Chapter 182: You've Woken the Devil
The old man's words boiled down to this: the world behind the door was merely a nightmare of the boy, Men Nan's, main personality.
Once the boy woke up, the passage connecting this world to reality might close, or even vanish entirely.
If Chen Ge didn't have a "door" in his own haunted house, he might have accepted the old man's explanation. But with "doors" appearing in two different places, this couldn't be explained away as just a little boy's nightmare.
Chen Ge didn't reveal that there was also a "door" in his haunted house. He looked at the old man and asked another question.
"You say this is the boy's nightmare, where everything is a manifestation of his subconscious. Then can you tell me what role you play in this nightmare? Or what you symbolize in his dream?"
The old man's expression stiffened, but he didn't evade the question. "I'm like you—I came in from outside the nightmare. We're outsiders. Even in the nightmare, we play ourselves."
"Play ourselves?" Chen Ge had entered from the outside, and his physical appearance hadn't changed at all.
The old man, on the other hand, had no trace of life in him. What caught Chen Ge's attention even more was the blood-red doctor's coat he wore.
His gaze swept over the coat, and a thought flashed through Chen Ge's mind.
Had the old man been wearing this coat when he entered the world behind the door? What had he done to stain a white coat red?
From the moment he first saw the old man, Chen Ge had a suspicion.
The director of the Third Psychiatric Ward had disappeared years ago, and to this day, he hadn't been found—alive or dead.
And this old man, in both age and demeanor, closely resembled the director. So Chen Ge guessed that the former director hadn't simply vanished; he had entered the world behind the door for some reason.
He had read the letters the director left behind. In the last one, the director had indeed shown some curiosity about the world inside the door.
But precisely because he had read those letters and had a favorable impression of the director, he couldn't reconcile the image of the director he had imagined with the blood-red vengeful spirit before him.
Shaking his head to dispel the thought, Chen Ge forced himself to calm down.
His understanding of the director came solely from those letters the man had written himself.
No one would paint themselves in a bad light when writing to outsiders, so the director portrayed in those letters might not be the real one.
Thinking of the electroshock therapy room, the cramped and filthy First Ward, and the Second Ward that was left empty rather than occupied, Chen Ge took a deep breath and became even more cautious.
"Did you understand what I said? Whatever you do, don't wake this child. Put him down, and I'll lead you out of the nightmare." The old man's voice was soothing, always making people overlook his danger.
Chen Ge slowly moved toward the door. "I won't hurt this child, but first, you need to show me the way out. Prove your sincerity."
"Leaving is simple. Just cross that door and—"
"Boom!"
The old man was cut off mid-sentence. A loud explosion came from inside the Third Ward, as if a door had burst open.
Hearing the sound, the old man's expression turned grim. His pale face twisted, and he could no longer maintain his kind and benevolent facade.
"What happened?" Chen Ge had a feeling this change was related to Zhang Ya. When the old man first entered, Chen Ge had noticed his deformed fingers and unnaturally twisted arms, as if he had taken an unexpected heavy blow while fending something off.
"Nothing, just a minor issue." The old man spoke in a sinister tone, standing in the middle of the doorway and looking up at Chen Ge. "Give me the child, and I'll take you out right now."
His pale face was devoid of any expression, giving off an eerie vibe. The old man had finally dropped his disguise.
"Send me out first, or there's no deal." Chen Ge was firm. The hand holding the knife trembled slightly from tension—this was his first time facing a blood-red vengeful spirit head-on.
"You want to leave? Fine, follow me." The old man turned around abruptly, suddenly becoming eager.
Chen Ge didn't let his guard down. He stepped carefully behind, keeping a three-meter distance.
In his mind, within three meters, no matter what the other party did, he could react in time. But after just two steps, he realized he had underestimated the terror of a red-clad spirit.
Strictly speaking, he had only taken one step. Before his second foot could land, the leg suspended in midair went numb.
Looking down, during his conversation with the old man, countless blood threads, invisible to the naked eye, had crawled up his leg from the ground. Now, like venomous insects, they were burrowing into his flesh.
"Don't you want to leave? Come with me." The old man twisted his head, his eyes sunken, his face covered in wrinkles, grinning in a bone-chilling way.
Chen Ge dared not follow him now. He gripped the knife, trying to step back, but the leg hanging in the air disobeyed him and moved forward instead!
"Is it because of those blood threads?" Chen Ge's scalp tingled. He didn't know how many threads had burrowed into his left leg. Worse still, as the old man spoke, more and more blood threads surged from the cracked floor and wall crevices, slithering toward him like tiny snakes.
Faced with the onslaught of blood threads, anyone else would have panicked and started wildly slashing with their knife.
But Chen Ge had a near-innate ability: the more critical the moment, the calmer he became.
He kept the knife steady against the boy's neck, letting the blood threads climb over his body, while pressing the blade down further.
The old man had deliberately turned around to make him drop his guard, but now he twisted his head back to watch him.
If the old man were fully confident, he wouldn't have gone through all this trouble. He was clearly still worried about the boy.
Chen Ge couldn't figure out why the old man feared the boy waking up, but in this situation, the more the old man feared something, the more Chen Ge intended to do it.
The blade cut through the skin, but no blood flowed from the boy's neck. Strangely, the blood threads the old man controlled would lose control as soon as they neared the boy, flowing directly into his body through the wound on his neck.
"These blood threads seem to originally belong to the boy. Could it be that the old man is just stealing the boy's power?"
Chen Ge had uncovered the old man's secret. He grew bolder, letting the blade fall completely. A sharp cry escaped the old man's lips.
The knife sank into the boy's collarbone. The boy, whose eyelids had been twitching, suddenly clenched his fingers and opened his eyes!
The blood threads in the electroshock therapy room split into two groups—some recoiled, while others were absorbed back into the boy's body.
"You madman! You've woken the devil!"
The old man seemed to age even more. He turned and ran, but before he could get far, an endless tide of black hair surged from the other end of the corridor.