Miss Witch, even if we're poor, we can't sell ourselves!

To be honest, the first floor of the abandoned hospital was a bit sleepy.

Miya followed behind Fig and Corona Borealis, pushing open one creaking hospital room door after another. The beam of her flashlight swept across the room, and she always saw the same setup.

The rusty iron-framed hospital bed had sheets that were already rotten and crumbly, with springs sticking out from the side of the mattress and cobwebs hanging on them.

The bedside table drawer was half-open, with a few empty medicine bottles and yellowed prescription slips inside, the writing long since blurred and illegible.

Large patches of lime peeled off the walls, revealing the gray-black bricks underneath. Glowing vines squeezed in from the cracks in the bricks, curling into clumps of bluish yarn balls in the corners.

Occasionally, a stray cat would dart across the end of the corridor, leaving behind two meows and a cloud of dust, but nothing else.

After searching the first floor for nearly half an hour, Fig flipped through the nurses' station register again and again, Corona Borealis squatted at the pharmacy door and peered inside with binoculars for a long time, while Miya obediently pushed open the door of each ward and took a look.

But the only unusual thing is that everything is too normal; there's nothing strange about it.

"Let's go upstairs."

The fig tree closed the register.

The steps in the stairwell were covered with dried moss, which made a soft, crunching sound when stepped on.

Miya walked up the stairs, holding onto the rusty handrail, each step accompanied by the soft sound of rusty fragments falling.

As you reach the corner platform, a broken window faces the Milky Way, and silvery starlight pours in through the gap, casting several diamond-shaped spots of light on the stairs, cut by the window frame.

The moment she stepped onto the second floor, all three of them stopped at the same time.

A faint melody drifted in the air, more like someone humming a tune that didn't have any lyrics, from a very, very far away place.

The girl's sobs were hidden in the gaps in the music, like someone in a room at the deepest part of a corridor, burying their face in a pillow, covering their mouth with a blanket, and releasing their pain through crying.

Miya stood still, the beam of her flashlight fixed on the floor of the corridor ahead.

The music, for some reason, sounded like a song she had heard in her half-awake state, a song gently hummed close to her ear.

But no matter how hard she tried to reach that memory, it remained slippery and hidden at the very edge of her brain, refusing to step into the light.

"This floor has twice as many rooms as the first floor. If three people search each room one by one, it will be dawn by the time they finish."

Corona Borealis suddenly stopped.

What are you trying to say?

Fig turned its head to look at her.

"Let's split up."

Corona Borealis hung the flashlight on his belt and counted on his fingers to show them.

"The left corridor is mine, the right one is Fig's, and Mi Ye is in charge of these wards in the middle plus the large double-door room at the end of the corridor."

"Each person only searches their own area, and if they find anything unusual, they shout it out, and the other two immediately rush over. Isn't that perfect?"

Miya opened her mouth, and the words "Those who split up in horror movies die the fastest" were already on the tip of her tongue.

She is indeed somewhat timid, or rather, she has a very clear self-awareness about certain things.

In her past life, when playing horror games with her friends, she was the type who would always close her eyes immediately when encountering high-energy scenes.

Now, she's being left alone in the corridor of an unfamiliar, abandoned hospital. To say she's not afraid would be a complete lie.

But she swallowed back her complaint, because she was afraid that Corona Borealis would laugh at her, especially when she thought that if she said she was afraid to be alone, Corona Borealis would most likely show that kind of wicked smile and then say in an exaggerated tone that she didn't expect the arrogant Night Sister to be so timid.

Miya finally turned her pleading gaze to the fig tree.

Fig, wrapped in a blanket, stood at the top of the stairs, thought for a moment, and then nodded.

"Okay, call immediately if anything happens."

"Alright, unanimously approved! Let's go!"

Before Miya could object, Corona Borealis had already excitedly rushed out into the left corridor.

Fig walked unhurriedly to the right, a corner of the blanket slipping off her shoulder, which she casually pulled back.

Miya stood still, took a deep breath, and had no choice but to turn the flashlight to its highest setting before walking down the middle corridor.

Fortunately, the second floor didn't plunge her into complete darkness, because the glowing vines climbing the exterior walls were even denser than those on the first floor. The branches reaching in from the gaps in each broken window were like blue tentacles, staining the corridor floor a mottled blue-white.

In addition, the silvery light of the Milky Way poured down from the sky outside the window, making the visibility in the entire corridor much better than expected. At least you could see the ward numbers within five meters without a flashlight.

Even so, Miya still regretted not learning something like lighting magic.

"I should have asked Chata-sensei for a textbook on basic elemental magic."

She muttered something to herself, the sound amplified in the empty corridor, startling herself.

"Even if I could just conjure a fireball to use as a torch, that would be great."

Then I pushed open the door to the first ward, and it was empty.

The second room was also empty.

The ceiling of the third room was half collapsed, with rubble and dust piled on the bed, and vines hanging down from the hole, swaying gently in the night breeze.

The sounds of crying and music grew clearer as she moved forward.

Miya's palms began to sweat.

She released one of her tentacles from her sleeve. The light pink tentacle slid along her arm to her wrist, and the blood fairy petals at the end opened slightly, like a wary little animal pricking up its ears.

Stop in front of the second-to-last ward at the end of the corridor.

Miya gently pushed the door open with her tentacles.

The room was small; it was a single hospital room.

The windowpane was cracked into a spiderweb pattern, and the light of the Milky Way seeped in through the cracks, covering the windowsill with a layer of silver frost.

A few clumps of glowing vines climbed the corner of the wall, but they were much sparser than those outside.

There was only a hospital bed, a bedside table, and a wooden chair with a crooked leg inside. On the bedside table was a tape recorder, and the music was coming from the small speaker that came with the tape recorder.

Miya walked closer to the tape recorder, squatted down, and looked at it.

For no apparent reason, I recalled the first time I heard this song.

At that time, she had just woken up from a coma, and there was a black star on the back of her hand.

While lying in her hospital bed, half-asleep, someone was softly singing beside her.

The voice seemed to drift in from a very, very far place, steadily pulling her out of a pitch-black chaos.

But she was too weak at the time to open her eyes and see who it was. She only remembered the faint smell of disinfectant and the warm touch on the back of her hand.

It's that person's song, it must be.

Mi Ye unconsciously turned her head to look at the hospital bed.

In the center of the pillow was a small white flower with tiny, round petals and a short stem, as if it had been casually picked from the roadside and placed there.

She reached out as if possessed, and the moment her fingertips touched the petals, it felt as if she had fallen into a galaxy deep in the universe.