"Teacher Han, are you sure the right side isn't scarier than the left?"
Little Du gripped the door handle. He was starting to miss the Tanteng Hospital, miss that iron locker that gave him a sense of security.
"What are you panicking for? Chen said it himself — the Third Ward hasn't been finished yet. What's there to be scared of in an incomplete set?" Han Qiuming snapped out of his initial shock. He grabbed the person in charge, Guo Miao, by the arm. "Lao Guo, you and I will lead the charge."
"What does that have to do with me?" Guo Miao shook off his hand. "Didn't you say you'd walk out in front by yourself?"
"I was afraid you wouldn't dare come in and would run away halfway through." Han Qiuming's face was as dark as the bottom of a wok, though with the dim lighting inside the haunted house, no one noticed. "Fine, I'll take point. Stay close behind me and don't fall behind."
Han Qiuming shoved the old iron door fully open. Rust flakes showered down as the group stepped into the Third Ward.
A strange, indescribable smell hung in the air. Pills and yellowed medical forms were scattered across the floor. Han Qiuming walked ahead alone, and the more he looked, the more unsettled he became.
The walls were covered with all manner of deranged ramblings — cruel words scrawled together into sentences that sent chills down the spine, utterly unlike anything a sane person could conjure.
What made him even more uncomfortable was that after walking several meters in, the number of blood-written words on the walls hadn't decreased at all. If anything, there were more of them.
Densely packed, not a single sentence repeated!
"How did Chen come up with all these lines? Is he really a lunatic?"
Crouching down, Han Qiuming lifted a corner of the bedding. Inside was a dummy made from pillows and a bed sheet.
Yet even this crude, almost childishly rough dummy was impossible to look away from.
"So haunted-house props can be made like this? I've been in this business for years, and I've learned something new today." Han Qiuming stared at the eerie face on the pillow — clearly drawn in a few casual strokes, yet it radiated an indescribable sense of wrongness.
"Look at this!" Su Luoluo stood at the doorway of the first patient room. Everyone followed where she pointed — the door hinge was covered in bloody scratches left by fingernails.
She held her hand up to compare. "It looks just like the real thing. Doesn't seem like any tools were used."
"If no tools, then did the set designer dig them out with his bare hands?" Han Qiuming tucked the bedding back into place, hiding the dummy underneath. "Watch what you touch inside. Be careful not to set off any traps. Especially the bedding on the floor — actors could be hiding under those covers."
He prepared to move forward, but the others didn't budge. The short-haired woman walked alone into the first patient room.
The window had been sealed shut. Through the gaps in the wooden planks, a thick concrete wall was visible outside, radiating a sense of suffocation and despair — like a prison cell.
Ye Xiaoxin's fingers traced along the bed frame. On both sides of the hospital bed, she found more scratch marks. "Come help me. Let's lift the bed board."
"We only have twenty minutes to clear this place. Can you hurry up? Stop fussing over details." Han Qiuming stood outside alone.
Little Du and Song An went into the room to help Ye Xiaoxin lift the bed board. The scene beneath it caught them off guard.
Along the edges of the board were rows of dark-red fingerprints. Fragments of broken nails remained wedged in the gaps. You could tell that whoever had carved these bloody scratches had endured unimaginable agony.
"After artificial blood dries, it turns a light red. But this dark-red color..." Song An swallowed hard and said to Ye Xiaoxin beside him, "It looks a bit like real blood."