I created the myth of the Great Old Ones.

Lu Ban noticed that a small handprint had appeared behind the white coat at some point.

Lu Ban adjusted his clothes but didn't feel any unusual weight.

He frowned slightly and was about to continue upstairs when he heard a screeching sound.

Lu Ban looked toward the source of the sound. It was a person walking slowly down the corridor, but he was neither wearing a doctor's white coat nor a nurse.

The man was wearing overalls, holding a shovel, and wearing a faded yellow safety helmet.

Although his face was tattered and decayed, some features could still be vaguely discerned.

Lu Ban immediately recognized the man as Liu Qingjiang, the construction team leader who had previously gone missing.

Why is he here, and why has he turned out like this?

Lu Ban saw Liu Qingjiang dragging a shovel, slowly walking to the side of the corridor, stopping at the door of a room, and then going inside.

After waiting for a while, no sound came.

Lu Ban decided to go and take a look.

Chapter 142 The Man Inside the Wall

Before entering the room at the end of the fifth-floor corridor, it's always better to gather as much information as possible.

Liu Qingjiang was the person in charge of the demolition project. On the day the demolition was suspended, he went missing while on duty. According to his last notes, he saw a light on in a room at the end of the corridor on the fifth floor, so he went to check it out and then disappeared.

It's easy to guess that Liu Qingjiang must have seen something on the fifth floor that led to his current predicament.

Lu Ban can now probably figure out some patterns.

First, if you take the stairs, you might encounter something the size of a baby following you, leaving footprints. Perhaps, when it follows you to the fifth floor, something bad will happen. From this point on, the missing nurse Xu Xiao was not lying.

Secondly, everyone who saw the things in the room at the end of the fifth-floor corridor has disappeared, but Lu Ban suspects that they are not missing, but rather trapped in this alternate dimension. Just as the mission description states, these missing people have not died; they have simply changed their existence in this hospital.

And perhaps the entrance to the passage between the two spaces is in a room on the fifth floor.

So, what is the reason for the existence of this space?

Lu Ban realized that it seemed that only Liu Qingjiang and he were on this floor. He tiptoed to the door of the room Liu Qingjiang had entered and peered inside.

Upon looking, Lu Ban saw Liu Qingjiang's deadpan eyes staring at him.

No, he wasn't staring at Lu Ban; he was gazing out the window.

Liu Qingjiang remained unmoved by Lu Ban's appearance.

He looked outside for a while, then picked up a shovel and scooped up the ground.

The cement floor was pried up and became pitted and uneven, with a small hole appearing.

Liu Qingjiang dug for a while before packing the rubble into cement bags, hoisting them onto his shoulder, and slowly walking out of the room, returning along the same route.

Lu Ban stood against the wall, silent and holding his breath, watching Liu Qingjiang carry the cement bags step by step.

What is he digging for?

Seeing that Liu Qingjiang had gone far away, Lu Ban immediately crept into the room and looked at the hole in the ground.

He saw that in the pit in the middle of the huge ward, there was a human corpse.

Those people had simple, unassuming appearances, just like any ordinary person you'd see anywhere.

But the bodies were already torn to pieces, and Lu Ban didn't even think they could be pieced together into a complete human form.

More importantly, Lu Ban discovered that these people's faces had not decomposed and still looked exactly as they did when they died. Moreover, they were the workers who had died in an accident here before!

Besides the workers, there were other faces that Lu Ban didn't recognize, but he could guess that they were also unlucky people who had suffered some kind of accident at the hospital.

"Was Liu Qingjiang digging up these corpses? Did he dig them out of the floor?"

Lu Ban suddenly felt a chill on his chest, and he realized it was from the red-covered notebook.

He hurriedly opened it and saw that on the last page of the notebook, on the muddy page, black text began to emerge. It was a different handwriting from Xu Xiao's, very neat and meticulous.

"It's very cold, but construction isn't going smoothly. The soil structure here is a bit problematic, so the foundation can't be laid properly, the steel bars are prone to bending, and the cement can't be poured. The construction period is passing by day by day, it's too difficult. Those foreigners are taking advantage of their money and ordering people around recklessly. Those fake foreign devils are no good either. Sigh, if it weren't for the high price they offered, I wouldn't have taken this job."

"According to the locals, this used to be Caishikou, the execution ground. The executioner would take a sip of wine and spit it onto the blade, and the onlookers would cheer. He would throw away the sign on the prisoner's back, raise his knife, and with a swift stroke, a head would fall to the ground, and the onlookers would cheer again. The blood from that head seeped into the ground day after day, and the resentment of those who were beheaded lingered here. That's why nothing built on this place lasts long."

