A Bad-Hearted Doctor is Unbearably Beautiful - Chapter 10

After circling the basement for a while, Lu Xiao saw many messy shoe prints near a floor tile. He walked closer and knocked on it, discovering that the area beneath the tile was hollow!

Holding a flashlight, he crawled into the dark passage. The air was filled with a damp, musty smell. He stepped on the ground and then turned on his flashlight. The beam illuminated the surroundings, creating a faint electronic buzzing sound. The walls were covered with a network of cracks. The path seemed endless, and Lu Xiao continued to feel his way along the wall. After walking for a while, he felt the path widen significantly. The beam of his flashlight swept across the ceiling, revealing a domed structure.

It looks like an air-raid shelter from the last century.

“You’re smarter than I thought.”

Shen Zhao’s voice came from the depths.

“Dr. Shen?” Lu Xiao called out into the darkness. The three words hit the wall and bounced back, creating a strange, trembling echo.

A rusty iron door was slowly pushed open with a creak. Shen Zhao’s face appeared in the faint light. The damp, musty smell of the air-raid shelter was now mixed with a hint of formaldehyde. Shen Zhao stood in the halo of light, his face pale and radiating a cold glow.

“You’re quite good at hiding.”

Lu Xiao narrowed his eyes, raised his right hand, and gently curled his fingers toward Shen Zhao in a flippant gesture before striding forward in his combat boots.

The door to the lab slowly opened. The silver-white operating table and medical equipment glowed with a faint blue light in the dim, cool-toned lighting. In the center was a long laboratory bench with many rows of various reagents with unknown labels, as well as several centrifuge tubes filled with blood samples.

Why would a chief surgeon at a hospital have so much laboratory equipment and so many reagents? And why would they be hidden in such a strange air-raid shelter!

Those few blood samples made Lu Xiao immediately think of the storage room on the second floor of the Ren’ai Physical Examination Center!

The more Lu Xiao saw, the colder his heart grew. Shen Zhao… you better not have anything to do with those events.

Shen Zhao stood in front of the lab. The wind blowing in from the ventilation ducts made him tighten the scarf around his neck. The lower half of his face was buried in the scarf, and a hint of unnatural panic peeked out from the corners of his eyes.

“You’re really full of surprises. There’s a complete laboratory like this dozens of meters underground at the military hospital. Is this for your personal use?!” Lu Xiao asked, raising an eyebrow and not mincing his words.

Shen Zhao turned to walk inside, taking off his gloves as he went and tossing them casually onto the lab bench. “It’s just an emergency medical area, a first-aid station from the 70s and 80s when we were preparing for war. It was abandoned later. There was some old equipment in this air-raid shelter, and I saw some of it could still be used, so I just tidied it up.”

“That’s easy for you to say. I may not know much about medical equipment, but I can tell that the lab equipment you have here isn’t something you can easily get. And what about those blood samples? What are you studying?”

Shen Zhao shrugged. His chin emerged from the scarf, and the corners of his mouth turned up in a slight smile, though there was no humor in his eyes. “Do I have to answer you? Besides, aren’t you a cop? If you want to know so badly, you can go find out yourself.”

Their words were like daggers thrown at each other, sparks flying where their gazes met.

“Shen Zhao, you better not be hiding any ‘surprises’ from me.”

Shen Zhao took a small step back, his gaze calm. “You should be worried about the people who are trying to silence you, not me. I suggest you figure out who your target is.”

Lu Xiao could see that Shen Zhao didn’t want to give too many explanations about this place, and if it weren’t for Shen Zhao, Song Laosan and the innocent hospital staff could have been attacked by those killers.

Forget it. I’ll just see what he’s up to for now.

“Where are Song Laosan and the others?” Lu Xiao decided to change the subject.

“Over there.” Shen Zhao pointed a well-defined finger at a door in the corner.

“Thanks.” Lu Xiao extended his hand to shake Shen Zhao’s as a sign of gratitude, but Shen Zhao glanced at it and pretended not to see it.

“…”

“Song Laosan, who are that black-clad man who shot at you and the scar-faced man from before!”

Lu Xiao was infuriated at the sight of Song Laosan. He had taken women hostage twice. Although he didn’t cause much harm to the two hostages, the explosion resulted in two deaths.

Even though Song Laosan insisted he knew nothing, it was impossible not to be suspicious of him!

Song Laosan hesitated, still unwilling to speak.

“Hey, have you no shame?! I almost died twice to protect you, and you’re still playing dumb here?” Lu Xiao was so angry he wanted to take off his combat boots and throw them at Song Laosan’s face.

“Half a year ago, I worked at this physical examination center. It wasn’t an important position, just doing odd jobs. Then, during the annual physical, I tested positive for… hepatitis B.”

Song Laosan spoke slowly.

“On the surface, everyone said it wasn’t a big deal and told me to relax. But secretly, they all kept their distance and wouldn’t come near me! Not long after, I was fired.”

“But right then, my old mother was diagnosed with uremia!” The corners of Song Laosan’s eyes turned red, and his nose scrunched up slightly. “I didn’t have much savings back then, and it was gone in no time! I begged the company for a job, so I could at least afford some basic medicine for my mother, but they treated me like a stray dog and kicked me out!”

“That person gave me money, which temporarily saved my mother’s life. I suddenly feel now that if he wants me dead, maybe it’s just my fate…”

Song Laosan’s voice grew fainter, but then he suddenly raised it and said, “But I really only destroyed those few blood samples! I didn’t kill anyone! I had no idea why there would be two bodies! There was no one else in that place… in that building… How would I dare to…”

“Calm down! We don’t have any evidence to accuse you of killing those two people either.” Lu Xiao patted Song Laosan’s face. “How many times have you contacted the person on the phone? Was there anything special about his voice, tone, or words? Think back carefully!”

“He… we must have talked four times in total. He was always the one who called me, and the number was different every time. I can’t remember his voice or tone. He must have used a voice changer, I…”

“No, wait. I remember every time we were about to hang up, there would be a clicking sound, like a lighter. It was like he was lighting a cigarette… if that counts as a detail.”

He likes to light a cigarette before hanging up the phone?

That detail was a bit too abstract. Lu Xiao weighed it in his mind.

“What about the blood samples? Where in the physical examination center were they kept? Did they have any numbers on them?”

“Those few were in the freezer in the cold storage room… They only had a sequence from one to four. Nothing else…”

“In a freezer? Were these the only ones stored there?” Shen Zhao asked.

“Yes.”