Thick blood vessels blanketed the entire operating room, wrapping around everyone inside like the gnarled roots of an ancient tree.
Organs on the walls contracted and pulsed, and rows of human faces were embedded in the ceiling, creating the impression of a massive jigsaw puzzle made of flesh.
Blood dripped onto the white lab coat, leaving no stain. Dr. Gao was the most peculiar existence in this world — he stood amid flesh, blood, and corpses, yet wore a white coat that symbolized salvation and hope.
His expression calm, Dr. Gao looked at Chen Ge and spoke the first words: "You came later than I expected."
"You knew I would come?"
"I knew you would definitely come. At the twentieth floor of the Fanghua Garden Complex, the moment I laid eyes on you, I felt it — you gave me an overwhelming sense of crisis."
"So that's why you kept speaking up for me back then, to prevent me from clashing with the other members of the Strange Tales Association?" Chen Ge recalled the scene. Number Ten had been helping him the whole time, and in the end even left a note under the table telling him about the Linjiang Blood Prevention Station.
Dr. Gao nodded. "You are all my patients. Isn't it perfectly natural for a doctor to consider the interests of his patients?"
"Patients?" Chen Ge shook his head. "You have no right to say that. In my view, you're the sickest one of all. The world behind the door doesn't lie — this thoroughly twisted, deformed nightmare made of flesh and blood is the true portrait of your soul."
"A heart filled with flesh and debris isn't called illness. Everyone has something deformed inside them. If that counts as sickness, then we're all sick — you included." Dr. Gao smiled. He seemed to genuinely enjoy talking with Chen Ge. This young man, whether in his thinking or his perception of things, was unlike anyone else. Dr. Gao felt a sense of kinship with him. "I'm a psychologist. I've seen countless twisted, deformed minds. The reason they became this way — much of the time, it's really not their own fault."
His voice paused, and the smile on Dr. Gao's face slowly faded. "When you came in, did you see the photographs on the walls?"
Chen Ge nodded. "Those victims — those are the crimes the Strange Tales Association has committed over these five years?"
"Victims?" Dr. Gao tilted his head up, gazing at the faces on the ceiling. "In my eyes, they are the perpetrators. They act with impunity, never considering consequences. They wear human skin and live among us, endlessly manufacturing misfortune. Every single one of them has a reason to die. All I did was make their deaths a little more meaningful."
"But is that fair to them?" Chen Ge stood as a third party, deliberately refusing to take sides. "I saw a man in the lab who was half-dead. According to the doctors here, they keep him in that state for extended periods — healing him on one hand while inflicting new wounds on him with the other. He endures endless torment simply because, when he was in elementary school, he bullied a classmate and stabbed them in the thigh with a pen tip. Do you think that punishment is fair?"
"You question fairness only because you haven't considered things from the patient's perspective. You can't see the trauma in their hearts. You can't understand the despair they carry — that suffocating agony that makes them want to tear themselves apart." Dr. Gao's speech quickened, as if he were thinking of himself. "That kind of pain is prolonged — a suffering that seeps into every nerve. It torments you every single moment. It follows you like countless tiny worms filling your body. You know they're inside you, occupying every inch of you, but you simply cannot expel them."
"No matter what you do, they follow you, continuously breeding inside your body, devouring every nerve. You can hear your memories being shredded bit by bit, until in the end your mind is nothing but those disgusting worms. Close your eyes and you see them. As long as you're alive, you think of them."
"Can you understand what that feels like? That is the pain a person whose soul has been wounded must endure twenty-four hours a day. Do you still think what I'm doing is wrong?"
Dr. Gao looked into Chen Ge's eyes. "Even with that agony, they still struggle to live. But clenching your teeth and holding on doesn't bring liberation — it only brings greater suffering."
"A person can be called human because they have developed self-awareness. When someone can affirm themselves with 'I,' they become human. And my patients — they are slowly losing themselves, because that pain is gradually devouring their 'I.'"
This was the first time Dr. Gao had spoken about this in front of Chen Ge. His words touched not only on psychology but seemed to veer into sociology and philosophy as well. "Humans are complex life forms composed of many contradictions. 'Human' is not a simple noun, so the harm and suffering they endure cannot be measured by a word like 'fair.'"
After hearing Dr. Gao's words, Chen Ge gripped the skull-cracking hammer tighter. Perhaps the gap in education was too wide — he didn't really understand what Dr. Gao was saying.
With a look for help, Chen Ge turned to glance at Dr. Wei beside him. The other man seemed to be hearing this sort of thing for the first time as well. He cleared his throat lightly and said to Chen Ge: "Whatever you do, don't take what a mentally ill person says too seriously. Don't dwell too deeply on the worldview they tell you about, or sooner or later you'll go crazy too."
"Don't use madness as an excuse. Whenever you encounter something incomprehensible, you always label it 'abnormal' — but have you ever considered who gets to define what's normal and what's abnormal?" Dr. Gao stood atop the pool of blood. He was the center of the entire room. "When your eyes fix on a human form, what are you looking for? What makes a person human isn't the sounds they make, their actions, or their appearance — it's the soul. Everything revolves around it."
Though Chen Ge couldn't fully grasp Dr. Gao's words, he somehow felt they made a disturbing amount of sense. That was an extremely dangerous signal.
Once a person accepted a madman's worldview, they weren't far from madness themselves.
"Dr. Gao, no matter how reasonable your words sound, there's one thing you can't deny. They died because of you. Your hands are stained with blood. You've crossed the line of the law." Blood threads had begun burrowing under his skin — Chen Ge's time was running out. He flipped open the comic album and released all the haunted house employees. "You're one of the very few people I admire. That's precisely why I can't let you continue. Dr. Gao, you've been sick ever since you pushed open that door. You're no longer yourself. Even if your wife were to rise from the dead and open her eyes to see the way you are now, she would find you a stranger. You are not the man she would want to meet."
Dr. Gao stood motionless, his expression calm, but the blood vessels beneath his feet began to surge violently. The organs on the walls thrashed wildly, and the faces on the ceiling above contorted one by one into expressions of terror.
The world behind the door was constructed from Dr. Gao's inner heart. Everything here seemed to be linked to him — and whenever his emotions shifted, the entire world shifted with them.