Chapter 730: The Mended Doll
"These little tools are quite well made." Liu Chengyi observed the items in the display case. "They're almost indistinguishable from real surgical instruments, even the thread sizes and numbers are marked."
"You know a lot about these?" Xu Ruosi glanced at him. "Were you a doctor before?"
"No, I worked with medical equipment for a while." Liu Chengyi said. "Even if you haven't eaten pork, you've seen a pig run. These things are basic knowledge."
"Then your basic knowledge is too broad." Xiao Ling said. "You recognize every tool."
Liu Chengyi looked at him with displeasure. "If you're looking for trouble, I'm game. No need for this passive-aggressive tone!"
Xiao Ling was much calmer than before, shrugging and saying nothing more.
Entering from the hall, there were a large number of therapy rooms inside. Though called therapy rooms, they looked more like hospital wards. Each room had an individual bed and a series of medical tools, mostly focused on surgery, equipped with anesthesia machines and oxygen equipment.
Some rooms, besides the tool arrangements, also had mannequins for demonstration purposes. However, the demonstration content had little to do with the medical tools provided. Instead, they used long steel needles, either piercing hands and feet to pin them to the bed, or sticking the entire body full like a hedgehog.
"Now I understand what a 'needle mountain' means. So it's literally needles piled into a mountain." Long Aotian said. "It has nothing to do with therapy at all."
"Only the titles of the venue projects are normal," Xu Ruosi said. "It doesn't look like a place for human experiments either. It's completely a murder base, and the methods are quite twisted."
"Calm down, this is just a game project." Long Aotian said. "Sunshine Museum City is a horror-themed amusement park to begin with. It's not strange for it to be like this."
The group searched around but again found no possible corpses.
After coming up empty, Jie Ling said, "Could it be that the venue only truly opens at night?"
The Wax Museum was normal during the day. If they hadn't entered the horror room and had come out before dark, they wouldn't have discovered that the Wax Museum turned living people into wax figures, nor would they have found the bodies buried deep underground.
The Human Mannequin Building, the Mad Prison, and now the Needle Mountain Therapy—three places and not a single clue.
"It's getting dark anyway. Why not wait until night?" Xiao Ling observed the expressions of Xu Huo and the others. "If things go wrong, we can still get out in time."
Xu Huo agreed. Although the venue's setup revealed some content, it contradicted the motives of the merchant who built Sunshine Museum City.
He suggested checking out the nearby Doll Clothing Store. Before it got completely dark, they could finish viewing this venue too. If something happened at night, they wouldn't be caught off guard.
The others naturally had no objections. The group left the Therapy Hall and entered the Clothing Store.
The Clothing Store was much larger than the Therapy Hall. A two-story building, the counters and walls were all filled with or hanging dolls. The store also had experience tools for sewing doll clothes.
Xiao Ling frowned as soon as he walked in. He reached out and cut a row of half-arm-length dolls on the counter in half. The stuffing squeezed out, bending the dolls at ninety degrees, their bellies bulging high, looking very strange.
Xu Huo also examined these dolls. Some were made of stuffing and other filling materials, while others were made of silicone, plastic, and such. They came in various types and sizes, and were quite realistic.
"I used to play dress-up games when I was a kid." Jie Ling picked up a doll and put clothes on it. "So many dolls—it's almost every little girl's dream."
"Your little girl dreams are too strange. How can you like such weird things? One or two is fine..." Long Aotian looked around. "Doesn't being stared at by so many different-colored eyes feel creepy?"
"They're not real eyes. They're usually glued on." Jie Ling went to pry at the eye socket of the doll she had just dressed. Unexpectedly, what came off wasn't a sticker, but a realistic eyeball.
"What the hell!" She threw the thing in her hand away. The round ball rolled to Xu Huo's feet. He picked it up and squeezed it. "Silicone product. It should be stuck in the doll's eye socket."
Saying this, he took the doll Xu Ruosi had picked up and pressed the eyeball back in.
"Some dolls have mending marks on their bodies." Yu Guangnan was violently dismantling dolls, already piling up a heap of doll remains beside him. "They were cut open after being made and then sewn back together. Nothing hidden inside."
Xu Huo and the others examined some nearby dolls and found that at least one in ten were like this.
"Deliberately damaging the dolls... is there a special purpose?" Xu Ruosi said. "If they made the mending scars on the face, it could at least scare children."
"Maybe there's no special meaning." Liu Chengyi said. "For a horror-themed amusement park, props don't always need to be too refined. For example, haunted house props—buying some old mannequins or discarded clothes and accessories can save costs while enhancing the atmosphere. These dolls might have come from that."
This was from a practical perspective. Aside from this, there seemed to be no other better explanation.
As usual, they searched all the display cabinets upstairs and downstairs. Finding no clues, they were about to go downstairs when Xiao Ling suddenly stopped. "Did any of you move that big one?"
He was referring to a human-sized doll in the corner, with blonde hair and blue eyes, wearing a plaid skirt, now facing them.
"Is there a problem?" Long Aotian chopped off the doll's head from a distance. The soft stuffing bounced on the ground a couple of times before the back of its head faced them and stopped moving.
Xiao Ling frowned. "Maybe I saw wrong."
"Don't scare people. What exactly did you see?" Jie Ling's voice changed pitch.
"If you saw something, just say it," Yu Guangnan said. "It might be a clue."
Xiao Ling said with slight irritation, "I felt like it was watching us."
He had checked that human-sized doll earlier. After finishing, he had casually laid it on its side so its face wasn't facing the room. But when they were about to leave, it had turned back to face them.
Xu Huo walked over and lifted the doll's head to examine it. "It doesn't seem like a special item, but it doesn't hurt to be cautious."
After saying this, he tied the doll's head to the corner of the display cabinet using its hair. However, just as he stood up, an iron skewer, flying from who knows where, grazed the back of his head and embedded itself in the cabinet beside him!
The group turned around in unison. But the venue was completely silent. The display cabinets on both sides were packed with all kinds of dolls. Perhaps because of the rough searching, they were tilted and lying on the cabinet shelves, their eyes uniformly fixed on Xu Huo and the others.
It wasn't their imagination. Because every single doll, front and back, had turned their heads!
(Chapter End)