54. Investigating Ma En (Seeking Follow-up Reads~)

"Dr. Liu." Ren Shizhi sat in a private booth of the cafe, looking at the female physician across from him, and asked, "You spent two years with Roan in the hospital, didn't you?"

"I am no longer a doctor." Liu Yujun shook her head. "But you are right. Ever since I became Dr. Lee's assistant two years ago, I have had contact with Roan. However, he was not someone keen on socializing, so apart from a few psychological rehabilitation sessions, we never really exchanged more than a few words."

Of course, she had no interest in an ordinary person like Roan either. She had attempted to approach a few wealthy individuals instead, but none of them showed any interest in her.

Ren Shizhi nodded slightly.

"That's fine. My main purpose is not to understand his personality or hobbies.

"Still, I must ask, do you have any general impressions of Roan?"

Liu Yujun pondered for a moment.

"He didn't usually interact much with others, but sometimes he would secretly glance at other patients—for instance, a young girl who was discharged around the same time as him."

"Ning Changkong?" Ren Shizhi said with a curious expression.

"Yes, exactly her." Liu Yujun nodded repeatedly. "There were a few others in the past, but I didn't pay particular attention to them at the time. Most of them have already been discharged, or were reassigned to other attending physicians after Dr. Lee's death."

Ren Shizhi continued to ask:

"What about Dr. Lee? Did he have any thoughts on Roan?"

Liu Yujun recalled:

"Him? Dr. Lee was a senior colleague worthy of respect, but—well, let's just put it this way: he wouldn't share his opinions on patients with me, and the content of our conversations was strictly limited to work.

"However, I never handled Roan's financial matters. That is to say, even if there was some transaction between them, I am completely unaware of it."

By now, Liu Yujun had faintly sensed that Roan was far from the ordinary person she had imagined him to be.

Otherwise, the man sitting across from her would not have sought her out, let alone offered as much as one hundred thousand Federal dollars. If Roan wasn't some wanted fugitive, he must possess a special status beyond anything she could possibly imagine.

"Then do you think he was a schizophrenia patient?" Ren Shizhi asked. "That's what the medical record says."

The former doctor, Liu Yujun, shook her head.

"No, he didn't exhibit any typical characteristics of schizophrenia. Of course, that could easily be explained as the normal condition after taking medication, but if you insist, the possibility that Roan was faking his illness definitely exists.

"Most patients admitted to the high-end ward of the Victor Sanatorium are not severely ill. For clients with genuinely obvious problems, we have dedicated, isolated areas."

Ren Shizhi nodded thoughtfully.

"In other words, it is entirely possible that he had no mental health issues whatsoever and was hospitalized for some other reason."

"Well..." Liu Yujun frowned slightly. "Although he lacked the common symptoms of schizophrenia, he did display some abnormal behaviors at times. After all, the therapeutic standards in the high-end ward of the Victor Sanatorium are world-class."

Ren Shizhi smiled and said:

"If he wanted to pose as a schizophrenia patient, would he try doing some unusual things?"

Moreover, supernatural beings frequently did bizarre things. In reality, this was simply because ordinary people sometimes failed to comprehend the motives driving their actions.

What they saw was different.

"That's one way to put it." Liu Yujun stopped trying to defend her professional judgment as a doctor. "Yet he didn't really do anything unusual here."

The corners of Ren Shizhi's mouth curled up slightly.

That was because he hadn't entered the sanatorium to accomplish something, but rather to hide from something.

"Dr. Liu, do you think Dr. Lee was the kind of person who would commit suicide?" Ren Shizhi asked. He did not suspect this was Roan's doing, though the possibility of a connection could not be entirely ruled out.

"I have no idea." Liu Yujun spoke the honest truth. "No one truly understood someone like Dr. Lee. Do you know how much he had in bank savings? If I had even a tenth of his wealth, I would have retired and enjoyed life long ago.

"Yet he didn't spend a single cent on himself; all his expenses came from completely legal income. Tell me, how am I supposed to judge whether a person like that would commit suicide?"

Ren Shizhi skipped over the question.

"What about Lü Yide?"

This was what he truly wanted to ask.

Liu Yujun froze visibly for a few seconds.

"I don't know." Realizing her reaction, she quickly shook her head. "He hadn't been hospitalized for very long; how could I possibly know his thoughts?"

Ren Shizhi merely gazed at her calmly.

Facing his gaze, Liu Yujun swallowed nervously, somewhat at a loss for words.

"It's fine," he said gently. "Lü Hucai already died of a heart attack two days ago. No one else knows about this... but if you refuse to answer, things might not be quite so simple."

"I know you took the money."

Under his scrutiny, Liu Yujun felt her entire body trembling slightly, her mind uncontrollably flooding with terrifying imaginations of her future fate.

"I, I..." she said, on the verge of a breakdown, "I've already returned the money! I didn't..."

"Calm down," Ren Shizhi said. "As long as you are honest enough, no one will ever know about this."

Liu Yujun felt as though his words possessed a magical quality. Upon hearing the word "calm," she actually stopped trembling and stuttering, gradually realizing that the truth was indeed as he stated.

Lü Hucai was dead; who would ever come to trouble her?

"Hoo," she let out a long breath. "Lü Yide might have committed suicide. He had two personalities, and the kind one claimed he wanted to kill his other personality to avenge a deceased girl."

"Is that true?" Ren Shizhi said earnestly. "Think carefully about the details at the time. Were there any other suspicious aspects? You might want to consider Roan's influence on the matter."

She blinked, following his prompt to carefully recall the scene at the time. The knowledge she had acquired during her studies and Lü Yide's subtle micro-expressions suddenly rose to the surface.

"However, Lü Yide's father wasn't worried at all that he might actually commit suicide. He didn't make any demands of us regarding that. Moreover, according to Lü Yide himself, his father probably knew about it as well.

"Besides, dissociative identity disorder is a self-defense mechanism, but based on my observations of his two personalities, he didn't really fit that pattern...

"He didn't actually suffer from dissociative identity disorder!"

Liu Yujun stated with absolute certainty.

At that moment, a belated realization hit her, and she asked:

"Just who on earth is Roan?"

"That is not something you should ask." Ren Shizhi looked calmly into her eyes. "I will wire you another five hundred thousand. Leave this city and do not return. You must remember...

"If you mention our conversation today to a single soul, you will die silently. Understand?"

His tone did not sound like a threat; it was closer to a simple statement of fact.

Liu Yujun nodded in a daze.