"What happened?"
More and more people were gathering in the fifth-floor hallway. Tenants were rushing over from all directions. Chen Ge pulled Wen Qing into a corner — the last thing they needed was to get involved in whatever was going on.
Xiang Nuan's blood door hadn't disappeared. When Chen Ge had entered the door, the monster from the living room had followed him through.
At the time, he'd tried to close the door, but he wasn't a "door pusher" and couldn't shut a blood door no matter what he did.
Now Chen Ge suspected that the killer was the monster that had followed him inside, but within the apartment building, he was the only one who knew the monster existed.
"I need to find a way to guide the tenants into discovering that monster." Looking at the blood-soaked room, Chen Ge took a quiet breath. To be this brazen behind someone else's door — the monster from the Cursed Hospital clearly had something backing it up.
"The Cursed Hospital must have started studying doors a long time ago. They understand 'doors' far better than I do. The world behind the door that seems like death at every turn to me might look entirely different from their perspective."
The Cursed Hospital had probably cultivated a great many monsters — like the Smiling One, for instance.
These monsters had lost themselves, stripped of their humanity, forever smiling, forever despised. They were perfectly suited to the environment behind doors.
Standing in the corner, Chen Ge listened to the neighbors' discussions while racking his brains for a plan.
"It makes perfect sense that an outsider would kill. The stairwell doors are locked — no one can leave this building. So he needs an absolutely safe room to hide in. Kill the occupant, and he can stay hidden in that room indefinitely, using it as a base to search the entire building at his leisure."
This one incident alone showed just how differently Chen Ge and the Cursed Hospital operated. The Cursed Hospital was far more ruthless. In their eyes, the 'people' behind these doors weren't people at all — as long as the outcome benefited them, killing was trivially acceptable.
"The monster from the Cursed Hospital had a good plan, but something must have gone wrong during the execution, forcing them to abandon this room and choose another." At this thought, Chen Ge looked toward the girl clutching the corpse inside. "Could the Cursed Hospital have abandoned this room because of that girl?"
Using his Yin Eye, Chen Ge couldn't find anything unusual about the girl. She looked frail and weak, with no apparent threat whatsoever.
"Make way! Stop blocking the path!" While Chen Ge was thinking, a young man's voice rang out from the sixth floor.
He turned to look. A disheveled young man was rushing down from the sixth floor, more frantic than any other neighbor who'd come running.
"Yan'er!" The young man shouted an unfamiliar name, and the girl inside the room cried even harder upon hearing his voice.
The young man pushed through the crowd and reached the door of 504. The moment he saw the scene, he froze, standing rooted to the threshold as all the strength seemed to drain from his body inch by inch.
"Brother..." The girl's face was streaked with blood and tears — a sight that was both pitiful and terrifying.
"What the hell happened?" The young man entered the room and dropped to his knees beside the middle-aged man's corpse. His body trembled uncontrollably, as though he couldn't believe what he was seeing.
The girl had finally found someone to lean on. Through her sobs, she began recounting what had just happened.
The girl was named Qu Yan. She and her father, Qu Gui, lived in Room 504. Her older brother, Qu Ying, lived in Room 601 with his girlfriend.
Qu Yan usually went to bed early, and since her father snored terribly, she always closed her bedroom door at night.
But just a short while ago, she'd been sound asleep when she heard strange noises in her room — something like a mouse gnawing at the wardrobe, or something crawling under the bed.
Qu Yan was very timid. She immediately turned on her bedside lamp.
Nothing in the room seemed to have changed, but she still couldn't fall back asleep. Her mind kept racing through one fearful thought after another, convinced someone was hiding in the wardrobe or under the bed.
Tossing and turning, growing more afraid by the minute, Qu Yan finally grabbed her blanket and left her room to find her father.
She knocked on her father's bedroom door and told him she was scared, that it felt like someone else had gotten into the apartment.
Qu Gui gave her a few perfunctory words of comfort, not taking the child's fears seriously. When Qu Yan refused to go back to her own room, he eventually just let her sleep in his bedroom.