Won't this lead to serious consequences?" I asked him. "Xu Tuo also said that you seem to have violated the rules of Class L, right? You can't involve ordinary people..."
"Well, no matter what, we've all violated the rules now." He looked at his brother with tenderness and love, like a parent looking at a child playing happily in a children's park. "After we deal with you, we'll also be listed as 'hunted targets' by Class L for violating the rules."
"...Why?" Then, I suddenly realized, "...Could it be that you just want your brother to experience the same feeling of being hunted as us?"
"Xiao Yu is really addicted to the feeling of being killed. The stronger the opponent, the more excited he gets. I've been trying to create crises for him, just like what happened to Qi Mengzhu just now..."
"If you play too hard, you'll be sorry."
"No." He placed the blade against my neck and slowly pressed down. "Xu Tuo seems to have tacitly acknowledged that my brother was the only one who attacked me, and I wouldn't dare do anything to you. But in fact, you are also my hostage now. If anything really happens to Xiaoyu, I will use you to make Xu Tuo stop."
I couldn't help but laugh: "You spoil him so much, be careful to raise him into a bro boy. It's better to let the child be independent."
"Xiao Yu will become stronger and stronger, stronger than Xu Tuo, and no one will dare to bully him anymore... I rescued him from the mud so that he could be strong enough to never get hurt again." He opened his eyes wide, and his elegant face inexplicably showed a kind of terrifying persistence. "As for me... when I was a child, I was beaten by my father every day. I was beaten all over my body. I was even tied to my mother and beaten by him in the living room until my head was bleeding... At that time, I thought, if only someone could come to save us, if only someone stronger than my father could come down from the sky and save us... So when I see a strong person, I can't help but get excited. I hear other people in the class talk about Xu Tuo. Every time I hear it, I get so excited that I feel like I'm going to break down——"
His voice was hoarse with excitement, and the blade trembled beside my neck, leaving a streak of bright red. I looked at him quietly, then sneered.
"I'd be jealous if you said that." I winked at him.
Before Dong Quanming could react, he twitched and fell down with a crackling sound of electric sparks - the stun gun slipped out of my sleeve, and I had been hiding it under my hand.
After all, he was young, and compared to the old man who was in a coma, he still had some consciousness: "You... uh..."
I got off the bed and squatted beside him, the stun gun in my hand crackling.
"Being with that guy, I'm being hunted by people like you every day, and I'm on the verge of death every day..." As I said this, I put the iron needle of the stun gun against his neck and turned on the shock, "--I'm so excited that I feel like I'm going to break down!"
Dong Quanming's screams caught Ji Yuyi's attention. He hadn't expected me to attack my brother, and his attention shifted from Xu Tuo for a second. In that same second, Xu Tuo, seemingly too weak to launch another attack, grabbed the iron rod of the IV stand and struck him in the temple with a precise thrust.
Ji Yuyi swayed and wanted to stand firm, but Xu Tuo, who had rushed in front of him, pressed his finger against his left eye.
The toothpick crossbow was fired. The boy's screams echoed throughout the corridor.
"We're contestants. Don't get as excited as those two spectators over there." Xu Tuo smiled miserably, looking at Ji Yuyi, who had lost his sight and was struggling on the ground. "...What are kids these days thinking? They keep saying 'I want to die' and 'I want to be killed'. They're always causing trouble for others."
I moved over with the help of a stretcher and glared at him unhappily.
"Are you angry?" Xu Tuo walked over unsteadily. "I'm not talking about you, I'm talking about him."
"…"
"Don't be angry, don't be angry...I asked Ajie for his concert tickets, okay?"
"…"
"I'm going on a trip next week, I'm not angry anymore..."
I don't want to pay attention to him.
I pointed at Dong Quanming lying there: "He may not be ready to understand the medicine."
"...If there's no antidote...that would be the worst-case scenario."
"There are so many people on this floor... Uncle Zhou is almost retired. He's probably working himself to death, right?" I looked at the square air conditioning vents above. "Can you help me push the gurney? I've thought of a place they might have hidden the antidote."
"Hold on, I'll go up." He hastily tore off the sheet and wrapped the wound. "You have a wound on the back of your head, don't move."
