The child's voice carried far down the hallway. When Chen Ge heard it, his face went white with fright. Right now, the "perverted serial killers" at the end of the corridor were "dismembering a body," and with the kid shouting like that, the entire third floor now knew he had come.
"Big brother, you're sweating so much. Are you hot?" This child was absolutely rotten to the core — cunning and treacherous glinted in his eyes, yet he wore an expression of perfect innocence on his face.
Chen Ge didn't even bother wiping the sweat from his forehead. He prepared to leave immediately. His reaction was already fast — in normal circumstances, this would have been the optimal move.
He turned to run back the way he'd come. Before he'd taken more than a few steps, he saw the charred doors along the third-floor hallway being pushed open one after another. Pale-faced tenants who looked like walking corpses poked their heads out.
"Big brother, where are you going?" The child was relentless, trailing behind Chen Ge with a wide, delighted grin.
Figures emerged from the rooms — students still in school uniforms, deformed and broken people — and they blocked every route Chen Ge might use to escape.
"What do I do now?"
Cold sweat slid down the bridge of his nose. Chen Ge's brain ran at full capacity, but he couldn't think of a single good solution.
"I told you to stay in your room, didn't I?" The sound of a saw blade scraping against the wall accompanied a middle-aged man called Old Zhou as he walked over.
His eyes, devoid of any trace of human emotion, fixed coldly on Chen Ge: "Now even if you wanted to leave, you couldn't."
Chen Ge had never imagined that this seemingly empty apartment building housed so many people — and that most of them lived right here on the scorched third floor.
"I think there may be some kind of misunderstanding here." Even in this extreme situation, Chen Ge found himself surprisingly calm. His gaze settled on the saw in the middle-aged man's hand. Wood shavings clung to the blade, but there was no blood.
That meant the man hadn't been sawing through anyone — he'd been cutting wood, or something like it.
"Misunderstanding?" The smile on the man surnamed Zhou grew increasingly cruel. He seemed to have an uncanny ability to read Chen Ge's psychology, ratcheting up the pressure little by little. "What could we possibly have misunderstood?"
"The truth is, I'm the same kind of person as you." Chen Ge's assertion had a basis. He was friends with Zuo Han and Zhang Wenyu, and a friend of a friend was most likely a friend too. Besides, these tenants had nailed the doctors from the Curse Hospital to the wall — the two sides were clearly mortal enemies. An enemy of an enemy was most likely a friend.
Chen Ge's words were sincere, but the people around him showed little reaction.
"I'm telling the truth." Chen Ge tried to explain, but the middle-aged man cut him off.
"The same kind of us? But who told you we're even people?" The child who had been following Chen Ge laughed happily, as though he particularly enjoyed terrifying others, still trailing right behind Chen Ge's heels.
The tenants tightened their encirclement around Chen Ge. Then, from the second-floor corridor, a familiar voice suddenly rang out: "Everyone, calm down! He is not the enemy — he was your closest… friend."
The Writer arrived on the third floor. He had thought for a long time before settling on the word "friend." In truth, he couldn't precisely describe the relationship between Chen Ge and the tenants — it was like colleagues, like friends, and like family, all at once.
"Zhang Wenyu?" When the tenants saw the Writer approach, they parted to form a path. Old Zhou lowered the saw in his hand. "Out of all of us, you're the only one who's kept most of his memories. Do you know this man?"
"He and I aren't particularly close — we've only met a few times. But I can tell you with absolute certainty that he is immensely important to all of you." The Writer walked up to Chen Ge and nodded with genuine relief. "I really didn't expect you to come. If someone asked me to make a choice like that, I'd rather live in a beautiful lie."
"Who exactly are you? What does the name Zhang Wenyu mean? Why have I seen tens of thousands of medical records inside that hospital all bearing the name Zhang Wenyu?" A thousand questions churned in Chen Ge's mind. "Why have all our memories been tampered with, yet you're the exception?"
"It's not convenient to answer out here. I asked you to come precisely so I could tell you the truth." The Writer stood in the center of the crowd, raised his arm, and swept it across every person around them. "Right now, inside this apartment, everyone except you — including myself — is dead."
"Dead?" Chen Ge felt no surprise at this answer. He simply recalled something Zhang Ya had once said. On the day they parted, Zhang Ya had told him she dreamed of a city full of the dead, and that Chen Ge was the only ghost in the city with any warmth left.
"That's right. Ghosts truly exist — at least, within this city they certainly do." The Writer had Chen Ge stand together with Old Zhou and the others. "You once ran a haunted house. They were all your employees. Between you, it was like a family."
The Writer's words confirmed Chen Ge's earlier suspicions once more. Those locked-away, cruel memories inside his head — those were the ones that truly belonged to him.
"What else do you know?"
"The reason you can't remember any of this is that your memories were devoured by a mouth — a power I cannot comprehend in the slightest." The Writer shared everything he remembered about Chen Ge without any reservation. "Let me tell you something even more despairing. This city is a prison cell, and every one of us is a prisoner trapped inside it. I don't know the way out, but I do know the key to escape lies with you."
As he spoke, the Writer kept his eyes fixed on Chen Ge. "You chose us. That means you voluntarily cast aside the beautiful illusion. From the moment you set foot in Ping'an Apartment, your life was about to undergo a tremendous change."
Piecing together the Writer's words, Chen Ge recalled the information Doctor Sun had let slip.