Chapter 222: The Morgue

Outside the window, the wind grew tighter in gusts; inside, the small duty room was lit with a ghastly pale light. Because it backed onto the autopsy room and the morgue, the air here was also permeated with the faint scent of disinfectant.

Sun Jian was in just such a place, slumped over, watching a livestream of beautiful women on his phone with unlimited data.

Sun Jian had just turned thirty. He was not a forensic pathologist; he had originally graduated from the police academy, but he lacked passion for the work. Through carelessness and passive-aggressive slacking, he caused a few accidents and was nearly kicked off the police force. However, his boss kicked him into the security department to manage the gates, which wasn't much different from being fired from the police force entirely.

Yet, his time at the police academy hadn't been entirely in vain, or perhaps it should be said that everyone has a few strengths. Sun Jian's strength was that he wasn't afraid of dead bodies. On his very first day in the police force, he encountered a vicious murder case. Most of the officers were temporarily reassigned to field duty, and he, having just graduated, saw the mangled, bloody corpse and had the good fortune to be the only one among the new recruits who didn't vomit on the spot.

The old leader at the time had pinned quite a few hopes on him because of this, thinking he was some kind of talent worth molding. Later, it was discovered that it wasn't like that at all. As for Sun Jian himself, he was a bit depressed at first, but later he realized that perhaps only corpses got along with him best; living people were far more annoying.

To put it bluntly, Sun Jian just didn't care. He didn't care about his career, didn't care about his work, didn't care about his quality of life, and didn't care if dead bodies were bad luck. As for being afraid of ghosts, heh, he didn't have the energy or the mental capacity to imagine them.

But tonight, for the first time, he felt something was strange here. This was not good; it affected his career. The old man who used to work here said that once you start fearing ghosts, everything is over. Working in this place, being suspicious and paranoid is just dragging yourself to death.

First, he felt a draft blow past his back, making his spine cold and the back of his neck numb. At this time, the doors and windows here were all closed. Although he was too lazy to move, he still checked repeatedly to see if someone had turned on the air conditioning. However, after he stood up and moved around a bit, the draft seemed to vanish; the moment he sat back down, a breeze actually blew out from the solid wall behind him.

That was impossible. He was truly too lazy to stand up and look again. He focused on the livestream, and sure enough, the illusion of the breeze blowing vanished.

But the good times didn't last. Before long, he felt he had caught a glimpse of something again. He wasn't so lazy that he couldn't turn his neck, but it still took a lot of willpower for him to be willing to take his eyes off his thousand-yuan piece-of-junk phone. Sun Jian looked out the window; there was nothing there—no ghosts, no people. Very good.

He turned his head back, only to find that he could no longer focus his attention on his phone. He realized with a dull slowness that things were, after all, a bit off. He had indeed seen nothing, but it was precisely because he had seen nothing that it was wrong.

He put down his phone and stood up to walk to the window. Outside, it was still pitch black. The office building in front, where people had been working overtime recently, had vanished into the night, and along with it, the guard post at the entrance. The entire police station was without a single light, except for the forensic area where he was.

It might be a power outage. Sun Jian turned and grabbed his phone; at a time like this, one absolutely must not let go of the phone. Perhaps the next area to lose power would be his side, and without his phone, he would truly be blind.

He just didn't know how much battery was left. If the power outage lasted too long, it wouldn't matter what happened to the morgue—dead people wouldn't die a second time, anyway—but he, a living person, wouldn't be able to charge his phone. If he couldn't watch livestreams or videos, what else could he do? Thinking of this, he immediately pressed the phone's main button, wanting to check the battery, but the phone screen didn't light up.

He grew a bit anxious and pressed it a few more times, but the phone was as unresponsive as if it had suddenly died. He pressed it repeatedly and tried to restart it, but after trying back and forth several times, there was still no reaction. He held the phone blankly, feeling hollow inside, agitated and not knowing what to do, as if he were experiencing withdrawal. Even the sound of footsteps outside the door couldn't attract much of his attention; his heart was filled only with irritability.

The door pushed open right in front of him. Sun Jian looked up in a daze—who was coming here so late? Was there another new corpse to be delivered? He heard a cat meow in a trance and remembered hearing someone say, vaguely, that the appearance of a cat in a morgue was the unluckiest of all unlucky things. This might be true, because he had been here for nearly ten years and had never heard a cat meow, nor had he seen any stray cats coming near this place.

He vaguely remembered again that this place wouldn't be haunted. Who was it that said government offices have always been full of baleful energy, and from ancient times to the present, there has never been a case of haunting in such a place? So... so... he didn't have time to think further. His brain, which hadn't been used much for nearly ten years, turned sluggishly and didn't produce a result for the "so." The door was pushed open, and a half-grown young man suddenly appeared at the doorway.

Sun Jian stared blankly at the young man at the door. He really was a very handsome big boy, about nineteen years old, with black, heroic eyebrows, a high-bridged nose, and large, bright eyes with a clear, gentle gaze. Although he wasn't smiling, that face looked like one accustomed to smiling, carrying an air of natural innocence. His hair was a bit messy, the tips sticking out in every direction, and he had a bulky jacket thrown haphazardly over his T-shirt. This person looked like the kind of healthy, athletic boy most loved by girls in school.

"Hey," the newcomer said, glancing at him as if judging that he wasn't an obstacle. "Stay there."

"Wh—" Sun Jian said blankly. The young man rushed in and grabbed a stack of documents on his desk, rummaging through them chaotically.

"Who are you?" Sun Jian asked, then suddenly felt vaguely that this question wasn't important, so he changed his wording: "What are you looking for?"

"The female corpse delivered this afternoon—what cabinet number is she in? Where are the records?"

Sun Jian had just vaguely understood what he was asking when the boy suddenly dropped the documents in his hand, turned to the filing cabinet on the east side where the registration files were kept, opened the cabinet without looking up, and accurately found the registration book.

"Has the autopsy been completed?"

He was startled. The boy suddenly threw the registration book back into the cabinet with a "clatter," grabbed a set of keys from his desk, turned, and walked out of the duty room, heading straight for the morgue, acting exactly like the master of this place.

Sun Jian stood there in a daze for a while, his mind gradually clearing a bit. He walked sluggishly to the door and hesitantly stepped into the eerie corridor. The boy's back stopped for a moment at the morgue door at the end of the corridor. With a harsh, grating sound, the door was pushed wide open.