Chapter 1175: Brain Maze (2in1)
When Chen Ge and the rest left the treatment room appeared to still have seven people sitting in them. The seven people appeared to look like Chen Ge’s group. He rubbed his eyes. When Chen Ge tried to take a closer look, Chen Ge felt a yank on his arm. He turned to look and it was Doctor Gao who was pulling him to the other corner of the corridor. “Perhaps I have mistaken?” 5 patients and 2 doctors had already exited the treatment room, so how could there still be seven people inside the same room?
[Or we are still inside the treatment room? The thing that has exited the room is actually our consciousness or soul?] Chen Ge shook his head to deny this thought because it was too impossible. Currently he did not dare to turn back to investigate it on his own so he followed the rest of them and continued to move forward. The most important thing now was to send Zhang Jingjiu to the emergency unit and try to stabilize his condition.
Doctor Sun, Patient Number 1 and Patient Number 2 walked at the front of the group. They found a stretcher at the nurse station. They carried Zhang Jingjiu and moved down the stairs. Patient number 4 appeared to be very afraid. She was still holding the torn paper b.u.t.terfly as she kept hiding behind Patient Number 5. With just a glance, it would appear that everyone was acting perfectly normal. Without the patient’s garb, no one would have believed that of the 7 people there, there were 5 of them who were suffering from serious mental illness.
[I have been to the fifth floor before. The patients at the serious treatment zone are noisier than the everyone else. Even at 1 am, this floor should be incredibly noisy but now, there is not even a whimper that could be heard throughout the floor. Have the patients been moved away from this place already?] The only answer that came to Chen Ge was this. He did not think someone could have killed all the patients and he did not think the killer was capable of silencing all the mental patients. [Unless the killer was a doctor and he had fed all the patients with a large amount of sleeping pills tonight.]
Chen Ge turned his head to glance at Doctor Gao, he felt Doctor Gao was turning into a stranger before his eyes. [It is this man who wants me to go insane, it has been twice already he wants to give me the drug that will make me lose control, but how come a doctor like this will give me a sense of familiarity? Is it possible that the Doctor Gao in my memory is not similar to the Doctor Gao currently before me?]
To prevent himself from accidentally triggering the memory from his past, Chen Ge carefully arranged the clues in his mind, [There were seven chairs in total in the treatment room earlier, that should not be a random number. The chairs were so many for a reason.] The few patients and doctors carried Zhang Jingjiu to the first floor. There was no one to be found at the nurse stations or duty rooms. The whole block was swallowed by the darkness, it was as if the hospital had been abandoned for a long time already.
“What is going on here? If it is just a simple loss of electricity, there should still be plenty of patients inside their room!” Patient number said urgently. He was worried about Zhang Jingjiu’s injury and at the same time, he felt the hospital that night was filled with strangeness everywhere.
“When I entered the treatment room, everything was still perfectly normal.” Doctor Sun walked at the front to lead the way. He was moving very fast like he was trying to escape from something.
“We have been in the room for at most several minutes only, it is impossible that everything has changed so drastically in such a short amount of time!” Patient Number 2 was still quite rational even though the diagnosis that the hospital had given him was that he suffered from delusion.
“Yes, this is too strange!” Patient Number 5 was very afraid too but he still stood firmly beside Patient Number 4. If there was any actual danger, he would bring Patient Number 4 away with him at the first notice. The few patients kept grumbling, perhaps he was annoyed by their endless question, Doctor Sun who walked at the front of the group suddenly stopped. He turned back to glance at Doctor Gao. After he made sure that Doctor Gao was now like a dead man, with no expression on his face, Doctor Sun’s eyes wandered over to Chen Ge. “Actually there is a ghost story at this hospital. According to legend, if you push open a door at the hospital after midnight, you will be able to see the other side of the hospital!” When Doctor Sun said that, he kept his eyes on Chen Ge as if the statement was meant for Chen Ge to hear and process.
“Push open the door and see the other side of the hospital?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Doctor Sun, are you really a doctor at this hospital?”
The patients bombarded him with questions but Doctor Sun did not reply any of them. It was as if by saying the statement earlier, he had already taken a huge risk already. For the patients, this was the first time they had met Doctor Sun, and the only person who knew about Doctor Sun’s real ident.i.ty was Doctor Gao, but the latter was acting very strangely at this moment. Not saying a word, his body temperature continuing to drop, to give it a more accurate description, Doctor Gao was slowly turning into a dead man before their eyes. The patients had many questions but none of them was going to get any answer. The doors and windows of the hospital were closely shut. They had nowhere else to run so the only choice they had was to keep on following the doctor and moving forward.
Pus.h.i.+ng open the door that led to safety corridor of the third sick hall, two dark and long corridors appeared before Chen Ge. He had been to this place with Zuo Han before but back then, he was playing the character of his second persona.
