Chapter 166: Who Is Playing the Doctor
In the dim corridor, piles of bedding lay scattered about, bulging as if hiding something beneath.
Chen Ge used his iron hammer to flip one open. Under the musty blanket was a dummy made from a bedsheet and pillow, crudely crafted, barely resembling a human shape.
What was more unsettling was that a face had been drawn on the pillow with colored markers—eyes, a nose, a split mouth. It looked like a child’s doodle, yet it sent a chill down Chen Ge’s spine.
“That’s not right.”
Chen Ge fought the urge to smash it flat with his hammer and began to think.
“The twenty-four mannequins in the haunted house are far scarier than these pillow-and-sheet dummies in every way. I didn’t feel a shred of fear facing them, but standing next to these fakes, I can’t shake this unease.”
He turned the dummy over. On the back of the pillow was a name written in unfamiliar handwriting—Li Chunyan.
“Why is there a name?” These dummies felt like something from a child’s game of house, where kids use dolls or stuffed toys to play mom and dad, or to represent real people.
Casually sprinkling a handful of salt on the dummy’s face, Chen Ge watched for two or three minutes. Nothing happened. Then he took a few steps and flipped open another blanket, revealing another dummy made from a pillow and sheet.
“Zhang Qisi?” A name was written on the back of this one too.
Chen Ge looked at the old bedding piled along the corridor, a chill creeping up his spine. “Does every dummy have a name behind it? Are these things actually standing in for living people?”
The mounds of bedding along the hallway looked like graves. Chen Ge’s hand gripping the skull-crushing hammer was sweating. He felt that after completing this trial, his courage would be greater than before.
He’d only gone a dozen meters when the two bags of salt ran out.
As it turned out, salt wasn’t very effective against whatever was lurking here. The unsettling presence in the corridor hadn’t faded; instead, it grew stronger.
“I’d better save the last bag of salt. Can’t waste it anymore.” Every few steps, Chen Ge glanced back, worried he’d run into a classic horror movie scene—walking all the way, only to find a row of dummies wobbling behind him.
Every muscle in his body tensed. Chen Ge had made up his mind: even if a dummy stood up behind him, he’d charge over, smash it to pieces, and finish it off with the butcher knife.
“No need to panic. I still have plenty of cards to play.” Chen Ge wasn’t sure if he was explaining to the viewers in the livestream or comforting himself, but as he ventured deeper into the Third Ward, the stream’s popularity skyrocketed at an alarming rate. In contrast, Qin Guang had hit a plateau, his viewership steadily dropping, now only propped up by big-spending donors.
The Third Ward’s rooms were different from the other two wards. Every room was a single. Strangely, none of them had beds, as if they’d never been occupied.
“Dr. Gao told me the Third Ward only has ten rooms, and only nine patients on record. So what were all these empty rooms for?”
None of the rooms had numbers. The doors were uniform, painted the same white, but they seemed never to have been opened. They probably weren’t meant for patients.
“The First Ward is packed, with beds even in the hallways. This Third Ward is practically empty, left vacant rather than used for patients. Is there a deeper reason?”
Chen Ge moved cautiously. When he reached the middle of the fourth-floor corridor, the stench in the air suddenly intensified.
Beyond the cold wind, another sound emerged.
It was hard to describe—like countless people breathing heavily, struggling to wake from a nightmare.
Shining his flashlight around, Chen Ge’s unease grew. He pressed his back against the wall, pulled out his phone, and checked the time.
“Midnight, exactly!”
As he looked at his phone, a door creaked open somewhere on a lower floor of the Third Ward.
The sensation was strange. The sound came from below, yet it seemed to echo right in his ears.
“The blood door in the haunted house’s mirror opens for one minute every midnight. Could the doors in this Third Ward be the same as the one in my haunted house?”
The doors appeared at midnight but didn’t open on their own. When the creak of a door sounded, it meant something had come out from behind it.
“Wang Haiming’s carved message said he performed the final ritual in the bathroom. It seems the only place in the rehabilitation center with large mirrors is the bathroom.”
After midnight, the entire building felt different, as if a sleeping monster was waking up.
Reaching the deepest part of the fourth floor, Chen Ge stood at the stairwell and peered down. The dark stairs stretched step by step into the blackness.
No one knew what was hidden there, or what might suddenly emerge from an unexpected angle.
Chen Ge’s eyes flickered. He gripped the tool hammer, standing at the stairwell. After a moment’s thought, he turned off the flashlight.
The Third Ward was a minefield of deranged patients, wronged souls, and monsters from beyond the blood door. Every step could be deadly.
In this situation, the flashlight’s beam would give him away, making him a sitting duck.
He closed his eyes, then opened them, letting them adjust to the dark. Then he stepped onto the stairs, heading down to the third floor.
From the start of this trial until now, Chen Ge hadn’t come away empty-handed. At the very least, his relationship with the white cat had improved.
Earlier, the cat had ignored him, but after entering the depths of the Third Ward’s corridor, it had jumped onto his shoulder on its own, claws digging into his clothes and backpack, looking like it would never let go.
“Don’t be scared. Everything’s still under control.” Chen Ge patted the white cat’s head. The usually irritable cat surprisingly didn’t resist, its heterochromatic eyes fixed on the darkness ahead.
Going down the stairs in the dark felt like the steps had multiplied. It took Chen Ge a minute or two to reach the third floor.
The windows were sealed. The third floor was even darker than the fourth, with only the vague outlines of bulging bedding in the corridor.
“The deformed face vanished into the Third Ward like it disappeared. Not even a footprint on the floor. Where could it be hiding? In some room? Or under the bedding, waiting to ambush me?”
There was also a nurse’s station at the corner of the third floor. Strangely, all the medicines and records inside the counter were neatly arranged. What struck Chen Ge as even odder was that there wasn’t a speck of dust on the counter, as if it were still in regular use.
Hopping over the counter into the nurse’s station, Chen Ge noticed many pre-prepared pills laid out. Colorful tablets were packed in small white paper bags, each labeled with a patient’s name.
“Li Chunyan? Zhang Qisi? Weren’t those the names on the dummies’ backs on the fourth floor? Could someone be dispensing medicine to the dummies every night?” A bizarre thought crossed Chen Ge’s mind. It was as if a child was playing a game in this building, making dummies to act as patients and pretending to be a doctor prescribing them medicine.
“Playing such a game in the middle of the night in the Third Ward?” Chen Ge stared at the names on the counter, feeling like he was missing something.