Rust-Colored Stethoscope

A new story is here! To find his younger sister Lin Wan, who has been missing for ninety-three days, Lin Shen sneaks into the abandoned First Municipal Hospital in the middle of the night. The half of a note marked “3:17” and a strange stethoscope symbol left behind by his sister before she disappeared are his only clues. The hospital reeks of a putrid mixture of formaldehyde and rust. Waist-high weeds coil around rusted IV stands, shards of glass glint coldly in standing water, and signs marked “3F” hang at every stairwell, as if the building were an endless maze. On the second floor, he finds an IV bottle bearing his sister’s signature. The writing on the bottle looks like a face in tears. In the third-floor nurses’ station register, the number “317” is smeared in blood-red ink beside a record showing that his sister checked out a stethoscope the day before she disappeared. Even more chilling, a dark red stethoscope that should have been sealed away by the police lies on the glass counter. The stains on its rubber tubing match the marks on his sister’s employee badge exactly. When Lin Shen touches the stethoscope, slippered footsteps sound in the corridor. A figure in a nurse’s uniform appears. She has the same scar as his sister, but a mole at the corner of her left eye, while his sister’s is at the right. Her hoarse whisper of “Big brother” freezes him on the spot. During his escape, he finds the coat his father left behind when he disappeared five years ago. The first page of the notebook in its inner pocket reads: “At 3:17, time repeats, but there is only one truth.” At last, aboard a truck, Lin Shen opens the notebook and discovers his sister’s surgical record tucked inside, dated 2023.10.17 at 3:17. Just then, an unknown text message arrives on his phone: in the photo, the notebook in his hands is lying on the glass counter at the third-floor nurses’ station. The mystery of 3:17, the secret of the rust-colored stethoscope