Chapter 172: Qin Guang Is in Trouble
There was nothing else in the wardrobe. After closing the door, Chen Ge took another photo of it.
"Four blood-red nails are driven into the four corners of the cabinet, and all the gaps are wrapped with transparent tape. This wardrobe has been preserved intact in the Third Ward for so long, probably thanks to these arrangements."
He wanted to pry the red nails out and take them away, but after trying for a while, he couldn't succeed. The four nails were deeply embedded in the corners of the wardrobe, as if they had become one with it.
"These four nails feel unusual. I'll come back during the daytime next time and pull them out."
Chen Ge had spent too much time in the director's office, and he had no idea how things were outside now.
As he walked out of the inner room, the white cat leaped back onto his shoulder with a "thump" and refused to get down no matter what.
Moving cautiously, Chen Ge carried the skull-crushing hammer and approached the door of the director's office. He didn't dare go out directly, worried that the nurse and the deformed face might be waiting at the entrance.
Hammer in hand, Chen Ge pressed his ear against the door to listen for sounds outside. After more than ten seconds, he did pick up something unusual.
From the corridor, the sound of doors opening and closing came closer and closer, as if someone was checking every room one by one.
He quietly cracked open the door of the director's office. The pitch-black corridor stretched endlessly, and in the dense darkness, something seemed to be moving.
The figure grew clearer, constantly entering and exiting various rooms.
"A white nurse's uniform... Is this thing looking for its notebook?" Chen Ge recognized it. He gripped the hammer tightly, weighing whether to strike it with a blow or retreat for now.
The nurse's body was twisted, her gait unsteady and stumbling, barely able to maintain balance, yet her movement speed was fast. From a distance, she did look quite frightening.
"This thing seemed to have spotted me on the third floor. If it weren't for the door opening sound at that moment, I might have already clashed with her. This monster means me no good. Keeping her around could bring more trouble. It's better to use the notebook as bait and take her out while I still have the upper hand." Chen Ge remained calm throughout, thinking through the most advantageous plan: "The director's office is spacious inside. Even if I don't kill her, it'll be easy to chase her down. Plus, I can see if the butcher knife really works on these foul things."
He placed the notebook in front of the cabinet, put away the envelope, and hid in the wardrobe with the white cat.
Adjusting to a comfortable position, a few minutes later, the door to the director's office was pushed open.
The twisted nurse spotted the notebook in the inner room at once. She didn't come straight over to grab it; this monster seemed to have an inexplicable fear of the wardrobe. After hesitating for a long time, she finally staggered into the inner room.
Chen Ge watched every move the nurse made. When she bent down to pick up the notebook, he seized the moment, burst open the wardrobe door, and swung the hammer at her.
The vicious hammerhead slammed into the nurse's body, crushing her already deformed form.
Not giving her a chance to recover, Chen Ge reversed his grip, drew the knife, and as the red cloth fell, he thrust the blade into her uniform.
A sharp tearing sound rang out as the nurse's top was cut open. Where the blade passed, no blood flowed, but Chen Ge could clearly feel that part of her body had been lost.
"The knife works!"
The nurse's deathly face changed, filled with pain and rage. She shrieked and lunged at Chen Ge, her mouth wide open, aiming to bite his face.
Chen Ge raised the knife to counter, but he underestimated the monster's ferocity. Unlike a human, even when stabbed through the body, her movements didn't slow—they became even faster.
The butcher knife hurt the nurse, but it also closed the distance between them. Her ugly face was now inches away.
In a critical moment, just as he was about to be hit, the white cat on his shoulder flashed its heterochromatic eyes and leaped directly onto the nurse's face.
This stray cat was fiercely aggressive. The nurse's attack was blocked, and she shifted her target, biting at Chen Ge's arm, which he had raised to protect himself.
The nurse's assault was relentless. Chen Ge dodged left and right, and something seemed to be knocked off his wrist, accompanied by a loud thud.
He ignored the sound, focusing all his attention on using the butcher knife to inflict wounds on the nurse.
Though no blood came from the nurse, her body was shrinking, gradually becoming ethereal and unreal. Finally, Chen Ge didn't know how many times he had struck, but the nurse's form completely dissipated, and the tattered nurse's uniform fell to the floor.
"Did it work?" Before he could celebrate, strange noises came from the corridor outside, as if new things inside the building were rushing over—and there were quite a few of them.
"Can't stay long. If I get trapped here, it'll be bad." Shouldering his bag, Chen Ge, with the butcher knife in one hand and the skull-crushing hammer in the other, hurriedly left.
He didn't stop until he reached the corner of the stairwell. Just as he caught his breath, his phone vibrated in his pocket.
"Did the black phone send a mission completion message?" Chen Ge reached into his pocket, only to realize he was getting his hopes up. The vibration was from a call by Liu Dao. "I need to make it clear to them next time—during the livestream, only I can contact them one-way."
Answering the call, Chen Ge spoke in a low voice: "If there's nothing important, I'll hang up."
"Check your livestream room!" Liu Dao's voice was excited.
"Livestream?" Chen Ge opened his personal page and looked at the livestream room. He was startled too. The popularity of his room had skyrocketed to 300,000! Even more terrifying was that this number was still growing wildly, and it would likely break 400,000 soon.
"What's going on? Is the platform having issues?" Seeing the surging popularity, Chen Ge decisively changed the livestream room name to his Horror House address and bolded it below the stream.
"The platform isn't the problem—Qin Guang is! His team entered the last classroom of Muyang Middle School, and then the stream suddenly went black. No one knows what happened. I thought it was a planned effect at first, but after a full twenty-five minutes, Qin Guang still hasn't resumed streaming. For a professional streamer, being off-camera for five minutes is a broadcast accident. Twenty-five minutes of black screen means something definitely went wrong on his end!"
Liu Dao grew more excited as he spoke: "This is a godsend! The whole platform promoted his ghost exploration stream with a big push, drawing in viewers who only saw a black screen. Most of them got impatient and started searching for similar content. Right now, you're the only other one on the platform doing ghost exploration shows. And the key is, your content and quality far surpass his—the tension is so intense you can't breathe. Most viewers who came in never left."
From Liu Dao, Chen Ge learned the whole story. At this rate, breaking 500,000 viewers tonight was possible, something almost unimaginable for a newcomer.