“Trash wanted to become a human. Everything it did was to achieve this goal. Thus, from this action, we can surmise that it is not a human being. Then, that begets the question, what is it?
“As Trash’s doctor, I have been puzzled by this question for a very long time. I wish to understand Trash’s origin. How did Trash come to be?
“Using the excuse to help it find bliss as a front, I asked it many questions, but I knew that it did not answer most of my questions honestly. It was hard to imagine that a monster who did not know what bliss was would know how to lie and cheat. Looks like these things are innately imprinted within every living creature. Nothing is an exception, no matter how unique it is.
“Trash is very clever, so incredibly clever that it worries me. Its ability to think and formulate thought improve by the days. I’m worried that one day he will start to suspect me and single-handedly decide to refuse my treatment on his own volition.
“The first conflict that I had with Trash came far earlier than I expected. Trash was once abandoned by the girl from Room 301. I thought it would have nothing but hatred for that girl, but I was surprised that the monster did not even understand the feeling of hatred. It had no idea what feeling that was. I trapped Trash and the girl, whom I’d tied up, inside the same room. I even prepared so many tools that were meant for its revenge for it inside the room, but when I opened the door again, all it had done was remove the rope from around the girl and untie her.
“Trash is seriously ill, but it is still not the patient that I need. There is no separation of good and evil in his heart, or rather, this monster does not have a heart.
“I passed the knife over to Trash and told him what to do to make the girl forever its possession. I taught Trash the method that I once used myself, but it did not appear like it was too keen on following my example. It started to have its own thoughts. This is incredibly different from its performance during our previous session. It planned to grow a flower that did not belong on this world on the bed of thoughts that I had prepared for him.
“For the sake of the experiment, I wish to do a test. If I kill the little girl, will it hate me enough to want to kill me? What kind of method will it use to kill me? Will its eyes when it kills me be filled with pain and despair? Just the thought of it excites me. Nothing’s going according to plan, but is that not part of the fun? I am getting more and more curious.”
When he finished reading the third file, Chen Ge had already labelled this doctor a mad person. “Better be careful. Be sure to close up your mind and have a firm belief in your principles when you read these files. They will try to pull you down to their same level and thus slowly cut through your internal defense line.”
“I do not care about these files. All I want to do is to leave now.”
“Is there anything related to Xiang Nuan in those files? Is there any information about him?”
Seeing Xiao Sun and Wen Qing’s reactions, Chen Ge sighed in relief. These two could not care less about what was written inside the files. For them, the truth was not that important. Instead, the most important thing was surviving with their lives and family by their side.
Putting away the third file, Chen Ge opened the last file. The surface of this file was soaked in blood. The fourth document file was the thinnest. It only had a few sheets of paper, but every sheet had a bloody handprint on it. The handprint matched the ones in the room perfectly.
“Trash wanted to become a human, but it did not understand what constitutes a human being. Using dead bodies and living humans as examples, I taught it many different things from many different perspectives. I told him about the difference between other living humans, dead bodies, and animals. I explained to him what bliss is, what emotions are, what warmth is, and what love is.
“Trash had grown. From a moment in time that I could not pinpoint, I was unable to read its thoughts anymore. The pair of eyes that it dug out from another person’s face were muddled and filled stench-inducing blood vessels. I could no longer see through them and access what their owner was thinking.
“Trash was different from all of my other patients. It is real, but it had no body to call its own. What it had instead was an amalgamation of sorts that it had built from many different parts. I was unable to reach into its heart as I normally would to study my patients. Eventually, I even had trouble telling at what stage his illness had advanced to.
“For a doctor to be unable to read their own patient, that is both very interesting and dangerous. I was unable to predict its next move, and I had no idea when I would be killed. Trash would always mysteriously appear behind me. I could sense its eyes on the back of my heart and the area around my neck and throat. Did it really wish to kill me, or was it also trying to help me cure the illness that I personally have—misery?
“We imprisoned the girl for a few days. In the end, Trash did not kill her, but the girl was no longer herself. Trash eventually found a compromise. It listened to my advice, but at the same time, it had retained its own uniqueness. It was the first time it had owned something of its own.
“Yes, it should be a thing. Even though Trash had seen this thing as its friend, but for me, it was just an object that had lost its soul.”
More and more blood soaked the records. The paper was getting more wrinkled. The handprints on the sheet of paper overlapped each other like many ‘ghosts’ had seen this last document before.
