In summer, the sky always lights up early. The clock on the table had just pointed to seven o'clock, and the faint golden sunlight was already radiating from the cracks in the sky above the city that had not yet been occupied by the tall buildings.

Liu Tianming has never been in the habit of getting up late. Sleepy-eyed, he stretched hard, pushed away the warm quilt, and walked into the bathroom with his slippers in a hazy tiredness. Squeeze the toothpaste on the toothbrush, and slowly brush it up with the clean water that has just been gathered from the tap in the tea jar.

For some reason, the moment the toothbrush was inserted into his mouth, he suddenly had a very strange feeling.

The foam of toothpaste that the tongue touches seems to be ...... Very sweet.

Liu Tianming looked at the toothpaste box next to him suspiciously. It was a very ordinary "blue sky six must be cured". The light blue carton is also printed with the bald fat man who grinned and smirked in the TV commercial, showing a mouthful of neat white teeth, and shouting "Eat well, the body is great".

This toothpaste is much sweeter than what you usually feel in your mouth. There is an urge to swallow it.

He shook his head vigorously and rinsed his mouth with water. Liu Tianming opened the drawer and took out a "White Rabbit" toffee from a small bag wrapped in red paper. Peel off the wrapping paper and stuff it into your mouth.

This is a wedding candy from a colleague when he got married last month.

Liu Tianming has never been interested in candy, so he casually threw it into the drawer at that time.

The amount of sugar contained in an ordinary diet is sufficient to maintain the normal consumption of the human body. Eating too much, in addition to tooth decay, is to gain fat. He doesn't want to be a shiny, fat-headed, big-eared guy at his current age.

If it weren't for the sudden recollection, the bag of sugar would probably stay there forever until it became moldy.

Munching on the softened toffee, he picked up the lunch box from the table, pushed open the door, and walked to the staff cafeteria where thick white steam rose from the roof in the distance.

……

8:05 a.m. is the time when breakfast is served in the hospital cafeteria.

Sixteen windows selling food have lined up with queues of people tens of meters long. The chef is a retired secretary from the army. Naturally, the hospital canteen also continues the biggest feature of the army's food———— the food is not delicious, and the production is not exquisite enough, but it is better than the portion, the amount is sufficient, and the price is cheap.

Five cents a steamed bun weighing three or two, porridge and soup are free, and the stainless steel basin next to the window is full of pickles such as raw lotus white prepared in advance last night, or pickles such as eggplant, salted radish, and sweet scallion. Of course, if you like noodles, rice noodles and the like for breakfast, you can spend just as much money and get a full teapot bigger than your head from the chef until you panic and won't feel hungry even at lunchtime.

This is only a treatment that hospital insiders are eligible for.

To the south of the inpatient unit, there is also a cafeteria open to patients and their families. The meals there are more varied and complete. Even fresh vegetables such as stewed chicken with wolfberry berries, blood pigeon in clear soup, and braised beef in red soup, which take five or six hours to stew, can be guaranteed to be supplied 24 hours a day.

However, medical staff, including Liu Tianming, never ate there.

They are well aware ———— goji berry stew has been heating back and forth in the pot for at least nearly a week.

The soup in the stewed blood pigeon is no longer the original, but a fake that has been blended with monosodium glutamate and white water hundreds of times.

As for the red stewed beef...... You don't expect to be able to spot chunks of beef out of a bowl at all. The stuff in it is either beef tendon, or beef offal, or something like a thoracoabdominal diaphragm or a casing. It smells really good, and the color of the ketchup is red enough, but it is definitely not as delicious as the tongue and mouth like, and it also exudes a very strange smell of ox's feet.

The food in the restaurant is surprisingly expensive: an ordinary fried bean sprout with oil and salt is clearly priced at 30 yuan. "Nutritious medicinal diets" such as wolfberry stewed chicken are usually sold for 150 yuan per cup.

This kind of sky-high menu has been criticized more than once.

