Men Nan dared not fall asleep, stubbornly standing in the center of the room. He still held that bizarre posture, his head bent as though someone were pressing it down off his shoulders.
"I keep feeling like there's something pressing on top of his head." Chen Ge kept his voice low, not wanting to agitate Men Nan. "Not something psychological, not something imagined — something that actually exists."
Dr. Gao gave a slight wave of his hand, staying beside Men Nan. He took out his own phone and appeared to be sending a text to someone.
Seeing that Dr. Gao wasn't responding, Chen Ge resumed searching through the other rooms of the apartment.
The place was only about thirty square meters, but small as it was, it had everything — a bedroom, a living room, and a separate bathroom.
"Looking at it like this, it's just a perfectly ordinary rental." Chen Ge circled the rooms without finding any blind spots, ruling out any possibility of a body being hidden here.
He stepped out of the living room and pushed open the bathroom's wooden door. To his surprise, directly across from the door hung a half-length mirror.
"A mirror facing the door?" Because of his first Nightmare-difficulty task, Chen Ge had grown extremely sensitive to mirrors.
He walked up to it silently and studied his own reflection. "That's a rare layout. You open the door and see yourself right in the mirror — it'd make most people feel a little uneasy."
The mirror's surface was spotless, as though it were wiped down regularly. Not a single smudge could be found.
His gaze shifted downward. Below the mirror was a washstand — the very place where Men Nan had been standing in his nightmare, washing his hair over and over again.
Chen Ge mimicked Men Nan's posture, leaning over the washstand, bending his body forward at roughly a ninety-five-degree angle until his head fit just under the faucet.
"From this angle, you can see straight into the room outside. The scenes he dreamed about are entirely possible to replicate." If leaning under the faucet blocked his view of the living room — or if something else obstructed his line of sight — Chen Ge wouldn't have been alarmed. That would've confirmed it was just a dream.
But after testing it himself, he realized that all of this was completely possible even in reality.
With his head in the washstand, the world inverted itself before his eyes.
"Men Nan said that every time he dreamed, the man got a little closer. This place is suspicious too — why doesn't the man just walk over and kill him? Why torment him bit by bit? Do they have some deep grudge?" Chen Ge was mulling this over when a sudden chill prickled the back of his neck. He jerked upright immediately and felt his neck.
"A drop of water? Where did it fall from?" Chen Ge tilted his head up toward the ceiling. There were no signs of a leak in the plaster — that drop of water had appeared from nowhere.
"Could it be the mirror?" An image flashed through his mind: himself leaning over the washstand washing his hair, and his reflection in the mirror reaching half its body out, grabbing him by the throat.
"The black phone said this Trial is called 'Room of Three People.' The name itself is a hidden hint." Chen Ge stared at himself in the mirror, feeling as though something had just clicked. "There are three 'people' in this room. Men Nan counts as one, the man who keeps approaching in the dream counts as another — and there's a third 'person' still present in this room right now. Could that third person be hiding inside the mirror?"
Chen Ge braced both hands on the washstand and glanced to either side. He noticed two empty shampoo bottles tossed in the bathroom trash can.
"How long has Men Nan even lived in this apartment, and he's already gone through two bottles of shampoo? If he's only washing his hair in his dreams, how could the real shampoo run out? Does this kid sleepwalk? Would he get up in the middle of the night to wash his hair by himself?" Chen Ge considered it for a moment but found it unlikely. When he'd spoken with Dr. Gao earlier, the doctor had mentioned that to rule out the apartment itself as the cause, he'd once taken Men Nan to stay at his own home — but Men Nan's nightmares hadn't stopped.
"That rules out sleepwalking for now. But if Men Nan used up two bottles of shampoo in a short while while fully awake, that's even stranger. Why would he wash his hair so frantically?"
Even the most hygiene-obsessed person would wash their hair once a day at most, yet Men Nan had gone through two bottles in a remarkably short time, and the third bottle on the washstand was already down to half.
"What kind of situation drives a person to keep washing their hair? An itchy scalp? Dirty hair? Or the feeling that there's something in their hair?" Chen Ge leaned against the wall, thinking. "Men Nan got into fights at school twice. The first time was because the animal pattern on a curtain wasn't symmetrical. The second was because he couldn't count the sesame seeds on a flatbread correctly. This kid must suffer from severe obsessive-compulsive disorder."
For someone with OCD, even the slightest thing out of place drove them to fix it — and if they couldn't fix it, they felt physically miserable. Chen Ge believed Men Nan's frantic hair-washing stemmed from the same impulse.
"The answer to all this is something only Men Nan himself knows. He's probably been hiding some very important details from Dr. Gao." While Chen Ge was speculating, his phone suddenly buzzed. He pulled it out and saw it was a text from Dr. Gao.
"Men Nan's family situation is a bit complicated — it doesn't match what I found during my earlier investigation. After I told his family about his condition, their reaction was very cold. They simply said they'd transfer enough money to Men Nan's bank account to cover treatment costs, with no intention of coming to Jiujiang to visit him. I can't let Men Nan know about this, so I'm texting you instead."
"He's their own son, and he's sick — and the parents don't even want to come be with him?"
"I didn't expect it either. When I asked Men Nan and his classmates before, everyone said he came from a very harmonious family. I even checked his social media — there are plenty of posts about being grateful for his family."
The image Men Nan presented to the outside world was that of a well-raised, cheerful, academically solid student from a warm and loving family. But in reality, all of it might have been nothing more than a mask.
Chen Ge finished reading the text and sent Dr. Gao a message detailing his own discoveries.
Before long, Dr. Gao replied with several texts.
"Obsessive-compulsive disorder can generally be divided into four categories: checking, rituals, cleanliness, and perfectionism. Based on my observations, Men Nan's symptoms don't fit into any of these four. His hair-washing appears to stem purely from some kind of compulsion."
"In my assessment, Men Nan's behavior more closely resembles another psychological condition — post-traumatic stress disorder. For example, after an earthquake, certain survivors remain in a state of heightened vigilance for a very long time. They have difficulty shaking off the shadow of the disaster, and their brains feed them false signals, as though the earthquake could strike again at any moment."
"Men Nan's symptoms bear a strong resemblance to PTSD. His nervous tension, his darting eyes — it all points to a profound sense of insecurity, as though something could emerge and hurt him at any moment. Under those circumstances, washing his hair may be a self-protective behavior."