Fully geared up,
The cramped room held two beds. The sheets and blankets had already been removed, leaving behind nothing but two bare bed boards.
Perhaps for safety reasons, the room contained nothing sharp — even the corners of the beds had been deliberately filed down.
"Wang Haiming was committed to the asylum by his second wife. He may have had some mental issues, but they certainly weren't severe. This was most likely a conspiracy against him." Piecing together what he knew, Chen Ge found Wang Haiming to be a rather complicated figure.
His life had been full of dramatic ups and downs, yet he had never surrendered, never stopped struggling and fighting back. Whether he was being forcibly committed to the asylum or battling a monster for control of his own body after discharge, he had never given up.
He had cheated on his wife and remarried — he could by no means be called a morally good man — but in a certain sense, he had already paid a terrible price for his mistakes.
"Every room in the rehabilitation center is fitted with a one-way lock — even with a key, you can only unlock it from the outside. There's a security door every twenty meters down the corridor, plus patrolling orderlies and nurses on duty. Under these circumstances, how did Wang Haiming manage to sneak out?" Chen Ge sat on the bed board and looked at the window, sealed shut with wooden planks. "Could he have jumped out the window?"
He pried the planks open and discovered that an iron wire mesh had been installed outside the window of this room. There was no way out.
The asylum had a concrete wall over two meters high, and beyond that lay a dense stretch of forest with no signage — it would be easy to lose your way inside. And yet Wang Haiming, under these very conditions, had not only escaped successfully but also managed to contact his ex-wife and persuade her to come rescue him. The entire sequence of events could have been made into a movie.
"For Wang Haiming to accomplish all of this on his own would have been far too difficult. He must have relied on the power of that monster inside his body. The two of them cooperated to break out of the asylum. Their goal was the same — to leave." Chen Ge understood this now, but another question arose: "When did that monster get into Wang Haiming's body?"
Recalling what Xu Tong had said, Chen Ge noticed a suspicious detail about Wang Haiming.
After receiving his first electroshock punishment, it wasn't long before he began provoking the doctors again — even assaulting nurses — all over something as minor as hiding medication.
Such irrational behavior might be understandable in a mental patient, but Wang Haiming was no madman.
"Could he have been deliberately provoking them? Trying to get himself sent back to Ward Three?"
Chen Ge surveyed the sparse room. The only places where something could be hidden were behind the curtain and under the beds.
He stood up and flipped both bed boards aside. Beside one of the boards, on the wall, he made a new discovery.
On the white-painted plaster, someone had scratched out lines of text with their fingernails. Because so much time had passed, most of the characters were faded and barely legible — only a few could be made out.
"Did Wang Haiming write this?" Chen Ge closed the room's door, stepped closer, and shone his flashlight on the wall as he read the words aloud.
"Am I really going insane?"
"Two orderlies and a doctor dragged me into the shock room. Once we were inside, those beasts locked the door — no one else should have been able to get in."
"So why, after the electricity was turned on, did I see four people in the room?"
"Who is that person wearing patient clothes?"
The words on the wall seemed to be left by Wang Haiming. In a hospital ward with no entertainment to speak of, secretly recording the strange things he encountered each day had become his only pastime.