Chapter 156: More Than One Person in the Building
Cooked meat left exposed to the air for a while will turn tough.
Chen Ge aimed the fixed camera on his chest at the duck and reached out to touch it. The skin was soft, still carrying a trace of warmth.
"This duck was cooked no more than an hour ago." He shifted his body, taking the duck out of the iron cage. "The innards haven't been cleaned out. The neck was chopped straight off, and the head is missing."
Chen Ge turned the duck over. On the half-cooked meat were bite marks, and the belly had been torn open. There were no duck feathers on the ground; the creature that had torn into the duck seemed to have swallowed the feathers as well.
"Was there a large dog kept in this iron cage?" Putting the duck back in place, Chen Ge looked toward the other end of the cage.
Outside the cage holding the duck sat two plastic bowls, filled with colorless liquid.
"Why put two bowls outside the same cage? Were there two dogs in here?" The bowls were identical in color and shape. Chen Ge picked one up and sniffed it.
The liquid in one bowl was odorless and tasteless, likely plain water. The other bowl held a liquid with a faint, pungent smell.
"Looks like rat poison." To prevent rats from damaging props, Chen Ge's haunted house had also bought rat poison before, so he was familiar with the scent.
"Two identical bowls—one with water, one laced with rat poison. Wasn't the keeper afraid the animal in the cage would drink the wrong one by mistake?"
The scene before him was indeed odd. Chen Ge captured it all on camera. Glancing at his phone screen, the barrage of comments scrolled rapidly. Among them, a lengthy message flashed by, vaguely mentioning "iron cage" and "person."
There were too many comments, and Chen Ge didn't scroll back. He inspected every steel bar of the cage and noticed a large patch of grease stains on the cage door, as if someone had desperately gripped the bars, unwilling to be taken away.
"Could it be that what was in the cage wasn't an animal, but a person?"
In the nurse's station, discarded medicine bottles lay scattered across the floor, along with small paper bags bearing patients' names. Some bags still held pills of various colors.
"In a psychiatric hospital abandoned for four or five years, there are actually living people, and it looks like more than one."
Chen Ge grew more cautious. All his preparations during the day had been aimed at dealing with ghosts and monsters, overlooking the potential danger from the patients themselves.
Stepping out of the nurse's station, Chen Ge focused on examining the walls on both sides.
The creature in the iron cage had been forcibly taken away. Its hands were covered in grease, and in its struggle, it would have left traces.
He hadn't gone far before he saw the wall plaster scratched off, grease mixed with bloodstains.
"Injured?"
Following the trail, Chen Ge traced it all the way to the second floor of the ward building. Here, the corridor split into two: one leading into the interior of the first ward building, the other into the second.
The entire rehabilitation center was a connected structure, with the three ward buildings linked internally.
It took nearly twenty minutes for Chen Ge to search the first ward building. There were few places to hide in the building, and he found neither the person from the cage nor any further signs of living people.
"Could that guy have been taken to another ward building?" Chen Ge headed downstairs when his phone suddenly vibrated in his pocket. It was Liu Dao calling.
"What's up?" Chen Ge's nerves were taut; any disturbance could affect him greatly.
"Chen Ge, you're moving too fast! This is an all-night stream, and it's only been twenty minutes. You've already covered one ward building. How are you planning to handle the rest of the stream?" Liu Dao was closely monitoring Chen Ge's broadcast. "Qin Guang's viewership just broke 600,000, and you're still under 50,000. Don't just focus on exploring—interact with the viewers more."
Listening to Liu Dao, Chen Ge returned to the first floor. When he looked toward the end of the first-floor corridor, his pupils contracted slightly. "How did the iron door to the ward building close? I remember it was open when we came in."
"What are you talking about?" Liu Dao's voice paused. "The situation isn't looking good for us, but don't put too much pressure on yourself. Just stream the way you want."
"I'll talk to you later. Gotta go." Chen Ge put away his phone, raised his tool hammer, and ran toward the iron door. As he passed the nurse's station, he glanced inside instinctively.
"Something seems different."
Worried about the ward building's main door, Chen Ge didn't immediately jump into the nurse's station to check. Instead, he first ran to the building's entrance and shook the iron door forcefully.
"It's locked! When did this happen?"
Chen Ge pressed his face against the gap in the door and looked outside. A new, large padlock had been added to the handle on the outside.
He slammed into the iron door, but something seemed to be propping it up from the outside, and the door didn't budge.
"A padlock and a prop—clearly the work of someone experienced." With living people in the abandoned psychiatric hospital, Chen Ge suspected former patients had returned. They weren't ordinary madmen; some might be smarter than most normal people. He couldn't underestimate them.
Chen Ge tried to pry the lock open with his tool hammer, but it was useless. He then checked the patient rooms on both sides—all the windows were sealed with iron bars.
At that moment, Chen Ge felt even more keenly what it must be like for patients sent to a psychiatric hospital. It was like a special kind of prison.
Call for help? Report to the police?
Chen Ge glanced at his phone screen. The stream's viewership was still climbing. If he left now, this broadcast would be ruined.
Besides, he had a trial mission to complete: enter the third ward building before midnight and survive until dawn. If he called the police, the questioning alone would waste several hours.
"I remember the windows on the second floor don't have防盗网. I can leave from there. No need to call the police for now." To complete this trial mission and find clues about his parents' disappearance, Chen Ge was willing to go all out.
Back at the nurse's station, Chen Ge noticed a subtle change from when he'd passed by earlier.
Jumping inside, he saw that the plastic bowls outside the iron cage had been emptied, their contents poured out.
"Is he afraid I'll find out one of the bowls had rat poison?" Chen Ge couldn't understand the reasoning. As he was about to stand up, he suddenly noticed a few lines of small writing on the wooden board under the counter.
To read the words clearly, Chen Ge bent down and stuck his head under the counter. Before he could get close to the writing, he felt an itch on his scalp, like a small bug had crawled into his hair.
He scratched his head, and the back of his hand accidentally touched something.
Looking up, Chen Ge's heart skipped a beat.
On the shelf under the counter were glued clumps of black hair!
Some long, some short—he had no idea where they came from.
"Why is there hair under here? Is it from the person in the cage?"
Before Chen Ge could figure it out, a sharp cat screech rang out from outside the nurse's station. He quickly crawled out from under the counter and looked around.
The white cat was baring its teeth and hissing at the staircase on the second-floor landing, its heterochromatic eyes fixed intently on a certain spot.