The underground structure of Xinhai Central Hospital was extremely complex, with vast interior spaces. Twisted writing could be seen everywhere.
The air was thick with the pungent smell of disinfectant. Discarded hospital gowns stained with filth and all manner of trash littered the floors. At the intersections of corridors, the occasional "No Entry" sign could still be spotted, though the wooden boards had rotted away and bore hideous scratch marks gouged out by fingernails.
"Why can't I see a single person? Could Xiao Sun have done this? But even if Xiao Sun is powerful, there's no way he could clear out the entire hospital!"
Chen Ge walked a long way through the underground passages before coming upon room after room of unlocked wards. Only then did he realize that every door in the entire hospital seemed to be unlocked — they could all be pushed open and examined directly.
He didn't know what this meant, only that something felt deeply wrong.
"Be careful of the 'doors.'"
The atmosphere in the hospital grew increasingly bizarre. That sense of oppression gradually intensified, as though the building they were in was plummeting ever deeper into an abyss, and no one inside could escape.
"Further ahead is the isolation ward. Everyone who's brought into the hospital — doctors and patients alike — is sent to the isolation ward first." Xue Rong's eyeballs rolled in their sockets, her pupils crawling with bloodshot veins.
"Then you must have been sent to the isolation ward too, back then. Do you remember what was in it?" Chen Ge suspected the hospital's killing blow was hidden in the isolation ward.
"The isolation ward is mainly for observing patients — helping them recognize themselves. Once their condition stabilizes somewhat, they're released." Xue Rong didn't answer what was inside the isolation ward, merely describing its function.
"How does a normal person 'recognize' themselves again? Someone who was never sick to begin with — how does their condition 'stabilize somewhat'?" Chen Ge's brow furrowed. "What's actually in the isolation ward?"
He didn't tell Xue Rong that he had discovered Xiao Sun was somewhere inside.
"I truly can't remember. After I left the isolation ward, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't recall what happened in there." Xue Rong didn't seem to be lying. "All I know is that after I left, I began to accept the hospital's philosophy and willingly stayed on to work."
"You forgot?" Chen Ge recalled the final stage of the Nether Fetus scenario. In the building where its memories were buried, he hadn't found anything related to the isolation ward either. The Nether Fetus's memories began directly from when it was assigned a ward.
According to what Xue Rong said, newcomers brought to the hospital were first sent to the isolation ward, not assigned a room.
"Did the Nether Fetus forget what happened to it in the isolation ward too?"
Chen Ge pressed onward. There wasn't a trace of light around him, not a single sign of human presence. A strange feeling slowly took root in his heart.
The underground structure of the Cursed Hospital was just like the underground scenes in his own Horror House. The atmosphere was strikingly similar — eerie, terrifying, constantly generating nightmares, devouring every shade of negative emotion.
"Somehow I get the feeling the Black Phone and the Cursed Hospital both want to build the same thing, but they've chosen completely different methods."
At the end of the corridor, a staircase leading even deeper underground lay before Chen Ge. On the wall at the landing, the words "Isolation Ward" were scrawled at a crooked angle.
The messages coming through the wedding ring on his finger were growing clearer. Chen Ge was on high alert as he slowly descended to the second underground level.
"This is the isolation ward?"
Chen Ge peered into the wards on either side of the corridor. The rooms were crammed with old clothes and shoes of every kind — some styles that had long since gone out of production, things from over a decade ago.
"I saw a similar scene in the warehouse at Chi Ren's old hospital. The shelves were packed with all kinds of shoes." That image had struck Chen Ge deeply at the time. Every pair of shoes seemed to represent a person. After entering the warehouse, he'd felt as though crouched figures — corpses — were perched all along the shelves.
Walking further down the corridor, he passed room after room stuffed with old clothes.
"How many people has the Cursed Hospital 'treated' in twenty years?"
Chen Ge hadn't yet found anything particularly unusual about the isolation ward. All he noticed was that the morbid writing on the walls was growing denser and denser, so thick and packed that even without looking closely, the words seemed to imprint themselves directly into his mind.
The smell of disinfectant in the air had reached the point of stinging his nostrils. What alarmed Chen Ge even more was that even this overwhelming reek of disinfectant couldn't mask the faint stench drifting through the air.
He knew that stench well. He had smelled it behind the Nether Fetus's door. It was a smell that only he could detect.
Cautiously making his way to the deepest part of the isolation ward, Chen Ge finally stopped beside a door.
This was the fourth underground level of the hospital — where the stench was strongest, and where the wedding ring's resonance was most intense.
Xiao Sun seemed to be just behind that door.
"Not a single person in the entire hospital, and yet they left Xiao Sun behind this door in particular. Has he been exposed? Or is it not just Xiao Sun — are all the hospital's ghosts behind this door?"
The situation in the Cursed Hospital was far too strange for Chen Ge to let his guard down. He thought for a moment, and before pushing the door open, he silently recited the name Zhang Ya in his heart.
Ripples spread across the shadow behind him. Zhang Ya hadn't detected anything unusual about this hospital either — she sensed no aura of danger. It seemed to be nothing more than an ordinary abandoned hospital.
With a Vicious God holding the field, Chen Ge felt considerably braver. He gestured for Xue Rong to go open the door at the deepest point of the isolation ward.
Xue Rong was a formidable presence among the Red-clothed, with great strength and the ability to protect herself in danger. Moreover, she teetered constantly on the brink of frenzy and could never fully obey Chen Ge's commands, so even if something went wrong, it wouldn't significantly impact the Horror House's overall combat power.
Chen Ge had considered every angle before sending Xue Rong to push the door. She didn't refuse — the gap in her memory regarding the isolation ward was a blank, and she wanted to fill it.
Her scarred fingers fell upon the door. Xue Rong applied gentle pressure. The moment she pushed the door open a hair-thin crack, the shadow behind Chen Ge began to spread like a black ocean!
Unspeakable terror surged to its peak. A pale hand tore through the boundary between reality and illusion, dragging an endless tide of blood crashing toward that door!
At the same time, the door in front of Xue Rong had somehow already swung open. An arm covered in black faces blocked Zhang Ya's crimson tide. Then another arm — blood-red — shot out from behind the door and seized Chen Ge by the shoulder!
"Two Vicious Gods!"
Black hair lashed out and coiled tightly around Chen Ge's body. He had become the focal point of a contest between three Vicious Gods.
His body temperature plummeted to its lowest in an instant. His form twisted and warped. Just as he was about to be torn apart by the three Vicious Gods, the black hair enveloped him completely, and Zhang Ya hugged him from behind and threw herself through the door!
In his backpack, Zhang Ya's diary crumbled to ash, and line after line of text was inscribed directly onto Chen Ge's body.
At the same time, the crimson color began to fade from Yan Danian's comic album. Every illustration vanished. One by one, the ghosts and Red-clothed were dragged into the doorway. And Yan Danian, as the album's owner, frantically sketched with a ballpoint pen wound thick in tape as the pages disappeared one after another until only the last remained.
The final drawing he managed to produce before being sucked through the door appeared on Chen Ge's back.
The world spun. His body felt as though it were being torn apart and reassembled. Chen Ge clutched his head in both hands as countless memories were ground to dust inside his skull, and scene after scene of painful recollections — none of them his own — began to surface.
"This is a distorted world. Deep down, you already know that!"