The dark corridor ahead was littered with dozens of old, bloated mattresses that had been dragged from patient rooms and piled haphazardly along both walls. Each one bulged unnaturally in the middle, swollen and misshapen as though something heavy were concealed beneath the stained fabric and sagging springs. The sight immediately set Chen Ge's nerves on edge; the shapes beneath looked too deliberate, too humanoid, to be mere coincidence or random debris. He approached the nearest mattress cautiously, raised Doctor Skull-cracker's hammer, and used the claw end to hook the rotting cover and yank it open with a single sharp pull. Inside lay a crude dummy fashioned from bundled bedsheets and a pillow for the head. The craftsmanship was rough and amateurish—limbs stuffed unevenly, torso lumpy—but the proportions were unmistakably human.
What made the discovery truly chilling was the face. Someone had taken a pillow and painted a crude human visage directly onto the white cotton casing: two uneven black circles for eyes, a crooked slash for a nose, and a wide, gaping mouth stretched in what might have been intended as a smile but looked far more like a silent scream. The lines were childlike, wobbly, drawn with what appeared to be marker or charcoal, yet the overall effect was deeply unsettling. The hairs along Chen Ge's forearms stood on end the moment the flashlight beam touched that painted face.
"This shouldn't feel this threatening," Chen Ge muttered, resisting the powerful urge to smash the dummy into pieces with the hammer. He forced himself to step back and think rationally. "The twenty-four mannequins back at my Haunted House are far more realistic, far more lifelike—and I've stood surrounded by them hundreds of times without feeling even a flicker of real fear. Yet standing next to these crude, pillow-stuffed things, my skin is crawling." The disconnect troubled him more than the dolls themselves.
He nudged the dummy gently with the hammer handle, turning it over. On the reverse side of the pillow—hidden until now—was a name written in shaky handwriting: Lee Chunyan.
"Why is there a name?" Chen Ge asked the empty corridor, his voice low. The question lingered unanswered in the stale air. These weren't random scare props. They reminded him of the makeshift dolls little girls sometimes use when playing house—stand-ins for parents, siblings, friends, or people they know in real life. Each one represented someone specific.
Chen Ge retrieved a small handful of salt from his dwindling supply and scattered it directly across the painted face, watching closely for any reaction. He waited a full two minutes, flashlight steady, breath held. Nothing moved. No twitch, no shift, no sudden exhalation of breath from inside the stuffing. The doll remained inert.
Satisfied for the moment, he moved to the next bloated mattress and repeated the process—prying it open with the hammer claw. Another dummy lay inside: bedsheets knotted into limbs, another pillow for the head. He turned it over. On the back, another name had been scrawled: Zhang Qisi.
Chen Ge slowly straightened and let his gaze travel down the long corridor. Mattresses stretched away into the darkness in both directions, each one swollen in exactly the same suspicious way. A deep chill crawled up his spine and settled between his shoulder blades. "There's a name behind every single one of these dolls… meaning each one represents a real person?"
The realization made the corridor feel suddenly much smaller. The rows of swollen mattresses now resembled nothing so much as a mass grave—silent, waiting, filled with stand-ins for the missing and the dead. Sweat began to bead on Chen Ge's palm where he gripped the hammer handle. He felt certain that completing this Trial Mission would leave him far braver than when he began, but right now bravery felt distant; what he felt instead was the slow, creeping certainty that he was walking through a graveyard of names.
He had already used two full packs of salt in just twenty or thirty meters of progress. Reality was proving harsh: salt had no visible effect on these things. The oppressive, suffocating feeling that saturated the corridor had not diminished at all—if anything, it had grown thicker, more personal, as though the building itself were pressing closer with every step he took.
"I need to ration the last pack of salt," Chen Ge told himself firmly. "I can't afford to be so liberal with it anymore." Every few steps he glanced over his shoulder, half-expecting to see a silent row of pillow-faced dolls rising to follow him—the classic horror-movie trope that now felt far too plausible. His whole body remained taut, muscles coiled. He had already decided: if even one of these things suddenly sat up or moved on its own, he would charge forward without hesitation, smash it into scattered stuffing with the hammer, and follow up with the cleaver until nothing recognizable remained.
