〈？？？？？？？？？？〉
〈I swear I didn’t even blink…〉
〈Wait, I just went to the bathroom, can someone explain what the hell happened?〉
〈Isn’t he a newbie? Where did he get a Lifebound Weapon? That doesn’t make any damn sense.〉
〈Looking at his movements and the structure of the umbrella, he’s not a main attacker more like a support role with some offensive capability. But even for a support, his skill level can’t be that of a newbie. It’s not even like someone who’s only cleared one or two dungeons. It’s weird. Are all the big shots into making smurf accounts these days?〉
After dealing with the doctor in the intensive care ward, Guan Si coughed up another mouthful of blood. He braced himself against the table with one hand, eyes closed, resting for a moment. Only when his body no longer swayed as precariously as before did he wipe his mouth and begin flipping through the experimental records and journals in the intensive care ward.
Since he was here anyway, he might as well do the bonus questions. If he died here, so be it, but what if he could actually get out?
The information in the experimental records and journals was lengthy. The earliest entry was from twenty years ago. Every three months, a batch of patients would be sent into the asylum to become test subjects.
The journal recorded that at first, the asylum had indeed partnered with the research institute, aiming to develop medication to treat the patients. The doctor who proposed and led the research was named Liu Shan. The first batch of drugs Liu Shan developed was genuinely effective patients who took them showed significant improvement in their mental state.
But Liu Shan’s goal wasn’t to cure them. He wasn’t satisfied with simple pharmaceutical treatment. He wanted to go further to physically modify the patients, to completely eliminate any possibility of them developing mental illness.
Liu Shan’s mother had committed suicide after developing a mental illness. When his father received the news, he got into a car accident on the road the car plunged off a cliff and exploded, killing him instantly.
Liu Shan didn’t want other families to suffer the same tragedy. So curing mental illness, making people normal and healthy, became the lifelong aspiration he pursued.
This should have been Liu Shan’s good intention.
In the spring of eighteen years ago, the first-generation test subjects entered the intensive care ward and began physical modification. The first-generation subjects weren’t forced into the asylum they volunteered for the experiment.
But that modification was brutal, because it failed.
Liu Shan had left on business and wasn’t in the intensive care ward. The other doctors who participated in that modification died horribly.
Their bodies were torn apart by the frenzied patient, limbs scattered everywhere. When Liu Shan returned to the intensive care ward, the room was splattered with blood, glistening entrails strewn across the floor, enough to make anyone gag.
For a normal person, a scene like that would be a lifelong nightmare. After something like that happened, the human experimentation should have been stopped right then and there.
However, Liu Shan saw it from a different angle.
That frenzied patient had been physically frail, with a severely deteriorated mental state one foot already through death’s door, not far from dying.
After undergoing the physical modification, not only did he not die, but his physical condition improved dramatically. He was able to single-handedly kill every doctor in the intensive care ward.
Liu Shan thought: if he could refine the experiment, strip away the side effects, might it be possible to pull a terminally ill patient with severe mental illness back from the Grim Reaper’s grasp and even make their body stronger than a normal person’s?
Liu Shan’s ambition grew ever larger. He wanted to continue the experiment. He wanted to develop a method that would make the human body completely immune to mental illness.
But the subsequent research didn’t go well. Either patients dropped dead, or doctors were killed by patients suffering from the side effects of the modification.
Eventually, no patients were willing to join the experiment anymore.
Liu Shan refused to give up. He had already seen the dawn of victory, how could he willingly let it go?
The experiment was no longer his aspiration. It had become his pathological obsession.
If no patients volunteered, then force them.
Sacrificing themselves for his research was, in itself, a glorious thing. If the drug could be developed, wouldn’t that be a contribution in its own right?
The relentless coercion led the patients to protest. They stopped obeying the doctors and nurses, banding together instead, which plunged the asylum into prolonged chaos.
So that year, the old asylum director also died in the riot. He hadn’t actually supported continuing the experiment in the first place. He knew very well that the experiment had strayed from its original purpose, and that pushing on would only lead to disaster.
So before he died, the old director said to Liu Shan: “Liu Shan, my boy, stop this. Your medical skills can be put to better use elsewhere, not trapped in this asylum.”
Liu Shan had been raised by him since childhood. After Liu Shan’s parents died, the old director took him in, treated him like his own son, and taught him everything he knew.
The old director had once been deeply gratified, because Liu Shan was truly a genius a genius among geniuses.
But genius and madness are often separated by a single thought.
The top-tier talent that had once been Liu Shan’s greatest asset became the shackles that bound him, and the very force that pushed him toward his death.
He had saved many patients, yet he could not save the doctor who was torn apart, could not save the experimental subjects who died in the lab, and could not save himself or the old director.
The old director should have retired long ago, but watching Liu Shan gradually lose himself on this path from walking alone toward the light to sinking deep into darkness, he found he could not let go.
Liu Shan was his child. Even if he had become a bad child, no matter what, he was still his child.
And so, the old director too became trapped within this madhouse.
Until the moment of his death, he never found release.
