Cooked meat left exposed to air for a period of time would harden.
"This duck was made less than an hour ago." He shifted his position and pulled the duck out of the iron cage. "The innards weren't cleaned out properly. The neck was chopped clean off — the head is nowhere to be found."
Chen Ge turned the duck over. Teeth marks marred the half-cooked flesh, and its belly had been torn open. No feathers lay on the ground. Whatever had gnawed on the duck seemed to have swallowed the feathers along with everything else.
"Large dogs kept in this cage?" He set the duck back where he found it and looked toward the other end of the cage.
Outside the cage where the duck sat, two plastic bowls were placed side by side, both filled with a clear liquid.
"Why are there two bowls outside the same cage? Are there two dogs inside?" The bowls were identical in shape and color. Chen Ge lifted each one and sniffed.
The liquid in one bowl was colorless and odorless — plain water. The other gave off a faint, acrid smell.
"Rat poison, maybe." To keep rodents from chewing through the props, Chen Ge's haunted house had once kept rat poison on hand, so he recognized the smell.
"Two identical bowls — one with plain water, one laced with rat poison. Doesn't the owner worry that whatever he keeps in the cage might drink from the wrong one?"
The scene before him was undeniably strange. Chen Ge captured everything on camera. He glanced at his phone screen — the bullet comments were scrolling at a furious pace, and a particularly long message with words that sounded like "iron cage" and "person" flashed past before he could read it.
There were too many comments to scroll back through. He inspected each bar of the cage and found a large grease stain smeared across the gate, as though someone had gripped the bars with both hands in a desperate attempt not to be dragged away.
"Could it be that what's locked in this cage isn't an animal — but a person?"
Inside the nurse's station, discarded medicine bottles lay scattered across the floor, and paper packets printed with patients' names were strewn everywhere. Some still held pills of various colors.
"An abandoned psychiatric hospital, empty for four or five years — and there are living people inside. From the looks of it, more than one."
Chen Ge grew even more cautious. Every preparation he had made that day was designed to deal with ghosts and spirits. He had completely overlooked the danger posed by the patients themselves.
Stepping out of the nurse's station, Chen Ge paid close attention to both walls along the corridor.
The creature in the cage had been forcibly removed. Its hands were covered in grease, and it would certainly have left marks while struggling.
After only a few steps, Chen Ge spotted a section where the wall had been clawed through, the grease mingled with spots of blood.
"Injured?"
Chen Ge followed the trail. It led him all the way to the second floor of the first ward building. Here the corridor split in two — one path led deeper into the first ward, the other toward the second.
The entire rehabilitation center was a connected structure, with all three ward buildings linked internally.
It took him nearly twenty minutes to cover the entire first ward. There were very few places inside where a person could hide. He found neither the caged individual nor any further evidence of people living there.
"Could that person have been taken to one of the other ward buildings?" Chen Ge headed back downstairs when his phone buzzed in his pocket. It was Liu Dao.
"What's up?" Chen Ge's nerves were taut — the slightest disturbance could throw him off balance.
"Chen Ge, you're moving too fast! This is an overnight broadcast. It's only been twenty minutes, and you've already covered an entire ward building. How are you going to fill the rest of the stream?" Liu Dao was monitoring Chen Ge's broadcast the entire time. "Qin Guang just broke six hundred thousand viewers. You haven't even hit fifty thousand yet. Stop rushing through the exploration and interact with the chat more."