A Patient's Night Out: Why Was There a Hidden Button in the Elevator?

In the hospital room, Ichirai Hisako shoved a long, narrow pillow into the blankets.

"Hisako-chan, you've stuffed that pillow way too high."

Sing Sing stood by the hospital bed, gesturing wildly.

"With the blankets piled up like this, when the nurse lifts them up later, she'll think I've been secretly incubating dinosaur eggs here behind the school's back!"

Ichirai Hisako grabbed a pumpkin wrapped in bandages and stuffed it above her pillow, making do with it as a makeshift head.

"Instead of nitpicking, you might as well get lost!" she snapped irritably.

"If you don't leave now, when the school doctor comes to check on you with a syringe, I'll pin you down on the bed and give you ten injections of sedatives!"

Sing Sing shrank his neck and quickly tightened his suit and tie.

Ichirai Hisako bent down, stuffed an old-fashioned tape recorder under the bed, and pressed play.

"Braised chicken wings... hehe... add lots of chopped green onions..."

Sing Sing's snoring, accompanied by his smacking lips and sleep-talking, played on a loop in the hospital room.

"Is this how you usually sleep?"

Ichirai Hisako looked at him, her face filled with despair.

"That's called the warmth of everyday life!" Sing Sing said matter-of-factly, tugging at his clothes.

"Remember to tell the nurses to prepare two deluxe special patient meals for me tomorrow morning; I won't accept it without even a chicken leg."

After giving his confession, he pushed open the window and jumped out like a nimble night owl.

"Eat, eat, eat! I'll eat you to death sooner or later!"

Ichirai Hisako clenched her fist against the empty night wind.

The old school building was eerily quiet.

Sing Sing skillfully followed the wall to the elevator he had previously visited.

Just as I was about to continue downwards in the same way as before, suddenly, my keen hearing picked up a sound like electricity.

Something's up?

Sing Sing rolled on the ground, squinting as he peered through the crack in the storage room door.

Two rows of infrared sensors were positioned intertwined at the door seam.

Goodness!

"These old foxes are so careful with thieves, they've practically covered their doors with their underwear."

Forcing his way through is out of the question. If the infrared detector is triggered, the people below will either block the road or silence him, and everything he brought tonight will be wasted.

We need to find another way.

He turned and walked into the depths of the corridor, pushed open the first abandoned classroom, which was empty except for moldy desks and chairs.

The second one too.

He stopped at the door of the school doctor's office at the end of the corridor.

The door lock had been broken for a long time; it opened with a simple push.

Sing Sing pulled out a "miniature flashlight and sunglasses combination" invented by Wenxi.

I put on dark sunglasses, turned on my flashlight, and waved it around the room.

In the corner stood a rusty tin medicine cabinet, with a rusted brass lock hanging on the door.

He walked over and knocked on the cabinet door with his finger.

"Thump, thump..."

Cavity resonance, the space behind it is empty.

By gripping the edge of the medicine cabinet with both hands and exerting force, the 200-pound iron cabinet was easily moved.

A man-made tunnel opening is visible in the wall.

The opening is less than a meter high, and the bricks along the edges are unevenly chiseled.

The smell emanating from the cave entrance was complex and difficult to describe.

It's like overripe fruit rotting in a sealed container, fermenting for a long time.

"Natural beauty is hard to hide; even finding a dog hole is this easy." Sing Sing dusted off his gloves, crouched down, and crawled inside.

The passage was much longer than I had imagined.

After winding through countless corners, a worn-out maintenance window finally appeared ahead.

After peering inside and confirming that no one was there, Old Zhou carefully pried open the door with Pig Butchering Knife and landed on his back.

This is an abandoned control room, but surprisingly, there's an elevator inside. Only B1 and B4 are lit up on the floor indicator lights.

This floor plan design is quite creative; did the dog eat the second and third floors in the middle as a midnight snack?

He pulled out the oddly shaped "Ear Pick Probe" from his pocket.

This thing can not only test DNA, but Da Vinci also confidently guaranteed that it can be used as a universal door-breaking tool.

Sing Sing shoved the pointed tip into the gap between the wiring on the panel and started poking around haphazardly.

"Sizzle!"

A plume of black smoke, accompanied by sparks, rose up.

Sing Sing quickly leaned back tactically, "Wenxi, you're so unreliable! You're trying to fool me with a used rice cooker motherboard again!"

He frantically fanned away the black smoke with his hands.

The panel flashed wildly a few times, and a small, hidden LCD screen popped up in the lower right corner.

A line of Japanese characters glowing green appeared above: B2 Life Adaptation Observation Area

The word "adapt" is so well chosen, so well that it makes you want to shove the person who named the child into the toilet and rinse them.

He took out Pig Butchering Knife and cut open the elevator floor, carefully placing the abandoned structure aside. Sing Sing then gripped the steel cable and felt his way down.

Sure enough, they found a locked elevator door within a few meters.

With a pry of the Pig Butchering Knife, the elevator doors slowly slid open to both sides.

The familiar scent of mothballs and dried flowers wafted towards me.

It smells very peaceful and has a warm, homey feel.

This actually made the hairs on the back of Sing Sing's neck stand on end; there shouldn't be this smell on the ground.

Stepping over the threshold, my feet landed on something soft.

Looking down, I was surprised to see a dark red wool carpet.

This floor is different from the laboratory on B1; B2 is a Western-style mansion.

The interior layout of the mansion is ridiculously large.

The room includes a living room, bedroom, library, and even a piano room with solid wood floors.

Sing Sing stopped by the wall in the living room, where several landscape paintings hung.

The painting depicts several scenes of the Jiangnan water towns rendered in traditional Chinese ink wash style.

After standing there for a few minutes, Sing Sing gripped the knife handle tightly. Something was wrong, very wrong.

Logically, it should have depicted Mount Fuji and cherry blossoms, so why is there scenery from China?

Still confused, Sing Sing turned into the open kitchen next door, which connected to a spacious dining room.

A long table was placed in the middle, with chairs and tables arranged neatly, except for a chipped enamel bowl on the main table.

This kind of thing is not commonly seen in Japan; it has a strong old China factory vibe from the last century.

By the light of the flashlight, three crooked Chinese characters were revealed at the bottom of the bowl: Gu Qingshan

There were also a few Japan characters inside the bowl: あおおに

The top-secret red document that Director Wang had given him flashed through his mind; the owner of this bowl was one of those people!

The list of thirty-three people was not marked as "confirmed dead" or "confirmed escape".

Whereabouts unknown.

"Click..."

Sing Sing turned around and saw a strange sound coming from the darkness at the end of the corridor.

"Smack... smack..."

It was like a wet, heavy lump being pushed forward by the rough carpet.

"Smack..."

We're a little closer now.

A head so large it was severely disproportionate peeked out from the corner of the wall.

Its head was as big as a water vat, and its skin was a sickly bluish-green, like a specimen that had been soaking in formalin for a long time.

The scalp was covered with bulging purple blood vessels that looked like earthworms, throbbing rhythmically.

The body, slowly emerging from behind the corner, was withered and shrunken, unable to support its head, which was as large as a water tank.

The monster grinned at Sing Sing, revealing a giant mouth that took up half of its face, and uttered a broken Chinese sentence.

"Are you... here to eat me too?"