Chapter 167: Wasn't She Already Dead?
Chen Ge carefully examined the paper bags on the counter, his expression growing increasingly grim. He rubbed the names on the bags with his fingers and finally spotted the problem.
The handwriting on several paper bags wasn't completely dry yet—the names on them had just been written!
He abruptly turned his head to scan the nurse's station. There was no cover, no place for anyone to hide.
"The person who prepared the medicine is probably nearby. It hasn't gone far, just temporarily left." Unsure if he'd been spotted, Chen Ge grew more cautious. He slipped out of the nurse's station and entered a ward across from the counter.
Leaving the door slightly ajar, Chen Ge stood at the entrance, watching the corridor.
"The names on the bags were just written, and the pills might have just been prepared. Who would be doing something like this late at night?" Several candidates crossed Chen Ge's mind, with the most suspicious being the deformed-faced man. Before becoming a psychiatric patient, he had been a doctor, and judging by what he'd done to his own father, this man had an intense streak of vengeance.
"Could it be that he prepared the medicine and force-fed it to the prisoners?" If that were the case, there would be no need for him to write each patient's name on the bags. So things couldn't be that simple.
Just past midnight, this was the most unstable time. Chen Ge would rather waste more time than risk not figuring out why these bags and pills had appeared.
Standing at the door, Chen Ge peered through the crack at the dim, endless corridor.
About ten minutes later, a blurry shadow appeared at the far end of the third-floor hallway. It was too far away for Chen Ge to tell if it had emerged from a ward or come from another floor.
"Is that the psychiatric patient?" He couldn't see its face, and he didn't dare turn on the lights. Gripping the skull-crushing hammer, he hid behind the door, ready to act.
The shadow's gait was strange—staggering, as if it might collapse at any moment.
As it drew closer, Chen Ge noticed something even stranger.
This thing made no sound when it walked!
"With that stumbling way of moving, there's no way it wouldn't make footsteps."
In a moment of distraction, the shadow came nearer, and Chen Ge caught a glimpse of its clothes.
A white nurse's uniform stood out in the pitch-black corridor, clashing with the foul-smelling bedding scattered everywhere, as if it didn't belong here.
"It's not the deformed-faced man. It seems to be a woman?" Chen Ge wasn't sure. He pressed his upper body against the ward door, his eye glued to the crack. He didn't blink, afraid of missing something important.
"It's coming."
The shadow in the nurse's coat kept its head down, muttering something under its breath. It moved closer and closer to Chen Ge's ward, and he could see it more clearly.
This moving shadow was nothing but a monster in a nurse's uniform. Its waist was bent, its body parts grotesquely uncoordinated, even its fingers deformed—as if it had been hit by a car.
The sight of this female nurse shattered the beautiful image Chen Ge had held of nurses for over twenty years. Behind the door, he gripped the skull-crushing hammer, his palms starting to sweat.
Tangled black hair hung forward, covering most of its face. As it passed the door of Chen Ge's hiding spot, the monster suddenly stopped.
In that instant, Chen Ge held his breath and slowly raised the hammer.
The female nurse seemed to sense something. Her lowered head slowly lifted, and the black hair slid to the sides, revealing a very ordinary face.
"It's her?!"
That ordinary face made Chen Ge's pupils contract.
He had seen that face before—in the activity room of the Second Ward, in a black-and-white photo!
"Wasn't she already dead?"
This stout female nurse was the one who had died in the Third Ward years ago. According to Dr. Gao, the police had investigated at the time and believed the killer was among the patients.
"Still lingering here after death?" Chen Ge began to understand why the nurse made no sound when walking. One hand reached into his backpack, touching the butcher knife.
After pausing for about a second or two, the female nurse laboriously turned her body, as if about to fall, lunging toward the door of Chen Ge's ward.
"Thud!"
Her head slammed into the ward door with a dull sound.
Chen Ge decisively drew the knife and leaped back.
The ward door wasn't locked, and Chen Ge was ready to fight this monster head-on.
But just then, the sound of a door creaking came from a room downstairs.
Hearing this, the female nurse, like a puppet on strings, forcibly turned around, opened the small door beside the nurse's station counter, and entered.
"What's going on?" Chen Ge's back was soaked with sweat. The female nurse held a low status in the Third Ward, seemingly just a lingering thought without a mind, acting on instinct. The one directing her to do all this was the true culprit.
Chen Ge dared not relax. To avoid alarming the enemy, he didn't take the chance to test the butcher knife on the female nurse. Instead, he silently hid behind the door, watching her.
Back at the nurse's station, the female nurse pulled out a notebook stained with grime and blood from under the counter. She checked the notes and placed bags of prepared medicine on the counter.
The nurse's station was directly across from the ward where Chen Ge was hiding. Now, the female nurse was facing him, and he could see every move she made clearly.
Her movements were practiced. She quickly selected a dozen or so paper bags and entered the stairwell, seemingly heading to the fourth floor.
Once the female nurse was far away, Chen Ge slipped out of the ward, jumped into the nurse's station, and grabbed the notebook she had been looking through.
The notebook was thick, stuffed with numerous case files and diagnostic reports.
Chen Ge flipped through a few pages and noticed a common trait among the patients recorded in the notebook: they were all no longer alive.
In every diagnostic report, the "diagnosis result" column had been altered with red ink, scrawling two words—"Confirmed Dead."
"Is the killer hiding in the hospital tracking these patients? Or did all the patients treated at the rehabilitation center return here after death?"
Chen Ge found the names Li Chunyan and Zhang Qisi in the case files. He glanced at the counter again—the two paper bags with their names had already been taken by the female nurse.
"On the fourth floor, two mannequins have those names written on their backs. Every deceased patient has a corresponding mannequin in the Third Ward, and every night, someone delivers medicine to them, just like when they were alive." The rehabilitation center had been abandoned for four or five years, but the Third Ward seemed to keep running normally, except its patients had shifted from the living to the dead. And all this change was likely linked to the door within the ward.
"Could it be that because the door has been open for so long, the world behind it has partially merged with the real world? Like that stall in my haunted house's bathroom." Chen Ge didn't read the notebook in detail. He picked it up and stuffed it into his backpack, then stepped into the third-floor corridor, planning to check out the third-floor bathroom before the female nurse returned.