Chu Chen’an shivered as he listened.
It seemed as though he was going to be devoured by the tall man in front of him.
A breeze picked up outside the window on the fourth floor, blowing the blue curtains.
This was located at the highest point of the hospital, and across from here was an empty blue sky with white clouds.
Chu Chen’an’s eyes were red, and tears stuck to his eyelashes.
The faint sobs spread out from the window and dissipated in the cool breeze.
Until four o’clock in the afternoon, two magpie birds played with each other and flew to the windowsill outside.
“Ki, ki, ki.”
Shen Delu kissed Chu Chen’an’s face intimately.
“Baby, look over there.” His voice was mellow and low, and he whispered, “Is that the little audience that came to watch the doctor treat the patient?”
Chu Chen’an’s gaze was confused.
He could hardly hear the chaotic sounds of the outside world anymore.
……
At eight o’clock in the evening, Chu Chen’an woke up.
He felt like he had just gone for an eight thousand-meter run; his whole body was tired.
He had just sat up when he heard that Peng Longlong had been discharged from the hospital an hour ago.
Chu Chen’an felt a little bit of pity; he narrowed his eyes and looked at the man who gave him the soup in front of him with resentment.
It was all because of this per-vert.
He deeply realized how terrible a man who had been forbidden to eat meat for more than two years could be.
Chu Chen’an hugged the yellow fat doll in his hand tightly and wanted to smash it on Shen Delu.
But he didn’t dare.
It wasn’t like he didn’t put up resistance in the afternoon.
The more he resisted, the more the per-vert was pleased.
“The doctor was really great today.” Shen Delu scooped a spoonful of soup and blew it cool, putting it in Chu Chen’an’s mouth. “My illness is much better.”
“You… You’re not allowed to call me doctor again.” Chu Chen’an stared with round eyes and whispered.
He had heard this name all through the afternoon, and now he was afraid of it.
Shen Delu smiled. “Why? Doesn’t An An like being a doctor? Tomorrow, you can cure me again, okay?”
Chu Chen’an pursed his lips, his earlobes reddened, and he urgently said, “I don’t want it.”
“Okay, then An An won’t be a doctor tomorrow.” Shen Delu coaxed him, “Baby, you worked hard this afternoon; drink some soup first.”
Chu Chen’an looked at the fungus and wolfberry in the bowl, shook his head, and squinted at him. “I’m not drinking.”
“An An.” Shen Delu called out to him and re-scooped the soup.
Chu Chen’an nervously laughed, then he opened his mouth and drank the spoonful of white fungus soup under Shen Delu’s very oppressive gaze.
Shen Delu fed him most of the soup before putting it back.
“So good.” Shen Delu wiped the corners of his mouth and kissed his cheek.
“Baby, eat the fruit by yourself. I’m going to go downstairs; I’ll be back with you in a while, okay?”
Chu Chen’an nodded repeatedly, like a chicken pecking at rice.
Shen Delu kissed his cheeks again before leaving.
Chu Chen’an leaned on the bed and watched him leave, then busily raised his hand, wiped his cheeks, and clicked on the system control panel.
Going to the personal information column, he found that there was a small red dot on the [illustration].
Chu Chen’an raised his hand and tapped [Tap here to expand], and an animated card suddenly appeared on the screen.
On the front of the card was a mushroom seed growing in a swamp, carried by a crow.
The crow disliked the seed and threw it in the swamp.
It had a circle of small mushrooms growing around it.
The large mushroom, with its smooth, soft surface, grew well and became the king of them all.
The smaller mushrooms that surrounded it, on the other hand, were all armed with sharp spikes.
They climbed on the body of the King Mushroom, vines growing on its rhizome, snaking their way around the King Mushroom, drawing on the blo*od of the big mushroom like blo*ody leeches.
The mushroom king bled, withered, and was covered in wounds.
Eventually, the King Mushroom was eaten by the little mushrooms and festered into a bl*oody pulp.
The crow finally realized that he shouldn’t have brought the King Mushroom to this filthy swamp, and he began to pity the mushroom.
He wanted to take the broken mushroom away and restore its broken body, but this was no longer possible.
When the crow was finally willing to kiss the rotten flesh of the mushroom king, the mushroom king gave birth to countless thorns with venom and ki*lled the crow with its embrace, devouring the crow’s flesh and blo*od.
Chu Chen’an frowned as he watched; he tapped the center of the card and flipped it to the reverse side.
On the reverse side appeared Peng Longlong’s character information:
Peng Longlong is a patient with a severe mental illness. His condition has no aggressiveness towards outsiders and won’t affect his normal life.
His parents divorced when he was young, and he was given to his father, while his younger brother, who was five years younger than him, was given to his mother.
