"Friends?" Chi Ren looked at
"Brothers under the same sky — I've made it this far thanks to having plenty of friends. You're Doctor Fang's friend, and so am I. We share the same goal and the same friends. That's enough." Chen Ge couldn't be bothered to argue the point. "Stop wasting time. Tell me everything you know about Doctor Fang right now."
"You can't save him. He's already been chosen." Chi Ren shook his head. "You can command Red Dresses — that's impressive, sure — but compared to *them*, it's still nowhere near enough."
"*Them* referring to?"
"A hospital. Doctor Fang has been chosen by that hospital. They want him to become a day-shift doctor there. I don't know the exact reason — it seems like a lot of the hospital's doctors have gone missing lately, and they're short-staffed." Chi Ren's words caught Chen Ge off guard. These were incredibly well-kept secrets, and Chi Ren somehow knew all of them.
"What's your relationship with that hospital? Don't worry — no one besides us can hear what you say here." To ensure Chi Ren's safety, Chen Ge even released the Red High Heels.
"I can't say it. If I say these things out loud, I might die instantly." Chi Ren unbuttoned his shirt. Running along his chest, right where his heart was, ran a deep black blood vessel — like a thin black thread embedded in flesh. "Everyone connected to that hospital is cursed. Once the curse activates, this black vessel keeps growing until it roots itself into the brain."
"What happens if the curse is broken?" Chen Ge stared at the black blood vessel. Inside it, he could almost hear crying.
"No one can break the curse. Not even the most powerful Red Dress." Chi Ren shook his head.
Almost the moment the words left his mouth, the temperature in the entire room plummeted. A hand wrapped in bandages pressed against his chest.
The black blood vessel faded in color and stopped growing.
"You're right — this curse can't be broken by anyone. But this friend of mine can make it temporarily ineffective without alerting whoever cast it."
The room's temperature slowly rose again. Chi Ren stood frozen in place. The hand that had just appeared on his chest felt like nothing more than a hallucination.
"Now you can speak freely." Chen Ge gestured for Chi Ren to continue.
After a moment's hesitation, Chi Ren took a deep breath as though staking his life on what he was about to say, and spoke in a rapid, urgent tone: "There's a monster inside that hospital that even Red Dresses fear. It has the surname Chi too — the curse on all of us is connected to it."
After the first sentence, Chi Ren's face had gone deathly pale. He stared intently at the black blood vessel on his chest.
He waited for a long time, but nothing abnormal happened to the vessel.
"The curse has been suppressed!" Chi Ren looked visibly relieved, as though a ticking bomb strapped to his body had just been defused.
Wiping the cold sweat from his face, Chi Ren's tone gradually returned to normal. "The living people in the Cursed Hospital are divided into four types: patients numbered outside one hundred, day-shift doctors, people surnamed Chi, and Bu Xiao. Bu Xiao is the director's blood relative. People surnamed Chi are family created by that monster."
The information Chi Ren had revealed to Chen Ge was enormously important. Excluding the Thousand-Faced Fierce God that
One was the director. One surnamed Chi.
"Your family — *made* by that thing?" Chen Ge used his Yin Eye to examine Chi Ren. He was just an ordinary middle-aged man — nothing remarkable about him whatsoever. Chen Ge couldn't understand why a Fierce God would have set its sights on him.
"That story starts fifteen years ago. I had just moved to Xinhai. Young and reckless. A relative living in Xinhai found me a job guarding the morgue. It wasn't tiring — just a lot of night shifts." Chi Ren began recounting his past.
"I'd never been to school, didn't have any special skills. I was just happy my relative could get me a job, and the pay was good too."
"The hospital management told me to do rounds at midnight, one a.m., and two a.m. every night — three inspections in total. The priority was checking the doors on the lowest level of the morgue. If I found any locks loose, no matter how late, I was to report it to him immediately."
"But think about it — who would pick locks in a morgue in the dead of night? There's nothing of value in there, just corpses. What thief in their right mind would break into a place like that?"
"I thought it was strange, but I didn't dare ask. The first week, everything was normal."
"There were no smartphones back then. Standing watch alone was boring. On top of that, the morgue was wonderfully cool at night — not a single mosquito. So I came up with a way to slack off."
"I'd do my single round, then hide inside and sleep. That room was so cool, it was like having the air conditioner on. Sometimes I even needed to pull a blanket over myself."
"After about two weeks, I started having nightmares. The kind that felt completely real."
"I dreamed that after I fell asleep, a circle of people would stand around my bed, staring at me. I also dreamed I was treated as a corpse and pushed into the cremation furnace. Those dreams were bearable enough — until the third week, when I dreamed of a child."
"That child had no eyes, no nose — just a mouth. He stood by my bed and asked me to tell him a story."
"I was terrified, but I didn't dare refuse. So I told him some of the strange stories from my old village."
"He seemed to get hooked on them, appearing in my dreams every night. Eventually I ran out of stories, but that child with only a mouth had no intention of letting me go."
"He didn't just appear in my dreams anymore. He started showing up in reality too."
"When I was completely cornered, at the end of my rope, a monster whose entire face was nothing but a mouth appeared — holding that child."
"He asked me if I was willing to become his family. I didn't dare refuse." Pain twisted Chi Ren's expression. "He seemed to have been searching for his family for a long time, but never found them."
"After I became that monster's family, he left. Then I discovered a black blood vessel had grown over my heart. I had to do whatever he commanded. No matter how unwilling I was, if I disobeyed his will, I would die."
Chi Ren finished recounting his experience and looked at Chen Ge again. "You're the first person I've ever met who has the power to suppress his curse."
Suppressing a Fierce God's curse was extraordinarily difficult. The Red High Heels possessed an exceedingly rare innate ability related to curses. On top of that, having devoured and inherited everything from the Fierce God Ming Tai, she was herself already a top-tier Red Dress.
Only by satisfying all these stringent conditions simultaneously could she suppress the curse of the Chi-surnamed monster.