"Once the nurse finishes distributing the medicine in her hands, she'll probably come back. When she notices the notebook is missing, she'll definitely search everywhere. But I have a feeling she's only a little stronger than Xiao Xiao and the Pen Spirit. Even if I have to fight her head-on, I'm not necessarily going to lose."
Chen Ge gripped his skull-crushing hammer and pressed deeper into the corridor. Under the same circumstances, anyone else would have already been scared out of their mind — there'd be no way to think about anything.
He pushed open the doors of the sickrooms one by one, finding nothing, until he reached the third-floor bathroom.
"The sound of the door opening came from downstairs. The third-floor bathroom probably isn't the room with the 'door.'" He could feel the white cat on his shoulder growing restless. Chen Ge tried pushing the bathroom door open. Inside was pitch black, without a single sliver of light.
Row after row of low cubicles looked a little unsettling. The toilets in a psychiatric hospital weren't like those in a school — probably out of concern that patients might hurt themselves inside, none of the cubicles had doors installed.
He circled around without finding anything unusual, and finally stopped in front of the mirror above the sinks. The design here was rather interesting.
A fabric curtain was mounted along the top of the mirror frame, much like a window curtain. A simple tug would easily cover the entire mirror.
This small detail in the third ward building's bathroom reminded Chen Ge of his own haunted house. "Looks like the mirrors here aren't clean, either."
Chen Ge pulled open the fabric curtain over the mirror. The glass surface was covered with smudges, as though someone with dirty hands had been constantly stroking it. Even the reflection within had become so murky that it was hard to make out clearly.
"The door isn't here." Now that he had a clear picture of the third ward building's bathroom layout, Chen Ge felt more at ease. He left the bathroom and headed straight for the staircase on the other side, descending to the second floor.
The closer he got to the lower levels, the thicker the stench hanging in the air became. What surprised Chen Ge even more was that the walls and floors along the second-floor corridor had begun to show some bizarre features.
Whether due to years of disrepair causing structural deformation or some other reason, certain spots on the second-floor walls would inexplicably bulge outward. The protruding areas would turn red, resembling human skin that had been struck hard — the kind of redness and swelling caused by burst blood vessels beneath the surface.
The cracked floor tiles also held residue that looked remarkably like dried blood, as if blood had once seeped out from the gaps before eventually drying up.
The second floor was completely different from the third. The terror index had practically doubled.
If the third floor could be described as eerie and unsettling, the second floor had reached the point of being genuinely dangerous — the kind of place that made you want to flee at every moment.
"Could this stuff really be blood?" Chen Ge picked up some of the crusty chunks from the floor and crushed them between his fingers. "No smell of blood. It's probably just ordinary red soil."
The bedding scattered along the corridor was somewhat in the way, and as he passed by, he had pulled back a few of them.
He discovered that the closer he got to the lower levels, the more lifelike the mannequins inside the bedding became. Not in a visual sense, exactly, but rather they gave off a feeling akin to that of a living person.
"When I get to the first floor, are the mannequins under the bedding going to get up on their own?" He wasn't joking — he was thinking about it with absolute seriousness.
After crossing the long corridor and passing room after room, Chen Ge spotted a few peculiar rooms near the bend in the hallway.
The doors to the regular sickrooms all had windows installed, allowing doctors to see the conditions inside from the outside. But these particular rooms had doors that were quite different.
"The director's office?" Chen Ge had practically toured all three ward buildings in the rehabilitation center, and this was the first time he had come across a door with a label on it.