"His office has been preserved exactly as it was after the director died?"
The people outside the door were filled with confusion. Except for
Chen Ge's condition was extremely poor. The memories related to the stench in his head had begun spiraling out of control, fragments of memory detonating into scene after scene behind his eyes.
"Hey! Don't stay in there alone!" Patient Number Two was worried about Chen Ge's safety and slowly approached the director's office, but when he reached the doorway, his body simply refused to go inside. Every single cell in his body was resisting, as though stepping inside meant certain death.
In a haze, Chen Ge heard Patient Number Two's voice, but his nerves had already been swallowed by searing pain.
Gradually, he lost control of his body. Under the dual torment of stench and agony, he pitched forward toward the director's desk.
His hands caught the surface, and Chen Ge's face—twisted with pain—narrowly avoided the glass jar sitting on the desk.
"Whose heart is this?"
His breathing came in ragged gasps, his chest heaving. As Chen Ge's agony deepened, the heart wrapped in countless black threads actually began to beat inside the glass jar.
It beat just like Chen Ge's own heart—each pulse tugging at his nerves.
"Could the heart in this jar be mine?"
Chen Ge felt that his heart and the heart in the jar were beating at the same rhythm.
He stared at the jar, feeling as though his soul was being sucked into the glass. Indescribable pain and despair flooded into his body.
The world before his eyes began to blur. The countless "death" characters filling the room swelled larger and larger, as if they had all come alive.
Chen Ge wanted to wave his hands in resistance, but both his body and his mind had been pushed to the brink of collapse—even moving a little was difficult.
"Trapped in a room full of 'death' characters—why does this scene feel so familiar?" A memory flashed from the depths of Chen Ge's mind: a clay figurine with the characters "Chen Ge" carved on its chest being stuffed into a shrine whose inner walls were covered with the character for "death."
What Chen Ge was experiencing now was exactly the same as that clay figurine bearing his name—except that he hadn't been locked inside a shrine. Instead, he was trapped in the director's office, which was covered floor to ceiling with the word "death."
"Someone is cursing me!"
The scattered flashes of memory made Chen Ge realize that he had been cursed before, but for various reasons the other party had failed. Now he had touched the curse once again, and he had no idea why he was so familiar with things that ordinary people could never even encounter.
His hands moved slowly. Chen Ge bit down so hard his teeth drew blood, and he forced his arms to embrace the glass jar on the desk.
He had originally intended to smash the jar, hoping it might break the curse. But to his surprise, the moment his hands touched the glass, the black threads clinging to the heart burrowed out from the organ and began frantically hammering against the jar, as if trying to shatter it and enter Chen Ge's body.
Cracks appeared on the glass jar. The stench in the room grew thicker. Chen Ge was already at the breaking point, and with the last of his strength he shoved the jar to the edge of the desk.
The black threads struck the glass, cracks spreading further and further. Just as the entire jar was about to shatter, deep crimson bloodlines surfaced from within the heart.
The bloodlines intertwined, weaving together at the bottom of the heart into the face of a child.
It let out a piercing shriek. The black threads—seemingly to prevent the child from escaping the heart—immediately retracted back inside.
Chen Ge witnessed the entire process. The black threads, the child's face emerging from the heart—none of it matched the real world that Dr. Gao had described.
He stared in a daze at the child's face on the heart, feeling a vague sense that the child looked very much like him as a little boy.
"Is this heart sealed inside the jar… that child's?"
The pain in his head had eased considerably. Chen Ge collapsed beside the desk, gasping for breath in great heaves.
The director's office had returned to normal, and even the stench hanging in the air had thinned somewhat.
"Are you all right?" Dr. Sun only entered the office now, crouching beside Chen Ge with his back to the door.
"Does it look like I'm all right?" The moment Chen Ge opened his mouth, he was wracked by violent coughing.
Dr. Sun watched Chen Ge in silence. He pointed at Chen Ge's hand and suddenly said something strange: "Before patients are admitted, their personal belongings are stored in Ward Five. In your locker, there is a wedding ring."
"A wedding ring? But I'm not married…"
"That's right—you're not married. So why would you have a wedding ring?" A relieved smile spread across Dr. Sun's scarred face. His back was to the ward door, so at this moment only Chen Ge could see his smile. "If you're discharged successfully, remember to put on that wedding ring. It must be very important to you."
Chen Ge felt that something was different about Dr. Sun. He thought back carefully.
Ever since leaving the treatment room in Ward Three, Dr. Gao had been gripping his arm the entire time, and Dr. Sun had been cold and distant toward him. Yet after entering the director's office, Dr. Sun had actually smiled—completely unlike his earlier behavior.
"Could it be because Dr. Gao didn't enter the director's office?" The more Chen Ge thought about it, the more he noticed the difference between Dr. Sun and Dr. Gao. Right now, Dr. Gao looked more like a corpse, while Dr. Sun seemed to be growing more and more human.
"Let's go. Don't stay in the director's office too long—this place is unlucky." Dr. Sun helped Chen Ge up from the floor and was supporting him toward the door when Chen Ge suddenly stopped.
"Wait a moment." Chen Ge turned around and picked up the glass jar from the director's desk.
"What are you doing?" Dr. Sun sucked in a sharp breath and instinctively moved away from Chen Ge, who was now holding the jar. The glass jar seemed to be something extremely dangerous.