"Calm down," he said aloud, unsure whether the words were meant for the livestream audience or for himself. "You still have trump cards you haven't used yet." As he pressed deeper into the Third Sick Hall, the viewer count on his phone continued to climb at an almost frightening speed. Meanwhile, Qin Guang's once-dominant livestream had clearly hit a plateau; his numbers were beginning to slip for the first time that night.
The Third Sick Hall felt fundamentally different from the other two wings. Every room here was designed as a single-occupancy chamber—no shared wards, no overflow beds in the corridors. Yet curiously, not a single one of these private rooms contained a bed. The spaces stood completely empty, stripped down to bare concrete and white paint, as though they had never been intended for actual patients at all.
"Doctor Gao's records clearly state that the Third Sick Hall originally had only ten patient rooms and nine officially documented patients," Chen Ge said quietly as he moved from doorway to doorway. "So what exactly were all these extra empty rooms used for? Why build so many if they were never occupied?"
None of the doors bore room numbers or nameplates. Each one was identical—plain white, smooth, featureless. They did not look like standard patient accommodations; they felt more like holding cells, observation chambers, or something worse.
"The First Sick Hall was so overcrowded that patients were sleeping in the corridors, yet the Third Sick Hall has dozens of completely empty rooms. The hospital would rather leave them unused than assign them to patients. Why?" The contradiction gnawed at him as he continued forward.
When he reached roughly the midpoint of the fourth-floor corridor inside the Third Sick Hall wing, the stench in the air suddenly intensified—thick, cloying, almost chewable. At the same moment, another sound layered itself beneath the silence. It was difficult to describe: not quite breathing, not quite whispering, but the low, collective respiration of many people filling a room just out of sight. The sound seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.
Chen Ge froze, pressing his back against the cold wall. He swept the flashlight beam in a slow arc, heart rate climbing. Anxiety tightened his chest like a fist. He pulled out his phone and glanced at the screen. The numbers glowed in the darkness: exactly midnight.
At that precise instant, the unmistakable sound of a heavy door being pushed open echoed from somewhere below—on one of the lower floors. The noise was strange: even though it originated downstairs, it felt as though it had happened directly beside him, intimate and close enough to raise the hairs on his arms.
The blood door inside his Haunted House mirror always opened for exactly one minute every midnight. Was there an equivalent mechanism hidden somewhere in this hospital? A door that appeared at the stroke of twelve but did not open by itself? When such a door was pushed open from the other side, it only meant one thing: something had just come through.
"Wang Haiming's diary mentioned that he completed the final ritual in the bathroom," Chen Ge whispered, eyes fixed on the corridor ahead. "That proves there must be a large mirror somewhere inside this hospital—most likely in one of the bathrooms on this floor or below."
After midnight struck, the entire Third Sick Hall underwent a subtle but unmistakable transformation, as though a sleeping monster had finally stirred and drawn its first slow, deliberate breath. The air grew denser, heavier with something that felt almost alive; the darkness thickened until it seemed to press physically against Chen Ge's skin. Standing in the deepest, most shadowed corner of the fourth-floor corridor, he leaned over the stairwell railing and peered downward. Below him stretched an absolute void—no faint glow from distant windows, no stray reflection off metal, only complete, swallowing blackness. No one could know what waited in that darkness. Something might already be crouched in a hidden alcove, patient and motionless, waiting for him to take the next step.
Chen Ge's eyes twitched involuntarily at the edges. He tightened his grip on Doctor Skull-cracker's hammer until the handle creaked under his fingers and positioned himself squarely at the mouth of the stairwell. After several long seconds of silent consideration, he reached up and deliberately switched off his flashlight. Inside the Third Sick Hall, threats came in every form: living mental patients twisted by years of torment, lingering spirits bound to the building, and far worse things that had slipped through blood doors from other worlds. Danger lurked at every turn, behind every door, inside every shadow. In such a place, carrying an active light source did not provide safety—it painted a bright, unmistakable target on his back for anything watching from the dark.
