453: Chapter 453: Could you tell how to get to the morgue?
(Long chapter) 453: Chapter 453: Could you tell how to get to the morgue?
(Long chapter) “Identity chip scan, please.”
The City Defense Army soldier stopped He Ao’s off-road vehicle at the city gate.
With a beep, He Ao scanned his wristband.
“Citizen, you are about to enter Lin City, please ensure you are not carrying any dangerous items and not carrying any live wilderness creatures.
We will inspect your vehicle and baggage shortly, do you agree?”
The soldier watched He Ao and said calmly.
“Agreed!”
He Ao nodded slightly and stepped out of the car.
His off-road vehicle was not carrying any firearms, weapons, or contraband, only so of the luggage they had taken out earlier.
Well, for the City Defense Army, cold weapons do not count as weapons.
Although Lin City is much smaller than Rock City, the defenses of Lin City’s army are less likely to be infiltrated.
As a Federation city situated around the capital, Ains City, the Lin City Defense Army does not take orders from the Lin City governnt, but directly from the Federation.
Of course, for so local powers and large consortia who provide sufficient tribute, the Lin City Defense Army will turn a blind eye.
For instance, when He Ao took the body of Shadow out of the city, if he had been alone, he would certainly have been stopped, but since he mixed with the Shalang Gang convoy, he was allowed to pass without inspection.
As for the personnel information going in and out of the city, as well as more profound secrets, they were not so easily obtained.
And He Ao guessed that Reid most likely had not yet reported his actions, after all, up until now, He Ao had not caused any actual damage to the Research Institute, the dead were all people Reid sent to kill him.
If the opponent’s fundantal interests are not touched, then those higher up will not care about it.
For Reid, he might feel the incident is still under control, not to the extent of reporting and ruining his own career prospects.
So, with only Reid’s power and resources, it would not be enough to persuade the Lin City Defense Army to provide him with intelligence.
He Ao had controlled the situation well, so now he could return to the city without any fuss.
The City Defense Army soldier conducted a thorough check of the entire vehicle, then allowed He Ao to pass.
After the outermost city gate, there was another, Jar City, where He Ao and company had to undergo a parasite material check and stay for twelve hours before entering the city.
The whole process encountered no surprises, and by the ti He Ao entered the city, it was around four in the afternoon.
He Ao’s off-road vehicle had no license plate; such vehicles cannot be driven within the city and mostly belonged to Wilderness Wanderers.
The laws of the various Fortress Cities differ, so cities would directly confiscate such vehicles, while others would not allow them into the city.
The laws in Lin City were relatively relaxed.
If it was a Wilderness Wanderer, they would not be able to drive the vehicle into the city.
But for citizens like He Ao who possess a social security card number, by paying a registration fee of two thousand federal coins and signing a statent affirming the vehicle’s lawful provenance, they could obtain a temporary vehicle license valid for three months.
With this temporary license, one could go to the Lin City Vehicle Administration to go through a series of procedures and then switch to a Lin City license plate.
Originally, there were no restrictions on the number of license plates one could exchange.
Therefore, many rchants took advantage of this to take vehicles in a legal gray area, drive them around the wilderness, and then use this law to switch those vehicles to Lin City license plates, and then to other city plates.
Turning ‘black’ into ‘white’.
The law was later anded so that a person could only get a license plate once a year.
However, this had no impact on He Ao; as he entered the city, he switched seats with Roger and had Ennie hide.
Just as they passed through the city gate, they saw a few individuals clearly observing and identifying people entering the city sitting in a coffee shop opposite the gate.
They were most likely the ‘eyes’ associated with Reid.
In fact, it would be easier to use artificial intelligence with facial recognition technology for surveillance, which has a much higher identification rate than manual recognition.
But first, the City Defense Army didn’t allow the use of these artificial intelligence caras nearby, and basically, anyone with the ability to enter and leave the city was not soone to trifle with.
Once discovered, it would attract unnecessary trouble.
And these artificial probes did not recognize Roger, nor did they find the hidden Ennie.
Then Roger simply drove past these probes with royal nonchalance.
After leaving the city gate, the off-road vehicle didn’t head straight ho but instead went to an old apartnt building.
Eve found a family here that offered ‘private renting.’
The so-called private renting was different from the mass rentals of apartnts by large corporations.
It involved individual hoowners renting out their properties and collecting rent.
