Mu Ke was thinking about what to do when his system panel shook and he saw an additional item in his inventory. Mu Ke hadn’t bought any items. Obviously, the person who bought this item was Bai Liu. Bai Liu could manipulate his panel to buy items and this was one of their methods of communication. Now they were living in separate wards and using this method of buying items to communicate with each other was extremely secretive. It could also avoid the eyes and ears of others.
Mu Ke opened the system panel and looked at the item in the warehouse. The audience could see the system store but the warehouse interface was invisible. In order to protect the players’ property, the warehouse was blocked. The private exchange between Mu Ke and Bai Liu wasn’t noticeable even by the audience in front of the small TV. It could be called extremely secretive.
The only way to expose Mu Ke and Bai Liu’s communication was for Mu Ke to be killed. The items they used to communicate would be exposed in front of the player who killed Mu Ke and they would perceive something was wrong. For example, if Bai Liu and Mu Ke used a memo or mobile phone recorder to write and communicate. Then after Mu Ke died, the items used to communicate would fall in front of the player who killed him.
If Mu Ke was killed suddenly during the communication or if he was killed before he had time to erase the traces of communication, the item dropped by Mu Ke might expose Bai Liu in front of others.
Of course, he could use a password to encrypt this communication process to prevent simple deciphering, but how could he be sure that this password wouldn’t be easily deciphered by others and could be quickly understood by Mu Ke?
Bai Liu didn’t like a situation where he was exposed to the opponent so he chose a non-conventional communication item Bai Liu bought a black keyboard for Mu Ke. The keyboard was a familiar tool for Mu Ke and Bai Liu. Compared with notebooks, paper, tape recorders and other items that would leave obvious traces of communication, it was more traceless to take off key caps and place them back on the keyboard after communication. It could be said to leave no traces compared with other communication tools.
The ‘password’ on the keyboard was one that could be quickly understood by the two game players, Mu Ke and Bai Liu. Even if Mu Ke was killed and the keyboard dropped, the enemy wouldn’t easily associate it with a communication tool and wouldn’t think about the information contained in this keyboard.
Of course, another reason for Bai Liu’s choice of the keyboard was that when he visited the system store, he saw the keyboard was less than 10 points. Bai Liu thought it could be used and bought it.
Mu Ke was taken aback when he saw the keyboard. The [ctrl] and [c] keycaps on the keyboard were removed. This was a very commonly used shortcut key that meant ‘copy’. Copy? Copy what? What did they have to copy right now? Wasn’t the most urgent task to find the life recovery medicine?
Wait a minute! Mu Ke quickly understood Bai Liu’s meaning. Bai Liu wanted to copy the life recovery medicine! Did Bai Liu want to copy this thing? Couldn’t it be copied? Where to copy it from? There were so many wards here. Was Bai Liu aware that one of the wards had the life recovery medicine?
Mu Ke looked at the keyboard and thought deeply. Then he hesitantly removed the [?] and [numlock] keycaps and put it in his warehouse. He waited for Bai Liu’s reply nervously and a bit worried that his thoughts wouldn’t be understood.
[Numlock] was to lock the keypad numbers on the keyboard but it could be literally translated as [lock number]. Combined with the [?] keycap and the message Mu Ke wanted to express was: [Bai Liu, what number do we lock onto?]
The rooms here were numbers. Bai Liu needed to tell him what number to lock onto so he knew which ward Bai Liu was going to.
Soon, the keyboard Mu Ke put in the warehouse disappeared and reappeared after a while. Once it returned, the [ctrl] and [c] keycaps on the keyboard were back but three more keycaps were removed.
“1, 7, 0.”
Mu Ke was immediately confused. For the room number, the number 0 couldn’t be placed in front so the number in front could only be 1 or 7. There were only three arrangements for these three numbers: 701, 710 and 107.
The seventh floor was the operating rooms and there were no wards. 107 was even more ridiculous. It was a ‘blank’ ward. There was no ‘107’ ward in this building. It should’ve been vacated to be used as a warehouse or something similar so it occupied this label, but it wasn’t a ward. There were the 106 and 108 wards.
Mu Ke was a bit sad because he couldn’t understand Bai Liu’s thoughts. He scanned the three numbers and thought of six arrangements of the three numbers in his head. Then he slowly sat upright.
This private hospital didn’t have a ward number with English letters but there was a special ward without numbers—the ICU ward. The ICU ward on the first floor wasn’t numbered. Every place on the first floor except the ICU was a ward, so this ICU ward was likely to occupy the number ‘107’.
