Chapter 95: Love Welfare Center

It's nighttime at the children's home.

Little Bai Liu, lying in his bed, opened his eyes silently, he heard an intermittent flute that was loud enough to wake him up, but everyone else in his room was still asleep, running all night had drained enough energy out of the children, and with the exception of Bai Liu, who was always somewhat alert, the rest of the children slept soundly.

Little Bai Liu got out of bed very gently, put on his shoes, and he glanced at the clock hanging on the wall - two o'clock in the morning.

Late at night in the communal sleeping quarters, only the soft snoring of the children can be heard, and the children hide in their cots with their soft bodies covered by quilts, and little Mu Ke even covers his head with a quilt as if to protect himself.

But the truth is that someone could easily break these kids if they wanted to, and little Bai Liu watched as the door to their room was slowly opened, the wooden door creaking as it twisted in time with the flute's rhyming feet, revealing the dark, eerie, empty corridor outside.

There was no one outside the door, and this door opened by itself.

The sound of the flute began to become continuous, and drifted in merrily, and the children in their beds began to wrinkle their brows and wriggle uneasily, and to murmur and dance their hands and feet as if they had entered into some magical dream.

Seeing this, Bai Liu calmly shook Mu Ke awake.

--No wonder he was not affected by the sound of this flute, the way this flute works is on sleeping children, but little Bai Liu was only here for the second day in this orphanage, and he sleeps very lightly in a strange and unfamiliar place, and as soon as the sound of the flute sounded little Bai Liu woke up, and therefore would not be affected by the hypnotic sound of this flute.

Little Mu Ke was pushed by little Bai Liu gradually woke up, he rubbed his eyes, forehead covered with cold sweat, confused and took a deep breath, after he woke up he looked at little Bai Liu standing at the head of the bed in a bit of a trance, he seemed to have not reacted to the fact that he had already woken up, and also did not react to the fact that there was a person standing at the head of his bed.

Little Mu Ke, half-squinting and dazed, stretched his feet out of bed to put on his shoes to head down the hallway, saying dully as he did so, "We've got to get out of this orphanage, which is going to draw our blood and kill us ......"

"Wake up, you are just dreaming under the hypnosis of the flute ......," Bai Liu Jr. pulled Mu Ke Jr. by the wrist, pulling Mu Ke Jr. who was about to walk out the door to face himself, and then he narrowed his eyes.

Little Mu Ke's eyes were awake, he was still shivering, and although his face looked a little sleepy with red marks, his eyes were very clear, and there was a layer of tears because of his fear.

"That wasn't a dream ......" said little Mu Ke shivering, that dream obviously scared him, "I saw a lot of nurses tying us to the bed, they used a lot of syringes to stick them through the backs of our hands, the backs of our feet into it, then red blood gushed out down the IV tubes and dripped into a stainless steel tank, and then we couldn't get the blood out ......"

Little Mu Ke's shoulders scrunched up in fear and he clutched his shoulders hard, "She, they would also stab us in the scalp and face with very thick black needles like the ones used to zap livestock, and bind our necks with rubber tubing to squeeze the veins in our faces to make it easier for them to extract the blood."

"...... We were so bound that our faces turned purple and black and we suffocated, and we couldn't escape the hospital bed even if we struggled desperately ......"

With tears streaming down his face, Little Mu Ke looked up at Little Bai Liu, who was calm and unperturbed, and stepped forward anxiously to grab Little Bai Liu's hand, trying to pull him along, "I swear it really wasn't a dream! I saw what will happen after our baptism tomorrow! Those investors are bad guys! They baptize us to fund us all for the blood in our bodies, they don't fund us for free, let's run! Let's get outta here!"

"Of course they are not funding us for free." Little Bai Liu's tone was cold, "There are no freebies in this world, especially for young humans like you and I who don't have much value, the only thing of value is naturally only our bodies, they invested in us to figure out what we have in our bodies, what's so surprising about them doing so, isn't it a natural thing to do? "

Little Mu Ke stared blankly at the very calm Little Bai Liu, and took a step back in a bit of dumbfounded fear: "You already knew that the group of investors were bad people?"

"They are not bad guys, they are just consumers who have the ability to buy our bodies." Little Bai Liu looked at the obviously frightened little Mu Ke with no ripples in her eyes, "And humans like us who don't have the ability to buy ourselves belong to the category of commodities that can be bought and sold at will and can only be purchased."

Bai Liu Jr. didn't have a single expression on his face as he said serenely, as if stating an objective truth: "We only have the value of our commodity category, so it's only natural that we're being purchased."

