"You can't find any information on those patients either?" Chen Ge was somewhat surprised. "Can you tell me which three they were? Maybe I can provide some leads."
"You know about something from four or five years ago?" Captain Yan had been given quite a few surprises by Chen Ge. It was precisely because Chen Ge had contributed to the Ping'an Apartment massacre case that he decided to share some information: "These three patients lived in Room 7, Room 9, and Room 10 of Ward Three, five years ago."
Chen Ge silently committed Captain Yan's words to memory and cross-referenced them with the files Dr. Gao had provided. The patient in Room 7 suffered from Cotard's syndrome, believing that something was wrong with all his internal organs and even that he was already dead.
According to what Dr. Gao had said at the time, this patient had been confirmed dead. However, Dr. Gao had only verified this through hospital records—no one had ever seen the body, and the possibility of fabricated records could not be ruled out.
The one living in Room 9 was Wu Fei—the person whose dominant personality had repeatedly warned Chen Ge to be careful.
And Room 10 belonged to the one whom both the doctors and patients called the Devil. The hospital had no records of any of these people, which was almost certainly connected to the former director. After all, he had been responsible for the entire rehabilitation center, and outsiders had no access to those files at all.
It was a pity that the former director had already been torn apart by Zhang Ya, with only a head remaining behind the door. Extracting patient information from him would be extremely difficult.
Chen Ge's mind raced. After Xu Tong and the phantom limb syndrome patient died, his mission completion rate had risen by five percent. This pointed him toward a path.
"Could it be that as long as I kill or capture all the escaped patients and bring them back, the mission completion rate will keep going up?"
On reflection, this was entirely possible. The patients had been "reborn" through the door of Ward Three—they bore its mark. Strictly speaking, they were also part of the Ward Three scenario.
Noticing that Chen Ge hadn't responded for a while, Captain Yan continued: "We interviewed doctors and nurses who once worked in Ward Three, and we discovered something even more serious."
"What was it?"
"The doctors who knew about these three patients have been passing away one after another over the past few years. The causes of death were all over the place—accidents, suicides." Captain Yan paused, seeming to weigh whether he should say what came next.
"Captain Yan, I absolutely won't tell anyone what you've shared with me."
"That's not what I'm worried about. I'm afraid you'll be scared once you hear it." Captain Yan's voice on the other end shifted. "The most notable case was a female doctor. She and her boyfriend left Jiujiang, but they still couldn't escape their fate. All the deaths seemed unrelated—different locations, spanning a long period of time—so they never attracted much attention. But when you connect their deaths together, the situation looks completely different. All the victims share one thing in common: a connection to Ward Three. And accidental deaths with a common thread have a ninety percent chance of being carefully planned murders!"
Captain Yan was very diplomatically telling Chen Ge that his current situation was truly dangerous.
"They've really got some nerve." Chen Ge let out a dry laugh and headed toward the haunted house exit. He wanted to get out of here as quickly as possible and return to New Century Amusement Park.
"They're a bunch of lunatics. Their thinking is completely different from normal people—they're capable of anything. The worst part is that they don't believe what they're doing is wrong. Crimes committed in the name of self-righteousness are the hardest to deal with." Captain Yan also felt a headache coming on. "Anyway, be careful. Contact me immediately if you find anything."
"Got it." Before Captain Yan could hang up, Chen Ge quickly asked another question: "Captain Yan, besides those three patients, you must have files on the others, right? Could you let me see them? After all, I'm the only one who's actually fought them."
"I'm warning you—don't go off doing anything dangerous on your own."
"Don't misunderstand. I'm just curious. If you already have information on some of the patients, why not arrest them first and interrogate them at your leisure?" His life was on the line—Chen Ge couldn't afford to be careless. "Are you afraid of alerting the enemy? Planning to round them all up at once?"
"If it were that simple, I wouldn't have called specifically to warn you to stay safe." Captain Yan didn't elaborate—they seemed to have run into some trouble of their own. "I can't release the detailed files publicly, but since you're essentially a victim, you have a basic right to know. I'll select some that you're cleared to see and send them over."
They chatted a few more moments before Captain Yan hung up. Shortly after, he sent Chen Ge several files.
Each patient had their own unique identification number, and all the information had been compiled into dossiers. What Chen Ge saw was the content that Captain Yan's team had整理led afterward.
"Patient No. 1, Wang Shenglong..."
The first page was Wang Shenglong's file. Of all the patients, his information was the most detailed—it covered every hospital he had visited, how many times he had moved in five years, and every person he had come into contact with who shouldn't have been anywhere near him. Everything had been investigated down to the last detail.
The second page was a woman's file. She was strikingly beautiful, with perfectly symmetrical features. There was nothing wrong with her appearance on the surface, yet she gave off a strangely discordant feeling—as if that face didn't belong to her at all.
The patient in Room 2—Chen Ge remembered her too. Dr. Gao had mentioned she suffered from Dorian Gray syndrome, was terrified of aging, had undergone numerous cosmetic surgeries, and used enormous amounts of cosmetics.
According to the police files, this woman had gone missing six months ago. The last place she had been seen was Fanghua Garden Community.
When he saw that name, Chen Ge paused. Everything revolved around a single location—this couldn't be a coincidence.
He quickened his pace toward the corridor exit. Passing through every scene, Chen Ge finally found the Tian Teng Hospital exit.
Dim light gave way to a long-absent brightness at the end of the corridor. Just a few meters from the exit, six or seven people were huddled together, grimacing as they inched forward.
"What are you all doing?" Chen Ge walked toward them carrying the recorder.
"Wait!" The supervisor raised a megaphone and shouted at Chen Ge. "Are you... okay?"
"Why wouldn't I be? Did you think I was possessed by a ghost or something?" Chen Ge walked casually past the supervisor and the six or seven haunted house employees as though nothing had happened. "Your haunted house is safe now. But let me give you a word of advice—people reap what they sow. The spirits' money isn't that easy to earn."
Stepping through the haunted house's front gate, the light was almost blinding. The moment Chen Ge emerged, every visitor's eyes turned toward him.
This was a man who had gone into a haunted house and scared every single "ghost" right out of it. Same visitors, same attraction—yet he had experienced it on a whole different level.