Rhodes Island does not exist.

Although it's not a very auspicious omen, I still have to thank her.

"You fainted in the hallway earlier, and it looked like you were having a dream," Warfarin said without looking up as she handled a corpse with tweezers. "How was it? Was it a good dream?"

"It was probably a good dream."

The doctor gently placed his palm against his forehead, recalling everything that had just happened.

Perhaps it was the nostalgic scent he caught upon entering the medical department that stirred up his past memories; the doctor hadn't even realized he was already dreaming.

“I thought so too, you seem to be smiling.” Warfarin put down the tweezers in her hand and picked up the scalpel instead. “So why did you come to me? And since you were able to get to the third floor, it means you must have seen those weirdos on the thirteenth floor, right?”

"Yes... Exia and the others, right?"

The doctor intended to say Exusiai, but realized that she wasn't using that name, so he immediately changed his mind.

"What? You only saw Exia?" Warfarin cut into the corpse's skin with a scalpel and then removed a broken bone fragment from the viscous flesh. "It seems they don't really like you?"

"Actually, there's another one, but only Exia spoke to me." The Doctor thought of Fleur.

"Ah, so you must be talking about that little girl." Warfarin put down the tools in her hand and casually wiped her hands on a rag next to her. "You must have been on guard against by them, otherwise you wouldn't have only known about Exia."

"But then again, the fact that you were able to get permission to use the elevator even while being on guard... shows that you do have some ability."

Warfarin finally looked at the doctor and spoke.

“It’s just mutual exploitation.” The doctor shook his head. “They think I can help them and help you achieve your mission.”

“Leave Rhodes Island.” Warfarin nodded slightly.

"Then, if I can offer them something useful, they'll help me in return... that's roughly the kind of relationship it is." The doctor shrugged.

"Isn't this great?" Warfarin seemed quite satisfied. "A healthy transaction should be like this, so why did you come down to find me?"

“I’ve come to you to tell you some information, some intelligence.” The doctor leaned on the autopsy table, sat up from the cold steel plate, and looked directly at Warfarin. “It’s intelligence that you may not have discovered in your research.”

"Research? You mean those bio-tanks on the tenth floor?" Warfarin's usually confident eyes were now tinged with suspicion. "After I said goodbye to you, what did you do with my research?"

“I didn’t do anything.” The doctor gently raised his hands to prove his innocence. “I just used an empty bio-tank to demonstrate my theory. Your organs are still the same as before.”

"So you used those scraps." Warfarin stared at the doctor and nodded slightly. "And the result? Just tell me the result. I'll decide whether to listen to your process based on whether the result is valuable."

"After all, if the outcome of something is interesting enough, then its process will inevitably be exciting, right?" The doctor smiled.

This is a quote from Warfarin.

"How come you...?" Hearing this seemingly familiar question, Warfarin's gaze toward the doctor became even stranger.

"It's nothing." The doctor changed the subject, ignoring the words he had just blurted out. "Let's talk about the outcome of that matter."

“Okay, go ahead.” Warfarin found an empty autopsy table and sat down to make sure she was at the same height as the doctor.

"The effects produced by the biological tanks in room 1002 are not permanent."

The PhD student got straight to the point.

"Not perpetual?" Warfarin frowned.

"For example, if you throw a strange piece of debris into a biological tank, after a while it will revert to its original state, right?"

"Yes."

"Have you tried taking those restored items out of the tank?" The doctor stared at Warfarin, observing her eyes.

“It hasn’t reached that stage yet.” Warfarin shook her head. “So you mean that once those things are restored, they will revert to their original state after leaving the bio-tank?”

“It could be even worse.” The doctor’s expression was grave. “The body parts you originally treated as scraps still had a discernible shape, but after they were restored in the bio-tank and taken out, they collapsed into a lump of mud in less than two minutes.”

"how so?"

Warfarin seemed to realize the fatal flaw in her research, which she had relied on.