His dad was a constant alcoholic and beat and kicked him from a young age. One night, his dad got drunk and pressed him against a hot iron stove after beating him, resulting in extensive burns on his back. After that night, he was never able to speak a full and normal sentence again.
Due to the stimulation of these childhood experiences, he suffered from a serious mental illness.
But his character remained timid and simple, and he thought of himself as a mushroom. Because mushrooms grew in dark and damp places, and those kinds of places were not liked.
If he became a mushroom, he could grow safely.
Later, the dad was too lazy to care about this crazy oldest son. So after his mom died, he threw him into the care of 22-year-old Liang Xu.
At that time, Liang Xu was still interning in the hospital, so he had no time to take care of this dumb brother. So he found the cheapest insane asylum and personally sent his own brother to hell.
Peng Longlong came in and was beaten until his skull was cracked, his legs and feet were fractured, and his left leg was disabled.
He had even been dragged into the toilet by a dozen male patients one night, and he was beaten and tortured by them for the whole night.
He was in so much pain; he was clearly a mushroom who could live without worry.
He was going to make all this pain go away.
So he could only see these abusers who caused him pain as mushroom subjects and see this pain as an offering from the subjects.
Only by lying to himself in this way could he free himself from his twisted thoughts and live through the pain.
And Shen Delu had offered a semblance of salvation when he was dying, though it was only a little.
Shen Delu became the god that was worshipped by him. Shen Delu was the one who possessed the supreme divine power and could drive out the root of all suffering.
……
And a month ago, he met his sorcerer.
The sorcerer said he could get him out of his predicament and could punish the restless mushroom subjects for him.
His brother said that he would avenge him and give them the punishment they deserved.
He believed it.
But he was deceived by them.
The sorcerer and his brother, together, victimized many innocent mushroom subjects; they ki*lled many innocent patients in various brutal ways.
He was devastated; he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
He was deceived by his most trusted brother.
His brother didn’t want to avenge him; his brother just liked k*illing.
His brother was a very good surgeon, but his passion was digging out the hearts of living people.
He was so disappointed that he had no hope of living, and he wanted to die.
But before he died, he wanted to eat his brother first.
He wanted to drag his brother, who destroyed him with his own hands, into hell.
Let him go first and be scolded by his mother.
Only by doing so could he be a forgiving and good brother, he thought.
……
[Click here to put it away.]
After Chu Chen’an finished reading, he vaguely felt heartbroken. Peng Longlong did nothing wrong, yet he suffered for twenty years for no reason.
How unfair.
He carefully read the hints on the card twice. He met the sorcerer a month ago.
Then the sorcerer that Peng Longlong was talking about could only be the dean.
He sighed, exited the [illustrated] page, and then clicked on the prompt given to him when copy two began.
[Kind Tips:
¹. Please make sure you learn to defend yourself in the game.
② Do not anger the patients;
³. What you want may be exactly what you fear.
⁴. Your charming attribute seems to be very high, which may become an important asset for you to pass the level.]
There was already a green check after the first two points of the prompt card, which reminded him that he had already achieved the first two points.
The third point was a hint that he couldn’t understand until now.
What I want might be exactly what I fear.
Chu Chen’an thought back carefully. What he feared was…
Shen Delu?
Chu Chen’an quickly shook his head to shake that guess away.
Impossible.
How could Shen Delu have anything he wanted on him?
Chu Chen’an pondered for a few minutes and still couldn’t figure out what he was afraid of.
He suddenly thought of something else and violently lifted the covers.
In this insane asylum, wasn’t Shen Delu the person with the highest rights?
Wouldn’t it be fine for him to ask Shen Delu about the whereabouts of the S-class patients?
The big deal was to make up a reason to trick him.
But Chu Chen’an didn’t know how; what if he couldn’t fool Shen Delu?
He was so smart.
Chu Chen’an was still hesitating when there was a knock at the door.
Shen Delu never knocked on the door when he came back. Who came?
Chu Chen’an put on his slippers; his legs and stomach were still trembling as he walked towards the door.
He looked through the cat’s eye on the door.
It was Lu Chengdong.
Lu Chengdong called out to him, “Chen’an, are you in there? I have something to tell you.”
Chu Chen’an’s heart tightened, still resting on the edge of the door without moving.
“I know that Shen Delu isn’t here right now; you’re inside, right?”
Lu Chengdong added, “I know you went to the monitoring room yesterday; there are some things you already know, right? If you’re hiding inside and not coming out, I’m going to have to go to Shen Delu and tell him that you hid a camera in your pocket today.”
Before Lu Chengdong could finish, Chu Chen’an opened the door.
“What do you want to say?” Chu Chen’an opened door a bit and looked at him with caution and annoyance.