Standing on the bed, he reached the ventilation port and removed the outer cover. Inside, there was indeed a volatile container filled with liquid. My guess was right—as long as the ventilation switch on this floor was turned on, the volatile inhaled antidote would spread throughout the entire floor.
Xu Tuo went to turn on the ventilation. Ji Yuyi, blind, was left in the corridor, howling and surging like a trapped animal. Dong Quanming woke slightly.
"...What time is it..." he asked.
I glanced at my phone. "Five-thirty. In half an hour, people will start arriving."
Xu Tuo came back and waved to him: "We're leaving. You guys should clean up this situation yourselves."
"...Take Xiaoyu with you." He said, "Please, take him away... He is a much better person than me..."
Xu Tuo ignored him and checked the wound on the back of my head. Dong Quanming's voice grew softer and softer, almost like a dying whisper.
"...Xiao Yu only killed that scumbag father..." he said, "but I killed my own mother..."
We were stunned.
"I want to save people. I've wanted to save people since I was a child... I chose medicine as my major in high school..." He chuckled, "But I've found that doctors are powerless to help with many things... Xiaoyu begs me every night to save him and turn him back to normal. I can work with him... But Mom... She can't stand it and wants to kick Xiaoyu out... The person I'm trying to save, she keeps pushing him to the edge of the cliff..."
Therefore, when Dong Quanming joined Class L, the hunting impulse was directed at his mother.
"When I was killing my mother, Xiaoyu tried to stop me. He knew better than me who deserved to die and who didn't..." Suddenly, he started coughing rapidly, his face turning purple due to lack of oxygen. "Save him—please save him..."
He'd taken poison, likely a capsule hidden between his teeth. Dong Quanming's respiratory system was rapidly suppressed by the nerve toxin, and death would soon take him.
Xu Tuo didn't want to delay for a moment. He hastily emptied the medicine basket from the nurse's desk into his backpack and was about to take me away. Behind us, I heard Dong Quanming's sharp and twisted wail before his death: "Take him away—"
Xu Tuo turned around and said something to Dong Quanming with a smile.
"He'll be happier dead," he said. "And so will you."
Then, we prepared to leave. It gradually quieted down behind us, and we all breathed a sigh of relief. Xu Tuo smiled bitterly and asked, "Am I embarrassing myself?"
"It's no shame if you're not dead."
"I thought it would be easy..." He looked dazed because of the blood loss. "What a shame! I boasted before that I would protect you..."
"I pretended not to know."
"Really? Let me see if I can pretend it well." He came closer to me and started grinning again.
We supported each other and walked towards the stairs. But at this moment, a familiar figure appeared there.
——Qimeng bamboo.
He looked straight at us, his eyes flickering. There was blood on his forehead, probably from the injury he had sustained when Ji Yuyi knocked him unconscious in the ward just now.
"I woke up very early," he said. "I heard everything that happened in Class L."
Xu Tuo stared at him silently, like the silence before a storm. I wanted to stop him from silencing me, but just as I opened my mouth to speak, a huge pressure and excruciating pain exploded in my head, and I was knocked to the ground by a dizziness like a huge wave.
The injury to the back of the head did indeed cause cerebral hemorrhage.
I was shaking all over, losing control of my body, and could only feel the excruciating pain in my head. Xu Tuo carried me to the nearby gurney and pushed it toward the elevator. He passed by Qi Mengzhu without making any move.
"——Let me join Class L!" Qi Mengzhu held the gurney, "I promise not to leave any evidence!"
"Because I'm in a hurry to take Xueming to the emergency room of another hospital, you can still speak now. Get out of the way."
"What if I could get you out of the Fifth City Hospital as quickly as possible and to the Neurosurgery Hospital for immediate treatment?" He offered a very tempting condition. "That would include your injuries—and no one would dare to question the source of these injuries."
The international ward building of the Fifth Municipal Hospital was completed a year ago.
Qi Mengzhu made a few phone calls, and during this time, we also took the elevator to the international ward building. With Mr. Qi accompanying us, we had no problems all the way.
There are thirty floors of wards in total, and we stopped at the twenty-ninth floor. Xu Tuo said, "I thought we were going to the helipad on the top floor to wait for the medical helicopter."
