Hearing Chen Ge's direct question about how long they had been kept in the cages, the three imprisoned individuals reacted in completely different ways. The elderly man paid no attention to the words at all; he simply continued licking his thin, stained fingers with slow, deliberate motions, as though he were savoring and trying to recapture the lingering pleasure of whatever greasy food he had recently consumed. The young woman in the center cage responded with immediate, frantic terror—she widened her eyes until the whites showed all around, and her body thrashed wildly inside the cramped space, flopping and twisting like a fish desperately trying to escape after being pulled from water. Among the three, only the middle-aged man gave Chen Ge his full, unwavering attention; his complicated gaze never left Chen Ge's face for even a second, watching him with an intensity that felt almost predatory.
"Why exactly are these three people being held captive inside this abandoned mental hospital?" Chen Ge asked himself aloud as he began to investigate more closely. He moved first to the cage containing the elderly man, crouching down to examine the small space more carefully. Inside, just like the others, sat two familiar plastic bowls—one empty, the other still holding a small amount of cloudy liquid. The old man noticed someone approaching his cage, yet he displayed absolutely no sign of fear or alarm. He simply remained seated in the very center of his tiny prison, calmly continuing to suck and lick at the dark oil stains coating his bony fingers with quiet obsession.
"The person who was forcibly dragged away from the nurse's station back in the First Sick Hall must be this old man," Chen Ge concluded after studying him for several long seconds. No matter how hard he looked, though, he couldn't spot anything particularly unusual or distinguishing about the elderly prisoner beyond the obvious signs of long-term malnutrition and neglect. "His hair is growing back unevenly in patches—someone shaved his head relatively recently, and this small clump here looks like fresh regrowth."
The observation immediately reminded Chen Ge of the bundles of hair that had been meticulously nailed to the underside of the nurse's station counter earlier. Among those samples, one lock had contained a mixture of white hairs intertwined with darker strands—very likely belonging to this very old man now sitting silently before him. "Even after being shaved, his hair is already noticeably long in places. That strongly suggests he has been trapped here for quite a long time already—months, maybe even longer." When Chen Ge had earlier compared the various hair samples nailed beneath the counter, he had determined they came from four distinct individuals. Yet right now, only three living people sat caged in front of him. "That means one person is still missing from this grim collection."
Chen Ge's gaze shifted slowly across the terrified young woman in the center cage before finally settling on the middle-aged man to her right. Unlike the others, this prisoner's hair remained long, tangled, and wildly unkempt, with no visible signs of having been forcibly shaved at any point. "This one's head clearly hasn't been shaved before—unlike the other two."
The realization made Chen Ge instantly more cautious and alert. Shaving the victims' heads appeared to be a bizarre, ritualistic habit of whoever was responsible for these cages—perhaps a way of dehumanizing them, humiliating them, or marking them as possessions. Yet for some reason, the middle-aged man had been spared this treatment entirely. Did that mean he knew the captor personally? Or—far more disturbingly—was it possible that he was the captor himself, or at least complicit in some way?
The thought struck Chen Ge like a cold shock, sending a fresh wave of wariness through him. Back in the connecting hallway between the First and Second Sick Halls, he had caught a fleeting glimpse of an unfamiliar, distorted face peering down from above—an uneven, twisted visage that had vanished the instant it was noticed. That person had clearly been able to move freely throughout the different sick halls and even follow Chen Ge without being detected until the very last moment. Logically, that twisted face should belong to the killer responsible for these cages. And yet here sat this suspicious middle-aged man, watching him with such guarded intensity. It was entirely possible—perhaps even likely—that more than one dangerously unhinged individual was roaming the abandoned hospital, each with their own twisted methods of trapping and tormenting victims.
Chen Ge tightened his grip on the mallet until his knuckles whitened, and an even darker possibility began to take shape in his mind: What if every single living person left inside this mental hospital—everyone except himself—was some kind of killer or accomplice? The thought was chilling, but he forced himself to acknowledge it as a real possibility, no matter how slim.