“I’m not superstitious. I’ve investigated the geological data. Because this used to be a riverbed, the soil is mostly sedimentary. Later, the Lingjiang River changed its course, and this place became land, so the soil is loose and not conducive to construction. If you want to build a five-story hospital, you have to reinforce the foundation. I’m an architect who graduated from Jiangcheng University, so these problems are no challenge for me.”

"But the construction difficulty here is obviously beyond my expectations. The structure designed may not be able to be realized in reality. The foundation is not being laid properly. It has been a long time, and only one-third of it has been laid. The workers are getting more and more irritable every day, and all kinds of rumors are spreading."

"The turning point came on the second day of the new year. Some of the workers who stayed here on New Year's Day somehow slipped and fell into the newly laid foundation. The sticky cement swallowed the worker instantly. I hurriedly wanted to send someone to pull him out, but the foreman next to me stopped me."

"He said that the foundation had been laid with great difficulty, and if they were to rescue the worker, the entire structure would have to be redone. If they were to start over now, they would definitely fall behind schedule, and everyone would have worked for nothing. Moreover, after he finished speaking, he said to me in a mysterious way that the worker who fell in was now a living human stake. The yin energy here is heavy, and it must be suppressed by the life force of a person. In the past, they might have had to find someone with a lowly life to fill the void, but now that the worker has gone in, it's just right."

"I don't understand how such feudal superstitious ideas can be so deeply rooted. I sent people to rescue the worker, but no one dared to touch him, for fear of getting caught up in it themselves. Seeing that the cement had already hardened, I had no choice but to give up, since no one could afford to pay for the delay in the construction period."

"It's strange, but ever since that worker died in the foundation, the foundation work has gone much more smoothly. We've encountered almost no problems, all the foundations have been laid, and construction is on track."

"Even I, who have never believed in these things, can't help but have some doubts about whether the so-called 'living human stake' really exists."

“It wasn’t until around the Chinese New Year that we encountered a problem with the main load-bearing beam. The construction progress was delayed, the workers had all gone home, and the work came to a standstill. I walked on the construction site and looked at the main load-bearing beam that was never finished. I felt very frustrated.”

“I saw a worker standing next to the load-bearing beam, pouring cement into it. Strangely, I clearly did not tell them to pour it. I called out to him, and the worker seemed to be startled, slipped, and fell into the cement.”

“I ran over immediately and grabbed his hand. He begged me for help. Most of his body was stuck in the cement. He was pulling me desperately, but I couldn’t hold on anymore. He was hurting me a lot, and I was about to fall in too. I screamed for help, but there were hardly any people on the construction site at the time.”

"I held onto him like that for a long time, and then suddenly, the foreman's words came to mind: 'living man's stake.' The worker was already mostly embedded in the cement and didn't even have the strength to hold onto my hand anymore. If I let go, he would fall in."

“I’ve done my best, I’ve done my best, I did nothing wrong, and as long as he sinks, he can be a living man, a living man, the hospital can be built, and everyone can get the money. Thinking this, I let go.”

"I just watched him sink, and suddenly I felt incredibly relieved. After calling the police, I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I found that I was smiling."

"The hospital construction is finished. I received a generous reward, and the families of the deceased workers received a huge sum of money that they couldn't earn in a lifetime of bricklaying. Everyone is living a better life now. But sometimes I wonder, when I walk into this hospital and stand next to those pillars, do the people inside those pillars smile at me?"

Lu Ban noticed that the writing was no longer neat towards the end, and it looked more like it was written by someone suffering from epilepsy or a physical illness.

Sensing some movement, Lu Ban looked up from his notebook.

He saw Liu Qingjiang standing at the door with a shovel in his hand.

Chapter 143 Breaking Superstition

Liu Qingjiang's face was pale, swollen, and had some bloodshot veins. He was wearing a safety helmet, and the shovel was dragging beside him. He was looking at the center of the pit, at Lu Ban in the center of the pit.

Liu Qingjiang raised his hand, held the shovel high, and then smashed it down.

Lu Ban dodged to the side as soon as he raised the shovel, gripped the crowbar tightly, and loaded the [Last Words] at the same time.

However, Liu Qingjiang's shovel landed between those heads, cracking the ground and turning the aged cement into rubble, which was then scooped up and moved aside.

Then, Liu Qingjiang picked up the shovel again and repeated the action, seemingly unaware of Lu Ban's presence.

"Can't he see me?"

Lu Ban stood diagonally opposite Liu Qingjiang, with his back against the wall, motionless.

