A foul, oppressive stench hung thick in the air of the Second Sick Hall, growing noticeably stronger and more nauseating the closer Chen Ge moved toward the boundary with the Third Sick Hall. It was a complex odor—part decay, part chemical residue, part something indefinably human—that seemed to seep through the very walls and cling to his clothes and skin. The narrow connecting hallway between the Second and Third Sick Halls was completely blocked off by a heavy steel door, its surface scarred with rust and old scratches, forming an unyielding barrier that clearly marked the transition into the most restricted and dangerous part of the entire complex.
Chen Ge pressed close to the rusted steel door and peered cautiously through the small, jagged gap at its edge, angling his flashlight to illuminate as much of the space beyond as possible. What he could make out in the dim beam looked like a scene of utter chaos: overturned tables and chairs lay scattered haphazardly across the floor, while bloated, misshapen mattresses were piled and strewn throughout the hallway in irregular heaps. The way the mattresses bulged unnaturally in places gave the disturbing impression that they might be deliberately covering or concealing something—or someone—directly underneath their stained and sagging fabric.
Chen Ge positioned himself right beside the heavily rusted steel door, his eyes fixed intently on the old keyhole as he studied its shape and mechanism under the flashlight's glow. The design was unmistakable—a double-sided lock, the kind commonly used in mental hospitals for maximum security and control. In emergencies, such locks could be engaged from either side of the door, allowing staff to quickly seal off entire sections and prevent patients from entering or escaping dangerous areas during outbursts or crises.
This detail might have seemed minor or inconspicuous to a casual observer, but it immediately captured Chen Ge's full attention and sparked a chain of deductions in his mind. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the old key that Wang Haiming had left behind—the one discovered in connection to this very hospital. Carefully, he inserted it into the lock and attempted to turn it, but years of neglect and exposure had caused severe rust buildup inside the mechanism. The key barely slid in at all, catching and grinding uselessly against the corroded interior without catching any of the tumblers.
"I knew it would be nothing short of extremely lucky if this key actually fitted here," Chen Ge muttered quietly to the camera as he withdrew the key and held it up for comparison. He closely examined the keyhole's size and shape against the key's height, thickness, and tooth pattern before slipping it back into his pocket with a sigh. Earlier, when he had first entered the hospital grounds and explored the lower floors, he had noticed that almost all the individual patient rooms used simple single-sided locks with much smaller, narrower keyholes—far too compact for a key of this size and design to ever fit.
Since Wang Haiming had somehow obtained and carried this particular key out from deep within the Third Sick Hall itself, logic dictated that the lock it was meant to open had to be located somewhere inside that forbidden section—perhaps on one of the inner doors or a more secure area. Building on that reasoning, Chen Ge allowed himself a cautious speculation: the Third Sick Hall was rumored to contain ten patient rooms, yet only nine current residents were accounted for in various records and clues. Could the mysteriously missing patient from Room 3 actually be Wang Haiming himself, the one who had managed to escape and take the key with him?
Chen Ge knew he couldn't confirm this theory with the evidence he had so far, and several pieces still didn't quite align. After all, Doctor Gao had thoroughly searched through every available hospital record and found absolutely no mention of a patient assigned to Room 3—not even a redacted name or partial file. A single escaped patient like Wang Haiming, no matter how significant, hardly seemed reason enough for the entire hospital administration to go to the extreme length of erasing all traces of an entire room's existence from official documentation.
The layers of mystery surrounding this abandoned hospital ran deeper than Chen Ge had initially anticipated, with secrets buried beneath years of silence and deliberate cover-ups. He wasn't particularly invested in uncovering the full truth of whatever horrific events had transpired here five years ago; his primary goals remained far more personal—to locate any clue his parents might have intentionally left behind during their own investigation and to discover a viable method for permanently closing the dangerous 'door' that had opened in his life.
Gripping his flashlight firmly in one hand and keeping the mallet ready in the other, Chen Ge proceeded cautiously into the dimly lit third-floor corridor of the Second Sick Hall, moving past each closed door with deliberate slowness and vigilance. "Could the person whose distorted face I glimpsed at the window earlier be hiding inside one of these rooms right now, waiting for me to pass by?" he whispered to the camera, his voice low and tense as he swept the beam across every shadow and corner.
At the far end of the long, echoing corridor, Chen Ge came to a halt before a door that appeared distinctly different from the standard patient sickbays he had seen throughout the building. A heavy, overpowering scent of mildew wafted strongly from the gap beneath it, thick enough to make his eyes water slightly. The door itself was heavier and more solidly constructed than the others, and most strikingly, a brand-new padlock gleamed on its hasp—free of any rust or weathering.
"This lock shows no signs of rust at all—it's clearly brand-new, just like the one that mysteriously appeared on the First Sick Hall's front entrance to trap me inside," Chen Ge observed, leaning in for a closer look. He tested Wang Haiming's key one more time out of habit, but as expected, it didn't come close to fitting. Satisfied that the corridor behind him remained empty and silent, he stepped back, raised the mallet high, and brought it down with forceful precision against the door's wooden frame and lock mechanism.