Of course, these things have nothing to do with the hospital———— the restaurant has been contracted, and the specific amount of meals should be sold is the contractor's business. As long as it's not a shocking thing like human meat buns, as long as you can't eat dead people, then no one can care about it.

……

Looking at the steaming heat wafting out of the kitchen, Liu Tianming only felt hungry.

Feel...... I don't think I've eaten in a long time. Suddenly smelling the smell of food, he couldn't help but feel the urge to let go of his appetite and eat a big meal.

Holding a lunch box full of white porridge and holding chopsticks with eight big steamed buns, under the surprised gaze of others, Liu Tianming blushed slightly and slowly walked to the dining table by the wall.

Even he himself thinks it's strange that at most two steamed buns can be enough for breakfast. But today, he felt that even if he swept away all the food in front of him, he was afraid that he would only be half-full.

Taking the spice plate on the table, Liu Tianming scooped out the sugar inside, and quickly piled up a thick layer on the porridge noodles in the lunch box in front of him. In normal times, he would never do that. But today, even he couldn't tell why, he just felt that he wanted something sweet.

And, the sweeter, the better.

"Morning! Dr. Lau. ”

Suddenly, a voice next to him interrupted his movements. When I looked back, I saw Xiao Wu, who was smiling, sitting down with a white porcelain jar full of white porridge. On the two chopsticks at hand, there are also eight steaming steamed buns.

Nodding politely, Liu Tianming glanced at the other party suspiciously, but did not speak.

He remembered that Xiao Wu suffered from a chronic stomach ulcer. According to the doctor's instructions, only eat small and frequent meals. The usual amount of rice is not large, and the staple food is usually a steamed bun or two taels of rice.

It may not even be able to finish eating.

But today, his extremely amazing, almost the same amount of food as himself, is obviously a little strange.

Xiao Wu pulled out the chair, sat down with a big grin, took the spice bottle containing sugar from Liu Tianming's hand, and poured all the remaining sugar into his porridge. While stirring back and forth in the teapot with a spoon, he leaned closer, lowered his voice, and whispered mysteriously, "Did you hear?" The patient we brought back with the car last night deteriorated and died in the early hours of this morning. ”

"Dead?"

Liu Tianming was taken aback. Ignoring the steamed buns that were still chewing in his mouth, he hurriedly asked vaguely, "What's going on?" ”

"I don't know. According to the doctor on duty, it should be the failure of the body due to long-term malnutrition. ”

Xiao Wu picked up the tea jar, took a few sips along the edge, hissed the hot air of his lips, and said, "Fortunately, on the way back from sending the patient back yesterday, we injected him with glucose in time." Otherwise, if something goes wrong, we will have to carry it. But then again, it shouldn't be the problem with that bottle of glucose, right? ”

Liu Tianming didn't care about the second half of what he said. Puzzled, he asked, "When is this happening?" ”

"It must be around three o'clock in the morning! Now the body has been sent to the morgue. Just wait for the family of the deceased to claim it. ”

"What? The guy from last night, who hasn't been there? ”

Hearing this, Liu Tianming was shocked again.

"Nope."

Xiao Wu chewed on the steamed bun and said while eating: "However, the 20,000 yuan he handed over to me is enough for the rescue expenses." As for the rest, we can only wait for someone to come and talk about it. Perhaps, the family of the deceased will demand compensation from the hospital for damages because of this incident. Oh no, it's another damn medical incident. ”

As long as someone dies in the hospital, the hospital must compensate the family of the deceased for huge financial losses. This seems to have become an informal practice. Because of this, the hospital also clearly stipulates that no matter what department or individual encounters such problems, they must be investigated to the end. Whoever starts is responsible for the end.

Liu Tianming frowned and shook his head unconsciously. Slowly swallowing the food in his mouth, his gaze immediately shifted to the steamed bun in his hand, which had already eaten half of it. At first glance, it looks like a curved and irregular arc. It's like the weird smile that solidified on the chapped lips of the mysterious patient last night, I don't know why, it's very weird.

