After leaving the hospital room, Wen Wen didn't actually go far. She simply went up two floors, turned a corner, and stepped into an empty conference room.
Tong Hua was sprawled across the table, dead to the world and snoring away, clutching several case files in her arms. It was painfully obvious she had pulled multiple all-nighters.
As for whether she had stayed up late grinding ranked matches or actually working, well... that was up for debate.
*Bang!*
Wen Wen slammed her fist onto the table without mercy, jolting her slacking subordinate awake.
"What is it? What happened?"
Tong Hua instinctively grabbed her phone, on high alert. "Who popped their ult?"
The dark, dormant screen showed no game display, reflecting only an expressionless face behind Tong Hua that bent down, drew close to her ear, and gently gave a reminder:
"Next time you stay up all night, I'm snapping your phone in half. Got it?"
"I wasn't sleeping, I'm awake, I'm up!" Tong Hua wiped her face, striving to look bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, which only made her dark circles stand out more.
Like offering up treasure, she raised the files in her hands.
"Everything's been investigated and cleared up."
"Then let's hear it." Wen Wen flipped through the files in her hands and asked, "What are their backgrounds?"
"Among the ringleaders, the woman you asked about last night is named Zhu Hong, thirty-one years old."
Tong Hua only needed to graze the files to know everything by heart. "On the surface, she's the operator of two chain restaurants and a KTV, but she's just a figurehead.
"Her real identity is the mistress of the second-in-command of the Quanxiang Friendship Association... err, what the underworld calls the Quancheng Gang. Word is she used to work as a hostess or PR girl. Later, after clinging to Chen Xingzhou's coattails, she hooked up with her current lover... though that lover of hers was seriously twisted in bed. Well, whatever, that doesn't matter.
"Anyway, after Zhu Hong contracted Bloodthirst Syndrome, he was the first one she devoured. You know the rest—things spiraled out of control, and she practically finished off all her little sisters and best friends.
"In a mere two weeks, she reached the fifth stage: physical mutation, altered life form, turning entirely into an abomination. At that stage, she could already be called a mutated ghoul.
"Over half of the infected in Yacheng right now got it from her. Xiao An, Old Zhang, and I spent the whole night following this lead and dragged back more than twenty of them!"
Filtering out the exaggeration in her claim of rolling through them, Wen Wen cut straight to the point: "How were they handled?"
"Per your rules, Sis Wen: anyone who's eaten people was put down on the spot; those who haven't reached stage three were sent to the sanitarium for mandatory treatment. The expenses were billed to the company's account. The specific costs are right here..."
Wen Wen didn't even spare a glance at the ledger books, casually tossing them aside.
"Anything else?"
"Then there's the old man who broke into his home and attacked him, mentioned by your 'Bro Quotable'—*cough, cough*—I mean, Student Ji Jue. We dug up his background too. Here it is."
After rustling around for a while, Tong Hua fished out two sheets of paper and slid them over.
A lightweight, feather-thin life.
Chen Lusheng, male, seventy-one years old, scavenger.
In his youth, he had been an idle loafer, a street punk itching for fights who didn't even care when his wife ran off with someone else. Only after his elderly mother died did he finally mend his ways, but by then, it was too late.
Aside from odd jobs and manual labor, no one would hire him.
Bricklaying, hauling bricks, fixing sewers—he had worked pretty much every trade on the market. Once he grew older, he saved a bit of money and set up a scrap yard, collecting refrigerators and color TVs to flip for cash, barely scraping by.
Such was the dull life of someone at the bottom of the ladder, devoid of anything worth mentioning.
Until... he found a child in a pile of garbage.
She suffered from a genetic disease, covered in festering sores, several of her fingers bitten off by rats. Everyone said she wouldn't survive, but the increasingly taciturn old man stayed by her side without a word, enduring an entire winter together, keeping each other company.
She pulled through.
Yet she couldn't hold on for too long.
Those hard yet happy days lasted only a brief seven years.
"Congenital immunodeficiency and damage. In the period following the Day of the Burning Sea, children born had a chance of developing such conditions—aberrant infections. Wealthy and powerful families could go to Midtown for surgery; those who couldn't afford it didn't live long.
"Even if they bankrupted themselves, they could only come to places like Mercy Hospital for conservative treatment, barely clinging to life."
Tong Hua sighed. "When I went to check, the neighbors said he'd fallen ill and hadn't come out for days. He probably was already on the verge of losing control days ago.
"Before losing control, he borrowed from every friend he had and even mortgaged what little property he owned to loan sharks, scraping together a large sum of money, and deposited every cent into his daughter's medical account at the hospital."
Wen Wen was silent for a long time before asking softly, "Did his daughter know?"
"She's already dead."
From the files, Tong Hua pulled out another death report. "Just the night before last. Massive internal bleeding, resuscitation failed... She passed away even earlier than he did."
"..."
Wen Wen said nothing more. In the silence, her lips merely parted and closed without a sound.
She cursed under her breath.
Even though she was long accustomed to death, death was, at times, unequal.
