The amusement park opened at nine o'clock.
"Captain Li, whatever you do, don't let your guard down. This man is dangerous. He's absolutely not as harmless as he makes himself out to be. Don't treat him like an ordinary mental patient." Chen Ge didn't know when Jia Ming would wake up, so after giving Li Zheng a few parting words of caution, he left the hospital ward.
He took a taxi to the place where Jia Ming had originally rented his room. Dawn had just broken, and the streets were nearly empty—only the occasional car passing by.
Chen Ge hadn't slept all night. First he'd chased the water ghost at the rehabilitation school, then he'd entered the reservoir to retrieve a corpse, and finally he'd returned to the hospital to help the police investigate Jia Ming. Every minute of the night had been put to use, without a single quarter-hour of rest.
His head was heavy, drowsiness creeping in. Chen Ge dozed off briefly in the taxi and was only woken when the driver called out to him at the destination.
He'd slept for just a few minutes—it was practically useless. Chen Ge felt as though his brain had been filled with water.
He rubbed his face and stepped into the alley. A cold, damp chill struck him head-on. Maybe it was something about the layout of the buildings, but outside light could barely penetrate into the alley.
"No wonder Jia Ming didn't dare linger after escaping from the building. He kept running all the way to the road before he finally relaxed."
This was the old part of the city. The surrounding buildings were all low—mostly two- or three-story structures that looked extremely run-down. Some of them even had red "demolish" characters scrawled on their walls.
"The things Jia Ming talked about at the hospital must have happened a few years ago. Hopefully the old woman hasn't moved and the place is still here."
Following the address Li Zheng had given him, he groped his way through the alley for quite a while before finally finding the old woman's house.
The neighbors on both sides had already moved out. One of them even had a gaping hole broken through the window—it clearly hadn't been lived in for a long time.
"This place really is hard to find." Chen Ge entered the stairwell and noticed several potted plants in the corner. They had probably been starved of sunlight for too long—most of the flowers had withered and their leaves had turned yellow and brittle.
"Anyone home?" Chen Ge knocked on the first-floor door and called out softly.
No answer. Only his own echo came back from the stairwell.
He glanced up the staircase. Something about this building felt off.
He tried the door handle. The first-floor security door swung open easily.
"Unlocked?" Curious, Chen Ge pulled the door fully open.
A thick, musty smell wafted from inside. The room was cluttered with old belongings. The sofa was the fabric-wrapped kind from over twenty years ago. The wall clock and the low dining table both looked like they had seen better days.
"The doorknob has no dust, and the clock inside is running. Someone should be living here." Without permission, Chen Ge wouldn't just barge into someone else's home. He called out again from outside, but there was still no response from within. However, from the rooftop came a peculiar sound—like a ball that was almost out of air rolling across the floor.
"Third floor?" Chen Ge headed upstairs. As he passed the second floor, he noticed the door there was also open, yet there was no unpleasant smell inside—it looked as though someone cleaned it every day.
He paused at the second-floor doorway for a moment, then continued upward.
The window at the stairwell corner was draped with black cloth. There were no lights installed on the walls. Outside it was already bright, but the stairwell remained pitch-dark.
"Anyone home?"
The strange noise burrowed into his ears. Chen Ge was like those protagonists in horror movies who insist on seeking their own doom, walking step by step toward the source of the sound.
His feet fell on the stairs as his body drifted deeper into the darkness. He gripped the handrail, feeling the chill seep through his palm.
The third floor of the old building had no light at all. Chen Ge pulled out his phone and turned on the flashlight.
He aimed it toward where the sound was coming from. As the beam swept across, something darted through the light.
His muscles tensed. Chen Ge scanned the third floor. The doors here had been stripped away, and the room was piled high with all kinds of junk. The most conspicuous item was a piano covered in a thick layer of dust.
Many of its keys were missing, like the open mouth of an old man who had lost nearly all his teeth.
"Their family must have been doing quite well before. A three-story building, and they could even afford a piano." Chen Ge walked over to the piano and pressed a key with his finger. The pleasant sound he expected did not come.
Chen Ge peered inside the piano. A massive tangle of hair had been stuffed inside it. Whether it was his imagination or not, the hair seemed to be shifting, retracting deeper into the piano's interior.
He reached his hand into the piano and calmly pulled out a handful of hair. "Black and white, cut cleanly at the edges, like it was trimmed with scissors. Did the landlady deliberately collect this?"
The landlady's daughter-in-law had still been young when the incident happened—her hair couldn't have been white.
"Why would the old woman stuff so much hair into a piano?" Chen Ge tossed the hair back into the instrument, but the instant he pulled his arm back, his eyes caught a flash of a gray face in the pile of hair—it had been lying in there the whole time, watching him.
"What was that?" The third floor was the domain of the dead. A few supernatural phenomena here seemed perfectly normal to Chen Ge.
He didn't panic. He set his phone to the side with the light aimed into the piano, then plunged both hands into the mound of hair. "Are you still in there?"
No one knew what was hidden beneath the hair, and no one knew what he might pull out. His fingers made contact with the strands—an unpleasant sensation to say the least.
After searching for a good while, Chen Ge still hadn't found anything. He withdrew his hands and glanced at the clock beside him. It was similar to the one in the old woman's room on the first floor, except that only the second hand was moving on the dial.
It ticked around and around, yet the time on the clock never changed, frozen at 3:44.