CHAPTER 178 – He’s Been Inside the Door All Along
“The door?” Men Nan’s voice shifted noticeably; he must have thought of something.
The photo Chen Ge had sent was one Men Nan himself also possessed. He just kept it at the very bottom of his drawer, weighed down by several books.
When Chen Ge saw that photo at Haiming Apartments, he’d found it strange. It was the only keepsake Men Nan’s mother had left him. Even if not framed, it should have been properly stored away.
But Men Nan’s behavior suggested he was deliberately avoiding it, hiding it somewhere out of sight.
He couldn’t bear to throw it away, yet he dared not face it. That was the deepest contradiction in his heart.
“Where did you see this photo?” Men Nan’s voice was hoarse, his speech slowing.
The thing he’d been evading was now laid out in the open by Chen Ge. This time, he couldn’t avoid it.
“I’m in the very hospital from the photo. I entered your mother’s old ward…”
“Get out of there now!” Before Chen Ge could finish, Men Nan shouted.
“Leave? Sounds like you’ve remembered something.”
Another stretch of silence on the phone, then Men Nan’s voice came through a few seconds later: “I don’t know why I said that, but my gut tells me it’s dangerous there.”
“The ward building is locked down. I can’t get out now. If it weren’t absolutely necessary, I wouldn’t be calling you.” Chen Ge gripped the butcher knife, his eyes fixed on the bloodshot veins still spreading toward Zhang Ya. “This isn’t just between you and me. Those lunatics who gave up treatment have brought their twisted worldviews back here. They’re deranged, imprisoning living people, wielding axes and saws. Can you imagine what they’ve done?”
“Someone was killed in the hospital?” Men Nan’s voice was full of uncertainty, as if he kept questioning himself, wanting to say something but afraid to voice it.
“I can tell you plainly—there’s more than one victim. I found a massive amount of human hair here.” Chen Ge didn’t know what Men Nan was hesitating about. “My own situation is extremely dangerous too. Monsters, patients—they chase me with axes, hysterical, completely beyond reason.”
After a long pause, Men Nan’s voice finally came through: “What do you want me to do to help?”
“Wake up the other personality inside you! He’s the one I need!” The blood-red hue spread, the stench in the air intensifying, as if a monster had opened its foul mouth.
“Can you tell me why you need him?” Men Nan’s voice was low, laced with complex emotion.
Chen Ge laid his cards on the table. He couldn’t afford to waste any more time. “I need to close the door in Ward 3 of the Third Ward Building. Only your childhood personality knows how to shut it. Call him out. I’ve figured out everything that happened to you as a child. I understand you, I know your pain, but there are things you have to face!”
“Close the door…” Men Nan seemed to be muttering to himself. “Sorry, I’m afraid I can’t help you.”
Men Nan refused outright, which Chen Ge hadn’t expected. “Why?”
“Because he’s not inside me.” Men Nan took a deep breath. “He locked himself inside the door.”
“Your childhood personality is on the other side of the door?!” Chen Ge’s brows furrowed together.
“Yes. Actually, he’s the original personality. My memories only start from age four.” Men Nan revealed a shocking truth. “The original personality was born in the mental hospital, saw sickness as normal. His world was unlike anyone else’s. Before age four, he tried hard to become normal. His only pillar was his mother. But when he was four, his mother was killed. Having witnessed everything, he gave up on the normal world.”
“Maybe because the normal world had never been kind to him, he thought the world we all accept as normal was the truly twisted one.”
“He sealed himself inside his mind, and then I appeared.”
“He never communicated with me, until one day later. The director of the rehabilitation center and a doctor surnamed Chen came to find me, hoping I could help them close what they called the ‘door.’”
“I was very young then, knowing nothing, and they took me back to the hospital where the original personality had lived.”
“They asked me many strange questions—questions I still can’t answer even now.”
“At night, they arranged for me to stay in Ward 3. What happened after that, I don’t know.”
“There seemed to be sleeping pills in the water cup. I slept very deeply. They might have taken the chance to awaken the original personality.”
“When I woke up again, it was midnight, twelve o’clock.”
“I opened my eyes groggily and saw myself lying in bed, but everything around me was blood-red. Stranger still, the original personality was standing right beside me.”
“He told me not to tell anyone about these things, then pointed to the electronic clock in the hallway outside the door, saying that no matter how tired I got in the future, I must never fall asleep before midnight.”
“Later, he sent me out of the room, staying behind on that side and closing the door.”
“From then on, he never appeared again. I just sometimes get memories in my head that don’t belong to me.”
“I originally wanted to bury these things deep in my heart, tell no one, because even now I’m not sure if I made it all up.”
“My situation is very similar to delusional disorder and schizophrenia, but it’s all too real. As I grew up, I’ve been struggling with self-doubt. That’s why I majored in psychology.”
Men Nan’s voice was full of pain. Even as an outsider, Chen Ge could hear his torment.
Disguising himself as normal, living an ordinary life like most people—that alone was a challenge for him.
“That explains it. No wonder even a mirror ghost could bully him.” Chen Ge held the phone, his mind unsettled.
“What Men Nan said is possible. The third personality I detected from him appears randomly and fragmentarily, like scattered memory shards.” Dr. Gao took the phone. He hadn’t understood the conversation between Chen Ge and Men Nan and couldn’t help much.
“Yeah, he probably isn’t lying to me.”
The only one who could close the door had entered it over a decade ago. That door had indeed been shut for a few years, only reopening four years ago when the mental hospital was sealed. Could it be that Men Nan’s original personality had met with an accident inside the door?
Chen Ge felt a desire to retreat. This building was too eerie. Even with Zhang Ya around, it wasn’t safe. “Better pull out first.”
He looked up at the center of the corridor. Yin energy swirled, stirring Zhang Ya’s bloodstained clothes.
Black hair, blending into the night, repeatedly pierced through the monsters’ bodies. Two of the three monsters had already been torn apart.