Chapter 507: Chapter 506: Returning to the Right Path

Yan Feifan, Yanyan, and Tian Yu gathered around the uncovered entrance. They peered down the stairs leading to an unknown depth, then exchanged wide-eyed glances.

"Yanyan, you really didn’t know there was a secret room here?"

Yanyan peered down the stairwell again, then shook her head. "Mr. Yan, I had no idea."

"My dad never told me there was a basement here all these years."

"Hey, you don’t think... my dad never knew about it either, do you?"

Tian Yu’s eyes lit up. "Maybe the previous owner left it behind? Could it be a treasure room?"

"You know, the kind with a big safe?"

Yan Feifan shot her a sideways glance and deliberately tried to scare her. "Why couldn’t it be a place where someone was murdered and their body was dumped?"

His words made both Yanyan and Xiaoyu inch closer to him.

Tian Yu tapped Yan Feifan’s shoulder with her little fist and grumbled, "Mr. Yan, would you stop trying to scare us?"

"It’s the middle of summer, and I’m getting goosebumps."

Yan Feifan teased her, "And you, with the heart of a mouse, are dead set on exploring a secret room?"

He turned to Yanyan. "First, give your dad a call and ask him if he knows about this basement."

Yanyan said, "Oh," and ran off to get her phone.

A minute or two later, she ran back.

The little dog, Helen, came running back with her this time.

"Mr. Yan, my dad isn’t picking up!"

Yan Feifan saw the ringing animation for a landline number on her screen and explained, "He’s probably in surgery or busy with something else and can’t pick up."

His gaze shifted back to the dark opening. "How about we wait for your parents to get home from work before we explore it together?"

Tian Yu tugged on Yan Feifan’s sleeve, her face tight with worry. "Mr. Yan, it’s not really a secret room for dumping bodies, is it?"

Yan Feifan crouched down, fanned the air out of the opening with his hand, and took a deep sniff.

"No musty smell. It probably hasn’t been sealed for very long."

Yanyan and Tian Yu crouched down beside him, copying his actions. They fanned the air with their small hands and leaned in for a sniff.

"You’re right, there’s no musty smell..."

Just then, Helen suddenly darted out from Yanyan’s side, hopped onto the stairs, and scurried down into the darkness.

"Hey, Helen! Helen! Get back here!"

But her urgent calls couldn’t stop the dog.

A moment later, Helen’s "WOOF, WOOF..." echoed up from the dark basement.

"Mr. Yan..."

Seeing Yanyan’s worried expression, Yan Feifan said with resignation, "All right, I’ll go down and drag it back up."

Tian Yu volunteered eagerly, "Mr. Yan, let me go instead."

"You’re a famous doctor, and I’m just an ordinary middle school student. If there’s really danger down there, it would be terrible if you got hurt."

Yan Feifan rolled his eyes at her.

"Helen is perfectly fine down there. What danger could there be?"

"You’ve been watching too many horror movies, haven’t you?"

As he spoke, Yan Feifan took the phone from Yanyan’s hand, turned on its flashlight, and started down the stairs.

As he descended the sloping staircase, the low ceiling forced him to crouch. Aided by the phone’s light, he spotted a switch panel on the wall.

He reached out and flipped it.

With a CLICK, the darkness vanished, replaced by a brilliant white light.

The scene in the basement was revealed in its entirety, laid bare before Yan Feifan’s eyes as he stood on the stairs looking down.

An operating table, a surgical microscope, a shadowless lamp, a ventilator, a cardiopulmonary monitor, a multi-function case for surgical instruments...

’Holy shit...’

Yan Feifan was looking at a standard surgical operating room.

It was so well-equipped that you could perform surgery on a patient the moment they arrived.

Yan Feifan scanned the room.

Near the stairs, he saw a single bed, fully made with a quilt and pillow.

On the far side of the basement, an entire wall was taken up by a wine rack, sparsely filled with bottles of red wine.

"Mr. Yan... Mr. Yan..."

Hearing the girls calling him, Yan Feifan quickly descended the rest of the stairs and called back up, "You can come down now."

"Be careful on the stairs!"

Before the words were even out of his mouth, Tian Yu was already clattering down the stairs, with Yanyan right behind her.

"Whoa, it’s an operating room!"

"Why is there an operating room here?"

Yan Feifan guessed, "Yanyan, Xiaoyu, this must be where the Director practices surgery to hone his skills."

He couldn’t help but click his tongue in amazement. "Rich people really play on a different level. This is just extravagant."

"The most I’ve done is buy a few common surgical instruments to keep at home and practice on chickens, ducks, rabbits, or pig hearts and livers."

"But the Director went and built himself a full-fledged, standard operating room."

"There’s just no comparison!"

After the initial surprise wore off, a slightly disappointed Tian Yu asked, "Mr. Yan, does an operating room like this cost a lot of money?"

Yan Feifan grunted in affirmation. "If not a million, it’s at least in the high hundreds of thousands."

"That surgical microscope alone costs two or three hundred thousand."

"It’s that expensive!" Tian Yu looked astonished.

Yan Feifan scanned the basement one more time and urged them, "All right, there’s nothing else to see here."

"Yanyan, get Helen."

"Xiaoyu, let’s go up."

Their curiosity satisfied, the two girls tugged on Helen’s ears and obediently followed Yan Feifan out of the basement.

After pressing the floorboard back into place, the three of them finally noticed that the seams around this particular board were, in fact, slightly different from the others.

It was a classic case of hindsight being 20/20.

Even if they had noticed the different seams before, who would have ever guessed there was a basement hidden underneath?

Yan Feifan returned to his room and resumed thinking about the surgical plan.

About twenty minutes later, his train of thought was interrupted by his ringing phone.

It was a call from Director Wang Chuan.

"Feifan, about that operating room... I had it built a few years ago. I was suffering from terrible insomnia back then and just couldn’t sleep, so I built it."

"When I couldn’t sleep, I’d go down there to practice my surgical skills. Once I was completely exhausted, I’d sleep right there in the basement."

Wang Chuan sighed over the phone. "That period was also when my skills improved by leaps and bounds."

"Later, I was fortunate enough to discover that recording of hypnotic rain sounds, so I didn’t have to rely on sleeping from exhaustion as much."

"Now, it’s basically become my private hideout for de-stressing and thinking through problems."

Yan Feifan let out a soft "Oh," then asked abruptly, "Director, there aren’t any legal issues, are there?"

The line went silent for a moment before Wang Chuan’s voice came through again.

"There might have been in the past, but not anymore."

"Yanyan’s recovery is imminent, and her mother’s business is on the right track. I’m not going to be foolish enough to do anything illegal or unethical."

Yan Feifan gave a faint smile. "I understand."

"Oh, by the way, Director, will you be able to get back on time today?"

"No problem. I’ve finished all my work for the day."

"Is there anything you all want to eat...?"

After a few more words, they ended the call.

Yan Feifan put down his phone, his expression growing somber as he stared out the window.

In that basement operating room, he hadn’t just found an unusually complete set of surgical equipment; he had also spotted several medical-grade steel canisters for anesthetic agents and oxygen.

’Spending a fortune to build an operating room like this to practice surgical skills through realistic simulations... that’s barely plausible.’

’After all, plenty of doctors develop all sorts of strange quirks to deal with their immense psychological pressure.’

’But stocking medical-grade oxygen and anesthetics... that’s much harder to explain. Especially since anesthetics are strictly controlled substances.’

’I hope the Director has truly, as he said, seen the error of his ways and already returned to the right path...’

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