"I've noted the patient's room number. I'll go back and report to my superiors now."
"You'd better be quick. The patient's condition is unstable, and prolonged unconsciousness can cause some damage and effects on the brain."
"Got it."
The police team leader left one officer to guard the scene and led the others back to the station.
……
Pushing open the glass door of the police station, a wave of noise surged towards the team leader.
He frowned, looking at his usual workspace. It was now packed with people, each with an exaggerated expression, eagerly telling the duty officer something.
"You have no discipline at all! Is this how the guidelines taught you to behave?" the team leader shouted at the young duty officer, his voice stern.
"Captain Cai! You're finally back. It's not that we aren't following procedure—this situation of theirs is really unusual." The young officer handed over the compiled statement to Captain Cai.
"Red-robed figure? Urban legend? Shadows under the building? Can also play the piano? What is all this?" Captain Cai slammed the statement onto the table. "They're going crazy, and you go along with it? Don't you have any basic judgment left?"
"We verified everything, even used a lie detector. It doesn't feel like these people are lying."
"Nonsense! You'd better return that broken machine immediately!" Captain Cai was growing irritated. He walked over to question them personally, and after a while, realized he had wrongly accused the young officer. These actors from the haunted house seemed to have been too deeply immersed in their roles, unable to climb back out of their own world.
"Did that haunted house hire a bunch of lunatics?" Getting nothing useful from the haunted house actors, Captain Cai focused on the tourists. The actors might conceal things for the haunted house's benefit, but the tourists certainly wouldn't.
To prevent the tourists from being threatened by the actors, Captain Cai specially invited the three visitors into another room. "You three, come with me."
Closing the door to the private room, the perpetually serious Captain Cai's expression softened. "Relax. Just tell the truth, don't hold anything back."
Li Yuan and Shirley, the couple, were visiting a police station for the first time and looked very nervous.
Compared to them, Chen Ge acted like he had returned home. He even went over to the water cooler and poured himself a glass of water.
"At the time of the incident, were there only the three of you tourists inside the haunted house?" Captain Cai shifted his gaze from Chen Ge to Li Yuan and Shirley.
"There were also three students and a quiet young woman." Li Yuan thought for a moment before answering.
"We've verified their identities. They are all temporary actors hired by the haunted house." Captain Cai had someone outside bring in the statement and flipped through it. "Think carefully again. Did you encounter any other tourists during your visit, or anyone who looked obviously abnormal?"
"Abnormal people?" Li Yuan glanced outside through the room's window. "Those people don't look very normal to him."
He truly couldn't understand why, after just visiting a haunted house, he ended up at the police station. "Officer, my girlfriend and I just wanted to visit a haunted house for a memorable date. We had no idea something so major happened inside. If we had known, we would've run out immediately. Why would we stay there to explore?"
"Understood. So, during your tour, you never encountered the 'Red-robed monster' the actors mentioned?" Captain Cai keenly picked up on the key point. Tourists had no reason to lie; what they said should be the truth. "The 'Red-robed monster' and the people under the building, as described by the haunted house actors, are likely their own staged farce. This is probably some new marketing stunt."
"Probably." Li Yuan and Shirley felt a lingering fear. They only now realized that the three students and the young woman were all actors from the haunted house. Using actors to pretend to be tourists, gain trust, and then scare the actual visitors—that was taking things too far.
Captain Cai asked a few more questions, which Li Yuan and Shirley answered honestly. When he finally had nothing left to ask, his gaze once again fell upon Chen Ge.
"What's your name?"
"Chen Ge."