Chapter 215: Dealing With It
When the four of them walked into the lobby, the hotel staff were already prepared.
“Why was it so noisy just now?” Wang Ruoyan looked around curiously and casually asked a staff member who was standing nearby, “And I think I heard someone crying?”
“We were just having a meeting earlier,” the staff member said with a somewhat forced smile. “The hotel might be closing soon. Some of us are very attached to this place, so a few coworkers were feeling emotional.”
“Closing down?” Wang Ruoyan sat down at one of the round tables, crossed her legs, and mumbled, “Business doesn’t seem that bad though?”
Earlier, Li Mu had seen a staff member stuff a headless chef under this very table. She looked nervously at Wang Ruoyan’s legs, afraid she might accidentally kick the body.
“What’s there to eat at the buffet?” Lin Yuanyuan looked toward the half-open kitchen. “It doesn’t seem like anything’s ready?”
“You can tell us what you’d like to eat, our chefs will cook it fresh for you.”
“This is... a buffet?” Lin Yuanyuan was surprised. She had never seen this kind of buffet before.
Usually, a buffet means all the food is set out for people to take themselves, or it’s brought to the table after you order. She had never heard of a buffet where they cook exactly what you ask for on the spot.
But she didn’t question it. In fact, she looked quite happy and asked, “Then can I have... barbecue?”
“We can do teppanyaki, is that okay?” The staff member nodded. “And what about the other three of you?”
“I’ll have stir-fried noodles.”
“Do you have porridge? I’d like the kind with preserved egg and pork.”
Li Mu shook her head. “I’m not hungry. I just came with them.”
It was a good thing she did come. If the other three girls had seen what happened in the lobby earlier, they probably would’ve been scared out of their minds.
Even though the chefs didn’t seem ready, the food they asked for wasn’t too difficult to make.
Li Mu yawned with nothing to do and took out her phone to read a web novel, but today’s chapter wasn’t updated yet. Feeling bored, she turned to the staff member and asked, “Why is the hotel closing?”
“I heard the boss got into some trouble in the past, and it just came to light recently. So now the hotel might be shut down because of it.”
“Huh? What kind of trouble?”
The staff member shook their head. “We’re not sure. But once the hotel closes, we don’t know where we’ll go.”
Wang Ruoyan, who was watching the kitchen, suddenly turned and said, “It’s not like this is the only hotel in town. Just go work at another one.”
“Our situation is a little different.”
“Really? I don’t see anything special about it.”
Chen Li suddenly poked Wang Ruoyan’s arm and whispered, “I just saw one of the chefs having a hard time using his hand while cooking.”
“He can’t use his hand properly and he’s still working as a chef?”
Wang Ruoyan looked toward the kitchen again, and sure enough, one of the chefs cooking teppanyaki noodles didn’t seem very steady. His right hand was shaking a lot, and he could barely hold the spatula.
Not only that, another chef had trouble walking. Just to grab something nearby, he had to use both hands to support himself on the counter and slowly inch his way over.
Suddenly it all made sense to her, and she felt deep respect for the hotel’s boss.
She lowered her voice and said quietly to the others, “So this hotel hires a lot of disabled people, huh?”
Chen Li nodded with understanding. “No wonder she said if this place closes, they won’t know where else to go.”
Li Mu almost didn’t catch on. She stared at them, confused.
What the heck? Disabled people?
They’re not even human, okay?
She grumbled in her heart but kept asking the staff, “Is your boss usually really nice to all of you?”
“Mm-hmm,” the young lady staff member just nodded, then walked over to the kitchen and brought out the late-night snacks.
Li Mu wasn’t hungry at first, but when she saw the fried noodles on the teppanyaki grill and smelled the delicious scent, her stomach suddenly started to burn with hunger, and her mouth filled with saliva.
She quickly turned her head away and tried not to look at the food. She had already eaten a lot earlier in the evening. If she ate again now, she was afraid she’d gain weight.
Just then, her phone suddenly rang.
She answered and heard Chen Yi’s voice.
“Come to the lobby on the first floor. We need to talk about something.”
“Okay.”
She stood up. “I need to go out for a bit. You all can head back after you finish eating.”
Chen Li looked surprised and quickly grabbed Li Mu’s arm, looking a bit scared. “But...”
She had been really frightened earlier. Right now, the lights in the lobby made her feel a little better, but thinking about walking back through the dark halls scared her again.
Especially since Li Mu had just scared her on purpose not long ago.
Li Mu thought for a second and then said, “If you’re scared, ask the staff to walk you back.”
She turned to the young lady staff member, who nodded. Seeing that, Chen Li let go of Li Mu’s sleeve and said, “Alright then.”
When Li Mu got to the first floor, she saw a few people sitting or standing around a couch in the hotel lobby. The hotel manager she had seen earlier was also among them.
She gave a confused look to Yu Fan, who was also there, as if asking what was going on.
After she walked over, Chen Yi spoke.
“Just now, the hotel manager was arrested. The hotel will go through bankruptcy and its things will be sold to pay back the victims from years ago.”
Since Li Mu and Yu Fan were the ones who reported the issue, Chen Yi was telling them how it would be handled.
But Li Mu couldn’t wait and asked, “What about the staff?”
Chen Yi paused. Everyone around looked helpless and unsure what to say. “We’ll just have to feed and take care of them as best we can.”
“After all, we can’t just let them keep walking around in dead bodies. So in about a month, when their bodies rot, all the ghosts will be collected and managed together.”
One or two ghosts would be fine, but having dozens of them? That was a real headache.
Ghosts are tricky. They can’t really be locked up unless you destroy them or help them let go of their regrets. Otherwise, they can walk through walls. There's no real way to keep them in.
For a short time, you can fool them into staying, but after a while, they’d probably all escape.
This plan was barely acceptable.
“Don’t we have a special department just for handling ghosts?” Yu Fan suddenly asked.
A middle-aged man nearby shook his head. “Normally the police handle it. Ghosts aren’t very common, and when they gather in large numbers like this, it’s usually because of a criminal group. In the past, we just wiped them out.”
Li Mu realized then that the man was from the police.
“What do you mean by ‘collect and manage’ them?” she asked.
“We’ll make some space in the prisons...” The police officer glanced at Li Mu, sighed, and said, “Actually, prisons have everything they need. Food, safety, and we won’t treat them like normal prisoners. They just won’t be allowed to leave the prison grounds.”
“We’ll also give them some things for fun... But this is the first time we’ve done this, so we’ll need about a month to get everything ready.”
“If possible, maybe in the future these ghosts can even do some kind of work. But for now, this is just a plan we came up with. We still have to wait for the higher-ups to decide.”
It didn’t sound too bad.
Li Mu felt a little more at ease, but she still thought it wasn’t fair to take away the hotel workers’ lives like that.
And the hotel manager seemed to know something about the ghost living inside her. She had been hoping to ask him about it... but now, he had already been taken away.