Chapter 163: Xu Tong
The live stream chat was flooded with comments; the "surprise" Chen Ge had brought to the viewers was simply too huge.
He glanced at the platform's hourly live-stream popularity chart. Qin Guang ranked first, while he himself had started at ninety-six when he first went live, but now had surged straight to nineteenth.
This chart was on the platform's homepage and carried significant weight. To break into the top twenty, one needed at least 400,000 followers and a built-in fan base as a major streamer.
His rocket-like rise caught the attention of many viewers, who wondered how a newcomer with fewer than 50,000 followers had barged into the popularity battlefield of top-tier streamers.
To be honest, Chen Ge wasn't entirely sure either. He was just being himself, acting as an "innocent victim" exercising legitimate self-defense against unlawful infringement.
"It seems you viewers have sharp eyes. In this age of corruption by money, there aren't many positive-energy streamers like me who focus on creating quality content."
After checking the cameras on his wrist and chest, Chen Ge put away his phone and returned to the madwoman's side.
When he had dragged the one-armed man into the laundry room, the woman had gone berserk, banging her head against the iron cage, desperately trying to escape.
Afraid she might crack her skull, Chen Ge grabbed some torn clothes from the floor and padded the spot where she was hitting.
"What kind of scene could scare a living person this badly?"
His eyes swept over the three cages. The old man was lying in his cage, covering his head with his arms like an ostrich, too terrified to look outside.
Among the three, the old man had been imprisoned the longest and had seen the most. Now, the moment he saw the one-armed man, he covered his eyes, clearly afraid of seeing something he shouldn't and bringing trouble upon himself.
The young woman in the middle was extremely agitated, banging her head against the cage, her eyes brimming with fear that seemed ready to spill over.
Both of their reactions made sense. What put Chen Ge on guard was the middle-aged man in the last cage.
He was also afraid, trembling, his hands clenched tightly together. His demeanor and expression were flawless. If someone else had been here, they might have let their guard down by now, but Chen Ge was different.
It wasn't that Chen Ge had particularly sharp observational skills; it was just that before coming, he had obtained the patient records from the Third Psychiatric Ward. The middle-aged man before him was very likely Xu Tong, who had once lived in Room 5.
All the killers came from the Third Psychiatric Ward, so why had he, also from that ward, ended up as a victim?
Based on this, Chen Ge slowly began to spot some flaws in the middle-aged man.
For instance, his relatively neat appearance, his unshorn hair, and his hands, which had been hidden under his clothes until Chen Ge dragged the one-armed man in, only then clenching tightly due to extreme nervousness.
Chen Ge saw it clearly: there was a deep wound on the middle-aged man's left hand, as if someone had bitten him, and it was still bleeding uncontrollably.
"Your hand is injured."
Chen Ge approached the last cage, carrying his skull-crushing hammer. When he first entered the nurse's station in Building One, he had noticed oil stains on the cage. Later, following the oil stains, he had found a mix of oil and bloodstains on the wall outside the nurse's station.
At the time, he thought the blood was from one of the victims in the cages, but after checking the old man's body and finding no major wounds, he deduced that the bloodstains must have been left by the killer who took the old man away.
The oil and blood were mixed together, and the most reasonable explanation was that the old man had grabbed the wall, refusing to leave. The killer had tried to pry his hands off and got bitten, leaving both blood and oil at the same spot on the wall.
When he opened the door earlier, Chen Ge noticed that neither the deformed-faced man nor the one-armed man had any injuries on their arms.
So, if no one else was in the building, the killer who took the old man was almost certainly identified.
The middle-aged man was likely one of the hidden killers in the hospital. When they noticed someone appearing on the outskirts of the psychiatric hospital, they urgently moved the old man from Building One to the laundry room in Building Two to avoid exposure.
The hammer swayed in front of his face, and the middle-aged man felt a chill under Chen Ge's gaze.
"I won't hurt you. I just want you to honestly answer a few questions." Chen Ge stared at the middle-aged man, who was still playing dumb and refusing to respond.
"Not talking, huh?" He took down the two cameras, placed them at a distance, and deliberately covered the lenses.
After doing all this, he silently turned back, swung the skull-crushing hammer, and slammed it heavily onto the lock of the cage.
With just one blow, the area around the lock was already deformed.
"Still not talking?"
Chen Ge swung the hammer repeatedly, bending the iron bars with sheer force, reducing the space inside the cage by a quarter.
"What... do you want to ask?" The middle-aged man watched the hammer getting closer and closer, his face twitching. This guy seemed even more deranged than he was!
"I won't force you. Just some simple questions." Chen Ge looked at the twisted cage and set down the hammer. "What's your name?"
The middle-aged man paused for about two seconds before replying, "Wang Haiming."
"Wang Haiming?" Hearing that name, Chen Ge's nerves felt like they'd been pricked by a needle. A wave of shock surged through him.
This guy knows Wang Haiming?
He was probably just throwing out a fake name, but he never expected Chen Ge to know that person!
"You're lying." Without giving the middle-aged man a second chance to speak, Chen Ge swung the hammer, grazing his body and smashing it into the cage.
The ferocious hammerhead whistled through the air, and the middle-aged man's hair stood on end. "My name is Xiong Qing! Qing as in cyan!"
Chen Ge didn't bother with his nonsense, slamming the hammer against the cage again and again.
The space grew tighter, the iron bars around the cage threatening to snap at any moment. The middle-aged man couldn't help but shout, "Didn't you say you wouldn't force me?!"
Chen Ge ignored him, hammering away for several minutes until the area around the lock was completely deformed, impossible to open even with a key.
It would take a while longer to smash the cage apart, and time was what Chen Ge needed most right now. His pupils slowly contracted as he grabbed the middle-aged man's leg. "I'll ask you one more time: what's your name?"
The middle-aged man couldn't figure out Chen Ge's intentions and hesitated.
Again and again, trapped in this dangerous building, Chen Ge had no choice but to act. He pulled the middle-aged man's calf out and aimed the hammer.
A piercing scream rang out. For these lunatics who locked living people in cages, Chen Ge had little sympathy. He lifted the hammer and moved to the other leg.
Just as he raised the hammer to strike, the middle-aged man screamed, scrambling backward. "Xu Tong! My name is Xu Tong!"
"It really is you." Chen Ge stopped. "Answer my questions honestly, and I won't do anything to you."
After saying this, he crouched beside the cage. "Earlier, I heard you say the name Wang Haiming. What's your relationship with him? Where was the ward he used to stay in?"