I Run Away with the Earth to Save the World [Unlimited Flow] - Chapter 113

After checking the four bodies currently stored in the morgue, everyone quickly rewrapped them and pushed them back into their respective cold storage compartments.

Jing Qizhen put down the corpse registration book and briefly summarized based on the recorded information, “Four bodies. One died five days ago in a traffic accident and couldn’t be saved, one was an elderly person who passed away from natural illness, one died from severe allergies leading to laryngeal edema and asphyxiation, and the last was a child with multiple congenital diseases who couldn’t be resuscitated.”

Wang Feizhou instinctively said, “These all seem like fairly normal causes of death for a hospital. Nothing like the infection or other stuff that the ghost nurse mentioned earlier.”

But Si Jiayang’s attention was clearly elsewhere. “Wait, ghosts can have severe allergic reactions?”

These ghosts in the erosion area seem so fragile 0.0!

Manman pondered over the seemingly normal causes of death of the four corpses but couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off.

Jing Qizhen lowered his eyes slightly, also deep in thought.

Old Xiao took a breath. “Should we head over to the patient wards now? Or maybe check the lobby on the first floor, see if we can register for a checkup.”

Jin Guijuan folded her arms and softly said, “There probably aren’t many people around here but it doesn’t feel right to stay any longer either…”

Lu Lingxi couldn’t help scanning the morgue again. What he was thinking, though, was that the erosion area was different from a horror game. Despite being a classic haunted location, today the morgue felt oddly peaceful.

Lu Lingxi muttered under her breath, “Maybe it’s because all the doctors and nurses outside are ghosts, so seeing normal corpses now actually feels kind of comforting.”

Hearing Lu Lingxi mention ‘doctors and nurses are all ghosts,’ Jing Qizhen suddenly recalled the scene upstairs just now.

That ghost nurse who had just come out of the department room and got gently bumped by a medical cart was, true to her name, actually sent floating from the bump. And on their rushed way downstairs, when another ghost in a white coat made way for them, it floated up on its own and leaned against the stair railing, giving them the whole staircase. Ghosts were definitely good at using vertical space.

Getting bumped was one thing but that light, floating quality of the ghosts was clearly the biggest difference between them and real, physical people!

Realizing this, Jing Qizhen suddenly understood what had been bugging him all this time. He almost blurted out, “The traffic accident five days ago!”

Everyone paused in surprise.

Manman frowned. “The first body died in a traffic accident, so it—”

Halfway through her sentence, Manman’s eyes widened as she suddenly realized something. “Ghosts are really light!”

The others were slower to catch on but by now, they were starting to get it. “So that car accident was suspicious?”

Having just knocked out a ghost three times, Lu Lingxi had the most authority there. Recalling the feeling of striking that unlucky ghost on the back of the neck, he frowned and said slowly, “Ghosts can probably get into traffic accidents. When humans touch them directly, it’s like touching air; there’s nothing there. But if you touch them with something from within the erosion area, you can make contact.”

Jing Qizhen said calmly, “You knocked out that ghost three times and there were no marks on the back of its neck.”

Lu Lingxi suddenly understood. “Right! And each time it woke up at about the same speed and I used about the same force, just a bit stronger on the last try.”

Jing Qizhen added, “But the corpse of the traffic accident victim clearly had visible signs of impact.”

Jing Qizhen wasn’t trained in medicine and didn’t know much about how doctors or forensic experts determine injury sources based on wound characteristics, but even a layperson could recognize major trauma caused by a traffic accident.

As the only one among them with more medical knowledge, Wang Feizhou actively joined in the discussion. “It could also be because living ghosts are semi-transparent, so we can’t see their wounds. But once they die, their bodies turn solid, so we can see the injuries.”

After saying that, Wang Feizhou seemed to feel weird himself and muttered, “Living ghosts? Why does that sound so wrong…”

Jing Qizhen gave him a look and continued, “Ghosts can be injured, true. But the way they’ve behaved so far, they don’t seem like they’re easily injured, right?”

Lu Lingxi had been able to knock out that ghost because his strike had been directed downward while the ghost was wedged against the medical cart, so the blow had force behind it.

But when they had pushed the cart into the second ghost that had just come out of the department room, that ghost hadn’t looked hurt. It had just floated away. Because there was nothing behind it to resist the force.

