Chapter 53 Circle (Part 1) Stitched Monster.
I slowly opened my eyes. The room was dimly lit, with only a single overhead light illuminating a faint circular area. When my sense of smell returned, I could immediately smell a disinfectant odor, which slid down my nose into my stomach, burning with a faint sour taste.
Xia Zhu was probably leaning against a soft pillow. She tried to move her feet, the rough texture rubbing against the skin on her heels. She tried to quickly analyze her surroundings, after all, the familiar deathly silence made her realize that she might have woken up alone in some space again.
Suddenly, her retina contracted and twitched. In the dim light, on another hospital bed not far away, sat a strange-looking person.
His long legs were casually crossed, presenting a lazy posture completely different from Xia Zhu's tense posture. He leaned against the headboard, and although his facial features were blurred in the dim light, his irritating expression still gave Xia Zhu a familiar headache.
"What a coincidence," the man said casually.
"What are you doing here?" She originally wanted to ask, "Are you following me again?" but that would obviously sound presumptuous, so Xia Zhu pursed her lips and changed her words.
Do you always have so many questions?
Xia Zhu did not speak.
"Alright, but I advise you to ask your question now, lest you wait a few minutes..." Ying Huo's tone always carried a hint of playful frivolity, which, in theory, should have been quite annoying.
"What happens in a few minutes?" Xia Zhu continued to ask, but the other party clearly didn't want to answer.
The two lay face to face on the bed like fellow patients in the same ward, the silence making everything around them seem unreal.
Xia Zhu turned her head and looked around, discovering that besides her and Ying Huo, there were several other hospital beds in the room.
An empty bed.
Feng Feng and Ji Wuchou are not here.
Due to the lighting, these were conclusions she reached after recognizing the general outline. Xia Zhu originally wanted to get out of bed and walk around to take a look, but when she glanced at the motionless man opposite her, for some reason, she chose to remain still.
It even relaxes the back muscles, allowing the spine to rest completely against the soft pillow.
This is probably a hospital.
Hospital.
Not a particularly pleasant place to wake up.
A few scenes from a horror movie set in a hospital briefly flashed through her mind.
Suddenly, the only light in the room flickered a few times before going out completely. For no reason, perhaps out of the instinct for survival, Xia Zhu held her breath.
In the darkness, she heard a strange noise, one after another, with a harmonious rhythm, like the sound of someone stepping on the ground with cloth strips wrapped around their feet, the subtle sounds being intentionally isolated.
If it's really as she imagines, then there must be more than one such person lurking in the shadows.
Footsteps came from all directions, a suffocating feeling welled up in her eyes, and it felt as if countless people were gradually enveloping her in the room. All her exposed skin was covered with a fine, tactile sensation, and she could feel something approaching.
Suddenly, her face was gently brushed by something furry. Xia Zhu's cerebral cortex contracted, and all her pores instantly opened. A strange thought came to her: the faint footsteps were not made by a human.
Instead, it was some kind of animal with paw pads, walking upright in the room.
More than one.
They are purposefully searching for any living creature that is still breathing.
Xia Zhu tried hard to hold her breath, but she was afraid that the increasingly loud heartbeat would alert the monster in the darkness.
Just as she felt she was about to suffocate and pass out, the room lights came back on.
There was nothing there. Ying Huo was still leaning against the headboard opposite him. What made Xia Zhu inexplicably angry was that he looked perfectly fine, and even had a sleepy look on his face.
But Xia Zhu knew she must look terrible; her complexion was poor, her lips pale, her breathing rapid—in short, she looked wretched. A strange competitive spirit made her refuse to exchange glances with Ying Huo.
"Alright, it's time to go out and take a look..." His voice came from the bed opposite. Before he could finish speaking, Xia Zhu rolled over and stepped onto the ground.
Ying Huo followed behind her, a cold sneer escaping his nose.
Xia Zhu pushed open the door to the room. Her eyes couldn't adjust to the bright light for a moment, so she squeezed her eyelids shut to catch her breath before re-examining the surroundings.
Outside the door was a long corridor, with stark white chandeliers hanging from the ceiling and stretching to the end. On either side of the corridor were two tightly closed doors, where the smell of disinfectant was even stronger than inside the rooms.
The floor was covered in light, almost white, blue tiles, which reflected the halo of light from the overhead incandescent bulbs, making one feel dizzy. The walls, the same color as the floor, gave the entire space a strange sense of cleanliness.
Posters explaining hygiene and pathology knowledge were displayed at both ends of the corridor.
It's definitely a good hospital.
The two entered the corridor and glanced at each end in opposite directions. To the left was a corner of the corridor, casting an unsettling shadow on the ground, indicating the existence of unknown space on the other side. To the right was a tightly closed, iron-gray elevator, its doors gleaming, casting their blurry figures upon the elevator. A bright green icon for the emergency exit flashed in the lower right corner of the elevator door.
For a moment, Xia Zhu was unable to decide which way to go.
Of course, she didn't expect Ying Huo to follow behind her, like a tourist who was indifferent to her affairs.
