The reason
Zhang Li's gloominess and oppression seeped from the very bones of his being. He must have been harboring a great many secrets inside him that he could never share with anyone.
Being stared at by Chen Ge, Zhang Li grew visibly nervous. He opened his mouth several times, but no sound came out.
"Don't hold anything back. Tell me everything you've heard, everything you've seen." The more Zhang Li hesitated, the more curious Chen Ge became.
"It's not that I don't want to talk. I'm afraid that even if I do, you won't believe me." Zhang Li fished a cigarette out of his pocket and held it in his fingers. "Can I smoke?"
"You're in your own home — do whatever you want. Don't worry about me."
With Chen Ge's permission, Zhang Li lit the cigarette and took a long, hard drag. He clearly savored the sensation of the smoke stimulating his lungs, as though it was the only thing that could let him briefly forget those troubling matters.
Slowly exhaling a cloud of smoke, the first words out of Zhang Li's mouth immediately seized Chen Ge's attention: "The corpses in that underground morgue — they move on their own."
"The corpses move?"
"There are things far worse than just moving." Zhang Li's hand trembled slightly. "When I first started working as a security guard at Jiujiang Medical College, it just so happened that the underground morgue beneath the West Campus was undergoing expansion. All of the old corpse storage pools were taken out of service, and the plan was to replace them with brand-new morgue cabinets."
"The morgue sits beneath the West Campus, so the construction was quite difficult."
"At first, the school wanted to renovate a few of the deepest chambers in the morgue — dig up the storage pools and completely redo the interior."
"They brought in a professional construction crew and estimated the work would take about half a month. But on the very second day after the crew entered the underground morgue, an accident happened."
"One of the workers was cleaning the formaldehyde out of a corpse pool when he accidentally fell in. The pool wasn't all that deep, but the worker couldn't climb out no matter how hard he tried. He said it felt like many hands were grabbing him, not letting him leave." Zhang Li finished his cigarette quickly and gestured with both hands toward Chen Ge. "Those large corpse pools are a lot like old-style public baths, except the liquid inside is yellowish-brown and opaque. You can only roughly make out the hands, feet, backs, and hair of some of the corpses."
"What happened to the worker who fell in?" Chen Ge was particularly curious about this.
"There are iron hooks next to the corpse pools — the ones used for pulling bodies out. The medical students normally use them during experiments to drag corpses out of the pools one by one. The other workers on site threw an iron hook into the pool and told the man to grab on, and it took several of them working together to haul him out." Zhang Li lit another cigarette. He was a heavy smoker, especially when recalling the things he desperately tried to avoid. "The worker swallowed several mouthfuls of formaldehyde from the pool when he fell in. He was sent to the hospital to have his stomach pumped, and he turned out to be physically fine. But I heard that after he recovered, something went wrong with his head. He started talking nonsense all the time."
"Can you still reach that worker? Did he say anything before he lost his mind?"
"I don't know. It's been a long time since all that. If you really want to find out, I can try asking around at the school, but don't get your hopes up."
"That's fine. Just keep going." Chen Ge took out his phone, ready to record anything important at a moment's notice.
"After the worker was sent to the hospital, construction resumed as normal. But on the very next night, another strange thing happened." Zhang Li's expression grew solemn, as though even now the memory made him deeply uncomfortable. "The number of corpses that had been transported out during the day — by the construction crew and the school staff — had changed."
"That's what you meant by the corpses moving?"
"Something like that, but the truly horrifying parts were still to come." Zhang Li was recounting other people's stories. He still hadn't mentioned why he himself had become the way he was.
His voice grew lower and lower. Zhang Li seemed to feel a chill, and he took another deep drag of his cigarette. "On the third day, the construction crew went deep into the underground morgue again. They had finished clearing the corpses from the first chamber and dug open a corpse storage pool that had been built over twenty years ago. The scene they uncovered terrified every single worker present."
"The bottom of the pool was covered in something that looked like blood vessels — just like the inside of a human body. The moment those things were exposed to light, they rapidly shriveled up." Zhang Li frowned and leaned back against the sofa, his face ashen. "I was there helping at the time, and I peeked inside. How to put it? It felt like the pool itself was alive."
"Blood vessels growing from the bottom of the corpse pool?" Chen Ge noted down Zhang Li's words.
"The construction crew foreman went to the school's leadership specifically over this matter. The leadership had no explanation either, and the conclusion they reached was that it was an extremely rare species of fungus." Zhang Li shook his head gently. "Even someone like me, who never finished school, could tell they were making it up. Some people on the construction crew raised objections too, but in the end, I heard the school doubled the original payment, and only then did the crew agree to keep working."
"That afternoon, the crew dismantled the edges of the pool and dug deeper, trying to clear out a space. But the deeper they dug, the more wrong it felt. The soil beneath the pool reeked of formaldehyde, and the dirt had turned reddish. Mixed in were dark brown threads that crumbled at the slightest touch."
"Nobody knew what the hell those things were. They didn't look like plant roots, and they didn't look like the remains of insects."
"The construction crew reported the situation at the morgue to the school. They took some soil samples out, and after examining them, the school still couldn't explain it. They just urged the crew to pick up the pace."
"To reassure the crew, the school staff stayed by their side constantly, telling them not to worry, that all of this was perfectly normal." Zhang Li seemed quite dissatisfied with how the school had handled things, and his tone shifted slightly. "I had just started working as a security guard back then, and nobody wanted the job of helping out in the underground morgue, so it got pushed onto me. At the school I was just a gofer, and I didn't know anyone on the construction crew. In the end, I caught flak from both sides."
"The renovation of the underground morgue progressed extremely slowly. Strange things kept happening, one after another, and people on the construction crew were getting injured in succession. Finally they couldn't take it anymore, and all the workers went on strike. The school had no choice, and after discussing it with the project manager, they changed their plans."
"They decided to expand outward and build a brand-new morgue, abandoning the original one entirely and shutting it down for good."
"But the school's concession came with conditions. They gave the construction crew a hard deadline — the renovation had to be completed within one month. If the crew still dragged their feet and failed to finish by the specified date, it would be considered a breach of contract."