"The construction crew had already withdrawn, so who were those people walking back and forth through the tunnel?"
"I hung up the phone and covered my body with a cement bag on the ground, leaving only my eyes exposed."
"The footsteps slowly drew closer. I squinted and looked over."
"The light was dim. A blurry figure walked over to where I was lying. The way he moved was strange — his body was uncoordinated."
"I held my breath and didn't dare move."
"The person walked around the room and was about to leave. I lifted one corner of the cement bag, and what I saw was a scene I would never forget for as long as I lived."
Zhang Li's lips had turned purple as he recounted the nightmare that had haunted him for years: "That person's face was hollow — the entire face had been hollowed out."
Ash fell onto the sofa as Zhang Li's arm trembled uncontrollably: "A long time ago, the cadavers used for anatomy at medical schools weren't donated bodies. Most of them were executed convicts. After a prisoner was executed by firing squad, their head would end up like that."
By this point, he could barely continue. This time, Chen Ge truly didn't dare push him any further: "Take a moment. Have some water."
"It's fine." Years had passed, but recalling it still terrified Zhang Li. He took just a few drags to finish a cigarette: "When I saw that executed convict, I already realized what was going on. The person who had just entered the room, and that crowd outside in the tunnel — they were all cadavers used for dissection."
The situation Zhang Li described was indeed far more horrifying than simply corpses moving on their own. It was as though an underground carnival of the dead was taking place in those tunnels, and Zhang Li was the only living person in attendance.
Enduring a full night in a place like that until dawn — it was no wonder his personality had changed.
"I really did see it. This has been weighing on me all these years. I've never dared tell a single person, including my sister." His pupils flickered, and Zhang Li's brows knitted together in pain: "A few years ago, after that girl who argued with my sister went missing, my sister suspected she had wandered into the underground morgue. She wanted to go in and look for her, but I stopped her by sheer force. That place must not be entered. It is no place for the living."
Having spoken what had been buried in his heart, Zhang Li seemed to feel somewhat better. He reached for his cigarette pack only to find the cheap cigarettes had all been smoked.
"Smoke less. It's bad for your health." Chen Ge sat in his chair, recording everything Zhang Li had told him into his phone.
"Doesn't matter anymore. Since that night, I stopped caring about things like that." Zhang Li crumpled the cigarette pack into a ball. Without a cigarette, his emotions turned restless — he seemed unable to calm down. "Do you think I'm insane? That everything I saw that night was just a hallucination?"
Chen Ge shook his head. He knew perfectly well the dangers lurking in the underground morgue. His black phone had even given him a warning, saying that a group of immortals resided there.
"Actually, sometimes I've wondered myself whether what I saw that night was really just a hallucination."
"Do you remember how you got out?" According to Zhang Li's account, the number of corpses should have been staggeringly large.
"I was hiding under the cement bags. My body felt frozen stiff — I didn't dare move at all. It wasn't until after five in the morning that the people in the tunnel began gradually filing deeper into the passage."
"During all that time, didn't you try sending a text to ask someone outside for help?" Chen Ge put down his phone — he was curious about the school's reaction.
"By the time I woke up, I'd already called that security guard. I told him I was trapped in the underground morgue, but they never sent anyone to rescue me. I don't know what happened." The discomfort was clear in Zhang Li's tone.
"Then when you got out, did you notice anything unusual — like large patches of formaldehyde residue in the tunnel, scratch marks on the walls, that sort of thing?"
"I waited until eight in the morning. When there was no sound outside at all, I finally crawled up from the ground. My whole body ached, I had bruises everywhere, and I was terrified. I just ran out as fast as I could — I wasn't paying attention to anything."
Zhang Li's personal story ended there. From that day on, he treated the underground morgue as forbidden ground, and his temper had only grown worse.
"I'm telling you, don't go to that underground morgue. If you absolutely must, bring as many people as possible, and go during the daytime." Zhang Li shared several other stories he had heard from elsewhere.
"The passage connecting the morgue to the laboratories is always sealing improperly. Even when it's properly shut, someone will open it."
"During the last expansion, the school added seven new morgue storage rooms. But whenever people went to retrieve a body, they would inexplicably see an eighth room — one near the original site of the underground morgue, with no number assigned."
"The route leading deeper into the underground morgue has been sealed off several times, but no matter how they sealed it, problems kept arising. I remember one occasion when the school bricked up the passage completely. But after a week or two, that wall suddenly collapsed. When staff went to investigate, they found that every single brick was emanating a thick smell of formaldehyde."
"There are many more things like this. Jiujiang Medical University's relocation was also related to the underground morgue. I've heard that the Jiujiang Forensic Medical Academy will be moving to a new campus by next year at the latest, and when that happens, this old campus will be left vacant and repurposed."
Chen Ge hadn't expected the Forensic Academy to be relocating too. He was starting to feel the situation was serious.
"The clues you've provided are extremely useful. I'll pass all of this along to several other officers. Also, you'd better get me that map of the underground morgue by tomorrow." After a few final instructions, Chen Ge prepared to leave. He stood up and walked to the door, then suddenly remembered something: "Zhang Li, why do you insist on living at Haiming Apartments? I've heard this place had an incident before — apparently right on the floor below yours."
"A lunatic downstairs killed himself. I know about that. I'm an old tenant here." Zhang Li's expression betrayed nothing unusual — it seemed his living here was purely coincidental.
"Then did you know that a student from your school named Men Nan once lived in this building too?" Chen Ge paused and asked casually.
"I did. That idiot was looking to save money and moved in right next to the room where someone died. That room shouldn't be lived in. A doctor stayed there before — but he moved out after just one night."
"How do you know he was a doctor?" Chen Ge, with his bag slung over his shoulder, looked puzzled. "A doctor wouldn't be walking around outside the hospital in a white coat. Besides, he'd only been there a day — with your temperament, I doubt you'd have gone out of your way to chat with him."
"I saw him at the school before. That doctor's surname was Gao. His family was wealthy. I was wondering what he was doing living in a place like that." Zhang Li truly couldn't figure it out. "That night, when I went downstairs to buy cigarettes, I saw Doctor Gao standing in the hallway. He was all alone — I couldn't tell what he was doing."