"Hey! Wake up!"
The woman's eyes slowly fluttered open and she sat bolt upright in bed. "Where's Xiang Nuan?!"
"Calm down first. Do you remember who I am?"
"Chen Ge?"
"Where did we first meet?"
"The dam at Donggang Reservoir. What's wrong? Xiang Nuan is gone — we need to go find him!" The woman was growing frantic, but Chen Ge stood rooted to the spot.
"What two words did I say before Xiang Nuan stopped crying?"
"I couldn't hear clearly. It was something like… Netherborn?"
"One last question — why would I kill Xiang Nuan?" Chen Ge stared intently at the woman's face. His final question stunned her into silence.
"You want to kill Xiang Nuan?"
"So you're not a monster from behind the door pretending to be her." The woman's reaction was perfectly normal. Chen Ge didn't bother explaining why he'd asked those questions. He turned and walked out of the bedroom, checking the front door first.
Windows and doors were all sealed. Only he and Xiang Nuan's mother were inside.
"Every time I enter another child's world behind the door, a black iron door reeking of disinfectant appears behind me. But when I entered this door, I never saw that black iron door. From the moment I stepped through the Blood Door to the instant I opened my eyes — what exactly happened?" Chen Ge was pondering silently when the woman's voice suddenly reached him.
"How did I fall asleep so suddenly? Where's Xiang Nuan? I vaguely remember him walking through a door, and I followed him in." The woman clutched her head — she simply couldn't recall what had happened after that.
"You're remarkably reckless. That door is one only the dead or the dying walk through."
"Does that mean my son is dying? Those death notices were real?" The woman grew agitated again. It was clear she was genuinely worried about Xiang Nuan.
"Stop worrying about Xiang Nuan for now. Let me help you sort out the logic. If we want to find Xiang Nuan, don't we first need to make sure we survive? If we die, doesn't Xiang Nuan's chance of survival drop too?" Chen Ge felt he needed to lay this out clearly first — if she did something impulsive and they both ended up in danger, it would be catastrophic.
"Mm."
"We can only find Xiang Nuan if we're alive. So in order to keep living, you need to listen to me from now on. Don't act on impulse." Chen Ge kept his voice low. "This world isn't like the real one. Think of it as Xiang Nuan's nightmare."
"Nightmare?"
"Even though it's a nightmare, if you die here, you really die." Chen Ge gave the woman a brief rundown of how the world behind the door worked.
"But it feels no different from reality to me."
"When you can tell the difference, that's when we'll be in danger." Chen Ge stood in the room and swung the bone crusher. He discovered that his stamina drained remarkably fast behind this door — even casual movement left him gasping, as though something were clinging to his back and frantically siphoning away his vitality.
"If it's this dangerous, what's Xiang Nuan supposed to do all alone?"
"I know you want to save Xiang Nuan, but remember this: only by keeping yourself alive can you bring Xiang Nuan back. I won't repeat that, so burn it into your memory." Chen Ge took a deep breath. "There's something else I need to tell you. If we run into danger and I can save you, I will. But if I genuinely can't, I'll leave on my own."
Chen Ge was blunt. The woman heard him out and nodded, then said softly, "Thank you. The fact that you followed Xiang Nuan and me through that door already means a great deal. Because of Xiang Nuan, you've been dragged into this too. I'm truly sorry."
Hearing her say that, Chen Ge didn't quite know how to respond. She seemed to have gotten the wrong idea — treating him as an innocent bystander who'd been dragged into their mess.
"Let's drop this subject. The world behind the door is dangerous, but it's not without a way out. You know Xiang Nuan better than anyone — you're familiar with all of his memories. That's extremely useful for us." The world behind the door was woven from the door-pusher's memories. Exploring the scenes meant decoding the door-pusher's experience of despair. With Xiang Nuan's mother to help this time, Chen Ge felt he should be able to steer clear of most of the dangers.
"Let's start exploring this room. Look around for anything that differs from the real world." Chen Ge stepped out of the bedroom and rummaged through every item in his backpack. He found two strange things.
The desperate, bloody diary entries in
The other thing involved the red high heels. Every other item was coated in a layer of dust, but the red high heels were the exception. Faint black patterns were converging across their blood-red surface.
"The red high heels are barely restrained behind this door. Is it because she devoured so many of the Netherborn's curses?"
The Netherborn had chosen a total of nine children, and the red high heels had consumed the curses from behind the doors of more than half of them. In Ying Tong's world behind the door in particular, her power had undergone a qualitative leap.
"This is the only good news right now." Chen Ge was about to check elsewhere when a voice suddenly came from the bedroom.
"Chen Ge! All the chopsticks I put under Xiang Nuan's bed are gone!"
At the sound of her voice, Chen Ge hurried back into the bedroom. He saw Wen Qing crouching beside Xiang Nuan's bed, one hand lifting the bedsheet. Beneath the bed was completely empty — nothing at all.
"What do those chopsticks represent to Xiang Nuan?"
"I don't know. That child can't communicate with people or express himself. He seems to have always lived in a world where only he exists."
"Apart from the chopsticks, did you find anything else?" Chen Ge picked up the white cat and took out the medical records from the Cursed Hospital, wanting the cat to memorize the scent of the paper. Unfortunately, the white cat showed no reaction.
"The death notices written for Xiang Nuan are gone too. And the schoolbag I bought for him…"
"Schoolbag?"
"Mm. The first time I took Xiang Nuan to the special education school, I bought him a schoolbag. That day I truly believed everything was going to get better."
"So the schoolbag might represent some kind of hopeful yearning. Then what do the chopsticks represent? Why are these two things missing from the room?"
After thinking for a long time without an answer, Chen Ge gave up. He carefully searched the small apartment and found the front door key and a fruit knife.
Chen Ge pocketed the key and handed the knife to Wen Qing. "Take this for self-defense."
Aside from the knife and the key, Chen Ge found no clues Xiang Nuan had left behind, nor anything related to the Cursed Hospital.
"Unsmiling must have entered the world behind the door too. They might have appeared somewhere else — if only I could find them sooner." All fierce ghosts were bound by the constraints of the world behind the door. The ones from the Cursed Hospital were either unable to appear right now or had lost most of their abilities, putting them on roughly the same level as Chen Ge. This was the perfect opportunity to eliminate them.
"This room should be safe. Next we go outside. Stay behind me, and no matter what you see, don't say anything recklessly."