Chen Ge leaned over the counter inside the nurse's station and examined the rows of small white medication bags with painstaking care. His expression gradually darkened as he studied them more closely. Reaching out, he gently rubbed his fingertips across several of the handwritten names taped to the front of the bags. A faint dampness lingered on the ink; the writing was still wet in places, the marker strokes fresh and slightly tacky to the touch. Someone had written these names very recently—possibly within the last hour.
Chen Ge snapped his head up and swept his gaze around the small booth in one swift motion. The nurse's station offered no hiding spots: no cabinets deep enough, no alcoves behind shelves, no shadows thick enough to conceal a person. The counter itself was open underneath, the floor visible from every angle. Whoever had been here moments ago was no longer present.
"The person who prepared these prescriptions can't have gone far," Chen Ge said under his breath, his voice barely audible even to himself. "They're still somewhere nearby—probably watching or waiting." He had no way of knowing whether the other party had already noticed his presence, but the possibility alone was enough to make every shadow in the corridor feel alive and watchful. He vaulted lightly back over the counter and immediately moved across the hallway, slipping into the room directly opposite the station. He pushed the door open just a sliver—wide enough to peer through—and pressed his eye to the narrow gap, scanning the corridor in both directions.
"The ink on those bags is still wet, meaning the pills were just sorted and labeled," Chen Ge reasoned quietly. "Who would come here at this hour—midnight in an abandoned hospital—to meticulously prepare medication for dolls?" Several candidates rose immediately in his mind, but the twisted-face man stood out as the most likely suspect. He had once worked as a doctor in this very hospital. The obsessive, ritualistic way he had treated his own father—caging him, controlling him—suggested a deep, festering need for revenge against the institution and everyone associated with it. Prescribing medicine to stand-in dolls could easily be an extension of that twisted retribution.
"Perhaps he's force-feeding them," Chen Ge mused, "or at least pretending to." But the theory didn't quite fit. If this were simple revenge or psychological torment, there would be no need to write each name so carefully, so freshly, on every individual bag. The precision felt ceremonial, almost devotional. Midnight had arrived; the hospital was at its most unstable, its rules most fragile. Chen Ge decided to linger a little longer in the shadows of the opposite room. Whatever mystery surrounded these nightly prescriptions, he intended to witness it firsthand before pressing deeper into the Third Sick Hall.
Approximately ten minutes passed in tense silence. Then, at the far end of the third-floor corridor, a fuzzy, indistinct shadow appeared. The distance was too great for Chen Ge to make out any features or determine exactly where the figure had come from—whether it had stepped out of one of the rooms or climbed up from a lower floor.
"Which patient is that?" Chen Ge whispered, heart rate climbing. He did not dare switch on his flashlight; doing so would instantly mark him as the only point of light in an ocean of darkness. All he could do was remain motionless behind the cracked door, hammer already raised and ready in both hands, muscles coiled for sudden movement. The shadow's gait was unnatural—staggering, uneven, as though it might topple forward at any moment. Each step looked painful, deliberate, almost mechanical.
As the figure drew closer, another detail became apparent: it made absolutely no sound. No shuffle of shoes on tile, no rustle of clothing, no labored breathing—nothing. The silence was absolute, unnatural.
"Based on that limp, it should be making noise," Chen Ge thought, a fresh wave of unease tightening his chest. "Something is very wrong here."
The shadow finally came near enough for Chen Ge to catch the outline of its clothing in the faint ambient light leaking from distant cracks. A white nurse's uniform stood out starkly against the surrounding decay—too clean, too conspicuous amid the dirtied mattresses and peeling paint that cluttered the corridor.
"It's not the twisted-face man," Chen Ge realized. "It's a woman?" He still could not be certain. Leaning his upper body forward, he pressed closer to the narrow slit in the door, eyes locked unblinkingly on the approaching figure. He did not dare blink; he could not afford to miss even the smallest detail.
The shadow with the nurse's uniform kept its head lowered as it moved, mumbling something too soft to make out. When it finally drew level with Chen Ge's hiding place, he got his first clear look.
The moving figure was not a living nurse at all. It was a monster wearing a tattered nurse's coat. Its waist had been grotesquely broken and reset at an impossible angle; its limbs twisted in directions that defied human anatomy. The body looked as though someone had forcibly rearranged it—bones snapped and repositioned, joints dislocated and forced back together in mockery of a normal human shape. The sight shattered every comforting image Chen Ge had ever held about nurses over the past twenty years. Through the narrow gap in the door, sweat began to bead on his palms where they gripped the hammer.
Long, tangled black hair hung forward, concealing most of the monster's face. But when it reached the doorway Chen Ge was hiding behind, it suddenly stopped moving. At that exact moment, Chen Ge held his breath and slowly raised the hammer higher, muscles tensed for an immediate strike.
The female nurse-thing appeared to sense something. It raised its head with agonizing slowness. The curtain of hair parted just enough to reveal the face underneath.