Wilcox, who had been fascinated by the ghosts from the start, suddenly looked serious. Being skilled in hand-to-hand combat, he thought through the situation Jing Qizhen described, and frowned. “So basically, if we want to fight these ghosts, we’d have to pin them against a wall. If there’s nothing behind them, we’d just knock them flying, literally, in a physical sense.”

Lu Lingxi flexed his fingers and shook his head. “That makes it hard to fight. A lot of angles are off-limits for striking.”

While they talked, Jing Qizhen had already returned to the compartment storing the first body, intending to take out the victim of the supposed traffic accident.

Si Jiayang and Wang Feizhou, who were standing nearby, immediately stepped up to help.

Grandma Fang said, “Little Jing wants to examine the wounds?”

Jing Qizhen nodded. “Yes.”

Even the Earth chimed in with a guess in Jing Qizhen’s mind. “Ah, I get it! It’s like in cartoons! If ghosts really got run over by cars, the scene should look like a ridiculously exaggerated accident. But if they were just hit by a car, they’d go flying, float up, or accidentally get tangled in a street tree or a lamppost, maybe even land on a passerby’s head, totally over-the-top and comical. There shouldn’t be any actual dead people!”

Jing Qizhen corrected the last two words, “Dead ghosts.”

The Earth wasn’t happy. “Hey, what’s that supposed to mean?!”

Jing Qizhen was busy with the autopsy and didn’t argue. His tone was gentle. “Just something I said. Let’s look at the body first.”

The Earth: “Oh, 0.0!”

Jing Qizhen called out to Wang Feizhou, “Help me examine the injuries.”

Wang Feizhou claimed he wasn’t a forensic doctor but still came over enthusiastically and even handed a pair of medical gloves to both Jing Qizhen and Si Jiayang.

Si Jiayang asked in surprise, “Where did these come from?”

Wang Feizhou casually replied, “From the equipment room earlier. Doctors have this habit. Our professor once spent over a thousand Yuan of his own money to buy a fancy stethoscope for personal use, even though the hospital-issued ones cost like twenty bucks.”

Everyone: “……”

Weird knowledge acquired.JPG

Jing Qizhen blinked. “Doctors collecting stethoscopes is probably like how anime fans collect figurines, or how some girls collect bags, or how elementary schoolers press leaves and petals in their dictionaries. Everyone has some kind of collecting hobby.”

Even the Earth chimed in, “I’m not human and I love collecting skins too! Looking the same all the time gets boring for anyone.”

The ball seemed about to go on a long rant about its beloved 2-million-year rain droplet animated skin effect but Jing Qizhen gently shut it down. “Let me examine the body first. We need to resolve this erosion area.”

The Earth fully agreed. “You’re right, Little Jing! Those shameless garbage balls #¥%…(#%U(0! Arghhh, I’m going to blast them all away someday! Every last one! Gone!”

Immediately, there followed another string of wild insults, changing styles, directed at the balls from other parallel universes.

Faced with the ball’s manic rage whenever other balls were mentioned, Jing Qizhen remained calm, nodding in agreement with a flat voice, “Mm, not a single one left.”

The Earth: “Mm mm mm!”

They had already examined the corpse of the deceased who died in a traffic accident once before. This time, they just needed to confirm whether there were any repeated injuries on the back of the body.

The group carefully turned the corpse over together.

Wang Feizhou observed for a while and then frowned. “This looks like the injuries of an ordinary person hit by a car… The frontal impact is obvious and the back shows large areas of soft tissue bruising, likely from falling to the ground.”

Jing Qizhen’s eyes narrowed. “These injuries don’t match what would be expected from a ghost flying, right?”

Wang Feizhou paused and then nodded. “Right, from what I see, it looks like the person was hit by a car and then thrown to the ground, suffering a second impact. In other words, it’s a common case of a human traffic accident.”

Manman took out her phone and snapped a picture of the corpse, asking, “This morgue is managed like a regular hospital, right? The person hit looked like they had a physical body at the time. But according to that ghost nurse, people with physical bodies are infected. Shouldn’t the hospital handle infected corpses more carefully?”

Jing Qizhen replied, “That’s assuming everything the ghost said was true. Of course, it’s also possible the corpse looked like this after the ghost died. After all, the erosion area can defy logic and we can’t fully apply real-world experience to analyze it.”

The Earth interjected on its own, “Those patients with physical bodies!”

Jing Qizhen nodded. “Mm, and not just those special patients. We haven’t seen a single normal patient either, the kind that should be in a hospital.”

Just like Yun Shuanghua, who was once full of suspicious points, the hospital was riddled with problems…