Bai Liu didn’t directly use the ICU ward to describe it because there was more than one ICU ward in the hospital. A failure to specify the ward number could cause a misunderstanding. Mu Ke directly asked for the number and Bai Liu simply used a more specific method to refer to the ward. This guy never thought that the person on the other side might not be able to keep up with his thinking and piece together 107 with the ICU ward on the first floor.
Fortunately, Mu Ke had a good memory and information gathering ability. He successfully understood what Bai Liu wanted to express. Bai Liu wanted to copy the treatment method of a critically ill patient!
“Fuck.” Mu Ke couldn’t help cursing. The one inside the ICU was the original investor of this hospital and a patient who was over two meters tall. He looked just like a ghost and was likely to be a monster in their instance!
In addition, the nurses here said that patients in the ICU ward wouldn’t leave the ward all day. How could they get in to copy the life recovery medicine? They also didn’t know for certain if the life recovery medicine was inside!
However, Bai Liu was quite certain that the ICU would have the life recovery medicine mentioned by the system. If the patients here were doctors then compared to the ‘novice doctors’ who just moved in, the ones more likely to have the treatment were the older doctors who were more seriously ill and had studied for longer.
To sum it up, Bai Liu felt that most of those in the ICU ward had the life recovery medicine. Whether he could obtain it was a different matter.
The patients in the ICU didn’t look like people and wouldn’t leave the ward all day long. Bai Liu had no chance to enter and he didn’t know if the patients or monsters would attack violently after entering. After all, Bai Liu wasn’t going there to do something good but to search through their things. The risk was quite high.
However, the corresponding benefits were also very high. If it succeeded, Bai Liu would be the first player to get the life recovery medicine. This would give Bai Liu a big advantage and he could use it to trade with other players. There were just two obvious difficulties in breaking into the ICU.
The first one: how to break in?
There were nurses wandering around the corridors of this hospital. Patients who did anything that violated the hospital’s rules and regulations would be caught and corrected. Don’t talk about breaking into the ICU with force. If players wanted to break into the ICU, they had to avoid the patrolling nurses. It was just that the nurses’ reconnaissance ability and movement speed were quite fast. At the very least, Bai Liu couldn’t outrun these nurses wearing thin high heels on this slippery ground.
The second point: how could he search through things after breaking in?
There was something very wrong with the patients in this ward and they were most likely monsters. It would be hard to rush in and search for things in front of them.
Before Bai Liu could come up with a concrete solution, night came. At 9 o’clock in the evening, the nurses informed them that there was a curfew and all patients were forbidden to go out.
The only sound heard from the corridor was the nurses pushing the carts back and forth. These nurses patrolled the corridor. Once they saw the dim light leaking from under the door of a ward, they would knock on the door to tell you to turn off the lights and rest. They were just like the dormitory aunties at Bai Liu’s high school.
It was just that these nurses were far less friendly than the aunties. Bai Liu opened the door to take a look. These nurses walked on high heels in the corridor at night, their faces frozen in the mist from the humidifiers. They reminded Bai Liu of the monsters in Silent Hill.
The eyesight of these nurses was surprisingly good. In this low visibility scene, Bai Liu just opened the door a crack but soon found that the nurse’s eyes emitted a cat-like fluorescent green in the night. She looked at Bai Liu from a distance and her cart quickly approached Bai Liu, high-heeled shoes running toward him. Bai Liu was also very fast and quickly closed and locked the door.
Soon, the squeaking of the cart stopped in front of Bai Liu’s door and the nurse banged on the door, her voice low. “Patient in Room 906, did you just open the door? Haven’t you read the hospital’s rules and regulations? It is strictly forbidden to leave after 9 o’clock. You can open the door of your ward after 9 o’clock in the morning.”
The nurse banged on the door while sternly speaking to Bai Liu, the sound ringing through the corridor in the night. Bai Liu definitely wouldn’t open the door for her. The nurse banged on the door for a moment before her tone lengthened and became slightly strange. “If you open the door during this time period and something enters your ward, the hospital isn’t responsible for your personal safety.”
Then the nurse pushed the cart away and left the door of Bai Liu’s room. What was this? Bai Liu frowned when he heard the nurse’s words. It seemed like something would be running around in the middle of the night. In addition, this time period…
It was forbidden to open the door of the ward from 9 o’clock in the evening to 9 o’clock in the morning. This was similar to prohibiting patients from leaving. However, this time period coincided with the child’s call time (6 a.m. to 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. to midnight).
The time when the child went out to call the investor happened to be the time when the investor couldn’t go out. The previous nurse talked about ‘something’ entering his ward. Assuming that the ‘something’ was a monster then the time when the monster emerged was precisely the time when the child came out to make the call.
It seemed that little Bai Liu (6) would be taking a lot of risks to call him.
Proofreader: Purichan
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