“Your temper has changed since you met Shen Delu.” Lu Chengdong laughed; he grabbed the edge of the door and pressed closer to Chu Chen’an. “Don’t forget that you’re just here to play a game like me.”
“Yes, it’s just a game.” Chu Chen’an nodded his head, barely holding back the fear in his heart. “So, that means you can just k*ill people? And the head nurse… It was you who used the head nurse’s hair to lure Wang Xue to her, right?”
Chu Chen’an had learned about this kind of sorcery in later copies.
Using a person’s hair as a lure, it could invoke a severe ghost with extremely deep resentment to ki*ll.
Since he had ripped off his meek disguise, he might as well do it thoroughly.
He added, “Actually, it’s not that you haven’t activated the quest yet; you’ve just been permanently stranded in this copy by the system because you’ve k*illed too many people, right?”
“What are you babbling about, Chu Chen’an?”
Lu Chengdong’s bright smile disappeared in an instant. He heavily slapped on the edge of the door, his expression twisted and stiff. “Don’t mention that disgusting woman; she deserved to die! And of the patients here, which one of them didn’t commit a crime before being sent in? I’m relieving them! They are better off dead!”
Lu Chengdong laughed wryly as he violently pushed open the door to the room.
His mind was twisted; he quickly moved on and asked him, “I didn’t come to you to argue about this. Quickly tell me, What is the mission you activated?”
Chu Chen’an took two steps back in fear. “What do you want?”
“If you die…” Lu Chengdong stepped closer, took out a sharp fruit knife from his pocket, and said in a paranoid manner, “I’ll be the only player left in this copy, and if your quest isn’t completed, will the system relax its strategy for this world and let me make up for it and complete the mission for you?”
Chu Chen’an immediately panicked.
He had heard of similar unspoken rules before.
In a critical situation, a teammate was allowed to inherit his mission.
He panicked and took two steps back, wanting to reach for the vase on the entryway cabinet to smash it at him.
But before he could get it, he heard a pained wail from Lu Chengdong before he could attack him.
“Uh…”
Chu Chen’an put down the vase in his hand.
He froze, only to see that Lu Chengdong had been stabbed a dozen times in a row by Shen Delu, the knife hit his vitals, and his body was a blo*ody mess.
Lu Chengdong was lying in a pool of blo*od, staring at Shen Delu unwillingly; he was no longer breathing.
He was trampled on by Shen Delu.
“Damn it, you’ve dirtied the floor,” Shen Delu cursed coldly.
In turn, he warmly looked at Chu Chen’an and said with a smile, “Baby, what were you guys talking about just now? How come I couldn’t hear a single word?”
The system had set an automatic shielding function for NPCs, and whenever players talked about issues related to game copies, what they said would be automatically blocked out.
“No, we didn’t say anything.” Chu Chen’an put the vase back with trembling hands.
Shen Delu then took the walkie-talkie and said something more, and soon, an administrator came up to remove Lu Chengdong’s corpse.
Chu Chen’an stood in place; the smell of blo*od was everywhere, he couldn’t help shivering.
He asked Shen Delu, “When did you come back?”
“From the time he came to our doorstep,” Shen Delu said with a smile.
Chu Chen’an raised his eyes to look at him.
“I originally wanted to see what he was doing here first,” Shen Delu said, pressing a few drops of alcohol hand sanitizer on his hands, “but it turned out that as soon as he arrived, my stupid An An opened the door for him.”
Shen Delu washed his hands three times before walking towards Chu Chen’an and picking him up. “How come my baby wasn’t this alert?”
“But it’s okay.” Shen Delu smiled and kissed his rosy lips. “With me here, An An doesn’t have to worry about this.”
Chu Chen’an was dragged by the back of his head, and his face was pressed against Shen Delu’s shoulder; he could hear his heartbeat.
“Don’t be afraid, baby.” Shen Delu felt him trembling, and his broad palm smoothed down his back. “I’m here.”
Chu Chen’an looked weak in Shen Delu’s arms.
His heartbeat accelerated as he clinged to the back of Shen Delu’s neck.
He felt like he was going to be ruined.
He probably didn’t really like Shen Delu.
……
Shen Delu led him back to the bedroom and said, “Didn’t baby just take a bath?”
“It’s all my fault; I stained An An with the smell of blo*od.” His words carried a hint of false guilt: “An An loves cleanliness so much; how can you sleep in clothes that smell of blo*od?”
Chu Chen’an sensed that things were not going well, and he quickly tried to break away from Shen Delu’s embrace, but unfortunately, Shen Delu didn’t move at all.
“Let’s go wash up again.” Shen Delu hugged him and added, “and try on the new pajamas I bought for you.”