The landlords of this family were a couple in their sixties, and the apartnt had three bedrooms and a living room.
The rent in Lin City was much cheaper than in Dawn City.
The rent for this apartnt was about 730 federal coins a week.
Both landlords were retired, but they did not have the opportunity to enjoy their family life, as their forty-year-old son was unemployed, and he, his wife, and their two grandchildren were cramd into a small two-bedroom rental apartnt.
The full weight of the family’s living expenses fell upon the old couple’s pension and retirent savings.
The old man had recently managed to find a part-ti driver job through old friends’ connections.
The apartnt where the son lived was in a worse area and much smaller, so the rent was much lower.
The old couple planned to rent out their own apartnt and live with their son and daughter-in-law to reduce expenses.
It’s worth ntioning that the mortgage on this apartnt wasn’t paid off yet.
The couple bought it at the age of forty-nine and had to pay the loan until they were seventy-nine.
“No matter how hard life gets, we always have to keep living,”
As they were leaving, the old man with a head full of white hair coughed a few tis and said goodbye to everyone with a smile.
The two elderly supported each other, carrying their luggage as they left the apartnt.
He Ao didn’t try to bargain down the rent for the apartnt.
Ennie watched the backs of the two elderly people, suddenly feeling a bit dazed.
She could empathize with the hardships of the elderly couple, as she had also spent a long ti living in fear of running out of resources after learning that her father had lost his job.
Suddenly, the young girl grabbed He Ao’s sleeve, “Dad, will our life get better?”
He Ao turned around, rubbed his daughter’s little head, and said tenderly with a smile, “It will.”
······
The sun set behind the mountains.
Roger prepared a thick stack of docunts and teaching materials for Ennie, nearly hundreds of pages.
Since he promised to teach, he planned to do it earnestly.
Ennie looked at the dense text on the teaching materials and suddenly realized she might have made a wrong decision.
Especially when Roger, out of nowhere, grabbed a mouse, preparing to teach her dissection in the first lesson.
While his daughter was in class, He Ao left the rental apartnt.
He didn’t go ho since that place probably had soone watching twenty-four hours a day.
He wasn’t planning on revealing himself just yet.
After returning to the city, he contacted Eve again through the network.
With Eve’s help, many things beca easier.
He sketched out the migration route map of the Andavi family that he had obtained and asked Eve to help search for data and collect information.
Eve went through all the docunts from the establishnt of Lin City and then compared the explored wilderness mountains nearby with the various mountains and forests in the migration map.
Eventually, with the information collected by Eve and after eliminating so inaccuracies, He Ao roughly identified the area where the Fountain of Youth once was.
Now, there was only one building in this area,
‘Stars Supre Hospital’
This is the largest private hospital in Lin City.
He Ao closed his eyes and briefly activated his Super mory.
Two trains of thought echoed in his mind, one from Reid, who was pondering why the squad sent to the wilderness to catch He Ao had not returned, and the other from a doctor, who was performing surgery at the mont.
From his thoughts, it seed he was performing a kidney transplant surgery.
And this doctor was the one who had first operated on ‘Pete’.
He Ao currently had two marks on the outside, one on Reid and another on this doctor.
The thoughts heard through Super mory were not complete and did not achieve the legendary ability of Mind Reading to know whatever one was thinking; Super mory could only hear the more intense surface thoughts of the marked individual.
He Ao listened for a few more seconds and heard a relatively clear na, ‘Joel’.
He turned off Super mory and opened the official website of Stars Supre Hospital, typing the na ‘Joel’ into the search page.
Shortly, a personal profile page popped up, featuring a middle-aged man with a gentle smile.
Joel was a surgical doctor at Stars Supre Hospital with a doctoral degree and an associate professor title.
In the mind of the doctor He Ao had marked, the other referred to Joel rather casually, which indicated that this person’s status or professional level was higher than Joel’s.
He Ao opened the hospital’s surgical doctor interface and filtered by associate professor title and above, quickly finding a sowhat familiar photo.
Kors, head of the Organ Transplant Departnt, with a doctoral degree and professor title,
The person in the photo looked to be in his fifties, with a warm and approachable face, full of affability.
He Ao compared the image of this person with the one in his mind, wearing a mask and surgical garb, roughly matching them.
There was a seventy to eighty percent similarity, but he still needed to go to the scene to be sure.
