Chapter 197

Angela didn't hesitate for a second. She grabbed her car keys and strode out, heading straight to Lucas's private hospital.

She drove like a maniac, flooring the gas pedal the entire way. After running God knows how many red lights, she finally reached her destination.

Angela got out of the car and looked up at the building in front of her. It was a five-story structure, plain and square, with beige tiles covering the exterior walls. Above the main entrance hung a white lightbox sign with green lettering that read "Silverline Hospital."

The reception hall was bustling with people—elderly folks holding children, pregnant women with swollen bellies, patients in wheelchairs hooked up to IV drips. A few electric scooters were parked on the front steps, and next to them sat a small cart selling grilled sausages, its vendor hunched over scrolling through his phone.

If she hadn't already known what this place really was, she probably would have thought it was just another ordinary hospital. But this wasn't the place Angela was actually looking for.

She crossed through the hall, navigating a maze of turns until she found a hidden elevator entrance. She unlocked it with her fingerprint, and the elevator doors slid open. She stepped inside.

The elevator descended smoothly. When the doors opened again, it was like entering another world entirely.

Rows upon rows of lab benches, all kinds of precision medical equipment, human organ specimens everywhere, blood analyzers, and neatly arranged bottles of reagents. The air reeked of a sharp, pungent mix of disinfectant and formaldehyde.

This was the place Angela was looking for.

But today was very different.

The lab technicians who were usually working methodically at their stations were nowhere to be seen. Scattered across the floor were broken medicine bottles and data files. Several lab reports had been trampled with shoe prints, as if some kind of chaos had swept through.

After unlocking the final bulletproof glass door with facial recognition, Angela finally realized something was seriously wrong.

The soundproofing on that bulletproof door was too good. The moment it opened, the screaming that poured out froze her in place.

"Ahh!! Get out! All of you get out! You useless pieces of shit!!"

Then came the deafening crash of something being smashed to the ground. Glass instruments shattered one after another, metal trays clattered as they overturned, people were running, someone got shoved and slammed into the wall.

All these sounds mixed together, pouring out from the open doorway at the end of the hallway, ricocheting through the sealed underground space, making her eardrums ring.

Angela's brow furrowed tightly. She recognized that voice—it was Lucas's. Her unease intensified, and she quickened her pace.

The scene inside the hospital room was even more chaotic than she'd imagined.

Three lab-coated technicians were frantically crowding around the hospital bed. One of them had his glasses knocked askew on his nose, and the front of his white coat was smeared with a huge bloodstain—whether his own or someone else's, it was impossible to tell.

The floor was littered with broken glass and spilled medicine bottles. A puddle of clear liquid seeped out from under an overturned instrument tray, soaking several CT scans scattered on the ground. Half the leads from the cardiac monitor had been ripped off, and the remaining ones hung crookedly from the patient's chest. The heart rate line on the screen was jumping erratically, and the alarm light flashed with blinding red pulses.

And that patient was Lucas.

He was lying half-dead on the bed. If he weren't still screaming, she might have thought she was looking at a corpse just taken down from a torture rack.

He was completely naked, his skin tinged with a faint charred blackness. His ten fingers hung limply, as if they were just skin barely holding together a pile of shattered bones, maintaining the vague shape of hands in a deeply unsettling way.

But what truly made Angela's blood run cold was his lower body.

Those two legs no longer looked like legs at all. From the knees down, the skin had turned the grayish-white color of cooked meat. Large patches of epidermis had peeled away, exposing the dark red, oozing, raw flesh underneath. All his toes were completely blackened, the nails loose, and the surrounding skin had split open, leaking a mixture of pale yellow pus and dark red bloody fluid.

Some kind of ointment had been smeared over it all, giving off a sharp chemical stench—acidic and overwhelming. The putrid smell of rotting flesh mixed with several different medicinal odors in the sealed underground space, creating a nauseating cocktail that made it hard to breathe and nearly impossible to keep your eyes open.

Angela stood in the doorway, covering her nose and mouth with her hand. She'd seen her share of horrors, but this scene still made her stomach churn violently.

She tore her gaze away from those legs and looked at Lucas's face. His complexion was paper-white, but his eyes were bloodshot—so enraged that the capillaries in his eyeballs had burst. Blood trickled from the corners of his eyes like bloody tears.

He was still screaming, his voice completely shredded—dry and hoarse, every sound like sandpaper scraping through his throat.

"You fix me! If you can't fix me, I'll kill every single one of you!!"

The three lab technicians stood frozen in place, hands flailing uselessly. No one dared approach.

His hands and feet were absolutely beyond saving now—the flesh was as fragile as tomato skin after being scalded with boiling water. But no one dared say it.

An older technician stood at the foot of the bed, holding up a tablet with trembling hands. The screen displayed vascular imaging of Lucas's hands and legs. He glanced at the images, then at Lucas, his expression grim.

"Mr. Lucas Howard," the older technician's voice was very low, deliberately slow and careful, trying to make what he had to say less harsh. "You need to make a decision quickly. The situation is critical. The entire vascular system, nerves, and muscle tissue in your lower extremities have been instantly destroyed by high-voltage electrical current. Your hands are the same—the current entered through your palms and exited through your fingertips. Your finger bones were already shattered by blunt force, and then the high-temperature current burned through them. They're completely cooked and necrotic."