuffed inside was a stack of printed papers. The cover of one stack read “National General Higher Education Graduate Employment Agreement,” with the graduate’s name listed as “Yu An” and the school’s name as “Changhui University.”

Surprisingly, it was his own backpack.

Apart from this, tucked inside were a few reply letters from different employers, but without exception, they were all rejection letters, tactfully expressing that he was not suitable for the position.

Looking again at the transcript sandwiched in the blank agreement, the course exam grades were uniformly high scores and top marks. However, his ratings for class participation, club activities, volunteer labor, and meeting attendance were staggeringly low.

Scenes from interviews slowly surfaced in Yu An’s mind. When the interviewers spoke with him, he straightforwardly said, “I’m not good at communicating with people. Could you assign me a position where I can just bury my head in work and not have to speak?” The outcome, of course, was rejection.

As for his current situation, it seemed he had been schemed against during his job hunt by a kidnapping ring disguised as a recruitment company.

He didn’t find a job and even lost an eyeball in the process. For a person’s luck to be this rotten was truly pitiful.

The most pressing matter was to escape this hellhole, or at least find a phone to call the police.

He slung the shoulder bag onto his back, inspected the surroundings, and took a fruit knife from the empty fruit platter by the bed. He quietly leaned against the door and investigated the situation outside through the small glass window.

By the light in the corridor, he could see the door to the nurses’ station was wide open.

Yu An quietly observed his surroundings for a moment, softly opened the door and stepped out, then went to inspect the nurses’ station.

The inside of the nurses’ station was pitch black. The tube lights were smashed, cabinets were overturned, and it was a complete mess, with glass medicine bottles and disposable medical supplies scattered all over the floor.

On the desk directly facing the door sat an old desktop computer with a yellowing back cover. To its left, the landline phone was knocked over, and its telephone wire had been cut.

The computer hadn’t been destroyed. Yu An tentatively wiggled the mouse, and the monitor suddenly lit up.

Illuminated by the faint light, Yu An quickly picked up the severed cross-section of the phone cord. Using the tip of his knife, he stripped away the insulation off the metal wires and twisted the broken ends together.

Normally, even complex circuits were child’s play in his hands, so connecting a mere telephone wire took no time at all. With no black electrical tape on hand, Yu An used one hand to pinch the insulation to secure the connection, while his other hand reached for the receiver dangling on its coiled cord beneath the desk.

But when he bent down and his peripheral vision swept across the space beneath the desk, a wave of coldness suddenly surged up from his fingertips straight to his brain.

There was someone under the desk.

A nurse was curled up under the desk, her eyes wide with terror, clutching a snapped cell phone in her hand.

Yu An froze for a few seconds before trying to touch her fingers. They were abnormally cold.

She was dead. A pool of blood had leaked out from beneath her. The blood was half-dry and bore a strange footprint on it. To be precise, it was a goat’s hoofprint. The situation in this hospital seemed to be deviating from his expectations.

It seemed the sole of the killer’s shoe was printed with a goat hoof pattern. After breaking into the nurses’ station and smashing everything up, they had murdered the terrified nurse hiding under the desk.

The body looked as if it hadn’t been dead for long, but Yu An hadn’t heard any commotion while in the ward. The killer should have made their move before he came upstairs.

These were just guesses, but the hoofprint instantly made Yu An think of something he had just seen.

Gripping the fruit knife in reverse, he hugged the corridor wall and crept all the way back toward the elevator, returning to the vicinity of the storage room he had initially entered.

The partially closed door had opened wide at some unknown point. Looking up, the goat skull that had been resting on the very top of the cardboard boxes had vanished into thin air.

Yu An poked the cardboard box with the tip of his fruit knife. The inside was empty, the side could be opened, and the exact same goat-hoof footprint was left on the cardboard at the bottom.

This meant that earlier, when Yu An had first walked in, there had been a person standing beneath that goat skull inside those empty boxes, completely motionless.

Meanwhile, inside the surveillance room, a man stood behind a computer monitor, observing the security footage with great interest.

In the black-and-white surveillance feed, Yu An leaned his back against the wall, cautiously peeking into the storage room. After briefly observing, he walked in. When he came out, the shoulder bag on his back was bulging significantly. It was unknown what heavy things he had scavenged inside.

The man broke into a smile. He casually propped both hands on the desk, pressing down on a job application resume beneath his palm.

Name: Yu An

Major: Precision Instruments and Machinery

Career Objective: Special Equipment Development

…

Special Certifications: IELTS 8.0, 100+ Horror Game Full Achievement and Speedrun Record Holder

Special Skills and Hobbies: Amateur Shooting

In the blank space of the resume were several notes jotted down by a referrer: “1. He has outstanding academic grades and possesses a special talent in precision equipment. 2. He has a criminal record from his youth for intentional assault causing severe injury. 3. His thinking is abnormal, and he has the potential to exhibit extreme behavior. The interviewer must handle him with caution.”