"Thankfully, this is only a wooden door—if it had been another steel one like the barrier to the Third Sick Hall, I wouldn't have stood a chance of breaking through," Chen Ge said with audible relief as several heavy blows finally splintered the frame and caused the entire door to collapse inward with a loud crash. The moment it fell, an even more intense wave of mildew smell rushed out to envelop him, so thick and cloying that it felt almost tangible against his skin.
The room beyond was completely stuffed from floor to ceiling with piles of old patient clothing, discarded uniforms, and stacks of moldy mattresses that had been heaped together into a single massive, precarious hill dominating the center of the space. "This must have served as the main laundry and storage room for the entire Second Sick Hall," Chen Ge narrated steadily, straightening up to full height while the chest camera captured every detail of the cluttered interior. Given the constant danger surrounding him, he didn't dare relax his focus long enough to read or respond to the livestream chat; instead, he kept up a continuous, calm commentary describing everything he saw and thought, turning his exploration into something resembling a real-time supernatural documentary for the viewers.
The overwhelming stench of mildew completely overpowered the fainter underlying odor that had permeated the rest of the sick hall, coating the back of Chen Ge's throat and making his skin feel sticky and unpleasant. Fighting down the rising discomfort, he stepped fully into the room and began to carefully navigate around the edges of the piled laundry.
The space itself was quite large for a hospital utility room, with several industrial-sized laundry machines and specialized anti-bacterial cleaning units still lined up against one wall, their doors hanging open and interiors coated in dust and cobwebs. Aside from those dormant appliances, the entire floor area was dominated by the mountains of dirty, abandoned clothing and old mattresses—some stained with unidentifiable substances, others torn and leaking yellowed stuffing.
"This room looks perfectly ordinary on the surface—a simple laundry facility—so why was it sealed with a brand-new lock from the outside?" Chen Ge wondered aloud, his suspicion growing as he turned his full attention to the central pile of soiled linens and mattresses. Holding his breath against the worst of the smell, he began using the head of the mallet to carefully shift and peel back layers of fabric. "I have a strong feeling that something—or someone—is deliberately hidden underneath all this filth."
Chen Ge worked faster now, methodically clearing away the top layers of stained clothes and bedding. Suddenly, the mallet struck something solid beneath the fabric with a sharp, unmistakable metallic clink that echoed through the room.
"An iron cage?" he whispered, heart rate spiking as he hurriedly shoved aside the remaining mattresses and laundry. The sight that emerged from beneath the pile caused his breath to catch in his throat and his blood to run cold: trapped inside a cramped, rusted iron cage was a young woman whose head had been completely shaved, leaving only faint stubble across her scalp. She lay curled in an unnatural position, motionless and pale under the harsh beam of his flashlight.
The duvet had been carelessly thrown over the bed in a heavy, rumpled heap, as though someone had tried to hide a shameful secret beneath its stained folds. When Chen Ge tugged the corner aside, the fabric slid away with a soft rasp, revealing not crumpled laundry or forgotten junk—but cold black iron bars half-buried in shadow.
Inside the narrow iron cage, barely tall enough for her to kneel upright, crouched a young woman. Completely bare. Her skin gleamed with a thin, unhealthy sheen of sweat under the weak bedside lamp. Thick coils of rough hemp rope cinched cruelly around the base of her heavy breasts, forcing the pale flesh to bulge outward in obscene, straining spheres. The constriction made her areolas darken and puff; her nipples stood painfully rigid, each pierced by a small silver ring from which dangled a tiny, tarnished bell. Every shallow breath she took sent the bells swaying, filling the stale air with a faint, obscene chiming—like wind chimes hung in a slaughterhouse.
A thick, black vibrator protruded from between her trembling thighs, the base glistening wetly. It buzzed with manic, uneven intensity, the motor clearly pushed far past its safe limit; the furious vibrations rippled visibly through the soft meat of her inner thighs and lower belly. Drool had leaked from around the cruel gag—a pair of once-white cotton panties now stained a sickly yellowish-gray and knotted tightly between her teeth. Her jaw worked helplessly against the sodden fabric, trying to push it out, only succeeding in making more saliva drip in long strings down her chin and onto the iron floor of the cage.
Her wrists had been lashed high to the top bars with more of the same coarse rope, arms stretched until the tendons stood out in sharp relief beneath her skin. Every frantic jerk of her body made the entire cage rattle faintly against the floorboards. When her wild, glassy eyes finally locked onto Chen Ge's face, something fractured behind them. Recognition? Terror? Hope? It was impossible to tell. She began to thrash her head side to side in violent negation, matted hair whipping across her cheeks. The motion set her bound breasts swinging heavily; the bells rang louder now, a bright, mocking jangle that clashed horribly with the wet, mechanical drone of the vibrator buried inside her. Each sway pulled painfully at the pierced tips, forcing small, involuntary whimpers past the gag.
Chen Ge stood rooted, breath caught somewhere high in his throat.
