Dimensional Store: Welcome to the Apocalypse Apartment - Chapter 268

Chapter 268

Gu Huaiwei lowered her head and glanced at the text message on the phone.

“Tiantian, are you feeling better? I know doctor visits and medicine are expensive, so I found you a part-time job. It’s at Hot Spring Mansion. You’d just help sell drinks and liquor most of the time. It’s really easy. If you’re interested, remember to message me back.”

Tiantian was the male student who had gone into the incinerator.

He was slag by now.

Gu Huaiwei simply took a photo of the half-burned male student’s corpse and sent it over.

The other side fell into dead silence. No reply came.

Gu Huaiwei made a circuit of the Mortuary and found the relevant Rules in the last row of furnaces.

Many fresh human bones in the cremators had not yet burned clean.

Sometimes, when she opened one, she could see a complete corpse inside, eyes open and staring straight at her.

Some smiled sinisterly. Some glared until their eyes looked ready to split. Some were oddly peaceful.

Gu Huaiwei felt the delightful thrill of opening mystery boxes.

The staff in white had tried to throw Gu Huaiwei into a cremator.

Naturally, Gu Huaiwei sent them in instead so they could experience the heat of the flames for themselves.

After photographing the Rules, Gu Huaiwei left the Mortuary by the stairs.

Before leaving, she did not forget to plaster little advertisements for Oasis Sanatorium on the cremators in the Mortuary.

Recently, Gu Huaiwei had discovered that the cleaning staff assignments in the Gray Mist Town Instance seemed to have been upgraded. On top of their original duties, they now had an additional task: tearing down little advertisements.

This seemed to have started because of her.

And whenever the aunties working as cleaners in the Instance saw her, there was always a hint of hostility in their eyes.

Gu Huaiwei sighed that even an Instance could keep up with the times.

Lin She was slow to react to certain things.

For example, as they were heading upstairs, a sharp scalpel dropped straight down from above, grazing his cheek before the tip stabbed vertically into the floor.

Not a ripple crossed those dark green pupils of his.

A nurse with bandages wrapped around her face stuck her head out over the stair railing. She reached an almost rotting hand toward him and asked him to pass her the scalpel. If it had been He Xueyi, he would definitely have helped, then exchanged a few words with her.

But Lin She did not reach out. He simply walked around the nurse.

Just like the programs he had designed, he was highly efficient. As for anything unrelated to Gu Huaiwei or Oasis Sanatorium, he basically would not pay it much attention.

He was busy every day, with his own value system and way of doing things, and for the most part he did not concern himself much with other people.

No wonder He Xueyi had said Lin She’s relationships with the other companions in Paradise were all rather distant.

When Gu Huaiwei reached the basement third floor, it seemed to be a conference room level. People in white were attending a class there. The person at the front was like the nurse from earlier: all ten of his fingers were rotten. He used that decayed flesh and brownish fresh blood to draw a mess of incomprehensible symbols on the blackboard.

As they continued upward, they encountered all sorts of Anomaly.

Those Low-level Anomaly would sometimes run over to harass Gu Huaiwei.

By contrast, the Anomaly that looked more human kept a respectful distance when they saw Gu Huaiwei.

The Anomaly in Gray Mist Town seemed to have an internal intelligence network.

When Gu Huaiwei had first arrived in Gray Mist Town, the Anomaly in the Instance had shown curiosity toward her.

But now, because Gu Huaiwei treated the Instance like her own home, coming and going as she pleased, and because she slapped little advertisements everywhere while bullying the locals… oh no, the local Anomaly, most Anomaly in the Instance now tried to stay as far away from Gu Huaiwei as possible, aside from performing their necessary role-playing duties in the Instance.

With Gu Huaiwei’s help, Zhang Wenwu obtained the Rules of the Infirmary. Then, during the time he spent pretending to be sick, he uncovered the Infirmary’s hidden secrets.
He slipped out of the Infirmary and hid in the men’s restroom to call Gu Huaiwei.

At that moment, Gu Huaiwei had just taken the stairs down to the basement level. When she found the passage upward was locked, she was in the middle of grabbing an Anomaly to ask what was going on when Zhang Wenwu’s call came through.

Gu Huaiwei could only grip the Anomaly’s wrist with one hand and free her other hand to answer the phone.

“Hello? If you’ve got something to say, make it quick. I’m busy.”

Zhang Wenwu noticed that whenever he was on the phone with Gu Huaiwei, the signal was especially clear. There was none of that strange static, and none of those odd ka-ka-ka noises either.

It was completely different when he called the others.

“Shopkeeper Gu, I’ve figured out what’s going on in the school Infirmary. It’s connected to Mist Lung Disease. I think I need to tell you in advance.”

“Go on.”

“There are two kinds of doctors in the Infirmary. One kind is the type you’ve seen: no eyes, but they have mouths. The other kind has eyes, but no mouth.

“Those two types of doctors stand on different sides…”

Zhang Wenwu kept his voice low, but bit by bit, he told her some of Gray Crystal University’s old history.

The students who came to Gray Crystal University were all children from ordinary local families.

Ever since the Black-hearted Merchant arrived, the town’s economy had flourished by the day, breaking away from its original way of life that depended on coastal fishing and farming.

Many of the local townspeople gave up their old livelihoods and took jobs as Miner in the mines. They earned quite a bit of money, and their families even built two-story houses.

But money brought wealth, and it also brought disaster.

Those who entered the mines to work as Miner contracted a chronic illness called Mist Lung Disease.

The older a person was and the weaker their resistance, the faster they were infected.

Their bodies would gradually swell, fester, and rot.

The disease was contagious to a certain extent.

There were two sources of infection: contact with severely ill patients, and contact with unprocessed raw Gray Crystal Ore.

For children from ordinary families, if an elder at home fell ill, there was no extra money to hire a caregiver. Most of them had to attend school while using their after-school hours to work part-time and earn a little money for their family’s medical bills. During holidays, they also had to go to the hospital to care for the sick.

As a result, quite a few students at Gray Crystal University contracted the disease as well.

Gray Crystal University had not originally been called by that name. It was only because the appearance of Gray Crystal Ore had brought prosperity to the local economy that the town mayor renamed the university in commemoration of it.

At first, students who fell ill could still receive proper treatment.

But as the disease spread, the school began to realize how serious the problem was.

To prevent the existence of Mist Lung Disease from affecting his business of mining and selling ore, the Black-hearted Merchant spent a great deal of money bribing Gray Mist Town’s schools, hospitals, and other institutions, making them keep Mist Lung Disease from being publicized. He also promised to invest a sum of money toward treating the disease.

The president of Gray Crystal University accepted the money and publicly recruited new school doctors.

The school doctor whose eyes had been gouged out was the most righteous among that batch of school doctors. After discovering the disease, he insisted on reporting the matter to the media.

In the end, he was betrayed by the colleagues he worked with. Before the information could get out, his eyes were gouged out.

A person with no eyes could never see the truth.

Anything he said would only be dismissed as baseless rumors.

As for the other school doctors, they had eyes, but no mouths.

They saw the darkness on campus, but they said nothing.

In time, they lost their mouths.