The security chief pulled up the tistamp and began the playback.
Dr. Wei stood behind him, hands gripping the back of the chair, knuckles white, eyes fixed on the screen.
The neonatal specialist’s face had gone completely pale, all color drained away as if soone had pulled a plug.
His hands gripped the desk edge so hard his knuckles had gone white, tendons standing out like cables under his skin.
Security personnel worked frantically at keyboards, pulling up recordings from multiple angles, rewinding, playing, rewinding again.
The first cara angle showed the specialised incubator in the neonatal intensive care unit.
The premature infant lay inside, barely moving, connected to a maze of tubes and wires.
Peaceful.
Still.
Alive.
Then....
The green glow began.
Soft at first. Barely noticeable.
But growing.
Brighter.
Brighter still.
In the footage, the dical staff on duty stumbled backward, hands flying up to shield their eyes from the intensifying radiance.
One nurse tripped over a supply cart in her haste to back away.
The light grew until it filled the entire cara fra, washing out the image.
The cara lenses themselves began distorting violently, the picture fracturing into geotric patterns, static interference crawling across the screen.
Then, for exactly 1.7 seconds according to the tistamp....
The infant’s tiny body seed to *dissolve.*
Flesh beca light.
Form beca energy.
The baby’s physical form unraveled into swirling jade luminescence that condensed rapidly, compressing down and down and down until it beca a single point.
A floating stone.
Perfectly spherical.
Glowing like a captured star.
And then....
It simply *vanished.*
Not shattered. Not faded gradually.
Just... *gone.*
Ceased to exist in that space entirely.
No door had opened.
No window had been breached.
No person had entered or exited the sealed intensive care unit.
No physical movent had occurred that could explain the disappearance.
The stone had simply stopped being there.
The room fell into horrified, stunned silence as the video ended.
Twenty dical professionals and security personnel stared at the frozen final fra showing an empty incubator where a living infant had been monts before.
"That’s..." The hospital administrator’s voice was weak, thready. "That’s been edited. It has to be edited. So kind of digital manipulation....."
The head of security shook his head slowly, his face gray. "Sir, we’ve checked. All three separate cara systems, hospital security, the neonatal unit’s dedicated monitoring, and the backup system, all show identical distortion patterns. Identical tistamps. Identical... everything."
He pulled up split-screen views showing all three angles simultaneously.
All three showed the sa impossible event.
"There are no digital artefacts that would indicate tampering," the security chief continued, his voice shaking slightly. "No signs of video editing. No unexplained gaps in the tiline. Whatever happened...."
He swallowed hard.
"According to every technical analysis we can perform, what we’re seeing is *real.*"
Before anyone could respond, before anyone could even begin to process that statent....
The waiting room doors exploded inward with violent force.
Lin Feng stord inside like a man possessed, his expensive suit rumpled and stained, his carefully styled hair dishevelled, his face twisted with an expression sowhere between rage and utter desperation.
Madam Chen followed imdiately behind him, sobbing hysterically, barely able to walk, clinging to her husband’s arm for support.
"WHERE IS MY GRANDSON?!" Madam Chen scread, her voice raw and broken. "WHERE IS HE?!"
Doctors and nurses rushed forward, hands raised in placating gestures, trying to calm the situation before it escalated further.
"Ma’am, please, we’re investigating....."
"Investigating?!" Lin Feng roared, his voice carrying enough force to make people flinch. He grabbed the nearest doctor by the collar of his white coat and slamd him back against the reception desk. "You *lost* a newborn child! A living infant! Inside a supposedly *sealed* intensive care ward!"
"Sir, please let go...."
"My daughter is dying in there!" Lin Feng’s voice cracked. "She chose to save that baby’s life instead of her own! And you’re telling you *lost him?!*"
Lu Cheng and Mrs. Lu arrived monts later, their entrance quieter but sohow infinitely more nacing than the Lin family’s explosive arrival.
Where Lin Feng and Madam Chen were loud, chaotic, drowning in emotion.....
Lu Cheng and Mrs. Lu were *cold.*
Controlled.
Deadly.
Lu Cheng’s gaze swept the chaos with lethal stillness, taking in every detail: the cowering dical staff, the security monitors still displaying that impossible footage, Lin Feng with his hands on the doctor’s collar.
When he spoke, his voice was quiet. Almost conversational.
"I want answers."
The two words cut through the noise like a knife.
The room went silent.
Everyone turned to look at him.
Mrs. Lu stood beside her husband, ramrod straight in her expensive designer dress, not a hair out of place despite the late hour. Her voice when she spoke was trembling, not with grief, but with barely controlled fury that made it sohow more terrifying than screaming would have been.
"That child is the Lu family heir," she said, each word precisely enunciated. "Our grandson. Our son’s only child. If anything has happened to him, if he has been hard in any way due to negligence or incompetence....."
She didn’t finish the threat.
She didn’t need to.
The implications hung in the air, sharp and clear.
The Lu family had enough wealth to buy this hospital ten tis over. Enough power to destroy careers, ruin reputations, and bury institutions under legal and financial warfare.
Madam Chen, still sobbing, suddenly lunged forward and struck one of the nurses across the face with her open palm.
The slap echoed like a gunshot.
"You monsters!" Madam Chen shrieked. "You killed him! You let him die! My grandson, my daughter’s baby...."
"Ma’am, we did not....."
Security personnel rushed in, trying to separate Madam Chen from the nursing staff before she could strike again.
Lin Feng had to be physically restrained by three security guards as he tried to force his way past the reception desk toward the neonatal ward, shouting incoherently about incompetence and lawsuits and criminal charges.
Accusations flew.
Shouting escalated.
Soone shoved soone else.
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