He closed his eyes for a full ten seconds, letting the blackness settle behind his eyelids, then opened them again and waited for his pupils to slowly dilate. The corridor remained almost completely lightless, but faint outlines began to emerge: the vague shape of the stair rail, the deeper black of the descending steps, the ghostly gray of the walls. Relying on memory and touch as much as sight, Chen Ge began descending toward the third floor, each footfall placed with extreme care to avoid making noise.
Even though the Trial Mission was far from complete, Chen Ge had already received one unexpected reward: his relationship with the white cat had shifted noticeably. At the beginning of the night, the animal had kept a wary distance, barely tolerating his presence. Now, after they had entered the oppressive corridor of the Third Sick Hall, the cat had leapt onto his shoulder without hesitation. Its small claws dug firmly into the fabric of his jacket and the straps of his backpack, anchoring itself so tightly that it seemed nothing short of physical force could dislodge it. The cat's body pressed close against the side of his neck, trembling faintly but refusing to flee.
"Don't be scared," Chen Ge murmured, reaching up to gently pat the top of the cat's head. To his surprise, the animal did not pull away or hiss. Instead, it leaned slightly into the touch. Its mismatched eyes—one blue, one gold—stared straight ahead into the impenetrable darkness, pupils wide and alert, as though it could see things Chen Ge could not.
The staircase seemed unnaturally long in the total absence of light. What should have taken thirty seconds stretched into two full minutes of careful, blind descent. Each step downward felt like sinking deeper into something alive and watchful. The windows along the stairwell had all been sealed years earlier, leaving the third floor even darker than the one above—no stray moonlight, no faint glow from the city beyond the forest. When Chen Ge finally reached the landing, he could barely make out the shapes of the mattresses still littering the corridor ahead, their swollen forms like silent, waiting bodies.
"The twisted-face man vanished the moment he crossed into the Third Sick Hall," Chen Ge said softly, more to organize his thoughts than to narrate for the audience. "There wasn't even a footprint left behind in the dust. Where could he possibly be hiding? Inside one of these rooms? Underneath one of the mattresses, waiting to ambush me the moment I pass?"
At the far corner of the third-floor corridor stood another nurse's station, its counter and shelves eerily well-preserved compared to the decay everywhere else. Unlike the abandoned stations on other floors, this one appeared almost… maintained. Records and medicine bottles were arranged in neat rows; the countertop itself was spotless, free of the thick dust that coated everything else. It looked as though someone had used it recently—perhaps only hours earlier.
Chen Ge vaulted lightly over the counter and landed inside the small booth. On the work surface lay dozens of small white medication bags, each one carefully separated and labeled. The colorful pills inside—red, blue, yellow, white—were visible through the translucent plastic. Every bag had a patient's name taped neatly to the front.
"Lee Chunyan? Zhang Qisi?" Chen Ge read the names aloud, his voice dropping to a whisper. "Wait… didn't I just see those exact same names written on the backs of the pillow dolls up on the fourth floor?" A cold, ridiculous suspicion bloomed in his mind. "Someone comes here every night… to dispense medicine to dolls?"
The thought was absurd on its surface, yet it fit the warped logic of the Third Sick Hall with terrifying precision. This entire wing felt like a child's twisted game: one player had created crude dolls to stand in for missing patients, then assumed the role of doctor, carefully preparing and "administering" medication to them each night.
"Who would carry out something so sick?" Chen Ge asked the empty station, staring down at the rows of labeled bags. A deeper unease stirred inside him—he felt certain he had overlooked something crucial, some vital connection between the dolls, the medicine, and the names that kept repeating across floors. The answer hovered just out of reach, maddeningly close.