121: Chapter 121 Reverse Entry

After the first bus from Jiangbei returned, Qinghe No. 1 Safe House did not get a moment of respite.

At 4:17 AM, a blank ticket appeared on the front desk.

No one saw who put it there.

The last frame captured by the entrance surveillance showed the staff member passing through the hallway with a coffee. The next frame flashed with static, and the ticket was already lying next to the registry, its edge pressing down on an uncapped pen.

When Tang Zhiwei saw the ticket, her first reaction was not to touch it.

She made everyone step back two paces, closed all the doors on both sides of the hallway, and removed all the papers on the front desk that listed the names of hospitalized patients, quantities of supplies, and vehicle routes.

"This thing didn't come to find a person," she said.

Xu Minglan stood beside her: "Then what is it looking for?"

"A place."

What a Safe House fears most is not an old object falling in.

What it fears most is it learning how this place operates. Who enters and exits from which door, which room the wounded are in, which row the supplies are stored in, which corridor leads directly to the medical area, where the Fire Seal is most stable. The Longevity Society already knows that Torch will save people and that the Safe House will keep them. What they want to do now is turn this shelter in reality into a Terminal Station where everyone has to line up to board.

The blank ticket remained unchanged.

Until the Guardian Lamp at the end of the hallway swayed slightly.

A line of text slowly appeared on the ticket surface.

[Please passengers enter the station in order.]

Almost simultaneously, everyone's mobile phones in the Safe House rang.

It wasn't an incoming call.

It was the same station announcement broadcasting from speakers, ward televisions, water dispenser beeps, and even seeping out from the cracks of the elevator doors.

"Next stop, Qinghe No. 1."

When Lin Zhao came out of the Candidate observation room, he saw a patient who had just been sent in for observation walking toward the front desk. The person's eyes were unfocused, but their steps were steady, as if they really knew where they were supposed to go.

"Stop," Lin Zhao shouted.

The person did not stop.

Lin Zhao didn't grab his shoulder but blocked his path from the side, holding up a medication list that had just been printed.

"Is your name Zhao Haiming?"

The person hesitated for half a second.

"Your daughter said you were coming to pick up medicine today. That box for high blood pressure, did you take it tonight?"

Zhao Haiming's steps faltered.

The station announcement suddenly became piercingly sharp.

Lin Zhao guided the man backward, retreating step by step into the range of the Guardian Lamp. Xu Minglan rushed over, took Zhao Haiming's wrist, and whispered for him to count his knuckles. When he reached the tenth one, Zhao Haiming gasped, his forehead covered in sweat.

"I just... heard someone telling me to board the bus."

"You don't have to now," Xu Minglan said. "Sit down first."

A yellow line emerged from under the front desk.

It wasn't like the waiting line that lay across the ground in Jiangbei, but rather it crawled along the corner of the wall, extending all the way toward the supply warehouse. Tang Zhiwei followed it with her gaze, her expression worsening bit by bit.

The yellow line finally stopped in front of the warehouse door.

Behind that door were stacked sealed boxes, medical supplies, spare Guardian Lamp equipment, and a large amount of miscellaneous items confiscated from the old goods line. As long as it turned the warehouse into a station platform, the entire Safe House could be carried out of the entrance by these "items" one by one.

Chen Fu had already arrived at the door.

He was holding a bunch of keys, which clattered urgently.

"Is there a problem inside the warehouse?"

"Don't go in," Tang Zhiwei said. Chen Fu glanced at the yellow line under the door crack, then at the inventory list posted on the wall.

"There are over seven hundred boxes of things inside," he said. "You can seal the door if you want, but tell me first which boxes can't be kept."

Tang Zhiwei looked at him. Chen Fu was a Candidate, responsible for storage and transport. He didn't usually talk much, and what he said most often was, "Who signed for this box?" At this moment, his face was pale, but he didn't back down.

"I'm not asking you to show off," Tang Zhiwei said.

"I'm not showing off," Chen Fu said, gripping the keys tightly. "I just know where it can collapse inside and where it can't."

A message came from Bai Ya via the Grey Net.

He had already arrived near the reverse elevator in Linhai and was investigating the outermost source of that batch of cross-city ticket stubs. Upon hearing that the Qinghe Safe House had been marked, he only replied with one sentence.

[Don't let the warehouse door open.]

From inside the door, the beeping sound of a forklift reversing suddenly rang out.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

There were no forklifts operating in the Safe House.

Chen Fu looked up, staring at the warehouse door.

The yellow line under the door crack retracted inward slightly by an inch.

It was as if there really was a vehicle inside, waiting for someone to open the door.

Tang Zhiwei did not let anyone force their way into the warehouse.

She first divided the Safe House into three layers. The front desk and medical area were designated as the evacuation layer, the observation room and supply corridor as the buffer layer, and only necessary personnel were left in the rear area where the warehouse door was located. All name tags, medication lists, family information, and access records were packed into unlabeled grey file bags, and even the room signs on the walls were covered with black cloth.

Someone asked if this was too exaggerated.

Tang Zhiwei took down the last sign that read "Medical Observation Room" and placed it into a box.

"If it wants to turn this place into a station, we can't let it know who is supposed to get off at which stop."

Xu Minglan understood what she meant. Anomalies are best at grasping identities, routes, and affiliations. Once a patient is fixed as "a person going to the medical area," and a Candidate is fixed as "a person coming out of the observation room," they might be written into the new station schedule.

She took Li Xi to move the patients to temporary cubicles without numbers, and had everyone confirm reality using the simplest methods: stating what they ate today, who the last message on their phone was from, and what color the shoelaces on their feet were.

When Zhao Haiming counted to his tenth finger, he suddenly asked: "Will my daughter's name be remembered by it?"

Xu Minglan did not say no.

"That's why we will remember you first," she said.

At the other end of the hallway, Lin Zhao watched the yellow line crawling toward the warehouse door and suddenly noticed that in the places it had passed, the old scratches on the walls had all turned into arrows. Those arrows did not point outside the door, but toward the deepest forklift aisle inside the warehouse.

After Chen Fu saw it, his face darkened.

"It's not the forklift making the sound on its own."

"What?"

"It knows which vehicle in the warehouse can move."

Everyone outside the warehouse went silent.

The reversing sound inside was still ringing, with a very steady rhythm, as if an invisible driver was backing the vehicle toward the yellow line, bit by bit.

When Tang Zhiwei put the blank ticket into the containment box, a layer of fine moisture suddenly appeared on the inside of the lid. In the moisture, it looked as if someone had used a finger to write a string of room numbers: infirmary, observation room, supply warehouse, back door.

These were the most commonly used locations in the Safe House.

It didn't just want to take people away. It was learning the life here.

Tang Zhiwei snapped the box shut, turned, and said to everyone: "Starting today, do not use room names inside the Safe House. To say where you are going, use colors and locations."

This sounded troublesome, even a bit ridiculous.

But before the station announcement could ring again, one of the arrows in the hallway that had originally pointed toward the warehouse had already quietly turned toward a blank wall.

Lin Zhao closed the register on the front desk, and the yellow line outside paused under the sealed door crack, as if it couldn't find whose name it should call for the moment.