“I desperately wish to know what it would feel like to be killed by Trash, but with just the thought that I would lose such a perfect patient after I died, it felt like something had gone missing from my heart. I have lived for a year behind the door. It felt very uncomfortable to return to the world outside the door. It was not until I met Trash that I suddenly understood the meaning of my existence. Yes, compared to me, Trash met the requirement of the hospital much better. If I sent it over there, all the doctors would be so overjoyed and excited.
“I really did not wish to share Trash with the others, but unfortunately, I was afraid I would not survive until the moment Trash received the treatment that it desperately needed. I shared my discovery and findings concerning Trash to my teacher. When it heard my story, it personally came to Jiu Hong Apartments. After it assessed Trash, it gave Trash a very unique patient number—Patient 0004.
“When I saw this number, I knew that my days were numbered. All of the patients at the hospital were arranged according to their number depending on the severity of their illness. The more unique the patient, the further ahead their number would be.
“Other than Patient 0001, which I have not seen before, Patient 0002 is left on the other side of the door, and Patient 0003 is hidden in Jiujiang. These three are beyond the realm of my comprehension. They are existences that I cannot completely understand. I really did not expect mere Trash to become Patient 0004. Can it suffer the weight that will be brought by this number?
“Normal doctors are unable to interact with the ten first patients. They are instead handed over to their respective teacher and doctor. Regarding the others that know about their presence, they are either sent to the other side of the door or disappear silently and mysteriously. I belong to the later camp. After all, I have instilled my own thoughts into the material that my teacher has considered to be incredibly important.
“Before I disappear, there is one last thing that I need to do, and that is to hide these records at a place that only me and Trash know about. I have no idea why I would do such a thing. Perhaps human beings are all selfish creatures, especially people like me…”
The last document ended right there. On first glance, it might appear to be the ravings of a mad doctor, but it actually contained a wealth of information. This crazy doctor was not the scariest entity; he had a teacher, and according to his statement, the hospital that he came from had many scary doctors that were just like him. In Chen Ge’s mind, there was only one such hospital in existence, and that was the cursed hospital that was built on the border between Xin Hai and Jiujiang.
“This is such troublesome news. From the records, it appears that they started to investigate the doors more than twenty years ago. That’s even earlier than Doctor Gao. There’s an impossible number of doctors, and I have no clue what they are capable of. Other than that, I need to pay attention to the patients that were mentioned inside these files. The doctor’s teacher probably saw something in the rag doll, so it listed it as Patient 0004. Several decades later, the rag doll became a Demon God, the ghost fetus, but even so, it was only ranked number four. Just how scary are the three before the ghost fetus?”
Chen Ge knew that among Red Specters, there would be a great difference in their ability. For example, Men Nan and Zhang Ya before she became a Demon God. Chen Ge believed that such a difference would exist between Demon Gods as well.
“Looks like I will have to reassess the overall ability of that hospital. The best thing I can do now is try to find as many patients as I can and try to work together with them. We are all patients, so there should be a common language, right?” Chen Ge placed all four files into his backpack. These things were very important.
“The rag doll was taken by the doctor’s teacher to the hospital. The experience at Jiu Hong Apartments was the second stage of the change that happened to the ghost fetus. It was at this place that it was given an education in a twisted worldview and moral values. What happened next at the hospital should be the last stage that ultimately propelled it to become the ghost fetus.”
Chen Ge was reminded of the scenario inside the worlds behind the doors of the few children that he had entered before. When he opened his eyes, there would be a black iron door that gave off a faint scent of disinfectant behind him. The world of every child that was chosen was different, but the doors that were used to leave their worlds were the same. Chen Ge greatly suspected that the black iron door was the ‘door’ that was pushed open by the ghost fetus himself.
“The black door with the smell of disinfectant feels like the door to the zone of the seriously ill at special hospitals. Using this as a basis of speculation, the ghost fetus probably pushed open its own door at that hospital.”
The four documents tied the ghost fetus to the cursed hospital, but this was just the beginning. From what was happening now, it appeared that it had been some time since the ghost fetus had escaped from that hospital, and due to various reasons, the hospital was not that desperate to recapture the ghost fetus.
In Chen Ge’s mind, there were several possibilities for this.
One, the cursed hospital was very confident in their ability. They believed that they would be able to recapture the ghost fetus any time they wanted, so they did not care about it and allowed it to grow while they observed it in the dark.
