Chapter 44

Although Xue Tong was a stranger, someone had opened every convenient door for her as long as she didn’t disrupt the hospital’s normal operations. Aside from the operating room and the intensive care unit, she could wander freely anywhere else. On top of that, under the pretext of assisting with checkups, the nurses and doctors answered all her questions without reservation.

It was nearing the end of the shift by now. The hospital wasn’t large, yet it remained bustling. Xue Tong stood in the lobby for a moment, eyeing the long registration line. No one had a spare hand to attend to her just then, so when Xun Ruosu appeared, she suggested, “Shall we go take a look in the wards?”

Most of those who had met with accidents over the past three months had spent some time in the wards. Few had collapsed suddenly while waiting for outpatient appointments. Some had already recovered and been discharged, while others lay comatose, hooked to ventilators and heart monitors, requiring constant attention from nurses and family members. Naturally, a few had passed away.

In those three months, four people had died from postoperative complications alone. Beyond them, two more had perished suddenly in their sleep.

Hospitals inevitably witnessed their share of partings in life and death, but these odds were excessively high. Moreover, none of the six had suffered from terminal illnesses; two had undergone routine minor procedures like circumcisions.

Xun Ruosu had just pored over the medical records, which documented far more than six cases—roughly thirty or forty by a rough count.

Xue Tong wanted no further dealings with Zhao Ping. Zhao Ping’s excessive enthusiasm felt like a burden to her. With work quantified in merits, accepting a favor meant repaying it in full. That was why Xun Ruosu had handed over copper coins on her behalf.

Xun Ruosu was her half-body, after all, so settling debts or returning kindness counted toward Xue Tong.

To steer clear of Zhao Ping for the time being, Xue Tong didn’t venture to the third floor. She confined herself to the first and second floors. The ward with the highest number of incidents lay on the second floor. From the office, one crossed a corridor linking the two buildings, turned left near the fire door, and found the ward on the right—

The nurses encountered en route offered simple directions and landmarks. But the moment Xun Ruosu and Xue Tong set foot in that corridor, they ran straight into a ghost wall.

Ghost walls typically relied on feng shui arrangements, functioning like pocket-sized labyrinths. One believed they advanced straight ahead when in truth they looped back unnoticed. Yet a hospital was a public space, replete with directional signs in its corridors and lobbies. Its architecture emphasized clean, straightforward lines.

This wasn’t some winding courtyard, artfully contrived with hills and streams, where patients entered on their feet and departed two days later on stretchers after losing their way.

For a ghost wall to manifest in such a direct environment had nothing to do with feng shui. Far more likely, they had encountered an actual ghost.

The corridor lights burned steadily. Windows lined the wall a meter off the floor. The sun had yet to set, its fading amber light mingling with the bulbs to cast a mottled glow.

Xun Ruosu had donned a wool overcoat upon leaving, drawing baffled stares from onlookers. Now a chill yin energy wrapped around them, yet she remained utterly calm. She pulled the coat even tighter; it couldn’t freeze her anyway.

After looping a full circuit and a half down the corridor, Xue Tong knew for certain they’d hit a ghost wall. She pressed her palm to the glass window. A faint crackle rippled through the air. From beneath her hand bloomed a ring of fine black lines, vaguely resembling the black-and-white wreaths sent to funerals. The pattern spread rapidly, webbing across the entire passage. Xue Tong twisted her palm in reverse—

—and the space wrung out like a sopping towel, splintering the illusion to fragments.

Xun Ruosu stood once more amid the flow of passing people. At the corridor’s far end loomed a snow-white figure. Not merely dressed in white, but his very skin gleamed devoid of all color.

Dusk marked the threshold between yin and yang. Xun Ruosu’s eyes could still discern the living, though their outlines began to blur. The figure ahead was no living soul. Against the ambient haze, however, he stood out in stark, vivid relief.

Thus, relatives, doctors, and nurses alike beheld two oddballs: one inexplicably polishing the glass, the other swaddled in wool during high summer, hands jammed deep in her pockets.

Without prior instructions not to hinder Xue Tong’s work, they would have been carted off for brain scans long ago.

Xue Tong brushed the dust from her hands. “Nothing impressive. Under normal circumstances, dispatch one or two wastes like you and it’d be handled. No need to drag me into it.”

“But aren’t the ones sent right now just one or two ‘wastes’ like me?” Xun Ruosu fired back absently. “I’m your half-body. Next time you go cursing, remember to carve yourself out of it.”

Xue Tong: “…”

She hadn’t meant her at all, yet fury still boiled up.

The snow-white figure at the limits of her vision didn’t linger. He vanished in a blink. Xun Ruosu and Xue Tong traversed the corridor, where traces of icy cold clung to the spot of his appearance… No hint of blood. Xun Ruosu even wondered if he was merely a wandering soul, lacking even the stature of a true ghost.

“He blocked the path here for a reason. And he doesn’t look like the sort to sow chaos around the hospital.”

Xun Ruosu tugged her coat tighter still. Her nose tickled; a sneeze threatened.

“Besides, that pallid, paper-white form— for a soul to appear that way, the cause of death must play a part… Do you remember that student who slashed his carotid artery?”

