Chapter 16

Zhuochuan thanked the female doctor and looked around the corridor of the hospice ward, finding room number 9 and walking in. Inside was a four-bed ward, but it was very quiet, with no one speaking. Only occasionally could the sound of patients' breathing be heard. The patients lay in their beds, connected to various tubes.

Seeing Zhuochuan enter, no one asked him any questions because he was wearing a doctor's coat. Only a family member, a man in his fifties with tear marks on his face, stood up, looked at him, and seemed to want to ask something but then shook his head and sat back down, holding his head.

Zhuochuan looked at the bed where the man was standing. From the patient's exposed face, it was clear that he was a young man, wrapped in bandages with bloodstains, as if he had been in a car accident.

Zhuochuan was silent. Although he had been mentally prepared, facing these lives that were about to end still left him deeply shaken. People living outside, arguing, making money, and busy with various entertainments, rarely experience the fragility of life. But here, the faces waiting for death to arrive truly made one feel how fragile life is and how luxurious it is to be alive.

He had also recently faced the threat of death. The feeling of being sentenced to death, with the execution date set, left his mind blank, with no time for fear, as if his entire being was being held. But this feeling was brief because he quickly thought of escaping to the modern world through time travel as a last resort, turning the death sentence into exile.

But these people lying in the beds were clearly sentenced to death, perhaps in a few hours or a few days. They had no way to escape; death was final, and all the beauty of their lives would end.

Zhuochuan placed his notebook on a table in the corner of the ward, moved a chair, and sat down, opening the notebook and pretending to work. The family members paid him no attention, each lost in their own grief.

The female doctor on duty was right; within half an hour, someone in the ward passed away.

The one who passed away was the young man. He struggled violently, as if gasping for breath.

Then Zhuochuan saw some mist of varying density appear around him, but it quickly dissipated, vanishing in less than a second. Zhuochuan didn't have time to get close and absorb it.

The man in his fifties, crying, shouted at Zhuochuan, who was sitting nearby, "You doctor, what are you just sitting there for? Come and save my child!"

Zhuochuan, who hadn't absorbed the mist representing soul power, felt a bit uncomfortable. The man's shouting made him even more uneasy.

But Zhuochuan knew the man was mistaken, so he suppressed his discomfort and said, "I'm an engineer who maintains the equipment system. I'm here to check the instruments. The doctor is in the on-duty room."

Hearing this, the man didn't say anything more and rushed to the on-duty room to call for help. But by the time the female doctor arrived, it was too late to perform any last-minute resuscitation. The young man had already stopped breathing, and the man collapsed on the ground, crying uncontrollably.

Zhuochuan shook his head. Although the man had shouted at him, he understood the man's feelings as a family member. He regretted wearing a doctor's coat, but if he hadn't, it would have been even more inconvenient to enter and stay in the ward without being a family member. Suppressing his discomfort, Zhuochuan continued to stay in the ward, busying himself with his notebook to avoid thinking too much.

There was wireless internet coverage in the ward, so he connected to the server and retrieved the information of the young man who had just passed away. He was 26 years old, had a master's degree, and worked at a well-known company. He had been severely injured in a car accident. This information was retrieved from the old system, as he had obtained the latest password during the server maintenance in the early morning, allowing him access.

Time passed quickly. After the young man, two more people in the critical care ward passed away. They had all been given emergency treatment, but it was ineffective. They had been brought here because there were no effective treatment options left.

One was an 84-year-old farmer with advanced lung cancer. He didn't release any mist when he died, and Zhuochuan couldn't see or absorb anything.

The other was a young man with tattoos who had been stabbed twice. He also didn't release any mist when he died. He was 19 years old, had graduated from junior high school, and was unemployed. There were no family members around, and soon after he died, a police officer came to take the body away.

Zhuochuan took a deep breath when he went out for lunch.

He calmed himself down, breaking free from the shock of facing death, and began to analyze.

So far, he had witnessed the entire process of four people's deaths. Combining the information about these four deceased individuals and the presence or absence of the mist, Zhuochuan found that the most mist was released by the 70-year-old associate professor, enough for him to absorb. The deceased gang member and the old farmer released no mist at all.

The information he had obtained from the new world was limited and didn't tell him what kind of people could release soul power. Moreover, Zhuochuan knew that the subjects of those studies were ordinary people in the new world, who were incomparable to people in the modern world.

He could only draw his own conclusions. From these four samples, it seemed that the deceased needed to be old enough and have a rich cultural background for the soul power to be released in a form that could be maintained as mist long enough for him to absorb it. People who met both conditions were rare, and encountering them was even rarer. But this difficulty was within his expectations. If it were easy, soul power wouldn't be so valuable in the new world.

After lunch, Zhuochuan returned to the hospice ward and informed the on-duty room before entering. He met the female doctor again, who was eating a simple boxed meal with only a few vegetables, no meat.

Noticing that Zhuochuan was looking at her, the female doctor, who had taken off her mask, revealing a young and beautiful face, looked at him and said irritably, "What are you looking at? We interns can only afford this. If you have any sympathy, you could say something to our hospital leaders to give us more subsidies."

"We engineers usually eat boxed meals too. It's about the same," Zhuochuan smiled. He knew that the distribution in hospitals was even less equitable than in companies. A few senior doctors and leaders earned a lot, but most people at the bottom earned very little and had to work their way up. In some remote county hospitals, intern doctors and nurses earned only a few hundred yuan a month a few years ago.

"Oh, you look like a leader, but I didn't expect you to be a manual laborer," the female doctor's attitude improved a bit, and she let him sit down. "What are you researching in there? They're all critically ill patients who are about to die. No one usually pays attention to them."

"I'm thinking of developing a hospice care system to help doctors and patients communicate better," Zhuochuan thought for a moment and said.

"Such systems are already popular abroad, but in our country, only a few high-end people can really use them. Your system won't have much of a future in the next twenty years. People are too busy with their own lives to care about those who are about to die," the female doctor said with a dismissive tone.