“Move quickly, do not stay inside the corridor for too long.” Doctor Sun chose the corridor that Chen Ge did not pick the last time. Doctor Sun kept urging them so even Chen Ge who was at the back of the group had started to pick up speed. When they had entered the safety corridor, the door on the other end of the corridor behind them closed with a bang on its own.
“There is someone following behind us?” Chen Ge now was getting more and more confused, there were too many unanswered questions. First they had encountered Zhang Jingjiu who was heavily injured. Then after they had supposedly left, Chen Ge realized there were still seven people sitting in the treatment room. Now the door behind them had closed on its own, a proof that people were following behind them. Chen Ge who had not fully recovered felt the splitting headache was about to come again.
“This is the fourth sick hall. All of the patients with terminal illness and heavy conditions will be transferred here.” Doctor Sun swept a glance at Chen Ge and added as if casually, “Many people have lost their lives here.” No one understand the meaning behind Doctor Sun’s last statement. The doctor did not appear like he was going to provide any explanation either, he only tried to move faster. The electrical system at the whole hospital appeared to have gone down for the night, they could only borrow the temporary brightness provided by the flickering lightning from outside the window to move forward in the darkness. The fourth sick hall had a completely different internal structure than the third sick hall. There were not that many sickrooms that were available for patients. The ground floor was occupied mostly by various medical rooms.
“There is no one at the duty rooms at this sick hall as well.” Patient Number 2 said desperately. “We need to stop the bleeding on this patient as soon as possible or else he will be in mortal danger!”
“Why are all the pictures on the wall of the duty room at the fourth sick hall are of that of males?” Doctor Fang looked at the faces on the wall and subconsciously took a step back.
“How is that a strange thing? Is it that weird that they are all males?” Patient Number 5 asked softly.
“I used to be a surgeon. There was a period of time when many of the patients at our hospital were attempting suicide, it caused a lot of pressure on the staff. To protect the female doctors, we only a.s.signed male doctors when we were deciding the night s.h.i.+fts.” After exiting the treatment room, Doctor Fang had failed to calm down. He would occasionally glance behind him for no reason as if worried that there was someone about to harm him who was hiding behind the nearest corner.
“You used to be a surgeon?” Patient number 2 was startled and then he turned to tell Doctor Sun, “We have a surgeon among us, so it does not matter whether there are people in the duty room or not. Now we only need some tools and we can help save this patient’s life.”
“But I was a ENT doctor…”
“It will be fine. I am a forensic doctor and thus know a bit of surgery skill, I will be able to help you.” Patient Number 2 did things quickly and swiftly. Even though he was not that much older than Patient Number 1, he was proven to be more adept at dealing with emergencies. Doctor Sun looked at the various patients and he only said lightly, “Follow me.”
Walking down the dim hospital corridors, Doctor Sun stopped before a surgery room. He did not enter it but did something quite out of the place considering the circ.u.mstance. He raised his arm and Doctor Sun knocked lightly on the door. The number of times that he knocked? It was perfectly six times.
When Doctor Sun knocked on the door, Chen Ge felt the temperature around him suddenly dropped. It was as if the world had decided to drop his disguise and to reveal his real self. But soon, the tick tock of the mechanical watch drilled into his ears again and nothing around him had changed. After knocking on the door, Doctor Sun did not enter the room. He just stood outside the room without speaking and did not push open the door.
“The door is locked?” Patient 2 was worried. He went over to push on the door of the surgery room and the door was pushed open easily. “Quick, carry him in here!” Patient Number 2 did not notice the strange way Doctor Sun was acting but Chen Ge watched all of this with his eyes. The few patients carried Zhang Jingjiu into the room. Just as they prepared to place Zhang Jingjiu on the bed in the emergency room, they realized there was a human-shaped stain left on the bed. It was black red color that had faded away. It was unclear whether it was blood or something but it had carved out the shape of a human being perfectly.
“It feels like someone who was bleeding out had occupied this bed in the past.” Chen Ge stared at the bedsheet with both of his eyes. Before he could take a closer look, Patient Number 1 and Patient Number 2 had already placed Zhang Jingjiu on the bed. Then they proceeded to look through the various cupboards in the room to look for medical instruments. They worked for quite some time before they managed to help Zhang Jingjiu stop his bleeding.
[Their mannerism and actions are so professional, they do not look like mental patients at all.] Chen Ge observed the proceeding silently from the side. He noticed more and more strange things happened around him. That feeling got especially stronger after Doctor Sun showed up. [Doctor Gao who had turned into a seemingly dead person had a death hold on him so that I would not be able to wander too far away from me. Doctor Sun who had been acting strangely kept giving me multiple hints like he is trying to tell me something. The two doctors appeared to have gotten into an argument because of me. This is strange. How come it feels like this whole world is constructed with me as the central character?]