"But the people here want to suck our blood!" Little Mu Ke whimpered very anxiously.

Xiao Bai Liu looked at him faintly, "So what? Do you think that the people out there are necessarily good people and will never suck your blood? They might eat your flesh and do other more horrible things to you? Do you have any resistance? Is there any point in you escaping? Until you have the ability to go and buy someone else, even if you escape, you, the commodity, are just escaping from the small shelf of the [Love Welfare Center] into a bigger shelf."

Hearing Little Bai Liu say this, Little Mu Ke was completely dumbfounded, he opened his mouth to retort, but didn't know where to start.

"You've ......" Bai Liu Jr. paused, "I'm sorry, how old are you?"

Little Mu Ke was made to cry again by Little Bai Liu's words, he twisted his fingers, watering as he returned Little Bai Liu's words, "I, I'm eleven years old."

"Oh, you're already eleven years old, don't be so naive in your thoughts, Mu Ke. "Little Bai Liu indifferently picked up the above words, then continued, "This orphanage build disappears a batch of children every Sunday, and this batch of children were obviously selected to disappear, and our batch of kids are all very good looking, I thought at first that they would be taken to ......"

Little Bai Liu looked at the overly delicate-looking Mu Ke, his eyes pausing subtly on Mu Ke's snow-white shoulders exposed from her pajamas.

Little Mu Ke looked at little Bai Liu with big eyes and asked back, innocently and confused, "Taken for what?"

Bai Liu Jr. inclined his head slightly as if nothing had happened, averting his eyes and digressing, "...... It's nothing."

He did think at first that the orphanage was a place for child pornography, so when his [investor] said that he should protect Mu Ke and Liu Jiayi, that was Bai Liu's first thought, because from his experience, this kind of place for adopting children is very prone to this kind of thing, but very soon Bai Liu realized that it wasn't such a simple purpose. But soon Bai Liu realized that it was not such a simple purpose.

This group of dying [investors] wants something else for them.

Because if it was for a relatively straightforward purpose like [love, lust], they could have started enjoying this group of kids the first night they entered, but a day had already passed, and this group of [investors] had taken no visible action against any of them, and were still just using the phone to maintain a one-way contact.

Xiao Bai Liu was just guessing - this group of [investors] might not have figured out the purpose of buying this pile of [goods] from them.

In other words, this group of [investors] is also exploring the functionality of their pile of [goods].

Use them for charity outreach? Psychological comfort before death? Or maybe it's a kind of survivalist desperate feudal superstition - thinking that doing good deeds will prolong life?

But these [purposes] are all too subtle and indirect, Bai Liu feels that there is something more central that determines [investors] to observe and invest in them closely, and this practice of building a hospital across the street from an orphanage makes Bai Liu think of a point - for example, that they can cure diseases.

This kind of healing includes psychological self-soothing - for example, the church where they were to be baptized the next day in this [loving orphanage], which is nicely decorated and obviously has some symbolic significance, and where [the investor] might be able to seek a kind of virtual healing by praying and seeking God's refuge through doing good deeds.

But there is a more direct way of healing than this - and that is to use the group of children directly.

Little Bai Liu looked calmly at Little Mu Ke : "On the first day I came in, I knew that my role should be a medicine guide, I just didn't know which part of the medicine I was entering into, and now it seems to be blood."

Little Mu Ke shook his head incredulously, "Why didn't you run if you knew they were going to draw your blood? You were on the phone with your [investor] last night, making small talk for half an hour, are you crazy! He's not even a good person, he's a monster who sucks people's blood!"

Little Bai Liu looked at little Mu Ke's gaze a little colder: "First, the Love Welfare Center is fully closed, except for the open day we simply can't run out, second, if it wasn't for my [investor] paying me to save you last night, I wouldn't have even looked at you more than once if you had died in front of me, even if he's a monster, he's just a monster who saves your life, you'd better figure that out. "

Little Mu Ke was speechless and quickly retorted to Little Bai Liu: "He saved me for my blood too!"

"Impossible." Little Bai Liu's eyes were obscure but retorted dryly, "While I don't really understand what he's trying to do either, he did give up his own life to prioritize preserving mine and yours and Liu Jiayi's, and if he wanted to draw your blood, he could have paid me to do it for him, and you'd have been drained by me tonight. "

Little Mu Ke instantly turned pale and backed up several steps, fearfully crossing his arms over his chest in a guarding position, "You, how ...... do you do that!"

