Chapter 325: Professor of Sandworms
Meng Chao did not return home immediately.
For some reason he could not fathom, he went down the stairs and visited the other wards.
He was in an inpatient building with more than fifty floors. The top two floors were suite wards. They had television, fridges, couches, living rooms, attached bathrooms, and bathing equipment. Aside from the faint smell of antiseptic, they were not that much different compared to a hotel room.
If he went downwards from the forty-eighth floor, all the wards he saw were normal wards from different departments.
But the normal wards were also divided into different grades.
The single wards were expensive. Even though they had no fridges, couches, and living rooms, they had their own attached bathrooms.
There were also double wards and triple wards. These could ensure the patients’ basic dignity.
But most of them were six-people wards, eight-people wards, and ten-people wards.
Theoretically speaking, ten-people wards should be the limit.
But after Dragon City transmigrated, all forms of matter were no longer stable. Due to cells mutating and new viruses, there were a lot more people infected by all sorts of diseases compared to the time they were on Earth.
The invasion of monsters also caused all sorts of secondary disasters, such as houses collapsing, fires, corrosive gases burning the lungs, and other things. It led to the government hospitals being filled to the brim.
The standard ten-people wards were usually stuffed full with twenty or thirty people until they were like sardines in a barrel.
Some of the patients were in dire need of a bed, but had no space in a ward, so the hospital could only put beds in the corridors or stairwells. But this was something only done if they begged for it and had certain connections.
It was the time when visitors were allowed, so Meng Chao casually went to a floor and entered it.
There were temporary beds on both sides of the narrow corridor. The wrinkled sheets had skeletal bodies, and even if there was a thick scent of antiseptic in the air, it could not hide the smell of death and decay.
A married couple dressed in simple clothes were at the nurses’ station. They were discussing something with distressed expressions.
Meng Chao listened to them. Apparently, their child was very ill and there were no longer any beds in the cheapest ten-people ward. There was one bed left in a single ward, but it was expensive, and they could not claim insurance for it. As the nurses urged them to make their decision, they calculated the medical fees and hospitalization costs.
The door to a ten-people ward was by the nurses’ station.
Meng Chao swept a glance inside through the open door and noticed that even though the ten-people ward was really cramped, it was divided into around thirty small cubicles with curtains. It was like a hornet’s nest.
Both men and women stayed in it.
The moans of the patients, the sounds of them excreting, the stench of rotting blood and flesh as well as excretion, and the cries as well as sighs from the family members gathered together into a wave that the curtains could not block, and it came charging at Meng Chao.
Some of the patients and their family members had even given up on preserving their dignity. They did not even bother closing the curtains completely and Meng Chao could see the strange-looking bodies. Some of them were handicapped or looked even more hideous than monsters.
Meng Chao shut his eyes and sucked in a deep breath of the foul-smelling air. It stimulated his nerves and stirred up memories of his past.
Humans were forgetful creatures.
Meng Chao had accompanied his mother to a hospital a lot of times. If they had to be admitted, his mother always insisted on staying in a ten-people ward despite all their protests.
So Meng Chao was very familiar with the environment. He had even stayed in one of such wards before.
However, once he awakened to supernatural powers, he had the power to send his mother to Feng Shui Medical Center. In just half a year, he got used to life with clean windows, fresh air, nurses being polite and patient, doctors being elegant and gentle, and an environment full of people who exercised professional behavior.
The memories from the ten years before that gradually disappeared because of it. When someone mentioned a hospital to him, Meng Chao now thought of Feng Shui Medical Center, or at the very least, a suite room like the one in which Xie Xiaolei was staying.
It was only when he stood there, his nostrils filled with the breaths exhaled by dozens of patients, his ears listened to the sound of family members arguing with nurses, patients peeing and farting behind the curtains, and heard moans and weeping did he remember the past. Most of the hospitals in Dragon City were like this.
‘Gao Ye… Is this the world you wanted to carve into your memory?’
Meng Chao had all sorts of complicated emotions in his heart while he quietly thought about Gao Ye’s psychological state.
Perhaps Gao Ye was right.
Humans were never born equal.
Life was not some invaluable treasure, either.
Human lives and dignity could be measured, and the scale was pretty accurate.
Once someone applied for reimbursement for a ten-people ward, the hospitalization fee would be around 24 dollars a day.
If it were a six-people ward, it was around 52 dollars a day.
The price for double wards and single wards went up to more than 200 dollars.
And the price for suite wards like Xie Xiaolei’s was 2,550 dollars per day.
The VIP rooms in Feng Shui Medical Center were naturally even more expensive.
If you deducted 24 from 52, you had 28.
If you deducted 24 from 2,550, you had 2,526.
This meant that the value of human dignity fluctuated between 28 dollars to 2,526 dollars.
The amount of money you were willing to fork out represented the amount of dignity you would receive.
As they sped up their actions to conquer the Other World and the cultivation system got perfected, the strong would continuously break the limits and the difference between people would continue widening… wouldn’t it?
