"Brother Wei, is this hole almost full? I feel like it's been seeping down slower today." Li Xu forced himself to endure his discomfort and took a peek into the morgue pool.
"Probably clogged up at the bottom." Wei Ge held the bucket, his brow furrowed tight with irritation. The more scared he got, the more strange things kept happening. "Go outside and find something — a broom, a wooden stick, anything like that."
"Brother, this is a morgue storage room. Where am I supposed to find you a broom?"
"Half this stuff won't go down the hole, and what if someone sees it? The school coming after us is the least of it — a fine would be nothing compared to losing the job. These medical colleges take cadaver use very seriously." Wei Ge's mood was foul. He flicked his hands, shaking the residue off his plastic gloves. "Stop standing there like an idiot. Go!"
Both wore white coats, masks, and plastic gloves, but Wei Ge's shoes were just ordinary sneakers. He looked down and noticed they seemed to have gotten wet somehow — they felt awful on his feet.
Li Xu had no choice but to go looking for a tool. He swept his flashlight around the room and walked over to a wooden cabinet in the corner where tools were stored.
He opened the cabinet door. Inside were several large iron hooks, rusted and fitted with long chains.
"What are these for?" Li Xu didn't want to go out alone. He dragged one of the hooks out. "Brother Wei, how about we try this?"
Wei Ge didn't want to waste time either. He took the hook from Li Xu and gave it a look.
The hook was large, the tip not especially sharp, and its only notable feature was weight — toss it into the pool and it would sink right away.
"It'll have to do."
In the middle of the morgue pool, there was a hole slightly wider than a grown man's shoulders. No one knew what it was for.
Wei Ge lowered the iron hook into the hole and watched it sink slowly. Before long, the debris inside the hole swallowed it up.
He stood to one side, feeding the chain down bit by bit.
"Why hasn't it hit bottom yet?" The hole in this morgue pool was far deeper than he'd expected. "Who would dig a hole this deep at the bottom of a morgue pool? Could it be... corpses?"
Out in the open, Wei Ge would have laughed at his own thought. But the problem was, he was the one standing inside the morgue pool right now.
"How deep does this thing actually go?" The previous times he'd come, he'd only thought about getting the job done quickly. He'd never actually considered this question.
To let the chain extend as far down as possible, Wei Ge crouched low.
When roughly a quarter of the chain remained above the water, the hook finally hit something.
Wei Ge gripped the chain with both hands and pulled upward. To his surprise, the chain was stuck — he couldn't pull it back up.
"There was no resistance at all when it went down. Did it hook onto something? Is that what's clogging the hole?"
He kept increasing the force. Wei Ge might not have been confident about many things, but when it came to sheer strength, he was among the very best at the entire crematorium.
Wei Ge pulled hard. The chain began to rise slowly, and it felt like the hook had snagged something at its end — something terribly heavy.
The scene before him was a bit like fishing, except Wei Ge had genuinely never considered what he might pull up from a morgue pool.
Half his face was flushed red with effort, and even through the thick mask, his labored breathing was audible.