Of course, the actual probability of that extreme scenario was low, and Chen Ge quickly reined in the spiraling paranoia. He paused to take a steadying breath before returning his focus to the young woman in the center cage. Neither of the two men had shown any willingness to answer his earlier question or speak at all, so he decided to try removing the gag from the woman's mouth in the hope that she might provide some desperately needed information.
"Don't be afraid—I'm here to help you, to get you out of here," Chen Ge said gently as he stepped closer to her cage. He examined the heavy padlock securing the iron bars; without a proper key, breaking it open with just the mallet would be a long, noisy, exhausting task that might attract unwanted attention from elsewhere in the building. For now, he simply tried to work the gag free so she could speak.
The young woman, however, seemed to harbor a deep, instinctive terror toward any living person who approached her. The instant Chen Ge drew near, she began mumbling incoherently behind the cloth, shaking her head frantically from side to side and jerking her bound hands as much as the tight ropes allowed, clearly trying to shrink away from him despite being trapped.
"Stay calm—I'm not going to hurt you, I promise," Chen Ge reassured her again, keeping his voice low and steady. He positioned himself directly in front of her cage, preparing to carefully loosen the gag. But before his fingers could reach the knotted cloth, the middle-aged man—who had remained completely silent and motionless until this moment—finally spoke.
"I strongly advise you to leave her gag in place," he said in a flat, emotionless tone. "She is very noisy."
Chen Ge turned sharply at the unexpected sound of the man's voice. He found himself staring directly into a pair of dark, heavily guarded eyes that regarded him with cold detachment. It was impossible to tell whether this wariness and disdain were reserved solely for Chen Ge or extended to every living person the middle-aged man encountered. A palpable aura of natural disgust seemed to radiate from him, as though the very act of Chen Ge trying to help the woman repulsed him on some fundamental level.
"She is very noisy?" Chen Ge repeated calmly, showing no sign of intimidation. He wasn't afraid of engaging them in conversation—what truly worried him was their complete refusal to communicate at all. As long as they were willing to speak, no matter how reluctantly, he had at least some chance of extracting useful information about the hospital, the captor, or the way out.
"Yes. Very noisy," the middle-aged man answered curtly, offering nothing more. From the way he spoke, it seemed he found the simple act of communicating with another person almost as distasteful as Chen Ge's attempt to free the woman.
"Can you tell me why she's so noisy? Was she traumatized by something that happened here?" Chen Ge pressed immediately, firing off two follow-up questions in quick succession in the hope of drawing out more details. But the middle-aged man offered no reply whatsoever; he simply returned to watching Chen Ge in silence, his expression closed and unreadable once again.
It was not until Chen Ge actually reached his hand through the bars of the iron cage, fingers carefully working toward the knotted cloth gag covering the young woman's mouth, that the middle-aged man finally spoke again in his low, measured tone. "Don't know."
Chen Ge paused mid-motion, his hand still extended inside the cage, and turned his head slightly toward the speaker without fully withdrawing. "Then what exactly do you know?" he asked calmly, keeping his voice even and non-confrontational. "Since you claim you don't know anything about this woman, do you at least know something about the old man in the first cage over there?" He gestured toward the elderly prisoner with a slight nod. "Why does his cage have two plastic bowls sitting in front of it, while yours and the young woman's only have one each? That difference has to mean something."
The middle-aged man regarded Chen Ge steadily for several long seconds before responding. "I can tell you the reason," he said slowly, "but in return, I hope you won't remove the gag from that woman. She really is very noisy." He repeated the warning with the same flat insistence, as though the phrase carried some deeper significance that Chen Ge had yet to grasp. Curiosity flickered through Chen Ge's mind—why was this man so fixated on keeping her silenced?—but he quickly weighed the trade-off. Information was more valuable right now than immediate action. "Okay," Chen Ge agreed on the surface, his tone careful and deliberate. "I'll leave the gag in place for now—but only on the condition that you don't lie to me. Not even once."
