Staring at the several photographs on the wall,
The truth he had been pursuing was right before his eyes, yet at this moment, Chen Ge felt a trace of bewilderment. "So it really was you…"
He gazed silently at the wedding photo, studying the younger
The man in the photograph wore a blissful smile — the kind Chen Ge had never once seen on Doctor Gao's face.
"Was it because the weight on your shoulders was too heavy?"
Hundreds of lives formed an airtight net that enveloped Doctor Gao, like countless needles piercing his soul, making it impossible to breathe.
"Three people eventually became one — is that why the Ghost Story Association is so fond of the number three?"
Many threads in his mind linked together, though Chen Ge didn't pursue that line of thought.
When he thought of Doctor Gao, the first thing that surfaced in his mind was a small incident that had happened at the pen spirit friend's home.
In that house belonging to the girl with severe depression, Doctor Gao had once said something — "You haven't walked the roads they walked. You can't know how rough those roads were. The fact that they made it through is a kind of strength in itself."
Recalling those words now, they felt more like something Doctor Gao had said to himself. As Jiujiang's best psychiatrist, he had actually known all along that he was ill too.
It was just that he had chosen a different method of treatment — not compromise, but resistance through the most extreme means.
Chen Ge walked to the bedside and opened the nightstand cabinet. Inside were all manner of syringes and pills of unknown purpose. Many of the drug packages bore warnings such as "Use under medical supervision" and "Overdose may be life-threatening."
"The packaging had already been torn open. This place was full of corpses, and the only living person was Doctor Gao himself. These drugs must have been prepared for his own use."
When Little Little's grandfather had been critically ill, Doctor Gao happened to be present. He had mentioned at the time that he too had once thought about ending it all.
Chen Ge sat down on the double bed, his hands clasped together, carefully recalling everything related to Doctor Gao.
"That day in the hospital room, after Doctor Gao finished talking about his wife's car accident, he added one more line — that he loved his wife very much. And then…" Chen Ge stood up and looked toward the room's door. "Then Doctor Gao pushed open the hospital room door and walked out."
The white cat was pacing outside the door, unwilling to enter this room. Whatever had been drawing it seemed to be right at the boundary between the two rooms, and between the two rooms was nothing more than an ordinary wooden door.
"Could it be that when Doctor Gao was about to seek death in the end, he pushed open the Blood Door?"
The room, built at the deepest part of the underground morgue, was filled with medical equipment and all sorts of bizarre objects. Doctor Gao had apparently considered bringing the dead back to life.
Unfortunately, he had failed. In the depths of his despair, he too had prepared to end it all. But then something happened that changed his mind.
"Standing at the very bottom of despair, there was a high probability that he pushed open the door to that blood-red world."
Chen Ge looked at the wedding photo. The woman in it had appeared in Ma Ying's phone video — only in the photo she was mature and striking, carrying a special aura about her.
"Someone who has been dead for a long time has appeared again. That can only be accomplished by using whatever lies behind the Door."
Now Chen Ge understood what was truly attracting the white cat. The blood-silk it had consumed came from the world behind the Door — in other words, it was those things that were drawing the white cat here.
"Midnight is when the Blood Door appears. The Black Phone's mission requirement just happens to be for me to enter the core area of the underground morgue before zero hour. Could the true venue for this trial mission actually be on the other side of the Door?"