Blue Mountain Psychiatric Hospital 11

Gu Shanshan couldn't help smiling too, but her attention was quickly caught by the materials Qi Chanyang pulled out.

The two of them huddled together and flipped through the papers in their hands.

Several sheets had been crumpled into wrinkled balls. Gu Shanshan couldn't help glancing first at Xie Fangcheng beside them.

He was leaning against a bent, misshapen stick, his chin propped on the back of his hand. He looked exactly like an elderly man with bad legs dozing over his cane.

He even yawned, as if he really were that bored.

Qi Chanyang was obviously the careful, meticulous sort. If he'd gotten hold of materials like these, he would certainly have put them away properly.

Yet the papers in their hands were wrinkled as though they'd just been fished out of a wastebasket. Clearly, that wasn't Qi Chanyang's style.

And given that Mr. Xie had been wandering around outside by himself for so long and still returned in one piece, it was obvious who had found the materials.

Sure enough, Qi Chanyang caught sight from the corner of his eye of the man beside him, sitting with no regard for posture and looking as though he might fall asleep at any moment. The longer he looked, the angrier he got.

"Xie Fangcheng!"

At his roar, the old man who had been drowsing over his cane jerked awake and looked at him blankly. "Huh?"

Qi Chanyang's face darkened. "You found these clues yourself. Aren't you going to come take a look??"

Xie Fangcheng said, "I looked. I couldn't understand them."

If he had said that with even a little hesitation or embarrassment, Qi Chanyang wouldn't have reacted like this. But this Xie fellow said it with such certainty, giving up so righteously, that it made Qi Chanyang, who diligently and cautiously cleared instances, furious every time he saw him.

Gu Shanshan hurried to smooth things over.

"It couldn't have been easy for Mr. Xie to get these clues. Let him rest."

Xie Fangcheng immediately put on an exhausted expression and slumped back over his cane.

Qi Chanyang turned away, determined to ignore him.

As Gu Shanshan went through the materials, she had already made a few discoveries and guesses.

Pointing to the entry, "Tentacles--rodent teeth, successful (11/41)," she said, "This should be an animal organ transplant experiment. Eleven out of forty-one. I think they transplanted forty-one rodent teeth, and eleven took successfully."

"Like Han Qi."

Gu Shanshan nodded. "Right. But transplants of eyes and teeth obviously weren't their ultimate goal."

The final few pages of the experiments were all head surgeries.

There were some common freshwater fish, as well as mammals, including whales. The experiments were clearly difficult, and even the final entries were failures.

"Why were they conducting experiments like this on animals? To replace their own heads?" Qi Chanyang couldn't make sense of it.

"Maybe." Thinking of the teeth all over Han Qi's body, Gu Shanshan shuddered. "All we can say is, thank goodness they haven't succeeded yet."

Just then, a voice cut in from beside them. "They succeeded."

"What?"

"This experiment succeeded," Xie Fangcheng explained. "I found these documents in the room near the stairs on the third floor. There was an especially huge octopus. Half its head had been sliced off and joined to half the head of some strange fish."

Qi Chanyang's eyes widened. "How did you see that?"

An experimental subject like that, at the very least, had to be quite formidable.

How had he seen it so clearly? More importantly, how had he looked that closely and still survived??

Xie Fangcheng thought he was being ridiculous. He poked at his own eyes through the air with a finger to indicate them. "With these."

"..." Qi Chanyang turned away. "Let's continue."

The two continued searching for clues.

The experiment data also listed the dates above them. The last experiment had been in January.

Gu Shanshan was still thinking. "If the experiment had already succeeded, why isn't there any later experiment data?"

Qi Chanyang thought of the rows of cages he had seen in that room when he went to the third floor.

"Maybe after the experiment succeeded, they stopped experimenting on octopuses and began experimenting on other animals instead. So the later experiment data was kept in another room."

Another voice cut in from beside them. "No. There wasn't any data like this in the other rooms."

"?? How do you know again?"

Xie Fangcheng poked at his eyes through the air again.

Qi Chanyang was truly at his wit's end with him. "Since you're listening right there anyway, just come over and analyze it with us!"

Xie Fangcheng shook his head like a rattle-drum. "No, no, no. I can't do this kind of mental work."

"Aren't you a manager in the Finance Department?? You can't do mental work?"

Xie Fangcheng fell suspiciously silent for a moment. "Our working environment is rather special. The people who manage the money don't need particularly good brains."

It mainly depended on a little force...

Qi Chanyang said earnestly, "In this game, analyzing the instance is an extremely important part. You should learn properly how to clear instances. Take this one: if you can't analyze it, how are you supposed to clear it?"

Xie Fangcheng answered honestly, "Beat the NPCs to death."

"?? How are you going to beat them to death?? Don't think just because No. 9 has a good relationship with you and won't attack you that the other NPCs won't either! Think about it. What if He Xin and Han Qi came to kill you together? What would you do?"

"Beat them both to death."

"..." Qi Chanyang was speechless. Then he thought about it: this man had wandered outside on his own for so long, so it was understandable that he was a little overconfident. "You just haven't run into a powerful NPC yet. Once you do, you'll understand that players are at an absolute disadvantage in game instances. Luck can't solve everything! What are you going to do if you run into an NPC you can't outrun?"

Xie Fangcheng was even more honest. "Chase it!"

Damn it!!

Qi Chanyang needed a moment before he understood that Xie Fangcheng meant he would chase the NPC. He cursed inwardly.

This newcomer really had an extraordinarily unusual way of thinking.

Was this what a living nonconformist was like? Did he really think he was the Underworld's Finance Department manager???

Qi Chanyang turned his face away again.

With his back to Xie Fangcheng, he regurgitated from Cow Stomach the newspaper he had gotten from the security office and continued investigating with Gu Shanshan, whose thought process was normal.

"Look, I found these in the security office. They should be local daily papers. The issue on top was published on August 11, and the calendar in the security office also said August 11. I think today should be August 11."

"If it's August 11, then seven months have passed since their experiment succeeded in January." Gu Shanshan looked down at the newspaper and thought for a moment, frowning. "The teeth on Han Qi's body may have been transplanted after the experiment succeeded."

"The security guard too. His upper body was human, and his lower body was canine. But the join looked very crudely done. I suspect the security guard was the first of these NPCs to undergo this surgery. But he's dead now. I don't know which NPC killed him."

Another voice cut in from beside them.

"Huh? He wasn't killed by an NPC."

Qi Chanyang shot him a cold look. "You saw that too?"

"Mm."

"Then tell me. Who killed the security guard?"

Xie Fangcheng answered calmly, "I did."