A severed carotid meant death by exsanguination. Deep and ragged wounds could kill in two or three minutes, beyond saving even in a hospital. Yet the figure they’d glimpsed bore no trace of blood.

“Three months now. If he’d orchestrated six deaths from the shadows, the Heavenly Dao wouldn’t hold back its thunder or conceal its strikes out of mercy. There’s more to this than meets the eye.” Displeasure etched Xue Tong’s face. “Once this job’s done, I’m taking a real break.”

The statement amounted to a brazen taunt hurled at the Heavenly Dao, arbiter of rules: “Keep dispatching tasks if you dare—they’ll all get bundled and dumped in the trash heap. Test me.”

Utterly unfilial offspring. Even the lofty, impartial Heavenly Dao felt a twinge in its liver from sheer exasperation.

They emerged from the corridor into the ward wing, where foot traffic flowed steadily. Hospital protocol demanded hushed tones in such vital areas; few raised their voices. Crowded, yes—but far from lively.

That corridor mishap proved the only interruption. From there, they reached their destination undisturbed.

The ward door stood ajar. No doctor in sight. Two nurses adjusted IV drips. They startled briefly at Xue Tong’s entrance, then traded knowing glances. The department head and head nurse had circulated her ID photo in the group chat—a shot eerily akin to her in person, instantly recognizable yet worlds apart, the gulf between a sleek jet and a hulking tank.

Not a matter of beauty or its absence, but wholly disparate features: eyes, nose, face shape, all mismatched… Utterly unconnected, and yet the mind deceived the eye into perceiving likeness. The effect unnerved everyone.

Her mortal guise was illusory anyway. At hundreds—perhaps thousands—of years old, Xue Tong would long since have been seized as a freak for vivisection.

The county hospital’s nurses skewed young; those past forty counted as veterans. They finished their tasks, then clustered, eyeing Xue Tong with frank curiosity but hesitant to pry. Xun Ruosu filled the breach. “She got plastic surgery.”

Xue Tong shot her a baleful glare.

The nurses wavered, half convinced. Xun Ruosu pressed on: “Minimal incisions, so it looks natural.”

Enlightenment dawned.

Xue Tong couldn’t be bothered to argue. She’d endured stares and whispers before, dismissing them outright. If pestered too long, she’d mutter a curse to rasp throats silent for days. Meeting Xun Ruosu had woven her tighter into the mortal weave, allowing tidy explanations for all.

“We might linger in the ward a while. Hope we’re not in the way?” Xun Ruosu ventured. A sour pang twisted in Xue Tong’s chest. She muttered under her breath, “Only you can charm everyone.”

“Not at all, not at all,” said the younger nurse, waving it off. “We’re heading out anyway.”

She broke into a pursed-lip smile. “Mind swapping WeChat? I’d love to be friends.”

“…”

“…”

Xue Tong tuned out the ensuing chatter as mere birdsong, twittering idly at her ear for a spell. Xun Ruosu tapped her shoulder from behind with phone in hand, drawing her back to earth.

A peek at the glowing screen deepened Xue Tong’s gloom.

“I didn’t share my WeChat,” Xun Ruosu said, crouching at her side. “And Ye Lei—that’s the younger one—wanted yours too… Getting chummy with us isn’t wise. I turned her down.”

They were specialists in averting calamity and banishing spirits. A single encounter spelled misfortune; daily contact meant ricocheting between realms. Caution prevailed.

“Whether you say yes or no, why drag me into it?” Xue Tong retorted. “You never paraded your friends past me for approval before.”

Xun Ruosu uttered a soft “Oh.” “Call it me overreaching, then.”

Those terse words bubbled tenderness in Xue Tong’s heart. An insistent inner voice carped: “Pity she didn’t overreach.”

Xue Tong quashed it with effort. She fixed her gaze dead ahead on the bed’s occupant. Four beds filled the room, each cradling a long-term comatose patient. Ordinarily, such cases stabilized after a stint, reduced to vegetative states their families took home to tend.

Critical cases warranted bedside kin. Xue Tong had given advance word; likely the attending physician had shooed them off under color of condition discussions. Beyond the pair of nurses, only insensate patients remained.

A month prior, this had been a turnover ward, patients cycling in and out. Then came successive postoperative infections. Two perished here. The hospital scoured the space, swapped linens, fumigated deep. Tranquility barely held before two more slipped into enduring comas.

Beds scarce, they consolidated the other two comatose here for streamlined care—birthing the ward’s present pall of doom.

Xue Tong had already examined all four patients in the room. Two of them showed no problems at all. One was locked in an irreversible coma caused by oxygen deprivation to the brain. Less than half his soul remained within his body, and from the look of things, he wouldn’t make it past the end of summer. The other case wasn’t quite as dire; he should wake up in another ten days or half a month.

The remaining two—the very patients who had collapsed into critical condition right here in this ward—presented a far stranger situation. Their souls remained perfectly intact, and the doctors had already treated their illnesses to the point where they were mostly cured. Yet their minds were trapped in dreams—terrible nightmares, in fact—so awful that they had utterly lost any will to live.