248: What they call hell is nothing more than a waiting room with no beds available.

Chapter 248: Hell Is Just a Waiting Room Without Beds. The wind howled in their ears.

The feeling of weightlessness was like an invisible giant hand, threatening to rip their internal organs out.

"Hold on tight."

Chen Mo gave a low shout, pressing Ruan Qiushui's head against his chest.

He adjusted his posture in mid-air. Although his left hand still wasn't responding well, his right hand firmly protected the back of his head.

It wasn't hard ground below.

Judging by the sound, it was empty.

Crash—

The two of them smashed through a layer of decayed protective netting and snapped several rusted iron cables hanging in mid-air.

The massive impact force nearly made Chen Mo vomit up his dinner.

It was the rat meat he had just eaten.

Thump.

One final muffled thud.

Chen Mo felt his spine let out an overburdened groan as his entire body sank into a pile of something elastic.

Dust billowed up, choking them and making it impossible to open their eyes.

"Cough, cough..."

Ruan Qiushui crawled out from his embrace. The first thing she did was disdainfully pat down her tactical vest, which was covered in machine oil.

"It stinks."

She sniffed, her pupil-less eyes scanning the surroundings. "This is the smell of corpse oil."

Chen Mo ignored her.

He lay in the darkness, rubbing his back against the pile of "elastic material."

The texture was very smooth, yet a bit sticky.

Click.

He felt something hard; it was the filter canister of a gas mask.

By the faint indicator light on the filter canister, Chen Mo could clearly see the "mattress" beneath him.

It was a mountain.

A mountain piled high with countless human bodies sealed in transparent body bags.

Serial numbers and dates were written on the surface of the bags. The one at the very top read: [Scrapped Item - G779, Cause of Death: Rejection Reaction].

"Welcome to the Old City District."

Chen Mo rolled off the pile, his feet making a squelching sound as they hit the slimy ground. "Or rather, the Doctor's trash bin."

This was an abandoned subway station.

Mottled billboards hung over the platform. Half the face of the beaming prosthetic doctor on one of them had already been eaten away by mold.

Only the four large characters for "Renai Medical" still emitted a faint fluorescent glow in the darkness.

The air was thick with the scent of formalin mixed with sewer biogas.

"Trash bin?"

Ruan Qiushui stood barefoot on the pile of body bags, tilting her head. "There's a lot of tasty food here."

"It's all expired."

Chen Mo pulled out his dagger and wiped the blood off on his tactical vest. "You'll get diarrhea if you eat that."

He looked around.

This should be the old Line 4, the lockdown zone known as the "Death Train."

It was also the underground entrance to Jiangcheng's largest slum before Wang Daoming made his fortune.

"The Doctor is just below."

Chen Mo pointed toward the bottomless tunnel. "But he definitely won't want us to just walk in like this."

Zzt, zzt.

The hanging lamp overhead, held by a single remaining tungsten filament, suddenly flickered twice.

The intercom crackled to life.

It wasn't the previous earpiece, but the subway station's speakers, which hadn't made a sound in hundreds of years.

"Zzt... Please note... Zzt..."

The static was ear-piercing.

"Patient No. 14, Chen Mo, please proceed to the first consultation room to wait."

That cold voice echoed through the empty subway station, carrying a nauseating elegance. "The previous patient hasn't been finished with yet. Please wait patiently."

Chen Mo sneered and raised his middle finger at the nearest surveillance camera.

"This is the appointment you wanted to make?"

Ruan Qiushui jumped down. Her eerily white feet stepped into the sludge, yet she didn't look the least bit disheveled.

"It's a specialist appointment; you have to queue."

Chen Mo stretched his left shoulder.

The energy provided by that rat earlier was almost exhausted. Although the bleeding from his wound had stopped, the tearing pain remained.

More critically, it was his chest.

That heart was beating.

It wasn't a normal beat; it was a craving.

Ever since it absorbed that rat, this "pump" was like a shark that had tasted blood, frantically urging him to hunt.

"You're hungry too, aren't you?"

Chen Mo looked deep into the tunnel.

There, he heard heartbeats.

Many of them.

Very slow.

Like hibernating snakes, or perhaps some kind of hatching insect eggs.

Thump, thump, thump.

Those sounds conducted through the rails, each beat striking Chen Mo's nerves.

"They're coming."

Ruan Qiushui suddenly stopped, her nostrils twitching. "It's fresh meat."

Click.

The crisp sound of a joint dislocating came from the darkness.

Followed by the sound of metal scraping against the ground.

Chen Mo gripped his dagger tightly, his body pressed against a pillar covered in missing person notices.

A shadow crawled out of the tunnel.

It was a "person."

To be precise, it was a modified humanoid creature.

It was on all fours, with rows of metal tubes plugged into its spine. Its face had been crudely stitched together with several steel plates, leaving only a mouth full of sharp teeth.

Around its neck hung a work ID: [Triage Nurse-09].

"This is the so-called 'queueing'?"

Chen Mo narrowed his eyes.

The thing had no eyes, but the two antennas on its head were rotating. It clearly relied on sound waves or thermal imaging for positioning.

"Roar—"

The monster let out a low growl, its hind legs kicking off the ground as it lunged like a giant flea.

It was incredibly fast.

Chen Mo didn't retreat.

The moment the monster lunged in front of him, he stepped forward with his left foot, his body like a fully drawn bow.

Thump!

His heart contracted violently.

A surge of heat instantly poured into his right arm.

The dagger traced a cunning arc, accurately stabbing toward the gap in the steel plate on the monster's lower jaw.

Screech!

Sparks flew.

The blade tip got stuck.

The monster's bones were harder than expected; it was a skeleton reinforced with titanium alloy.

"Tsk."

Chen Mo flicked his wrist, using the momentum to sidestep and dodge the monster's swinging claws.

The monster's claws caught the pillar, sending cement fragments flying and leaving three deep gouges that reached the rebar.

"Its skin is too thick."

Ruan Qiushui stood to the side, with no intention of helping at all. Instead, she offered a critique with great interest. "This piece of meat is a bit tough."

"Shut up."

Chen Mo cursed and closed in again.

Since head-on force wouldn't work, he'd change his approach.

He closed his eyes.

The sounds of the world vanished.

Only that dull, slow heartbeat remained.

Thump—

That was the monster's core.

It wasn't in the left chest, but in the... abdomen.

The slightly bulging area where the stitches were densest.

"Found you."

Chen Mo snapped his eyes open, his pupils shrinking to the size of needlepoints.

The monster lunged again.

This time, Chen Mo didn't dodge.

He charged straight into the monster's claws.

Puchi!

The claws pierced his left shoulder, and blood splattered.

But he didn't even flinch. Holding the dagger in a reverse grip, he dove into the monster's embrace and plunged the blade deep into its bulging lower abdomen.

Squish.

It was the sound of a blade slicing into soft flesh.

The monster let out a shrill scream, its body convulsing violently.

"Not over yet."

Chen Mo gave a savage grin, twisted the hand holding the knife ninety degrees, and then stirred forcefully.

Thump!

He could feel the tip of the knife touching that frantically beating heart.

At that moment, the "pump" in his chest resonated.

Like two magnets attracting each other.

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