Two patients who were formerly doctors were trying to provide the best treatment to save Zhang Jingjiu’s life but the real doctors were standing outside the door to watch. This scene wrapped Chen Ge in a sense of absurdity. Inside this hospital at midnight, who truly was the patients and who was the doctor?
The grasp on his arm got tighter and tighter. Chen Ge frowned as he turned to take a look. He realized Doctor Gao’s fingernails had practically dug into his flesh. “Doctor Gao?” Chen Ge waved his arm but Doctor Gao did not respond in any way. He only clutched onto Chen Ge tightly, refusing to let him go no matter what. [Why would he do something like this?]
Doctor Gao who was like a dead person beside Chen Ge seemed to have sensed something. The facial expression on his frosty face was slowly changing. Just as Zhang Jingjiu’s condition was slowly stabilized, there was another sound of a heavy object being dragged that came from outside the emergency room.
“There are other victims here!” Chen Ge looked out the door. There appeared to be another person standing inside the corridor meeting his eyes.
“Who is that?”
[The hospital wants to make me go insane, their original plan is to have me kill everyone who are related to me. For example Zuo Han and Zhang Jingjiu, this means that the patients who receive the treatment with me tonight should be people that are related to me as well. But there is a detail that I should not forget. There were 7 chairs but there were only 5 patients. Doctor Gao said that the other two patients had gone missing. If these two patients were people that I know as well, then the higher chance was that something had already happened to them and not because they had gone missing. One of the victims was Zhang Jingjiu, the other was most probably Zuo Han.] With this thought in his mind, Chen Ge’s heart wrenched with pain.
Coincidentally, just as Chen Ge walked out the room to take a look down the corridor, a flash of lightning crossed the sky. The blinding white light shot through the windows installed with security wires and lit up the corridor in that instant. Chen Ge’s eyes slowly widened. With the light from the lightning, he finally had a clear look of that figure standing at the end of the corridor.
“Doctor Sun?” There was another Doctor Sun standing at the end of the corridor. His white coat was covered in blood, his hair was tussled, and blood was coming out from every orifice. But there was an exaggerated smile on his face!
The light from the lightning lasted for less than a second and the corridor outside the emergency room sunk back into darkness again.
[Doctor Sun is the killer? There are two Doctor Suns?] Chen Ge felt like someone had muddled his brain. He could not even tell that whether he was currently inside a nightmare or whether he was still in the real world. [Doctor Sun inside the emergency room had mentioned a door earlier. He said that if you opened open a door at midnight you would be able to see the other hospital, could there be a Doctor Sun both inside and outside the door at the hospital?] His mind reached this conclusion naturally but when that thought stuck to his mind, that heart-wrenching pain returned again. A growl escaped from his throat. Chen Ge gritted on his teeth. Initially it was Doctor Gao who held onto his arm tightly but now it was Chen Ge who was hanging onto Doctor Gao’s arm. The latter’s arm was twisted into painful shape by Chen Ge but the expression on Doctor Gao’s face had not changed. It was as if after they left the treatment room, Doctor Gao was no longer a doctor but he had turned into a dead body without self consciousness.
[I must not faint now. This place is too dangerous. The Doctor Sun in the dark is slowly approaching, he might reach here at any moment.] Chen Ge tried his best to slam the door of the emergency room close. But the enclosed s.p.a.ce not only did not bring him any sense of security, it only amplified the horror a.s.saulting his heart.
“What did you see outside?” It was unclear when Doctor Sun had materialized beside Chen Ge. A question abruptly left his lips.
“When the lightning crossed the sky, I saw someone standing outside the corridor, he was covered in blood.” Chen Ge did not say that the person had the same face as Doctor Sun.
“he was covered in blood?” Doctor Sun appeared to be reminded of something, “Does he have a fixed smile on his face?”
Looking into Doctor Sun’s eyes, Chen Ge did not know how to answer anymore. If he said that he saw the figure was smiling constantly, then it would prove indirectly that he had seen the killer’s face and he knew what the killer looked like. After giving it some thought, Chen Ge decided to nod in the end. “Yes, he is smiling like he cannot stop. And I realize he looks very similar to you.”
“I know what you are afraid of. That man is not me, he is the ghost at this hospital.” The smile on Doctor Sun’s face was slowly morphing to mimic the smile of the ‘ghost’ outside the room. “Do you believe in the existence of ghost in this world?”
“I feel like many people have asked me that question before.”
“Then do you know what kind of ghost is the scariest?” Doctor Sun appeared to be trying to help Chen Ge but at this moment he was really looking very scary.
Hearing Doctor Sun’s voice, a figure with a red dress floated up in Chen Ge’s mind as if on instinct. He answered as if hypnotized. “A ghost in a red outfit is the scariest.”
“That is not correct.” Doctor Sun’s voice slowly lowered. He pointed at Chen Ge’s eyes. “A ghost with warmth in his eyes is the scariest.”