Before he died, the old director had left behind a secret passage. If one day Liu Shan found himself with nowhere to go, as his father, he hoped to leave him one final path to survival.
“I love you” not the intimate whispers of lovers in each other’s arms, but a father’s helpless and profound care, left behind for a child who had gone astray.
Only, the old director died too suddenly. He never remembered, and never had the chance, to tell Liu Shan how to open the secret passage.
…
After the old director’s death, Liu Shan became the new director of the madhouse.
He cultivated a type of flower, naming it Liuxiang. The fragrance of the Liuxiang flower, combined with the drugs he had developed, could render patients unconscious. As long as he blew his whistle, the patients would follow the sound to the intensive care ward, becoming his experimental subjects, lambs waiting to be slaughtered.
And so the experiment continued. Most of the patients who came in were people abandoned or persecuted by their own families in clan struggles, or those tricked into coming under the pretense of receiving treatment for illness. Even if they died, disposal was simple.
This experiment somehow managed to remain hidden for countless years.
Guan Si continued reading, his gaze stopping at five years ago.
Five years ago, among the new batch of patients admitted to the madhouse were Xiao Yu and Xiao Yan.
The records stated that they had mysteriously disappeared. Liu Shan searched everywhere to no avail. But the intensive care ward was heavily guarded, and Xiao Yu and Xiao Yan were unlikely to have learned the secrets of the experiment.
Of course, Liu Shan knew they did not have mental illnesses. So, perhaps out of some remnant of goodwill, Liu Shan ultimately chose to let them go and stopped sending people to search for them.
However, the two missing experimental subjects still needed to be replaced. So three days later, a new patient was admitted to Room 103.
But this patient’s mental state was too poor. He didn’t even make it through that night he mutilated himself to death.
Driven by the pathological psychology of his episode, he cut his own flesh into ragged pieces. Enduring excruciating pain, he smeared his blood everywhere. The walls were covered in large swaths of crimson stains, extremely difficult to clean up.
Liu Shan made a very simple decision he built a new thin wall directly over the bloodstains to cover them.
Reading this, Guan Si closed his eyes as if unable to bear it, because he already knew how Xiao Yu and Xiao Yan had died.
Liu Shan had let them go, but he didn’t know they were hiding in the secret passage. He only assumed they had escaped by some means.
But for Xiao Yu and Xiao Yan, they didn’t dare go to the intensive care ward, they couldn’t reach the main gate of the madhouse, and their only escape route had been sealed shut with cement.
They had starved to death.
At the stairwell between the second and third floors, He Zhu raised his hand slightly. Puppet threads shot out all at once, piercing through the nurses’ blood vessels, and blood gushed forth immediately. As one nurse fell, another charged forward, seemingly endless and inexhaustible.
Pei Su’s whip lashed continuously, and each strike against a nurse split their flesh open. “What the hell are these things? No matter how many we kill, they just keep coming.”
He Zhu said, “You know they can’t be killed, so why aren’t you leaving? Do you want me to die here with you?”
Pei Su activated his formation while quipping, “Your suggestion isn’t bad, but if we die in this godforsaken place, we’d have to be a pair of wild mandarin ducks in the afterlife.”
He Zhu’s voice carried a scolding tone, but his hands were honestly clearing a path for Pei Su. “You’re dreaming. Get moving go get the key.”
Pei Su nodded, acknowledged with a sound, and said, “Brother He, guard the path well for me. Otherwise, you won’t even be able to collect my corpse, I’ll just be left to rot in the wilderness.”
With that, he slipped into the director’s office on the third floor.
Inside the office, Liu Shan sat quietly behind his desk, looking at Pei Su with a calm and natural tone: “You’ve come?”
Pei Su said, “Who are you?”
“He’s Liu Shan, the mastermind behind the human experiments.”
Guan Si’s voice came from beside his ear illusory and ethereal. Pei Su almost doubted what he had heard.
“Kill him, take the key. His body might undergo mutation be careful. Look around his room for any flowers.”
Guan Si transmitted his voice again, and Pei Su confirmed he hadn’t misheard.
Pei Su quickly scanned the room’s furnishings, and his heart sank there were no flowers in the director’s office.
That meant Liu Shan’s body had already evolved to another level. He no longer needed the Liuxiang flower to guide him or rather, to restrain him.
Liu Shan stared into his eyes. There was no emotion in his gaze more like a machine than a man.
“It doesn’t matter. You won’t leave here alive.”
He raised his hand, leaped into the air, and drove a fist toward Pei Su. The punch carried a gust of fierce wind that made Pei Su instinctively sense danger.
Pei Su dodged to the side, the fist grazing past his face and slamming straight into the wall, caving it in nearly two inches deep.
Pei Su was stunned at the sight. What the hell had he gotten himself into? Qi Dengzui was no iron-armed warrior, this Liu Shan was the real iron-armed warrior.
The man was a lunatic. He’d even modified his own body. One punch like that could shatter his bones. How was Pei Su supposed to fight him?
He was a formation master, not an attack type.