Two, they ran into some big trouble. The person who had created trouble could be another patient. After all, if the ghost fetus was able to escape, the patients who were ranked before it would naturally be able to mount their own escape as well.
Three, the cursed hospital ran into a huge challenge in Jiujiang. It was not that they did not wish to recapture ghost fetus, but they no longer dared come to Jiujiang so openly like they did in the past.
Note that these three situations were not mutually exclusive to one another. After all, with that hospital’s scary ability, Chen Ge believed that just one situation would not be enough to prevent them from doing what they wanted to do. Perhaps a collection of deterring factors had contributed to the situation that Chen Ge was faced with.
“There is a high chance that the ghost fetus was once trapped at that cursed hospital. It appears like I interacted with people from that hospital when I was young. Could all roads eventually lead back to that cursed hospital? And what kind of character do my parents play in this whole incident? Is their disappearance related to the cursed hospital as well?”
“Chen Ge, Chen Ge!” His elbow was being tugged on, and Xiao Sun’s call echoed in his ears. “Look at the faces on the wall. They appear to be looking at you!”
“Looking at me?” Chen Ge turned around to scan his environment. The faces of the children on the wall were bleeding. Their eyes appeared to have come alive. Their eyeballs were so lively that it felt like they would pop out from the wall at any moment. Even when he was stared at by so many strange gazes, Chen Ge was as calm as ever. He slowly took the files out from his backpack. He did not believe that he had done anything that crossed the line. The only thing that he had done was take the files from the drawer. If these children were targeting him because of that, before his employees woke up, Chen Ge could give up the documents for the time being. He could always come back to fetch them later.
A great man knows when to yield and when not to. There was nothing embarrassing about this. Chen Ge placed the documents back into the drawer, but he realized that the children were not looking at the documents; they were all looking at him. The gazes all zeroed in on him. All the children had found him as their target.
“Why are they looking at me like this?”
Chen Ge put the document files back into his backpack. He still did not wish to leave this building because he had not found the source of the stench inside this building. Room 504 was the room where the stench was the thickest. If his earliest speculation was not wrong, the remaining body part of the rag doll should be hidden somewhere inside this room.
“Let’s go now. If we do not go soon, I have a feeling that we will not be able to leave.”
“Just give me a moment.” Even though Chen Ge did not wish to stay in that room any longer, it had not been easy to make their way to this place. He would feel too much regret if he did not take a good look around the room. “According to the doctor’s files, their teacher would do their best to make everyone else who knew about their patients disappear silently and mysteriously. The tenants of this building were probably murdered by the doctor’s teacher. The dead spirit of every family lingered here, and the faces on the wall probably belong to the children who had died in that massacre.”
Even Chen Ge felt uncomfortable being stared at by these multiple faces. He did not want to waste any more time. Grabbing his backpack with one hand and the Doctor Skull Cracker’s hammer with another, he pushed open the door to the bedroom and the kitchen.
“There is no sign of the rag doll?” The stench in the bedroom was more obvious. Chen Ge was about to step into it when Wen Qing screamed behind him. Both Chen Ge and Xiao Sun were given a jolt of fright. They turned to look at Wen Qing at the same time.
The color drained from the face of Wen Qing, who was walking at the back of the group. She touched a part of her hand. “Some… someone just dragged me back earlier. It felt like they wanted me to leave this place as soon as possible.”
“They are trying to warn you. Looks like this place is indeed very dangerous. It is unwise to stay here for too long.” Chen Ge picked up speed. This place was different from Jin Hwa Apartments. He did not have enough time to give the place a thorough search. He could only search as fast as possible. He could have missed some vital clues, but that was something that could not be helped at this moment. The place was simply too dangerous for his group to stay for long.
The thing that radiated the heaviest haze of the horrible smell was the bed. Chen Ge lifted the cover of the bed and saw that there was a moldy jacket placed under the cover. He used the handle of the Doctor Skull Cracker’s Hammer to pick up the jacket. A broken leg sewn from tattered fabric fell out from the folds of the jacket.
The horrible stench crawled into his nostril. The whole building started to shake like there was an earthquake. Their surroundings started to turn for the worse. The human faces that were painted on the wall appeared to come alive in that moment.
“The rag doll’s left leg was hidden inside Jiu Hong Apartments Block 1.” Chen Ge held his hand over his mouth and nose. Without any hesitation, he retreated. “We need to leave this building as soon as possible, and then we will decide what to do next!”