"I never lie," the middle-aged man replied without hesitation or inflection, as though stating a simple, unchangeable fact about himself. He shifted slightly inside his cramped cage, settling more comfortably against the bars, and then began to speak in a rough, gravelly voice that seemed to scrape against the stale air of the laundry room. "The old man's body has always been weak, but his temper was far worse—violent and uncontrollable even in his younger days. After his first wife passed away, he was left living alone at home, completely dependent on his only son to survive. That son became a doctor—a psychiatrist, actually—and although the salary wasn't high, it was steady enough to support both of them without too much struggle. The son never complained; he simply kept sending money home every month even after moving out on his own."
"Unfortunately, fate doesn't spare anyone, no matter how decent they try to live," the middle-aged man continued, his dark eyes fixed unblinkingly on Chen Ge. "According to the rumors that spread through the village and the hospital corridors, prolonged daily exposure to severely mentally ill patients eventually broke the son down. The constant strain of dealing with their delusions, violence, and despair slowly eroded his own sanity until, one day, he snapped. In a fit of madness, he seriously injured several of his own patients. The incident couldn't be covered up; the victims' families pressed charges aggressively, and the lawsuits drained every last bit of savings the family had. The son lost his medical license, his job, and very nearly his freedom."
"The son desperately needed professional treatment, but the fees at any government-run mental hospital were around four thousand yuan per month—an impossible amount for a family already ruined by legal costs. With no other options left and no one willing to help, the private hospital where the son had once worked stepped in unexpectedly. They offered to accept him as a patient at a drastically reduced price—far lower than the government facilities. So the once-respected psychiatrist became just another inmate, confined behind the same locked doors he used to walk through freely."
"That reversal—doctor turned patient—pushed the son even further into the abyss. His condition worsened steadily, and he remained untreated and deteriorating until the entire hospital was finally shut down years later. During all that time he was locked away, the old man's own health continued to decline rapidly. Too frail and elderly to hold down any kind of work, he relied entirely on the meager government stipend, every yuan of which went straight toward paying for his son's care. Eventually, even the new wife he had remarried grew tired of the endless hardship and divorced him, leaving him completely alone once more."
"When the hospital closed and the son was released back home, the old man tried to appeal to him—begged him to pull himself together, to fight against the mental illness that had stolen his career and his life. But not long after returning, the son was reported to have bitten a fellow villager during one of his violent episodes. Whenever he 'acted up,' as the villagers put it, he became wildly destructive—smashing furniture, lashing out at anyone nearby, completely uncontrollable. With no hospital willing to take him back and no money left to pay for care, the old man had no choice but to build an iron cage himself and lock his own son inside it to keep him—and everyone else—safe."
"This grim arrangement continued for some time, but eventually the old man's own body gave out completely. He could barely feed himself, let alone prepare meals or medicine for his caged son. Day after day he watched the young man deteriorate further inside the bars—becoming thinner, more feral, more lost. Finally, the old man reached a terrible decision."
"He waited until one of his son's worst episodes had passed and the young man was once again calm—or at least exhausted—inside the cage. Then he placed two plastic bowls just outside the bars where his son could reach them if he stretched far enough. One bowl contained clean, ordinary water. The other was laced with rat poison. He left them there without a word, giving his own flesh and blood the final choice: live on in torment, or end it quickly and quietly."
The middle-aged man's face remained utterly expressionless throughout the entire recounting, yet by the time he finished speaking, his already pale complexion had drained to an almost ghostly white, as though telling the story had physically sapped something vital from him. "That is why there are two bowls of liquid in front of the old man's cage now—one for life, and one for death."
After listening to the grim tale in silence, Chen Ge felt a cold shiver trace down his spine. The words echoed in his mind, pulling up the exact sentence he had seen scratched beneath the nurse's station counter earlier that night: "I will repay everything that you have done to me." The connection was unmistakable, and it settled over him like a heavy shadow.