Chapter 165: I Saw the Devil
Fully armed as he stepped out of the laundry room, Chen Ge made his way to the second floor of the Second Ward Building and found the hospital room where Wang Haiming had once stayed.
The narrow room held two hospital beds, their sheets and bedding already removed, leaving only bare bed boards. Perhaps for safety reasons, there was nothing sharp in the room—even the corners of the beds had been deliberately smoothed down.
"Wang Haiming was sent to the mental hospital by his second wife. He might have had some mental issues, but nothing too severe. This should have been a conspiracy against him." Piecing together the information he had, Chen Ge found Wang Haiming to be a complicated man.
His life had seen dramatic ups and downs, but he had never given in, never stopped struggling and resisting. Whether forcibly admitted to the mental hospital or fighting for control of his body with the monster after discharge, he had never given up.
Having an affair and remarrying, he could never be considered a morally good person, but in some ways, he had already paid a heavy price for his mistakes.
"Every room in the rehabilitation center has a one-way lock. Even with a key, you can only unlock it from the outside. There’s a safety door every twenty meters in the hallway, plus night-shift orderlies and nurses on duty. Under these circumstances, how did Wang Haiming sneak out?" Sitting on the bed board, Chen Ge looked at the window sealed with wooden planks. "Did he jump from the window?"
Prying open the planks, Chen Ge found that the window outside this room was fitted with wire mesh—impossible to get out through.
The hospital had a cement wall over two meters high, surrounded by a dense forest with no landmarks, making it easy to get lost. Yet Wang Haiming, under these conditions, not only escaped smoothly but also managed to contact his ex-wife and convince her to rescue him. The whole process could almost be made into a movie.
"Relying solely on himself, Wang Haiming couldn’t have pulled this off. He must have used the power of the monster inside him, cooperating to escape the mental hospital. Their goal was the same—to get out." Chen Ge figured this out, but another question arose: "When did that monster get onto Wang Haiming?"
Recalling what Xu Tong had said, Chen Ge noticed a suspicious point about Wang Haiming.
After his first electric shock punishment, it wasn’t long before he started provoking the doctors again, even beating a nurse, all because he had hidden some medication. This irrational behavior might be understandable in a mental patient, but Wang Haiming wasn’t a madman.
"Could he have been deliberately provoking them? Trying to get back into the Third Ward Building?"
Chen Ge surveyed the spartan room. The only places to hide things were behind the curtains and under the beds.
Standing up, he flipped over both bed boards. On the wall beside one of them, he made a new discovery.
On the white-painted wall, someone had scratched lines of text with their fingernails. Time had blurred most of the words, leaving only a few legible ones.
"Did Wang Haiming leave this?" Chen Ge closed the hospital room door, moved closer, and shone his flashlight on the wall, reading the words aloud.
"Am I really going crazy?"
"Two orderlies and a doctor escorted me into the electroshock room. Once inside, those bastards locked the door—no one should have been able to get in."
"But why, after the shock, did I see four people in the room?"
"Who was that person in the hospital gown?"
The text on the wall seemed to have been left by Wang Haiming. In a room with no entertainment, secretly recording the strange things he encountered each day became his only interest.
Here, only constant thinking allowed him to feel different from the other patients around him.
"Was it a hallucination from the shock? But why could he still talk to me? It seemed like only I could see him."
"He said he’d help me escape, but I had to agree to one condition?"
"A temptation from the devil, but it seemed I had no choice."
"Maybe I got something wrong. Could it be because of those pills? Lately, I’ve been getting sleepier, my head feeling like it’s filled with lead. No, I have to get out of here."
"The devil seems unable to leave the Third Ward Building. To find a way out of the mental hospital, I have to go to that building to see him."
"The hospital staff are a bunch of brutish idiots! I’ll destroy this place, I swear!"
"Entering that room a second time, I agreed to the devil’s request. In the bathroom, I completed the ritual, letting him into my body."
"Am I really going crazy? Believing there’s a devil in this world and making a deal with him?"
The diary entries ended abruptly there. After completing the deal, what happened to Wang Haiming, no one but him would know.
"The monster on Wang Haiming came from the Third Ward Building. Their ritual was completed in the bathroom. Could the medium for the ritual also be a mirror? If so, the thing attached to Wang Haiming isn’t a devil at all—just an ordinary mirror ghost." Chen Ge knew mirror ghosts fairly well. They weren’t particularly powerful, but they were cunning, treacherous, and used strange methods.
Finding no other clues in the room, Chen Ge had to leave.
"The mirror ghost on Wang Haiming escaped from the Third Ward Building. The tall vengeful spirit on Wang Shenglong also escaped from there. Why don’t even ghosts want to stay in that building?" The clues he had weren’t enough to support further speculation. He picked up his skull-crushing hammer, called the white cat, and prepared to enter the Third Ward Building.
On the fourth floor, at the corridor connecting the two buildings, the deformed face had run into the Third Ward Building from here.
"The salt on the ground is undisturbed. No one has passed through." Pushing open the iron door, Chen Ge plunged into the thick darkness.
The floor tiles beneath his feet were loose. As he crossed the corridor and entered the Third Ward Building, he immediately felt an extremely ominous sensation.
A bone-chilling coldness, as if some terrifying monster had set its sights on him.
Even the white cat, usually fearless, cowered at his feet. If not for Chen Ge wearing the coat imbued with the kitten’s scent, the white cat would likely have fled by now.
"The clues my parents left are here. Tonight, no matter what, I can’t back down."
Chen Ge unzipped his backpack halfway, exposing the handle of the butcher knife wrapped in red cloth, ready to draw it at any moment.
"Time to go in and take a look." He pulled out his phone for one last glance. It was 11:51 PM—nine minutes until midnight.
Stepping into the building, Chen Ge felt a strange sensation, as if the entire Third Ward Building were a massive living entity, and the chilling wind was its breath.