Liwan Private Hospital was painted white from top to bottom, making it the most conspicuous—and most peculiar—building in the entire town.
Pulling open the rusty iron gate, they found yellowed medical records scattered across the pitch-black corridor. Pick up any one of them, and words like terminal illness, death, and malignant contagion stared back at you.
The glass windows rattled in the wind, creaking and groaning. Every single ward door stood open, as if the deceased patients had already returned and might step out at any moment.
Finger marks lingered on the door frames. Unnamed plants crawled across the walls. Large chunks of ceiling had peeled away, revealing strange patterns behind them that looked disturbingly like human faces.
This hospital was one of the most terrifying scenes in the entire town, and it was welcoming all its guests with its own unique brand of hospitality.
The floor was cracked, and every step produced a sound. In that blanket of deathly silence, even the faintest noise was enough to make one's skin crawl.
"Where did that guy Li Xu go? They were only a dozen seconds ahead of us. How did they vanish in the blink of an eye?" Wang Yan's expression was grave. He stood in the waiting hall, studying the two corridors branching left and right, trying to trace the pair's direction from the debris on the floor.
To his surprise, both corridors bore signs of foot traffic. He counted seven or eight sets of bare footprints.
"Besides us, there are others in this building." Wang Yan stared at the prints on the ground, hesitating.
He knew full well that every actor in this haunted house was a master of terror. Running into one at random could drive a person mad, and right now there could be several of them lurking inside.
"Which way do we go?" Wang Yan's girlfriend spoke up. She was dressed in stylish, lightweight clothing, and her body was trembling involuntarily—whether from fear or simply from the cold, it was hard to tell.
"I remember Li Xu and the male streamer were both wearing sneakers. From the prints on the ground, they should have gone left. But..." Wang Yan lowered his head, thinking.
"But what? Can't you just finish what you're saying?" Zhang Huang was getting impatient. When people found themselves in a completely unfamiliar environment, irritability was only natural.
"Can't you come look for yourself?" Wang Yan shone his phone's light on the floor. In the left corridor, there were two sets of prints side by side.
"The front pair has sneaker treads. The back pair has no tread pattern at all. I can guarantee you, whatever was following that visitor in front wasn't another visitor—it was something else." Wang Yan wasn't trying to scare anyone on purpose; he was simply stating facts. "These two sets of prints are less than thirty centimeters apart. Do you still not see the problem?"
When Zhang Huang still didn't get it, Wang Yan decided to demonstrate personally. He walked up behind his girlfriend and stood exactly thirty centimeters behind her. "The visitor walks up front, and this is what follows right behind them—a complete stranger. And they walked the entire length of the corridor like that. And look at the prints on the ground—perfectly orderly. Which means, all the way to the very end, the person in front never once realized there was a 'person' trailing just thirty centimeters behind them."
"Man, these haunted house employees don't mess around." It was Zhang Huang's first time visiting a haunted house, and Wang Yan's description alone was enough to make his stomach drop.
"Li Xu and the male streamer should have gone left. The haunted house actors on that side are being drawn toward them right now, so that route should be safe." Wang Yan walked off toward the left corridor on his own.
Once Wang Yan left, the hospital lobby became even more terrifying. The medical records on the floor stirred in the spectral wind, scraping against the ground with a raspy, whispering sound—a form of torture for first-time haunted house visitors.
"Wait for me!" Wang Yan's girlfriend and Zhang Huang hurried into the left corridor after him.
Even though no one touched them, the ward doors on both sides rattled and clattered of their own accord. All manner of monsters might be hiding in those pitch-black rooms.
Treading carefully, the three moved at a snail's pace, nearly pressed against one another.
"This just looks like a regular ward—run-down, obviously unoccupied for a long time." The furnishings inside were remarkably realistic, almost making you forget this was a haunted house set.
"Stay sharp. The actors here are all professionally trained. They can follow behind you without making a sound, and their scare tactics are endless. You never know when they'll strike."
Danger could come from any direction. Besides watching for wards with half-open doors, they had to watch for cracked walls and floors—and even the ceiling above them.
Their nerves were stretched to the breaking point. If someone had shouted right then, it probably would have sent all of them flying.
A corridor barely a dozen meters long took them over a full minute to traverse. By the time they reached the staircase landing, all three discovered their backs were drenched in sweat.
"That's it? I thought actors in ghost costumes were going to burst out of the rooms." Zhang Huang let out a breath of relief. "Honestly, it wasn't even that scary. Your little analysis at the beginning was the creepiest part. Were you trying to build up the tension on purpose just to freak us out?"
This sports scholarship student really did have more nerve than the average person. And there was another crucial point—he didn't want to come across as less brave than Wang Yan.
The truth was, he looked down on Wang Yan from the bottom of his heart. A forensic medicine student who did nothing but bury his head in corpses—boring, plain-looking, short, from a poor family. An utterly hopeless case with not a single redeeming quality.
With that thought, some of the fear in Zhang Huang's chest dissipated. He stole a glance at Wang Yan's girlfriend.
She had been his high school classmate, but back then he never would have guessed that once this girl learned how to dress herself up, she could look this good.
When he'd seen her profile photo online, Zhang Huang could hardly believe it was really her.
Hearing Zhang Huang's words, Wang Yan felt a flicker of anger. He'd offered a sincere analysis, and all he got in return was suspicion. People like this didn't deserve his help.
Suppressing his displeasure, Wang Yan—though he too had once had a fiery temper—found that after visiting Chen Ge's haunted house, his rough edges had been worn smooth.
He wasn't entirely sure why. Maybe it was because he'd witnessed truly real devils, and now everyone else looked like a gentle soul by comparison. Or maybe it was back in the underground morgue, when he'd passed out again and again only to be revived each time, and in his haze he'd heard the late professor from Jiujiang Forensic Medical School offering words of admonition.
Whatever the reason, the Wang Yan of today was no longer the same person. He had grown.
Facing Zhang Huang's repeated provocations, Wang Yan didn't argue back. He understood that arguing was pointless. His main purpose here was to ensure Zhang Huang had a "good time" in the haunted house. As long as he could achieve that goal, everything else was secondary.
"What, cat got your tongue? Feeling guilty?" Zhang Huang thought he'd seen right through Wang Yan. "Coming to a haunted house just to prove who's braver—don't you think that's a bit childish?"