"Someone's here?"
Without a second thought, Chen Ge grabbed the hammer and charged forward, not intending to give the other party any chance to react.
"Come out!" The ward's main door was locked from the inside—his presence had already been exposed, so he stopped holding back.
Man and cat rushed to the stairwell landing, but the corridor was pitch black. Nothing.
"Where did they go?"
Chen Ge had already tested the white cat back in the haunted house. The cat was extremely sensitive to certain things and was almost never wrong.
"The white cat didn't puff up—just showed aggression. Whatever that thing is, it shouldn't be more dangerous than Muyang High School." The white cat had puffed up twice inside Chen Ge's haunted house: once upon entering Muyang High School, and once when the blood door appeared in the bathroom. Based on the white cat's reaction just now, Chen Ge had a rough estimate of the monster's strength.
"The most critical thing right now is figuring out whether that thing is human or ghost."
Back at the nurse's station, Chen Ge used the hammer to smash open the partition board and lifted the entire base panel.
The sight beneath was rather unsettling. Nails pinned bundles of hair tied with thin string to the board. If you flipped the board over, the ends of the hair would hang downward, a sight that sent chills down one's spine.
"Why would someone nail hair to a board like this? Some kind of weird fetish?"
Every bundle of hair was tied with thin string. Some were fine, soft, and glossy black—clearly well-maintained, probably shaved from the head of some young girl. Others were frizzy, split, and nearly all white—obviously belonging to some elderly person.
By comparing lengths, Chen Ge separated the hair into groups. They appeared to belong to four different people.
"At least one of these four is still alive." Chen Ge looked at the two large iron cages placed in the nurse's station and gradually understood their purpose. "Truly deranged."
He set the board aside and crouched under the counter once more. This time he could clearly read the writing on the board: Everything you've done to me, I will return in kind.
The words were written very small, and beneath them were some fragmented, completely incoherent sentences—like someone who had started writing normally, then suddenly gone mad and begun spouting nonsense.
"Some mentally ill patients, when agitated, will talk to thin air in words no one can understand. Ordinary people do the same thing when talking in their sleep." Chen Ge tried to decipher it but couldn't figure out what the author was trying to express.
Staring at the words on the board, Chen Ge felt a chill crawl up his spine. The outer wall of the psychiatric hospital was covered with countless similar writings, each containing a person's name. What was even more terrifying was that every handwriting was different—clearly not the work of the same person.
A single patient exhibiting such behavior would be understandable, but when every single one did, the implications were entirely different.
"It seems the patients in this hospital carry enormous resentment." Chen Ge took out his phone and photographed the writing inside the counter, then tied the rooster to the back of his pack. "The more people there are, the easier it is to leave traces. I should go check out the second ward."
Chen Ge climbed over the nurse's counter, pulled a bag of salt from his pack, tore a small opening, and sprinkled several lines on the floor around the nurse's station.
He wasn't doing this to ward off evil spirits. He wanted to catch the madman hiding inside.