……

After going to work, Liu Tianming first followed the order and accompanied the attending doctor to conduct ward rounds on all the patients in the ward under his jurisdiction. After that, the inspection records were compiled into a book and entered into a computer database...... After doing all this, the tip of the needle on the clock was already pointing to half past ten.

According to the usual practice, in the absence of special circumstances to deal with, from now until the period before lunch, Liu Tianming can be at his disposal.

He is just a graduate who has come for an internship, and it is impossible for the hospital to arrange for him to be officially in-house. Out of consideration for his own job, the attending doctor who is responsible for leading the newcomer will only arrange him to do irrelevant chores, and will never really teach experience and knowledge. More often than not, it's still doing some inconsequential chores. It is called "let young people receive more exercise in all aspects".

As for the patients who come to see us...... For doctors, they will only make the most intuitive judgment from appearances.

Young, handsome, and other synonymous with youth and beauty, in the eyes of patients, they are equivalent to inexperienced little idiots. They would rather pay ten times more for a specialist with wrinkled faces, lost teeth, and bald brains, than accept young doctors who have just walked out of school.

Even those who, on the street, always follow the breasts and buttocks of young beauties, constantly counting the size of each other's cups in their brains. When I walked into the outpatient room, I immediately changed my appetite, and I couldn't wait to find an "old expert" who was old enough to be my wife or grandmother.

In normal times, Liu Tianming often sits in front of the computer, bored and plays games for more than an hour, and then sits and waits for the cafeteria to open. But today, he didn't have the slightest such thought.

He always felt that the patient had died strangely.

Thinking of this, Liu Tianming subconsciously pinched the finger that was injured last night. The place where the needle was punctured, leaving only a light gray needle eye that was not very obvious, but faintly exuded a pain that seemed to be absent.

……

Like all high-traffic public places, the 29th People's Hospital has a large underground parking lot. However, few people know that just below the parking lot on the third basement floor, there is a floor of space that can only be reached by a special elevator for the hospital.

This is the deepest level underground. It serves only two purposes: to store medicines, and to store corpses that have died due to various accidents.

Coming out of the elevator, the first thing that entered Liu Tianming's line of sight was a narrow "T" shaped corridor. On the pale green wall on the left, a striking red arrow is painted. Next to it, there are two large printed ———— medicine warehouses that are almost ten centimeters square.

As for the right...... There were no suggestive signs, only a not-so-bright incandescent lamp on the ceiling, which feebly shone his shadow on the gray-yellow walls. Maybe it's because the voltage is not very stable! The two sides of the lamp, which were swirled back and forth by a few small flying insects, also made a slight "hissing" sound from time to time.

"Which department are you from, young man? Can I help you? ”

As soon as he walked around the corner, from a small half-open door next to him, there was a hoarse question. Immediately afterwards, an old woman wearing a white coat, short stature, thin body, wearing black rubber wooden slippers, about sixty years old, with a numb and rigid face, without the slightest expression, also appeared in front of him.

Her name is Chen Po, and she is in charge of guarding the underground morgue.

It is said that in her early years, she was the most beautiful woman among the many young nurses in the hospital. However, Chen Po's life experience is very miserable. First her husband had an affair that led to divorce, and then her only son died in a car accident, and she herself suffered from a variety of chronic diseases. Out of care, the hospital arranged this job for her, which sounded a little scary, but was actually quite oily.

Whenever the family of the deceased comes to the morgue to pick up the body, they always give the caretaker a large red envelope. It's just that this money is really bad in the eyes of ordinary people. Especially when Chen Po went to the canteen to eat, people also avoided her from afar, and if it was not necessary, they would not answer her at all. It's as if she's an unconscious walking corpse.

Looking at Mrs. Chen, who looked cold, Liu Tianming subconsciously took out a note stamped with the department's stamp from his pocket: "The department asked me to take a look at the corpse sent in the early hours of this morning, and prepare to file the information." ”