“This is the major flaw in your research, or rather, it’s not a flaw at all, just a characteristic you haven’t discovered,” the doctor said. “And I came here just to tell you this.”

Chapter 287, Part 285: The Most Familiar Stranger

Warfarin looks like a housewife on the eve of her honeymoon.

She busily tidied up the clutter on the autopsy table, then put her various knives back into her toolbox one by one.

"Are you planning to go back to the tenth floor now?" The doctor stepped down from the autopsy table and dusted off non-existent dust.

“Hmm.” Warfarin nodded. “I’ll have to figure out the exact situation inside those biological tanks myself.”

“Alright.” The Doctor walked to the door and waited for Warfarin to finish packing her luggage. “Then I’ll wait for you to go up together.”

"and."

Warfarin stopped packing her things.

She looked up and gazed at the doctor.

"While it's not that I don't trust your testimony, for matters that demand rigor, I must..."

"it does not matter."

The doctor shook his head, extended his hands to Warfarin, and smiled.

"I know what you want to say, and I know what you mean. You don't need to explain to me; I understand."

He had always understood Warfarin's habits and personality.

So when he saw that Warfarin still maintained that personality, he felt gratified.

It's like that dream I had before has come true.

"Alright, then... let's go out."

Looking at the doctor, Warfarin couldn't think of anything to say in response. She just nodded silently, picked up her toolbox, walked to the door, and pressed the button to open it.

"Click——"

The metal door opened in front of the two.

The familiar corridor appeared before the doctor once again.

Not long ago, I was immersed in a dream here.

"What are the other rooms for?" The Doctor suddenly asked Warfarin as they walked side by side down the corridor.

This is a question asked purely out of curiosity, and the intention behind asking it is also very simple.

So Warfarin chose to answer directly, instead of beating around the bush as before.

“The room we were in just now was the morgue… I think you could tell.” Warfarin moved a little faster, reaching the elevator before the Doctor and pressing the elevator button.

"Ding."

The elevator, which had been left idle on this floor by the doctor, had not been recalled by anyone on the thirteenth floor, so it remained stationary.

“Those cubicles in the morgue are filled with frozen bodies, ranging from healthy people to infected people, and I estimate that the number of infected people may even be greater.” Warfarin stepped into the elevator and pressed the button for the thirteenth floor with practiced ease. “I really don’t know what the people who put the infected people in there were thinking.”

If you don't know, then nobody else does.

Looking at Warfarin's grumbling face, the doctor couldn't help but mutter a curse in his mind.

"Moreover, the condition of those corpses is also very strange." As the carriage door in front of her gradually closed, Warfarin's mouth remained open. "When I first saw them, I thought they had been bitten to death by some ferocious wild beast."

"Hmm." The doctor didn't offer any comment, he just listened.

“Especially some of the corpses, they were rotten to the core.” She frowned, looking at the display screen above.

The electronic screen flashed, displaying the number "3".

"So later I thought, since it's going to rot anyway, I might as well keep it and let it do something useful." Warfarin shrugged, looking helpless. "So I took out the organs from some of the more thoroughly rotten corpses, and also took some pieces of flesh and bone that were still attached to the bones, and put them into my experiments on the tenth floor."

"So that's where those chunks of meat came from." The doctor finally understood.

After all, it's quite difficult to obtain meat of that quality from monsters.

"As for the other rooms..." She thought for a moment, then looked away from the monitor and back at the doctor's eyes. "There's not much to say."

"Why?" the doctor asked.

“Because Room One is an operating room, there’s not much in it except for the operating table, so it’s not as convenient as the autopsy table here.” Warfarin shrugged. “Then I haven’t opened Room Two yet, and after taking a look at Room Four, I found it was a storage room, so I came out again. As for the control room, it’s not very useful—except for the control console.”

"storehouse?"

“Yes, the medical warehouse.” Warfarin nodded and patted the toolbox she was carrying. “I’ve simplified all the good stuff I could find in Room 4 and stuffed it into this little suitcase.”

