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...’