Liu Qingjiang simply shoveled away, digging open the ground and unearthing the workers' remains.

"The designer of this hospital was a foreigner who committed suicide after completing the design. The construction team leader also seems to be suffering from mental torment. Human stakes... They used workers who died in accidents to create human stakes in an attempt to suppress something, but is that really effective?"

Lu Ban had seen all sorts of strange and bizarre things and evil gods in other lands, and in his opinion, the custom of using human stakes was probably a legitimate feudal practice.

If there really are those demons and monsters, they are not afraid of living people, so why would they be afraid of dead people?

If we're talking about ghosts fighting ghosts, these workers were harmed by you so much that their bodies couldn't even be buried and are now sealed in cement forever. If it were Lu Ban, wouldn't he haunt them every night, seeking revenge on the people who buried him? Why should he help you protect the hospital?

The so-called "living human stake" is probably the result of another ritual, the purpose of which may not be to suppress anything, but to summon something.

The rituals of evil gods in various exotic lands always involve human sacrifice; only the scent of death and souls can attract these bizarre, evil, and indescribable beings.

"It seems the missing people have all entered this alternate dimension. Is this the other world?"

Lu Ban thought of the setting in a horror game he had played before. In that game, humans could potentially enter another world due to the influence of supernatural forces. One of these worlds was the Otherworld, which was full of anomalies and monsters and was extremely dangerous.

"It can be seen that they may have survived for a period of time after entering this place, but with the erosion, they eventually all mutated into monsters. Moreover, these monsters seem to act according to their obsessions in life. Liu Qingjiang felt guilty because of the workers' deaths, so he wanted to dig up the workers' remains. Xu Xiao wanted to escape from here, so he kept asking for help at the nurses' station?"

He saw Liu Qingjiang dig up a pile of dirt, put it in a cement bag, and drag it out of the room. His movements were stiff, like a machine that had been neglected for a long time.

"As for the doctor from earlier, perhaps he had a failed surgery or something else that caused him to become obsessed with this place, so after accidentally wandering into it, he's continuing his original work?"

Lu Ban thought of that obstetrician-gynecologist.

However, new questions arose.

"Wait a minute, but this hospital shouldn't have an obstetrics and gynecology department, so where did this obstetrician and gynecologist come from?"

Lu Ban began to suspect that the obstetrics and gynecology department of this hospital was hiding a secret, perhaps closely related to the hospital's deepest secret.

"Is he the kind of private doctor who delivers babies for rich people?"

He thought that some doctors would secretly deliver babies for wealthy people, some of whom were currently popular celebrities, some were mistresses or concubines of wealthy men, and some were even more sinister illegitimate children who violated moral principles.

"No, it can't be that simple... This hospital used human stakes during its construction, and human stakes should be part of some kind of ritual. The designer of this hospital committed suicide. The investors in this hospital are foreigners and overseas Chinese business associations. In other words, this hospital may have been built for some purpose from the very beginning?"

Lu Ban left the room and stood by the wall near the window. The world outside was pitch black, so dark that he couldn't see his hand in front of his face and there was nothing to be seen.

"Moreover, judging from the situation just now, there should be more than just one or two missing people in the hospital. There are many more lost people here. However, with such a large number of missing persons cases, it is impossible for the police not to intervene in the investigation. According to the information Song Yunyan gave me, Nanhua Private Renji Hospital has not been subject to any similar investigation."

He saw Liu Qingjiang enter the room again, digging continuously, and then leave with the rubble. But the pit kept getting bigger and bigger, and he could never reach the end of it, as if it had a life of its own.

"From an outsider's perspective, I should be missing by now. The only way to get out is to unravel the secrets of this hospital."

Lu Ban realized that two hours had passed since he came in, and it was still early until six o'clock.

Where are the fragments of Du Danping's melody?

He walked down the corridor and saw the nurses' station on this floor.

In the nurses' station, a nurse sat with her hands empty, as if she were knitting, but in reality, she had nothing. Her rotting face was reduced to two holes, and she sat there blankly, as if nothing had changed.

Lu Ban returned to the stairwell and saw the footprints that looked like a baby's crawling marks stopped there, as if the thing wouldn't follow Lu Ban upstairs.

"Or does it need to be guided by someone to climb the stairs?"

As Lu Ban stood there pondering, a sound suddenly rang out, which was particularly jarring in the silent corridor.

That was the sound of machinery running.

Lu Ban looked up and saw that the elevator next door had suddenly turned on at some point.

The floor indicator showed the first floor, but soon, accompanied by the sound of machinery, the elevator arrived at the second floor.