Han Qiuming had only time to let out a single scream before something clamped over his mouth.
Boundless fear swallowed him whole. He couldn't see a thing. A bone-deep cold crept in from every direction as his body was dragged along toward some unknown destination.
The sound of a door slamming shut rang out, and the corridor returned to its original state.
The third ward was enormous, with each corridor situated far apart, but Ye Xiaoxin still caught a few faint sounds.
She hesitated for a moment, then stepped out of the director's office. This usually brash girl now moved with painstaking care, deliberating over every single step.
She rounded the corner. The other side of the corridor was completely empty.
"Where did that guy run off to? Did he trip some kind of trap or mechanism?" Ye Xiaoxin headed toward the far end of the pitch-black corridor. Halfway there, she suddenly heard footsteps.
"Han Qiuming's footsteps were light and weak. These footsteps are steadier — the kind made by someone who knows exactly where they're going and won't waver." Ye Xiaoxin ducked into a nearby patient room and peered through the crack in the door.
Before long, an utterly terrifying monster appeared.
He wore a blood-soaked red doctor's coat, his face looking as though it had been stitched together from mismatched parts. Killing intent radiated from his body, and in his hand he wielded an exaggeratedly oversized war hammer.
Stains of dried blood caked the hammer's fuller, and its sharp corners scraped against the wall — this was no prop. It was the real deal.
"An actor from the third ward?"
Twenty minutes had already passed, and only now was the actor making his entrance?
The first time Ye Xiaoxin had felt genuinely alarmed since entering the haunted house was when she saw someone riding on Han Qiuming's back. The second time was now. As the monster drew steadily closer, her slender white fingers instinctively clenched around the door.
This was an experience she had never had in any other haunted house, and she couldn't explain why.
"Why am I scared?"
Watching the monster skillfully swing the massive hammer, Ye Xiaoxin's instincts screamed at her to put distance between them. "Actors at other haunted houses are just putting on a show, but the way this doctor moves… it's like he's actually done something cruel with that hammer."
Only after the blood-robed doctor finally moved on did Ye Xiaoxin sneak out. She pulled out her notepad, scribbled a few words, then quietly trailed after him.
……
At the deepest reaches of the third ward, Guo Miao and Song An stopped outside rooms nine and ten.
"Every room number on this corridor is different from the other corridors, and rooms eight, nine, and ten are the most unique of all — they're the only ones with iron doors."
Guo Miao shared his discovery with the others. "We'll focus on checking these three rooms first. Everyone stay within each other's sight. If you find anything, call the others over immediately — don't touch anything on your own."
The group entered room eight first. A security grille was bolted over the window, and restraint straps lay scattered on either side of the steel-frame bed. The entire room felt off, but at first glance none of them could pinpoint why.
"This ward…" Guo Miao stared at the steel-frame bed for a long time before saying uncertainly, "It seems like everything in here is asymmetrical."
His remark opened the others' eyes.
One side of the wardrobe had been smashed and carved apart, while the other was perfectly intact. The left side of the bed looked completely normal, but the right had been bent and folded out of shape. Even the floor and walls were divided — one side spotless and clean, the other smeared with filth.
"What is this room trying to say? Is asymmetry the key to solving the puzzle?"
The patient in room eight was Xiong Qing, a lunatic suffering from hemispatial neglect. What appeared symmetrical and harmonious to a normal person looked twisted and grotesque to him, so his perception of the world was deformed and pathological — something that needed to be corrected.
The visitors searched high and low but found nothing useful. There were no hidden passages in room eight either.
They left room eight and moved on to room nine.
Pushing open the iron door, they found that room nine was the cleanest room in the entire third ward — no clutter, no trash, and nothing strange scrawled on the walls.
But under the circumstances of the third ward, the cleaner a room appeared, the more abnormal it felt.
The visitors rummaged through drawers and cabinets but turned up nothing useful either.