Chapter 162: Xu Tong

The livestream chat was flooding with comments. The "surprise" Chen Ge had delivered to his viewers was just too much.

He glanced at the platform's real-time popularity rankings for the time slot. Qin Guang held the first position. When Chen Ge had first gone live, he'd been at ninety-sixth place. Now he'd rocketed straight up to nineteenth.

That ranking was displayed right on the platform's homepage and carried enormous weight. Anyone who cracked the top twenty was a major streamer with over four hundred thousand followers and a built-in fanbase.

The meteoric rise had caught the attention of countless viewers, who were scratching their heads in bewilderment — how had a newcomer with fewer than fifty thousand followers muscled his way into the big leagues?

Honestly, Chen Ge wasn't entirely sure himself. He was just being himself — playing the role of an "innocent victim" who was exercising his right to self-defense against criminal assault.

"Well, it seems all you viewers have sharp eyes. In this day and age of money and corruption, positive-energy streamers like me who actually put effort into content are a rare breed."

After double-checking the camera on his wrist and the one on his chest, Chen Ge put his phone away and returned to the insane woman.

The moment he'd dragged the one-armed man into the laundry room, the woman had lost it, slamming her head against the iron cage in a desperate attempt to escape.

Chen Ge was afraid she'd crack her own skull open, so he grabbed some tattered clothes from the floor and padded the spot where she was striking her head.

"What exactly did she witness that could scare a living person into this state?"

His gaze swept across the three iron cages. The old man was hunched inside his cage, arms shielding his head like an ostrich refusing to look out.

Of the three, the old man had been imprisoned the longest and had seen the most. Now, the moment he laid eyes on the one-armed man, he covered his eyes — clearly terrified that seeing something he shouldn't would bring trouble down on him.

The young woman in the middle was in an even more extreme state of agitation, her head crashing against the iron bars, the fear in her eyes practically overflowing.

Both of their reactions made sense. What put Chen Ge on guard was the middle-aged man in the last cage.

He was scared too — his body trembling, his hands clasped tightly together. His expression and demeanor were flawless. Anyone else might have let their guard down by now, but Chen Ge was different.

It wasn't that Chen Ge possessed some extraordinary power of observation. He'd simply obtained the patient records from the Third Ward before coming here, and this middle-aged man was very likely Xu Tong — the one who had been confined in Room Five back then.

All the killers came from the Third Ward. So why was he, also from the Third Ward, the one who'd become a victim?

It was based on this that Chen Ge had slowly begun spotting flaws in the middle-aged man's act.

For instance, his relatively neat appearance. His unshaven hair. And those hands — hidden beneath his clothes the whole time, only clenching involuntarily from sheer tension the moment Chen Ge dragged the one-armed man inside.

Chen Ge had seen it clearly. On the middle-aged man's left hand was a deep wound, as though someone had bitten through the flesh. Blood was still seeping out without stopping.

"You're hurt."

Chen Ge approached the last cage, skull crusher hammer in hand. When he'd first entered the nurse's station in the First Ward, he'd noticed oily stains on the iron cage. Following those stains, he'd later found a patch on the wall outside the nurse's station smeared with both oil and blood spatters.

At the time, he'd assumed the blood belonged to a victim inside the cage. But after examining the old man's body and finding no significant wounds, he'd concluded the blood must have come from the perpetrator who had taken the old man away.

Oil stains and blood marks found together in the same spot — the most logical explanation was that the old man had been gripping the wall, refusing to leave. The killer had reached out to pry his fingers loose and been bitten in the process, which was why both blood and oil were present at the same location on the wall.

Just now, when Chen Ge had opened the door, he'd noticed that neither the deformed face nor the one-armed man had any injuries on their hands.