Some people could stir up tempests while alive and shake the heavens and earth when they died, but far more lived in obscurity and died in complete silence.
Living or dying was never up to them.
Pain, wails, despair, and tears all vanished into an unnoticed silence.
"That's why I hate this dogshit world."
She closed her eyes.
Sending heads rolling through the gangs of Beishan District and tearing Zhu Hong's infection out by the roots had only contained the spread of Bloodthirst Syndrome; the true source was still wandering loose out there.
For exposing that Dragon Cult dog's slip-up this time, Wen Wen genuinely had to thank Ji Jue. Otherwise, who knew how much longer the bastard would have hidden?
With Tong Hua, who had inherited [Matrix: Yesterday Once More], present, as long as he showed himself even once, hiding would be impossible. Sooner or later, he would be unearthed.
Yet based on their current leads, it still wasn't fast enough.
Then again, weren't more clues right before their eyes?
***
Fifteen minutes later, the conference room table was covered in medical records.
The attending doctors were answering Wen Wen's questions, while Tong Hua's fingers skimmed across the charts and files—among the Twelve Virtues, the Path of Aether was best at reading and observing the world's information and phenomena. Faced with this jumble of materials, Tong Hua processed them at a speed even more exaggerated than the legendary "quantum speed reading."
Unfortunately, useful information was scarce.
After finishing, Tong Hua slowly shook her head at Wen Wen.
"That's all?" Wen Wen furrowed her brows.
"That's everything," the vice director said, wiping his sweat with a bitter smile. "Aside from patients' medication fees, the vast majority of Mercy Hospital's revenue comes from church donations. We haven't even achieved a paperless office yet, and our patient pool is limited. The records you mentioned regarding abnormal lab values and patients exhibiting rabies-like tendencies within a short period—that's all we have."
"What about beyond that?"
Wen Wen pressed on. "Anything else relevant can be brought out too. If they're too heavy to carry, we can go check the archives ourselves."
The vice director fell silent and sighed, but ultimately said nothing.
Instead, a young doctor trailing behind hesitated for a moment before finally blurting out, "What you're concerned about should be blood-borne infectious diseases, right?"
Wen Wen's brow twitched. "What do you mean?"
"..."
The doctor realized he had spoken out of turn and fell silent. In fact, several colleagues were already glaring at him. He lowered his head and took a slight, unsteady step back; his leg was fitted with a brace, making it obvious he had trouble walking.
Yet certain things could not be said.
At least, not by hospital staff to the Security Bureau.
"Your hospital is assisting the Security Bureau in official business, after all. To be honest, those other messy affairs have nothing to do with me, nor do I want to meddle," Wen Wen frowned, warning in a cold tone. "I hope things don't end on an ugly note."
"No, no, no, it's not that we're intentionally hiding anything, it's just..."
The vice director sighed. "If you want to investigate issues related to blood-borne diseases, checking with hospitals is reasonable, but the truth is, most of the time we're helpless.
"Most patients needing blood who still have choices won't come here to suffer in vain."
He smiled wryly, sighing in self-deprecation. "Because we can't afford it."
Yacheng's blood banks were for-profit institutions, giving priority supply to private hospitals and upscale sanitariums that could foot the bill. A church-sponsored hospital barely scraping by like Mercy Hospital couldn't afford the exorbitant annual contracting fees at all, and its patients couldn't afford blood priced by the gram.
More often than not, even if surgery demanded it, they chose to... bring their own.
After all, where there was demand, there was a market.
If people couldn't afford the exorbitantly expensive official blood banks, those desperate to survive would naturally turn to less secure channels. For instance...
"Illegal blood banks?!"
Tong Hua stared blankly, eyes wide. "There's actually such a thing?"
Wen Wen didn't say a word, her expression grim.
Finally, the realization dawned.
This was why Mercy Hospital had been reluctant to bring it up. Who knew how many patients with no other choice relied on that single lifeline? Even if it wasn't safe, even if there was a risk of infection, even if it had countless problems—sometimes, without that lifeline, one could only wait for death.
For an aristocratic family like the Tong clan of Yacheng, boasting countless family estates and stakes in multiple hospitals, a place like an illegal blood bank was destined to have nothing to do with Tong Hua's entire life. Not to mention a Celestial Chosen like Wen Wen, who held gold membership service at [Hope Hospital]—even if she were hacked to pieces, as long as her head was still intact upon arrival, those madmen could patch her back together whole.
These gray areas of the medical industry were simply too far removed from the Celestial Chosen.
And the figure lurking behind the scenes only needed to follow this invisible vein, using a few blood bags to release the Bloodthirst Syndrome virus across Yacheng, rooting it in the agony and despair of the innocent, quietly sprouting and spreading from the shadows.
At last, they had found it.
Another trail of footprints left behind...
"Let's move, A-Hua." Wen Wen scooped up the car keys from the table and pushed through the door.
"Huh?"
Tong Hua was bewildered. "Where are we going?"
"To find someone!"
From the corridor came words fading into the distance, carrying a resonant metallic ring.
"And then kill their whole damn family!"
Chapter 17