For several long heartbeats his mind refused to process what his eyes were seeing. Not lust—nothing so clean or predictable as arousal crossed his thoughts. Instead there was only a cold, crawling wrongness, the same instinctive recoil one feels when stepping barefoot on something soft and warm in the dark and realizing too late that it is still alive.
He had come here expecting dust, mold, maybe a forgotten suitcase full of old pornography. Not this. Not a living human being packaged like meat beneath a stranger's filthy bedding, trembling and leaking and ringing like some obscene Christmas ornament left to rot in July.
The bells kept jingling.
The vibrator kept buzzing.
And the woman's eyes—huge, bloodshot, pleading and accusing all at once—never left his face.
Chen Ge instinctively took a single, measured step backward the moment he uncovered the iron cage and saw the young woman inside. Even in that shocking instant, he managed to keep his composure remarkably steady, his breathing controlled and his movements deliberate. Without hesitation, he reached out and quietly pulled the splintered door closed again, then dragged one of the heavy, dust-covered industrial laundry machines across the floor until it blocked the entrance completely. The precaution was purely to protect himself from any potential assault from behind—someone could easily sneak up through the now-open doorway while his attention was fixed on the cages. Only after the makeshift barricade was securely in place did he feel safe enough to approach the iron cage once more.
"Can you understand what I'm saying?" Chen Ge asked in a calm, low voice as he drew closer to the bars. The moment he spoke, the shaved-headed woman inside began to struggle violently against her restraints, thrashing her body as much as the cramped space allowed and making muffled, panicked sounds behind the gag. There was clearly no way to establish any meaningful communication with her right now; her terror seemed absolute and overwhelming. "There aren't any visible wounds or injuries on her body, and there are no traces of oil or grease stains around her lips or on her hands. That means this woman definitely isn't the same person who was forcibly dragged away from the nurse's station in the First Sick Hall earlier. It looks like there are multiple other people—living people—still active somewhere inside this hospital."
Chen Ge turned his attention to the rest of the massive pile of laundry and began carefully shifting aside more layers of filthy clothing and bedding with the head of his mallet. The overpowering, horrible stench grew even stronger as he worked, and soon three separate iron cages emerged from beneath the mound. They had been deliberately arranged in the distinctive triangular formation of the Chinese character '品'—exactly the same layout used for the three main buildings of the mental hospital itself, with one central cage flanked by two others.
The young woman occupied the middle cage, still the focal point of the arrangement. To her left sat an elderly man who appeared to be around seventy years old; he was emaciated to the point of looking skeletal, his skin stretched tight over protruding bones, and dark, oily stains glistened noticeably around his lips and smeared across his thin fingers. To the woman's right was a pale, middle-aged man whose complexion suggested he hadn't seen direct sunlight in many years—perhaps decades. Unlike the other two, this man was the only one who actively looked up and met Chen Ge's gaze directly. His expression was extraordinarily complex: a turbulent mixture of wild excitement, deep-seated disgust, and raw, unmistakable fear all flickered across his features in rapid succession.
"Three separate victims?" Chen Ge whispered, the words barely audible even to himself. The discovery far exceeded anything he had anticipated or prepared for. A cold, cautious thought quickly surfaced in his mind: in a place this dangerous, with unknown threats still lurking, he couldn't afford to trust appearances. He tightened his grip on the mallet and deliberately backed away until he stood at a safe distance from all three cages, keeping them clearly in his line of sight.
When encountering strangers in an isolated, high-risk environment like this, the safest course of action was always to avoid believing anything they might say and to refrain from getting too physically close. The real murderer—or murderers—could easily be hiding among the supposed victims, waiting for the perfect moment to strike when trust was extended.
Chen Ge slowly circled around the three cages, examining them from every angle. Each cage was painfully small—far too cramped to have been designed for holding adult human beings. Even with a living person curled tightly inside, there was scarcely enough room for them to shift position or turn their body more than a few inches in any direction; the bars pressed in on all sides like a metal coffin.
"Three cages in total, yet only the woman has been gagged and had her limbs tightly bound with rope," Chen Ge observed aloud, his brow furrowing as more questions piled up. If all three were genuine victims trapped here against their will, why had only the physically weakest among them—the young woman—been restrained so thoroughly and brutally? The inconsistency gnawed at him, refusing to align with any simple explanation.
The elderly man sat motionless with a completely blank, vacant expression on his face, staring straight ahead at nothing in particular as though his mind had long since retreated to some unreachable place. In contrast, the middle-aged man's face kept shifting through subtle but rapid changes of emotion, though he remained utterly silent. Neither of the men had their arms or legs tied, yet neither made any attempt to call out for help, beg for release, or even speak. They simply sat quietly inside their cages, watching Chen Ge with unnerving stillness.
Compared to the explosive energy and constant chatter flooding the livestream chat, Chen Ge himself remained eerily calm and composed. He positioned himself directly in front of the three cages, mallet still in hand, and spoke in a clear, steady voice that carried easily to the camera.
"How long have all of you been kept locked inside these cages?"