Just as she was struggling with this, the door to the other ward behind her was suddenly smashed open by a dark, indistinct object. Due to inertia, the object broke through the door and crashed straight into the opposite wall. The brief pause allowed Xia Zhu to see the true appearance of the blurry shadow.
It was neither human nor dog; there was simply no accurate way to describe it.
The body was that of a dog whose fur had been plucked, leaving only pale pink, wrinkled skin. However, a small, pointed head resembling a rabbit was attached to the fleshy neck with clumsy stitches. The stitches on the monster's body were also unusually obvious, and the four reassembled paws looked extremely strange.
It supported itself against the wall and stood up again, facing Xia Zhu and Ying Huo with its soft belly and animal organs. Its body was strange and tall, and it had to hunch its back to prevent its rabbit head from twisting and hitting the ceiling. The monster opened its mouth full of fine teeth and let out a sharp cry that made people's teeth ache as it pounced on the two of them.
Xia Zhu and Ying Huo exchanged a quick glance and, surprisingly, ran toward the elevator in perfect unison.
Just as Xia Zhu was about to touch the elevator's open button, the Stitched Monster behind him let out a muffled thud followed by a scream. Xia Zhu stopped in his tracks as if possessed and looked back.
A folding chair seemed to have flown in from the other end, hitting the monster's back before sliding across the smooth ground to Xia Zhu's feet.
It's an ordinary folding chair with a stainless steel frame and a black cloth backrest, like something a patient's family member would carry with them in case they don't have a spare seat to rest while caring for them.
She looked toward the corner of the corridor, where there was nothing but a shadow cast by the building facade.
The monster was knocked down by the chair and struggled to its feet. Its eerie red eyes, located on the sides of its head, glared angrily at the two of them, almost dripping blood.
Xia Zhu gripped the small sword in his hand. It seemed that the thing in front of him was not invincible. Taking the elevator to escape was obviously not the best solution. He might as well fight it.
She made a quick decision to fight in her mind and charged at the stitched monster before Ying Huo could react. Xia Zhu's progress in martial arts was frighteningly rapid. She lowered her center of gravity to imitate Ji Wuchou's attack posture. The wind whistled past her ears, and she vaguely heard Ying Huo mutter something, but Xia Zhu, in the midst of battle, could only focus on defeating her opponent and had no energy to understand what others were saying.
It wasn't until after several rounds of fighting the Frankenstein monster that she suddenly deciphered the sentence she had just heard.
"A brute."
Ying Huo commented that Xia Zhu's decision to rush out alone to fight the monster was, in a sense, also a way of protecting him.
Xia Zhu took a deep breath, her breath so hot that she could feel it herself. It was that inexplicable anger again. She decided to finish this quickly and not say another word to Ying Huo afterward.
Ying Huo, who had been standing by and watching from the beginning, felt that Xia Zhu, who had been expressionless, suddenly became like he had been injected with chicken blood, and every stab he made at the monster with his short sword was deadly.
How did she manage to beat an inhuman opponent to a bloody pulp while wearing a high school uniform and with a completely expressionless face?
Ying Huo took a step back in confusion, the thick blood almost splashing onto his shoes.
Xia Zhu plunged the small sword in her hand into the monster's forehead. With a long howl as it raised its head, the monster's chest, which was being held down by her knee, finally stopped breathing after a large rise and fall.
As the adrenaline subsided, the wound on her forearm began to burn and itch, followed by a sharp, piercing pain. Xia Zhu tried to take a breath, but it all escaped midway through her trachea.
She opened her eyes wide in confusion, her hands beginning to tremble uncontrollably.
I can't feel any force within my body, and the wound on my arm just won't heal.
Her abilities seem to have disappeared.
Xia Zhu's courage in rushing out to join the battle stemmed largely from the protection provided by her healing abilities. It turned out that in the fierce struggle just now, every direct strike to her vital points by the Stitches could have been fatal.
Xia Zhu suddenly felt a wave of fear, but she didn't want to show it to Ying Huo. She comforted herself, thinking that this way she wouldn't have to bother hiding her power. So she clenched her fists tightly and then released them, forcibly suppressing the irresistible trembling, and stood up from the ground.
"Slap, slap."
Two abrupt claps rang out in the quiet corridor.
Xia Zhu ignored Ying Huo's teasing gaze, moved away from the mangled monster corpse on the ground, and walked straight to the corner of the corridor on the other side.
Unsurprisingly, there was nothing here. To the left was another shorter corridor with some similarly closed doors, while to the right was a dark fire escape, with the staircase extending downwards like an open embrace.
A medical cart was parked against the wall behind the corner, with some bottles of red medicine, a stethoscope, and a thermometer on it. Xia Zhu glanced at it quickly, then her gaze suddenly stopped on the wall behind the cart.
There was a scribbled reddish-brown maple leaf drawn there, with the words "1L" written next to it.
Both the maple leaf and the word "1L" were dripping with water, clearly indicating that they were written using mercurochrome from the cart.
Xia Zhu ran her finger across the maple leaf, and the already messy mark instantly blurred into a blurry pattern.
I just wrote this.
Xia Zhu's pupils contracted. Suddenly remembering something, she abandoned Ying Huo behind her and ran into the fire escape.
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Author's note: This is my favorite unit so far!!
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