Cold and shaky.
I don't know how long it had been, but Yan Ao slowly opened his eyes. The first thing that came into view was a sweet-looking nurse in a pink uniform.
After a brief moment of daze, Yan Ao suddenly sat up, accidentally bumping his forehead against the nurse's.
"Ow, that hurts." The nurse covered her forehead and let out a sharp cry, her expression pained.
"I—I'm sorry..." Yan Ao winced, wincing as he apologized to her while rubbing his own forehead with his hand.
"What's going on?" A magnetic voice rang out as a doctor in a white lab coat walked over and pulled the nurse aside.
"It's nothing. He woke up suddenly, and we accidentally bumped into each other," the nurse said in a soft, gentle voice, explaining to the doctor before pointing at Yan Ao.
The doctor was a handsome young man in his early thirties. He walked over, squatted down in front of Yan Ao, and asked, "How are you feeling? Does the wound still hurt?"
Yan Ao was momentarily stunned, only then realizing he was lying on a stretcher inside an ambulance. Looking down, he saw that his upper clothes had been removed, and his chest was tightly wrapped in gauze, with faint bloodstains visible through it.
A flash of memory crossed his mind, and his chest ached for no apparent reason. The source of the pain wasn't just the wound, but also those terrifying memories.
"Hey, are you alright? Is anything else injured? Should I have Xingyou check you over?" the nurse asked with concern.
"I'm fine. What hospital are you from?" Yan Ao asked. Hearing this, the doctor and nurse exchanged a glance, locking eyes for a moment, before the doctor said in a low voice, "We're from Hengzhou City First People's Hospital."
Hengzhou City First People's Hospital?
Hearing the name of a familiar place, Yan Ao finally breathed a sigh of relief and collapsed back onto the stretcher as if drained of all strength. He had finally escaped that horrifying mall.
He remembered that before losing consciousness, he had already walked out of the mall. At the time, the wound on his chest slashed by the ghost was bleeding continuously; after walking a certain distance, he had passed out from excessive blood loss.
It seemed now that he had been rescued halfway by the doctor and nurse before him and put into their ambulance. That meant he should be arriving at the hospital for treatment very soon.
Only, when the time came, how was he going to explain things if the police asked about the mall?
At this thought, Yan Ao's mind grew somewhat chaotic again, but these problems were immediately cast to the back of his mind. Screw it, I barely managed to survive; I'd better call home first to let them know I'm safe.
Lan Zhijie's death had hit Yan Ao hard. Thinking of his parents at that moment, Yan Ao finally couldn't help but sit up again. Enduring the pain from his wound, he said to the doctor and nurse, "Do you have a phone? I want to make a call."
The doctor was checking Yan Ao's wound, while the nurse was organizing the medical kit nearby. Hearing Yan Ao's words, both of them froze simultaneously for some reason. After a long moment, the doctor pulled out a smartphone, handed it to Yan Ao, and said, "I've tried calling many times, but the result is always the same. If you refuse to give up, go ahead and try."
Not paying attention to the tone of the doctor's voice, Yan Ao took the phone and hurriedly dialed his father's number. But the moment he put the phone to his ear, his expectant expression instantly froze.
"Static..."
There was only static in the earpiece. Yan Ao knew this situation all too well. His expression shifted, and he dialed his mother's number, but the result was the same.
The doctor seemed to have anticipated this. After finishing his checkup, he told Yan Ao, "It's been a whole day. We haven't been able to get a single call through either. You should just get some rest, or the wound will get infected."
Yan Ao still sat there holding the phone in the posture of making a call. After a while, he crawled off the stretcher and pulled back the ambulance curtain.
When he first woke up, Yan Ao had noticed the light inside the ambulance was very dim. The curtains had been drawn the whole time, and he had assumed that was why, but when he pulled the curtain back, he realized the dimness was entirely due to the outside world being shrouded in darkness.
Yan Ao pushed the window open, and a chilling gust of wind blew in. When he clearly saw the world outside the window, he froze. Pitch black—absolute pitch black. Though there wasn't a single light, relying on the headlights of the ambulance, he could barely make out the outline of the city.
The ambulance was currently driving along a highway. Looking out, the entire city was dead silent. The nightscape belonging to human civilization was nowhere to be found, and everywhere the ambulance passed, Yan Ao saw only rows of dilapidated high-rise buildings. These buildings looked just like the scenery Yan Ao had seen on the mall rooftop: the windows were completely shattered, the outer walls peeled away, and the steel reinforcement bars exposed, giving the impression they had been abandoned for a long time.
Not only that, but on the highway where they were driving, Yan Ao saw numerous wrecked cars. Some had crashed alone into the highway guardrails, dozens of vehicles had piled up into chaotic heaps in other spots, and some large trucks had even overturned right in the middle of the road with their cargo scattered everywhere. The ambulance had to continuously weave around these obstacles and drive slowly.
Turns out the nightmare wasn't over yet—or was it just beginning?
Yan Ao sat back blankly, and after a moment, asked, "How long have I been unconscious?"
The nurse replied, "About five hours ago when we found you."
Hearing this, Yan Ao raised his hand to look at his watch. The date displayed was 20:33 in the evening. Five hours ago... that meant he had left the mall around 15:30. Only six or seven hours ago, he had still been happily shopping and playing in the mall with a group of classmates, discussing where to travel after graduation.
Never had he expected that in the blink of an eye, those classmates, his crush, and his best friend would all be dead, leaving only him alive.
"Don't think about it so much. Just live well; none of it is easy for anyone," the doctor patted Yan Ao's shoulder and said.
Finally registering what the doctor had said, Yan Ao hesitated for a moment before asking, "You guys... like me, you've seen those choices?"
The doctor and nurse were just about to answer when a lazy voice chimed in. "Of course we've seen them. Don't tell me you're not a survivor who crawled out of hell just like the rest of us?"
Yan Ao looked toward the source of the voice. It turned out there was a fourth person here, curled up in a corner where Yan Ao hadn't noticed him earlier. It was a young man with dyed blonde hair and a military-green overcoat.
He slowly sat up and said fiercely to Yan Ao, "Damn it, I finally managed to fall asleep and you woke me up. You want a beating?"
Startled by the other man's attitude, Yan Ao thought to himself that this guy was really aggressive.
"Mr. Ouyang, don't be angry. He just woke up and probably doesn't know what's going on yet," the gentle nurse stepped forward to speak up for Yan Ao.
"Heh heh." The blonde young man rubbed the stubble on his chin and looked at the nurse with a lewd gaze. "I can spare him, but you have to..."
Before the blonde young man could finish, the doctor abruptly stepped in front of the nurse, his voice turning icy as he said, "Daresay that again?"