Chapter 251: Heard You Gambled Away Your Brother's Life
"Everything she brought out when she was fired from the hospital was burned."
"Burned?" Xu Huo looked at the old woman sitting on the edge of the bed wrapped in a blanket. Her eyes were fixed forward, but there was no content in her gaze.
"She burned it herself." Liao Xu said, "I remember she was very angry at the time. After she finished throwing her tantrum, she burned everything she had brought out."
"Do you know if your mother had a lover at the Seventeenth Hospital?" Xu Huo asked.
Liao Xu was taken aback instead. "Although my parents divorced very early, she never mentioned remarrying or anyone she was involved with over the years. But she was relatively happy during her time working at the Seventeenth Hospital."
"She never mentioned any other colleagues?" Xu Huo pressed on.
"Occasionally she did, and she complained about a female coworker being hard to get along with." Liao Xu thought carefully. "I can't remember the rest clearly."
Xu Huo walked over to the female doctor, bent down to look at her, "How many doctors were at the Seventeenth Hospital?"
The female doctor's gaze was vacant, showing no reaction to his words.
"At the Seventeenth Hospital, do you still remember the man standing beside you in the group photo?"
"Besides the four other young male doctors, there should have been a man about your age. He was also a doctor. You did a lot of things for him. You might have been in a relationship, but he abandoned you and disappeared."
Liao Xu frowned at Xu Huo. "Mr. Xu, I'm very grateful that you came to see my mother, but she really can't remember things from before anymore."
Xu Huo's expression didn't change. He only said, "People don't delete memories. Forgotten things are still in the brain, just temporarily unable to be recalled."
"What you say is correct, but my mother is sick. Her brain has undergone pathological changes. If she can't remember, she can't remember." Liao Xu blocked him, about to ask him to leave, but at that moment, the female doctor suddenly moved. She returned to her bedside, took a very small heart-shaped dressing mirror from the cabinet, neatly arranged her hair with a smile, then put the mirror back in its place.
Xu Huo picked up the mirror and gently tapped it on the back. Along with the mirror piece falling out was a folded portrait sketch, but the man in the painting had no eyes drawn.
Liao Xu was greatly surprised. "This was something my mother drew a few years ago when she was learning sketching. She drew a lot of identical ones back then."
"None of them had eyes?" Xu Huo photographed the drawing and put the paper back exactly as it was.
"No. She said that as she drew, she couldn't remember what the model looked like anymore."
Xu Huo looked at the female doctor. An incomplete beginner's sketch was the only clue he had found so far, and this was only possible because the female doctor was ill.
Everyone who had been at the Seventeenth Hospital, including doctors and patients, none of them remembered the seventh doctor. It was as if the memory had been erased. But he trusted himself.
Unless a person's brain was surgically removed or had undergone pathological changes, memories wouldn't disappear. They would always be stored in the brain, and under special circumstances, they might suddenly be recalled, but they might also never be remembered.
The female doctor had started getting sick a few years ago, so she might suddenly remember someone she should have forgotten. And after he became a player, his brain was also evolving. Under the catalysis of the potion, it wasn't strange for forgotten memories to flash up. Besides that, another piece of evidence was his medication history.
In his clear memories, because he was more stable than the other patients, eating and sleeping didn't cause trouble for anyone. On the other hand, it was also due to his parents' strong insistence, so the hospital mostly did psychological interventions and didn't have him take a lot of medication. Therefore, the medication scenes he saw in his dreams should be real.
He had simply, like everyone else, forgotten the key figures in this matter.
It was unclear whether that doctor was the same person as the businessman who established the Seventeenth Hospital but never showed his face. But if someone had been secretly training him and then erased his memories afterwards, the situation for the other four children might be the same.
Chang Bei and the other three had all gone missing or died ten years ago. Except for Chang Bei, the entire families of the other three had died. Before the incidents, their file records were completely normal. They grew up, enrolled, and graduated as normal people, were named model students, and received medals for being honest and helpful. On the surface, what happened to their families was just exceptionally unfortunate, but in his view, it was that the four children had upgraded.
Concealing emotions, disguising identities, achieving their goals through cruel means, and still gaining sympathy and support from outsiders. It could be said that when they left the Seventeenth Hospital, they had completed their pathological psychological evolution. Growing older only made it easier for them to carry out their plans.
And what a coincidence, they all went missing or died ten years later.
Xu Huo knew in his heart that they weren't dead. They had been taken away.
Disappeared memories, erased records, people who didn't exist, a suddenly vanished mental hospital. Who could do all this?
Xu Huo walked along the bleak path outside the sanatorium. Seeing a leaf falling from a tree, he stopped, lit a cigarette, and sat down by the roadside.
Xu Zhi had also died ten years ago.
If Chang Bei and the other four had been taken away, someone should have come for him too. But he was still fine.
"Screech—!" Several cars sped over and braked sharply near him. The doors opened, and a group of muscular men got out one after another. The buzzcut man in front threw down his cigarette, crushed it out, and spat. With a strange grin, he said, "Xu Huo, it really is you, you little bastard."
Xu Huo didn't look up. "I don't have time to talk to you right now."
The buzzcut man slapped his forehead. "Haven't seen you in years, and your damn temper still hasn't changed. Look at you, you ran off clean, but you dragged me into debt collection. And even that's not the worst of it. I was about to catch Zhang Dong, but you had to go and tip off the Special Defense Department. The Vanguard Squad came and took him away directly. I didn't get my debt back either. How are we going to settle this?"
"Jie Ge, is this the Xu Huo you were talking about?" A lanky man beside the buzzcut man sized Xu Huo up. "He looks pretty ordinary to me. I heard you two were friends ten years ago?"
"Pah! Damn friends!" Jie Ge rubbed his own buzzcut. "If it weren't for the fact that the kid had some skills, would I have bothered to be brothers with a brat who hadn't even grown his hair out?"
"Xu Huo." He called out. "Back in the day, you caused trouble in the underground market and screwed me over for the first time. Today, you've screwed me over for the second time. What do you say? Let's settle the old and new accounts together?"
Xu Huo stood up to leave, but the lanky man blocked his way first. "I heard you're very good at gambling. How about a bet with me?"
"I quit." Xu Huo said.
The lanky man sneered. "I heard you gambled away your own brother's life because of your addiction..."
Before he could finish speaking, he was sent flying through the air. Before he even hit the ground, a blur of motion caught up to him and stomped him directly onto the car. The force was so great that the entire car door caved in!