Little Bai Liu gave little Mu Ke a scattered look and suddenly stepped forward a bit nastily and spread his arms wide to intimidate little Mu Ke: "How am I? By your standards, I'm much worse than the [investor] I saved you from, ten year old Mu Ke."

Ten years old Mu Ke The little friend was so frightened that he took several steps backward and almost fell down, his tears soared out, "Ahhhhh! Don't come over! "

After wickedly scaring little Mu Ke once, little Bai Liu quickly withdrew his hands and resumed his expressionless look, "Even if all the investors here are bloodsuckers, that [investor] of mine is on our side because it's too easy for him to kill you, and he's going to help us out so you'd better listen to him and don't act rashly. "

Little Mu Ke nodded his head furiously, his heart was a little bit uncomfortable by Little Bai Liu's shock and he stammered, "Okay, okay, I know!"

Bai Liu, after making sure that Mu Ke was listening to him, turned towards the corridor and stood behind the door of the sleeping room, which had been opened by more than one thing, and looked into the corridor, and suddenly Bai Liu frowned.

In the corridor where the flute was fluttering, the doors of several rooms were open, the hanging open lamps stained with cobwebs swaying gently with the night breeze and the sound of the flute, and the sound of children's running footsteps and soft laughter coming from somewhere, echoing indistinctly in the empty corridors in the night, with a seeping, eerie feel to it.

But these are not the reasons why little Bai Liu frowns.

"Something's coming in."

Little Mu Ke hid behind little Bai Liu, he did not dare to stay alone, woke up and could not sleep, but also hardheadedly imitated little Bai Liu probe to look at the corridor, listening to little Bai Liu said so, eyes confused: "I did not see something come in ah ...... "

"You look up." Little Bai Liu spoke calmly, "On the ceiling."

After hearing Xiao Bai Liu's words, Xiao Mu Ke was stuck for a moment, and like a machine with a rusty neck, he raised his head stiffly and slowly.

The promenade of the orphanage was a deep, high arch type over a meter wide, tall and narrow, and it was painted with many colorful oil paintings of animals, and in the night all these animals that looked hidden looked ghostly, as if they had the light of a real carnivore in their eyes, and that was generally what little Mu Ke was most afraid of at night, but now there was something more frightening to him than these animals --

These oil paintings are dangling like bats with children who are wrapped in blood-dried infusion bags and tubes, densely wrapped around the children while the needles of the tubes are sticking into the walls, and they rely on these constantly moving and migrating needles of the tubes sticking into the walls to move forward.

These children were like little Mu Ke in his dream, they had been completely sucked dry, the skin on their faces was all wrinkled and dry, sticking to their skulls like a piece of sun-dried orange peel, their arms and legs were thin and thin, like malnourished and deformed macropods, their eyes looked black and white and big and scary on their dried out faces, because the eyelids had shriveled up, and you could see protruding out of their faces the complete with half an eye.

Translucent infusion bags of various colors wrapped around them like a floral dress while they were playing the flute.

But the flute they were playing was not a regular flute, but a very long and large syringe, with holes drilled in it for a harp, the walls of which were still stained with dried crusts of blood, and which made a flute sound of strange pitch under the thin, dry skin of their mouths.

"The Colorful Flute Players." Bai Liu Jr. seems enlightened, "So it turns out that the reason I didn't see any flute players yesterday but felt like the sound of the flute was everywhere in all directions was because these flute players were on the ceiling of the house."

Little Mu Ke's legs went weak as he watched, and he tugged at the corner of Little Bai Liu's clothes: "I, let's go back to bed."

Little Bai Liu didn't care about Little Mu Ke at all, he looked up for a while at the group of flute-playing children, and after seeing them go into the doors of different open bedrooms, he lightly followed them out, Little Mu Ke was about to faint when he watched them, but he was afraid to be left alone in the bedrooms with the doors wide open, and in the end, Little Mu Ke cried without any tears and followed Little Bai Liu, who was still shivering like an irreverent follower. He was shivering, like an ungrateful follower.

After the group of flute-playing children had entered the different sleeping rooms, they rolled their large eyeballs as if they were going to fall out of their sockets the next second, stood on the ceiling, screwed their heads with a click at an angle almost parallel to the floor, and tilted their heads to observe the children slumbering below them.

Little Bai Liu hides sideways next to the half-open door, not going in, leaning slightly to watch through the crack to see what the bunch of flute-playing kids are up to.

The child on the ceiling walked around the sleeping room, and it cocked its head right above each sleeping child to take a serious look, and finally stopped on a sleeping child, as if it had finally locked on to its target, it slowly dropped the tentacle-like infusion tube from its body, and gently lifted up the quilt of this child.