Yes, that should be the case.
At the very least, based on what Meng Chao remembered of his previous life, decades later, the powerful in Dragon City were so great that they might as well be gods and normal people had no hope to catch up to them with just their hard work.
As the distance between people continued widened, the difference in treatment also became more obvious.
Of course it did.
He was sure of that based on what he saw right now. He didn’t even need the memories of his previous life to know that it would end up like that.
From what Meng Chao knew, many of the powerful forces were developing high-end medical equipment and technology. There was one medical cabin in particular that was made entirely of the highest-grade crystal. It was practically on the same level as the Blue Origin Crystal Cave. It could form an amazing spirit energy magnetic field that resonates with a human’s vitality magnetic field so the cells’ regenerative power works at maximum capacity.
No matter how badly a person was injured, if they stayed in this sort of medical cabin, they would get better even without the administration of drugs.
Of course, it would also cost an astronomical amount of money.
The patients who stayed in the ten-people wards and were trapped in this sort of horrible environment would never be able to enjoy the crystalline super medical cabins.
In truth, normal people did not even dare to dream about staying in single wards like Xie Xiaolei’s.
What was Gao Ye thinking about when he saw this every time he came to the hospital?
‘Since the powerful are supposed to shed their blood for the weak, why can’t the powerful first build some larger inpatient wards for the weak so they can retain their basic dignity?’
Gao Ye’s ugly face rose once more in front of Meng Chao.
It was only at that moment that Meng Chao noticed that there was always a slight hint of mockery on Gao Ye’s face.
And when his intentions were revealed, that mockery turned into indignation.
Meng Chao sighed, turned around, and left.
When he walked past the nurses’ station, he noticed that the distressed parents were still arguing with the nurse.
Right when they made up their minds to have their child stay in a single ward, it was taken by some other patient. They lost the ward because they had hesitated for too long.
While on his way back, Meng Chao kept on thinking about Gao Ye’s psychological state.
He also thought about how Dragon City would bring about its own end. It would happen because the difference between people would keep on growing and the tear would end up too wide to cross.
Perhaps it was because he had been thinking about it, but when he returned home, Meng Chao found a very strange email.
Meng Chao had an official account on the largest broadcasting platform in Dragon City. He had inherited a lot of fans from the Weeping Reaper, so he handed his account to Yan Feirou’s group to operate it. His exposure rate was pretty high, and if he ignored the ghostwriters and lurkers, the remaining active fans still sent him hundreds of passionate emails every day.
But the email he received was sent to the account Meng Chao had used during high school. It was a pretty private account.
The person who sent him the email was Professor of Sandworms.
Meng Chao stared at the name for a long time before he held his breath and opened the email.
It contained the experiment log that started half a month ago.
There was a large amount of experimental data, detailed diagrams, biological neural network scans… as well as Gao Ye’s changes in sense of self.
[28 April, New Era Year 56.
[The growth of organs is far faster than what I imagined. My wounds are about to recover. The self-regenerative abilities of annelids have further research value. If a human being came in possession of them, we could regrow lost limbs, which would increase Dragon City’s fighting power.]
[30 April, New Era Year 56.
[The brand new nervous system gave me a new cognitive experience. Since my nerve bundles are ten times thicker, have myelin sheaths a, and are independent existences in different sections, I possess something similar to multithreading. I’ve never felt as smart as I am currently.]
[1 May, New Era Year 56.
[It’s my greatest oversight to not have created a few tentacles for this body. It must be known that the first sparks of human civilization were created by neanderthals, who freed their upper limbs from the ground and learned to do things with them.
[But it’s not necessary for me to create a few pairs of tentacles like those of an octopus.
[In the next stage of evolution, as long as I can get some sturdier nerve bundles and connect them to mechanical arms, I’ll be able to handle the loss of arms.
[My past self was truly foolish. There was simply no need for me to be conflicted about choosing a body of flesh and blood or one of metal.
[The soul itself is the only proof of human existence.]
[3 May, New Era Year 56.
[This accursed phantom pain. I didn’t expect that after I transferred my consciousness, it would still cling to me like a shadow. It’s even stronger than before.
[I keep thinking that I’m still a human and that I still have my arms, legs, and head. These non-existent limbs are constantly reminding me of their existence through pain.
[It might be because the human soul is not compatible with monster nerves. As my calculation abilities and mental power increased, the pain has also increased ten times. It feels like my soul is submerged in powerful acid, and I can’t bear it, not even for half a second.
[It seems like there is a reason behind why human nerves and human souls were never used to their full potential.
[If I want a soul that is ten times stronger, I must pay a price that is ten times larger.
[But this is fine.
[At the very least, I found out that there is another fatal flaw in the consciousness transferring technology—phantom pain. I had never considered it.
[I hope that my calculation abilities and mental power will be able to last for a long time.
[Before the phantom pain defeats me, I must defeat it.]