"Lawyer, stop playing dead. It's your turn to take the medicine!"
"Yeah, that's right. Get out here."
"Damn it, these educated types always love weaseling out of things!"
"That's enough. When that lunatic went crazy yesterday, I was the one out there taking all of it. Do you know how terrifying that was? I'm not taking the medicine this time. Pick any one of you to take it for me."
"Those are separate issues. You happened to be out when he went crazy. That has nothing to do with us!"
"I actually think Lawyer has a point. He really did suffer quite a bit yesterday..."
"Then will you take his medicine for him tomorrow morning?"
"Why should I? I won't!"
"..."
An incessant argument came from inside the room.
After listening for a while, Jiang Chen roughly understood. Critical Patients were forced to take medicine every day, and these personalities were deciding who would occupy the body when it was time.
"I didn't think to ask about that detail. Could the medicine Critical Patients take cause tremendous pain?"
Muttering to himself, he reached out to knock.
But the instant his hand touched it, the door opened. A figure stood behind it, wearing a beret, with a sheet of white paper covering his face. Facial features had been drawn on it in black ink.
Those eyes looked real, carrying a trace of something eerie as they stared fixedly at Jiang Chen.
Jiang Chen recalled that, in the earlier story, the killer who survived to the end had been disfigured in a gas explosion.
It seemed this novelist had actually disfigured himself to recreate the character, then covered his face with white paper as a makeshift face.
"Interesting. He actually wasn't scared of us."
"He didn't scream or jump?"
"Were his legs