Mu Ke was breathless, covering his mouth for fear of screaming.

Soon the boy awoke, apparently from the same horrible dream that Mu Ke had brought on by the sound of the flute, his face still tear-stained and panicked, and he almost screamed out in horror at the sight of such a horrible child all at once, but his mouth was muffled by the feeding tube.

The child on the ceiling seemed to gesture something to the waking child with the IV tube, and soon the child broke into a smile, quickly jumped out of bed and put on his shoes, and followed this child on the ceiling, and little Liu Bai quickly retreated back into his room and closed the door, leaving only a small crack in the door to watch the scene in the hallway.

Each flute-playing child who entered a different sleeping-room came out with a smiling child, and the child on the ceiling played a flute in a queer key with a syringe, and the children on the floor hummed in a line and went out after one another, like the scene which little Bai Liu had seen yesterday.

But suddenly the procession stopped, all the children on the ceiling suddenly tilted their heads through that doorway, staring with their dead eyes at Little Bai Liu peeping at them behind the doorway, and Little Mu Ke hiding behind Little Bai Liu frantically tugging at the corner of Little Bai Liu's coat, looking at Little Bai Liu with a look of horror that was about to burst out in tears.

Mu Ke Jr. covered his mouth to control himself from crying out as he shook his hand and slowly pointed above their heads.

As soon as Bai Liu was quiet, he slowly looked up and saw a child above him with his head tilted, a pair of eyes the size of ping pong balls on a wrinkled, blackened face, staring at him in disbelief and disbelief.

This child should have just come in from the ceiling when Little Bai Liu went out, the IV tube right below it is still wrapped around the head of a child, this child and Little Bai Liu they are in the same bedroom, was also sleeping, now wrapped in the IV tube under the face with a strange smile looking at Little Bai Liu and Mu Ke.

Little Bai Liu slowly opened the door to let them out, the kid bounced away, the kid on the ceiling possessed and watched Little Bai Liu and Mu Ke, who was shivering and weeping with his mouth covered, for a moment, caressing them with his IV tube as if confirming something, and then finally rustled back his own IV tube and stepped on the ceiling expressionlessly and left.

The flute sounded again in the corridor, whimpering through the bloodstained syringes, and faded away in time with the humming voices of the children who had been taken away, echoing ethereally through the corridor and disappearing at the end of it.

Bai Liu Jr. quickly unlocked the door to his sleeping room from inside the door after checking that there were indeed no monsters on the ceiling.

Little Mu Ke completely deflated soft to the ground, he covered his heart mouth hard to exhale and exhale, adjusting the heart rate, just now he was really almost scared to death, but when Little Mu Ke slowed down and turned his head to look, Little Bai Liu seems to be nothing happened as if he was already lying on the bed and lifted up the quilt to cover himself ready to go to sleep.

It wasn't at all like the monster had just almost taken him.

Little Mu Ke was speechless and devastated as he walked over to Little Bai Liu's bedside and lowered his voice to accuse him, "We were almost captured just now! Can you think before you rush out next time!"

Little Bai Liu covered the quilt eyes closed, little Mu Ke came over to scold him, he did not open his eyes, but salty explanation, "will not take us, I have observed before, this flute take away the child is very directional."

He had noticed this while observing yesterday, this flute was indiscriminately hypnotizing all the children, but only so many were taken in the end, and before that Bai Liu Jr. had wondered how it was done; his door had not been opened by the flute yesterday, and he had been observing the corridor through the window from his sleeping quarters, and had a limited line of sight, and so he had not seen this group of children on the ceiling.

And there were no flute-playing children who entered the sleeping quarters where Bai Liu was yesterday, so he is not sure how these children locked in on the way they took the children.

But Bai Liu felt he needed to find out, after all, that [investor] of his would be very interested in this information, that's why Bai Liu ventured out.

"But, even if it's directed, how do you know that we're not the kind of kids being taken away?" In fact, little Mu Ke also sensed this, that this group of [flute-playing children] were obviously looking for children who fit a certain profile to take away, but the problem was that they didn't know what the criteria for this kind of other party's selection of children was.

Little Mu Ke queried with wrinkled eyebrows, "Our door was open tonight too, which means we have kids in our room tonight that are eligible to be taken as well, so how do you know we're not?"

"Because it's Tuesday." Little Bai Liu finally relented and lifted her eyelids to look at little Mu Ke, "It's just our baptism day, so we won't be taken away."