The elevator doors opened. The lights inside instantly came on. Even though I was lying in bed with a splitting headache, I couldn't help but be shocked for a few seconds by what I saw.
"No need to wait," he said, pointing to the helicopter before him—the entire 29th floor was an indoor helipad. The on-call pilot was already waiting in the cockpit, using the communicator to arrange the fastest low-altitude medical transport route. "Just take it."
The 29th-floor ceiling spun and blossomed like petals. The helicopter was lifted by a platform onto the 30th-floor rooftop helipad and took off smoothly. After taking a few minutes to calm down, Xu Tuo asked a practical question: "Medical helicopter transport...won't that leave more records?"
"When the International Building of the Fifth Municipal Hospital was built, my family donated a large portion of the funds. The medical helicopter system on the rooftop is privately owned by the Qi family, and all records can be directly erased. Anyway, the people who designed to hunt you down must have taken advantage of some of the surveillance systems in the Fifth Municipal Hospital beforehand, and there are no surveillance cameras in the sky. You have a perfect escape tonight."
My head hurt the moment I opened my mouth, but I still asked softly, "How did those pursuers... make sure you would come to the Fifth City Hospital tonight..."
Qi Mengzhu didn't know either. He had simply seen a few news reports about the Fifth Municipal Hospital, or heard people discussing a few serious cases there. After disposing of the body for me, he decided to come here to look for his target.
But Xu Tuo's face looked very unhappy.
"Xueming, you're being targeted," he said. "His bizarre murder plan and your conversation have all been discovered. There are people in Class L who are good at this kind of thing, and there are also people who are good at controlling a person's actions by manipulating the flow of information around them."
I tried to comprehend the situation with my groggy mind. Simply put, the conversation and argument between Qi Mengzhu and I while we were handling the body was monitored. They knew Qi Mengzhu's urgent desire to kill, and by "controlling and altering" the information received by Qi Mengzhu, they made the Fifth Municipal Hospital his destination.
This is even more terrifying than an attack with real swords and guns.
Qi Mengzhu was shocked: "You don't have a bug on you right now, do you?!"
"We changed clothes before coming out. Let's go back and check again." Xu Tuo covered my eyes with his palms. "We're almost there. We can see the lights on the hospital sign. We can rest soon."
I don't know if it was my injuries or his words, but a silent, intense sleepiness overwhelmed me. I finally passed out, unconscious.
When I woke up again, I was lying in an overly large room.
If it weren't for the medical equipment and pipes surrounding it, no one would have thought it was a hospital ward. Its decoration is simple and homely, and the gray blackout curtains isolate it from the outside world, making it impossible to tell whether it is day or night.
A nurse was checking my IV drip. Seeing me open my eyes, she performed a quick physical examination and wrote a few notes in a notebook. Just as I was feeling uneasy about the completely unfamiliar surroundings, the ward door opened and in came Xu Tuo.
He was holding a food bag in his hand, and I immediately smelled the aroma of fried food and looked at it eagerly.
"No." He knew what I was thinking. "This is what I ate. You should eat light when you wake up."
"How long have I slept..."
"Not long, about seventeen hours. No danger to life. Just need to rest for a few days."
I was still staring at the food bag. Xu Tuo couldn't do anything to me. He took out a piece of fried chicken, broke off a piece of batter the size of fish food, and put it to my mouth: "You can only eat this much."
Might as well not eat. I lay back down.
"I dreamed we were traveling to Iceland," I said.
"Really? What's Iceland like?" He turned and went to the sink in the ward to wash the fruit.
"It's all gray and snowy." I reached for the bag of fried chicken, but he caught me red-handed. "...Can I still go on the trip?"
"cannot."
"I want to go. Even if you don't let me go, I'll still go to the airport secretly with my passport. The hotels over there are so expensive..."
He fed me a piece of fried chicken to satisfy my craving: "Okay. If you're not afraid of death, then we have two plans. The first is a trip to Iceland during the National Day holiday, and the second is..."
—Another person walked into the ward, with short silver hair, a black leather jacket, and silver-and-black striped tights...
It's Jackman.
"We're going to see the teacher." Jackman took off his sunglasses. "Class L is going crazy. The teacher wants to see us, including you, the source of the commotion."
——After returning from the trip to Iceland, Xu Tuo will take me to meet his "teacher".