It's her! The face itself was perfectly normal—ordinary, even pleasant—but the recognition hit Chen Ge like a physical blow. He had seen that exact face before, rendered in stark black and white, hanging in the center of the Second Sick Hall's activity room during the mourning ceremony.
Isn't she dead? This was the large female nurse who had been murdered inside the Third Sick Hall. According to Doctor Gao's records, the police investigation had eventually concluded that one of the patients was responsible for her death.
She's still wandering these halls after she died? The realization explained the complete absence of footsteps. Chen Ge's hand instinctively moved toward the cleaver hidden in his bag. After a brief, frozen second of hesitation, the nurse-thing began to turn its body with great difficulty. Its large, broken frame leaned slowly toward the door Chen Ge was hiding behind, as though pulled by some unseen force.
DONG!
The monster's head struck the door with a heavy, dull thud that reverberated through the wood and into Chen Ge's bones. He jumped back a half-step and yanked the cleaver free in one fluid motion, grip tight, blade already angled forward. The door was unlocked; if the thing tried to push through, he was fully prepared to meet it head-on and end the encounter in blood.
However, at that precise moment, another sound of a heavy door being pushed open echoed from somewhere downstairs—low, deliberate, and unmistakable. The moment the noise reached the female nurse-thing, her movements changed completely. It was as though an invisible puppeteer had tugged on strings: her broken body jerked upright, head snapping around with mechanical stiffness. Without hesitation or pause, she turned and began walking back toward the nurse's station. Her twisted limbs dragged and shuffled in an unnatural rhythm as she disappeared through the small side door beside the counter.
What was that? Chen Ge's back was instantly drenched in cold sweat. The realization hit him hard: the female nurse was likely nothing more than a bottom-feeder in the hierarchy of horrors that infested the Third Sick Hall. She was a lingering spirit without independent thought or will—little more than an automaton, compelled to follow orders from something far more dangerous. Whoever—or whatever—had assigned her this nightly routine was the true culprit pulling the strings.
Chen Ge did not dare relax his guard for even a second. Rather than bursting out with the cleaver raised and risking a direct confrontation, he chose stealth. He remained hidden behind the cracked door, breathing shallowly, and watched her every move through the narrow slit. The nurse-thing moved with eerie purpose, as though following a script she had performed countless times before.
Once she had returned fully to the nurse's station, she reached beneath the counter and retrieved a thick, battered notebook. Its cover was stained with layers of dirt, old blood, and something darker that had long since dried into the leather. She flipped it open with practiced ease and began consulting its pages while simultaneously rearranging the rows of medication bags on the countertop. Her movements were quick, precise, almost professional—exactly like a nurse preparing rounds.
The station stood directly opposite Chen Ge's hiding place, giving him a clear, unobstructed view of everything she did. He watched, motionless, as she selected about ten of the small white bags with swift, confident motions. Once she had gathered them into a neat stack, she turned and shuffled toward the stairwell, heading upward to the fourth floor without a single backward glance.
The moment her uneven footsteps faded into the distance, Chen Ge slipped out of the room. He crossed the corridor in three quick strides and vaulted back into the nurse's station. The notebook still lay open on the counter where she had left it. He picked it up carefully. The pages were thick and warped, filled with old patient records, handwritten diagnosis reports, medication logs, and discharge summaries. Many entries were faded, smudged, or partially obscured by stains, but enough remained legible.
Chen Ge flipped through randomly at first, then more methodically. A chilling pattern quickly emerged: every single patient documented in the notebook shared one grim commonality—they were all dead. In the diagnosis-result box of each record, someone had used a thick red pen to violently cross out the original entry and scrawl two words in large, angry letters: Confirmed Dead.
Were the killers hiding inside this hospital still tracking the fates of former patients years after closure? Or had the patients themselves—those who once received treatment here—somehow returned to this forsaken place after death?
Chen Ge's gaze landed on two familiar names: Lee Chunyan and Zhang Qisi. He glanced back at the countertop. The bags bearing those exact names had already been taken by the nurse-thing on her rounds.
There were dolls on the fourth floor with those same names written on their backs. Every patient recorded as deceased in this notebook seemed to have a corresponding crude, pillow-faced stand-in somewhere in the Third Sick Hall. And every night, someone—or something—still came here to "prescribe" and "administer" medication to them, exactly as though they were still living patients under care.
The hospital had been officially abandoned for five full years. Yet the Third Sick Hall appeared to remain in operation—just not for the living. The patients had changed. The living had been replaced by the dead. And every piece of this macabre routine could be traced back to that one mysterious door.
Could the blood door have been left open for so long that the world behind it and the real world had slowly begun to overlap? Had the boundary between the two eroded until the dead could return and continue their old routines as though nothing had changed?
Chen Ge did not linger to read any further entries. He closed the notebook with a soft snap and slid it carefully into his backpack. Then he stepped back out into the corridor. Before the nurse-thing returned from her rounds, he needed to investigate one last place: the third-floor bathroom. If Wang Haiming's diary was accurate, that was where the final ritual had taken place—the ritual that had allowed something to cross over and enter him. The mirror that had served as the doorway might still be there.