"The patient has the same number as me?" Chen Ge was immediately drawn in by Dr. Sun's words. "Since you know his patient number is the same as mine, you must know mine too, right?"
"When you find out his number, you'll know your own." Dr. Sun's voice kept dropping lower. "If you want to leave the hospital as quickly as possible, you'd better find all the jars and remember what's inside them."
"Just remember them?" Chen Ge's pupils contracted. He stared at the eyeball submerged in black threads, and in that instant, a horrifying feeling washed over him—as if the jars contained his own facial features.
Relying purely on instinct, Chen Ge blurted out one last question: "Could it be that these are all parts I'm missing?"
Hearing Chen Ge's words, Dr. Sun looked visibly surprised. With his back to Dr. Gao, he gave a slight nod, then fell completely silent.
"A familiar pungent stench. Glass jars filled with black threads. A patient divided into seven parts." Chen Ge's mind was in chaos, and he had no idea what to do. Deep down, he wanted to take the glass jars with him, but he only had two hands—he couldn't possibly carry all these jars. And even if he could, where would he put them?
He reached out and touched one of the glass jars on the bookshelf. Grisly human faces surfaced along the black threads inside, wailing and slamming against the glass, only to be dragged back by the blood-red veins that flickered across the facial features.
"Dr. Sun, this glass jar looks dangerous, but I don't think it'll hurt us. How about you help me carry one?" Chen Ge hoped to get Dr. Sun's help, but Dr. Sun flatly refused.
The doctors all seemed unwilling to touch the glass jars. Dr. Gao, who had been gripping Chen Ge's hand tightly back in the ward, was now keeping his distance as well.
Judging by the behavior of both doctors, the glass jars weren't harmless—they just wouldn't hurt Chen Ge.
Back in the ward, Dr. Sun had subtly hinted at the method for leaving the hospital. Chen Ge needed to find all seven glass jars on this highly unusual night and memorize what was inside each one.
He still didn't understand how this was connected to being discharged, but he followed Dr. Sun's instructions. In his subconscious, he felt that Dr. Sun was unlikely to deceive him.
On top of that, a force deep within his mind was urging him onward, driving him to find those jars.
"When I entered the first director's office, my past memories were triggered. The pain and the room full of the character for 'death' nearly made me pass out. But after touching the glass jar, the pain in my head lessened significantly, and my mind became much clearer."
A bold idea formed in Chen Ge's mind. He wanted to secretly try something—holding the glass jar while recalling his past.
The two doctors were watching him closely, so Chen Ge couldn't find an opportunity just yet. He simply kept holding the jar, treating the thing everyone feared as his own treasure.
Playing the fox to borrow the tiger's authority—Chen Ge had perfected that trick.
After leaving the second director's office, Chen Ge and Dr. Sun entered the adjacent medicine storage room to search for various medications.
A few minutes later, Patient No. 2's expression had turned rather ugly. He was deeply dejected. "There's no medicine we're looking for in here."
"There's nothing we can do then. We'll just have to try our luck in the other wards." Dr. Sun seemed to have known this outcome all along. He and Chen Ge—still cradling the glass jar—walked ahead, and Dr. Sun resumed telling Chen Ge about the hospital's terrifying urban legends.
Looking at the three companions beside him, Patient No. 2 couldn't stop the cold sweat from dripping down his forehead. A doctor who didn't care one bit about whether the injured lived or died and whose face was covered in scars. A lunatic carrying a glass jar full of human organs. And a deathly pale attending physician who looked like a corpse. Could it be that the killers were the doctors themselves?
He felt like the protagonist in a horror movie, experiencing the most desperate situation imaginable, walking step by step into the abyss.
Surviving on his own was far too difficult. With no other choice, Patient No. 2 gritted his teeth and forced himself to follow alongside Dr. Gao.
Chen Ge and Dr. Sun clearly hadn't noticed Patient No. 2's inner turmoil. They walked and stopped, discovering countless abnormalities throughout the hospital.
Xinhai Central Hospital had a total of seven wards and had once been the largest hospital in Xinhai. Far too much despair and horror had unfolded within these walls.
Suffering and pain were tightly intertwined here, and the full spectrum of human experience was on vivid display. Behind every urban legend lay a story.
Under Dr. Sun's guidance, they made their way through all seven wards.
The offices of the seven former directors were located in seven different wards, and each office contained a stench-radiating glass jar holding a portion of human organs.
All those organs were submerged and soaked in black threads, and some of them had already turned completely black.
Following Dr. Sun's instructions, Chen Ge carefully memorized every organ in every glass jar. Each time he entered a room, he personally reached out and touched the contents.
At first, he had planned to use the contact to stimulate fragments of his past memories, hoping to recover as much as he could. But then he discovered something terrifying.
Every time he touched a glass jar, the black threads would go berserk, trying to burst through the jar and attack him. But whenever that happened, deep crimson blood veins would emerge from the organs and drag the black threads back inside.
This was where the truly bizarre phenomenon occurred. To make the black threads go berserk, Chen Ge's hand inevitably had to touch the glass jar. And when those blood veins pulled the black threads back, they would also, almost as a side effect, drag something away from Chen Ge's body.
It was a sensation difficult to put into words. Chen Ge felt as though the shackles on his body had loosened slightly, certain memories of his past became blurrier, and most importantly, new memory fragments began appearing in his mind.
They weren't memories from his own past, nor were they the memories Dr. Gao had described to him. They belonged to a completely unfamiliar third person.
When Chen Ge leafed through this third person's memories, he didn't feel any headache. But a sensation of heart-pounding dread kept rising in him, as if reading these memories would invite catastrophe.
Chen Ge told no one about this. He planned to wait until he was safe before going through the third person's memory fragments in detail.
He had no idea how much time had passed—it felt like at least several hours—but the sky outside the window remained pitch black, with no sign of dawn whatsoever.
They searched every ward but couldn't find the medicine. In the end, they returned to the third ward.
This was where Chen Ge had been held at the very beginning, and it was also where the seventh director's office was located.
They made their way to the seventh floor of the third ward and found the seventh director's office at the end of the corridor.
Pushing open the door, they found a bare room with a desk in the center. On the desk stood an enormous glass jar, and inside the jar sat a human head facing away from the office door.
It was a child's head, stripped of all facial features and skin—an empty shell, as though the soul had long since departed.