"Did you find this toolbox in the warehouse too?" the doctor asked, staring at the leather case.

“I suppose so,” Warfarin said. “After all, in such a barren place, it’s hard to find anything usable outside or in the corridors. You’re lucky if you find anything at all.”

"Where's room number two? Why can't we open it?" the doctor asked.

"Because the switch controlling room number two in the control panel is broken." Warfarin leaned casually against the inner wall of the car, raising one hand slightly with a somewhat flippant air. "No matter how I tried, I couldn't open it, so in the end I had to give up."

"Then it seems there's still value in investigating Room 2." The doctor nodded slightly.

"You seem to care quite a bit," Warfarin glanced at him.

“It’s just that I can’t tolerate anything ambiguous in my field of vision.” The Doctor tightened his grip on the pickaxe. “The deeper I go into Rhodes Island, the more I understand this principle—never leave anything that might cause instability in your field of vision.”

"Ha, so I'm not considered an unstable factor?" Warfarin smiled, staring at the Doctor with her blood-red eyes. "You're standing right in front of a complete stranger who doesn't trust you at all. Aren't you going to exclude me?"

“I think we’re not strangers, are we?” The doctor looked at Warfarin with a friendly smile.

He was so familiar that Warfarin would even have the illusion that "Is there really a time when I saw him?" just by glancing at him.

"No, of course we're strangers." But even faced with this misconception, she firmly shook her head. "Or do you think that knowing someone for less than a day makes us acquaintances?"

“At least we know each other’s names now,” the doctor smiled again.

"Then why don't you just look at the graduation roster of Peterheim High School?" Warfarin scoffed. "It's full of names, boys and girls, young and old, you can even find the teachers' names."

"Heh, and if simply recognizing a name makes us acquaintances, then you and I are even more like strangers, Doctor."

-

Thank you segment.

Thank you for the monthly pass.

Chapter 288, Chapter Two Hundred and Eighty-Six: Time Chasing Behind

"Ding."

As the arrival sound effects and the feeling of weightlessness disappeared, the elevator car doors slid open to the sides in front of the Doctor and Warfarin.

They returned to the thirteenth floor.

What greeted them was the still dimly lit corridor.

"No one."

The PhD student commented, "I thought they would at least welcome you."

"It's not like I did anything big, who would deserve to be treated like this?" Warfarin didn't pay much attention to the doctor's words, but quickly stepped out of the sedan chair and headed towards the exit on the thirteenth floor. "Besides, my relationship with them is equal, I don't need this kind of grand ceremony."

“I think so too.” With that, the doctor lowered his pace and followed.

"Since you've said that, why did you say those things just now?" Warfarin's tone was quite casual.

"I just thought your relationship would be that good," the doctor replied.

"In your eyes, is this the kind of thing that close friends would do?" Warfarin turned her head slightly to look at the Doctor, her gaze quite strange. "You don't actually have any friends, do you?"

"...Yes, I really don't have any friends."

After a moment's thought, the doctor chose to admit it on this issue.

To be honest, he hadn't really considered Warfarin's words.

Indeed, in the end, no matter how good the relationship is between the operators and him on Rhodes Island, there is still a thick barrier called "superior-subordinate" that is difficult to overcome by subjective feelings alone.

To remove this thick barrier, the first step is to eliminate the relationship between the operators and the Doctor.

But it's so difficult that it's almost impossible to do.

After all, as long as the operators exist on Rhodes Island, their relationship with the Doctor cannot be changed.

Building a wall is easy, but tearing it down is extremely difficult.

"Oh, how pitiful." Hearing the doctor's righteous and stern words, "I really have no friends," Warfarin couldn't help but reach out and pat the doctor on the shoulder and back.

“But I think maybe we can start making friends now.” The doctor looked at Warfarin and smiled.

"Huh?" Warfarin's face showed obvious panic. "You're not talking about me, are you?"