He had just guessed that the doctor might be at Stars Supre Hospital, but he wasn’t certain; it was rely a search attempt.
Once he had a rough idea of his target, He Ao imdiately hailed a taxi and headed to Stars Supre Hospital.
The dical technology at Stars Supre Hospital was very good, and correspondingly, the prices were not low.
Even when Pete was at his wealthiest, he had never co here for treatnt, as most minor illnesses could be handled by a family doctor.
So this was He Ao’s first ti arriving at this hospital and also his first ti seeing the full view of this hospital.
And the mont he stepped out of the taxi, he was stunned.
Although it was already nightfall, all the lights in the Stars Supre Hospital building were still shining brightly, outlining the shape of the entire hospital.
The lights were clearly carefully selected, making the hospital under the night sky appear majestic while filled with a divine radiance.
What surprised He Ao wasn’t how magnificent the hospital was but that the hospital…
was circular.
The photos of the hospital on its official website were very vague, existing as a background, and He Ao had not paid close attention to them.
Only upon arrival did he fully see the whole picture of the hospital.
In his mind appeared the circular hospital of the Andavi family.
Two hospitals, differing in height by over a dozen tis, now overlapped in the depths of his thoughts.
In that mont, the grandiose divine radiance on the hospital’s exterior all faded away, turning it into an abyss standing silently in the deep of the night, lying in wait for its prey.
He Ao took a deep breath and walked into the hospital.
He went straight to the reception desk.
“Hello, may I help you with sothing?”
The hospital receptionist was a beautiful woman with striking blonde hair, wearing a crisp white uniform, who lifted her head with a smile, looking at He Ao.
“I’m looking for Doctor Kors,” He Ao said softly.
“Okay,” the receptionist opened the computer and did a search, “Doctor Kors is currently performing surgery.
Do you have an appointnt?”
“No.”
He Ao shook his head.
“I’m sorry, but you can’t see the doctor without an appointnt.”
The receptionist apologized with a smile.
“It’s fine, I’m his friend.
How much longer will his surgery be?
You can just contact him for when it’s over—he’ll see .”
He Ao spoke calmly.
“This…”
The receptionist hesitated, her gaze fixed on He Ao’s calm yet icy deanor, then she swallowed her words.
She had the feeling that He Ao could pull a gun out of his coat at any mont.
After a mont of silence, “Doctor Kors’ surgery is about to finish…
Let’s see…
If there are no complications, it should end in about ten minutes.
I can only contact him for you.
If he doesn’t want to see you, we can’t violate the hospital’s policies.”
“Okay, thank you.
I’ll co back later.”
He Ao nodded lightly in thanks and then turned to walk towards the elevator.
The lovely blonde receptionist watched his departing figure, her hand on her chest, and breathed a deep sigh of relief.
It was the first ti she felt so close to death.
She hesitated for a mont, then picked up the desktop phone and called the security office.
The morgue in hospitals is usually next to the underground parking lot, or if not directly adjacent, there is a corridor connecting the parking lot and the morgue.
This allows funeral ho personnel to drive directly in and take away the bodies.
The underground parking lot of the Stars Supre Hospital was on the second basent floor, and He Ao wanted to check out the hospital’s ‘deceased’ conditions.
As soon as He Ao stepped out of the elevator, he felt a gaze land on him.
He looked up and saw a tall, strapping security guard, dressed in a uniform and weighing over two hundred pounds, his arms crossed, holding an electric baton, watching him fiercely.
He Ao’s gaze briefly t the sturdy security guard’s.
The guard was taken aback, then turned his head away and ambled to the side as if he were just patrolling the area.
But He Ao didn’t let him go so easily; he took a few steps forward, approaching the guard.
…
“A few hundred federal coins for a salary, why risk my life…
I’m just passing by…
just passing by…”
The corpulent guard muttered to himself, then glanced cautiously back in the direction of the elevator.
He froze, the person who had been inside the elevator was now gone, leaving only the slowly closing doors.
The man stiffened, sweat beading on his forehead.
“Hello.”
A gentle greeting sounded right in front of him.
“Ghost!”
The corpulent guard got such a fright that he lost his balance, stumbled backward a few steps, and fell to the ground.
“Could you tell how to get to the morgue?”
A smile appeared on He Ao’s face as he tried to make himself seem friendlier.
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