[Your worries are what give us peace of mind…]
[Listen to that. Does this sound like anything a normal person would say?]
[It feels like there’s an energy field at play, but something still doesn’t add up.]
[That’s right, it doesn’t. I watched when the third-ranked streamer broadcasted here. The moment he entered the energy field, there were intense magnetic fluctuations—he dropped offline for several minutes, and it was obvious to the naked eye that something was seriously off with everyone inside.]
[Right, right. When Jiang Yan and the others arrived in the evening, everything was normal, and Fang Miao was too. It all started getting strange at midnight.]
[That must be a time trigger. I suspect that once the sun rises, Fang Miao and the rest will go back to normal.]
[Agreed, and now I support Jiang Yuqing’s theory too: Baishan Sanatorium is evolving into an energy field, but hasn’t fully transitioned yet.]
[Same as above; the spirits inside can probably only control people who’re in the sanatorium after midnight.]
[Does anyone remember that sentence at the start—“Anyone who tries to get you to leave your room is a psychiatric patient at this hospital. Don’t believe a word they say.” I think there’s a big problem with that line.]
[It’s reasonable to suspect that the real psychiatric patients in the institution can’t be controlled—they’re actually lucid in there.]
[Since their minds are already abnormal, they can’t be made to act more unnaturally?? (Just a wild guess)]
[Wait, there’s a problem here. The twins and Jiang Yan are faking mental illness, right? They can be controlled. And what about Yu Renwan and Lin Xinjiu??]
[No need to worry too much. Psychics’ spirits are stronger than ordinary people’s. Unless this place fully evolves into an energy field, or those five stay here for more than a week, it’s very hard to affect them.]
[Uh? Why did the live viewers soar past six thousand just while I went to the restroom??]
[Damn, except for a few especially famous streams, I’ve never seen numbers this high in a normal broadcast.]
Because *Red Pillow* is only open to officially registered psychics in China, and there are less than ten thousand official psychics total, with a third of them over sixty years old.
So six thousand live viewers is a sky-high number.
Countless new viewers were flooding the channel in the dead of night, all drawn by the news that the location for the fourth episode of *Red Pillow* was a “semi-energy field.” Among them were many who’d been woken from sleep by friends eager not to miss it.
This crowd watched the stream for a while, then finally couldn’t resist opening their mics:
[I’m sorry, am I the only one who thinks this “semi-energy field” is even weirder?]
[Seconded. It’d be one thing if everyone inside just wasn’t human, but swapping between being human and not being human, what are we supposed to do with that??]
[Exactly. During the day, they’re normal; at night, they turn into ghosts who want to kill you. This constant switch is really disturbing, and honestly, downright creepy…]
Jiang Yan, of course, had no idea what was being discussed in the stream chat.
She was only concerned with the situation at hand.
Thinking back on everything they’d just encountered, her mind spun with inferences.
“Are we the sick lab rats?”
Jiang Yan turned her face toward Le Yi, lowering her voice to ask.
Le Yi, sensing there was no sound nearby for now, satisfied Jiang Yan’s curiosity: “Yes.”
Then, in a very odd way, she added, “But also maybe not.”
“What do you mean?” Jiang Yan asked.
“If the nurses and ordinary patients can’t find us, the nurses will just grab a random ordinary patient to use as the lab rat. If they can’t even catch an ordinary patient, the head nurse picks one of the staff from the nurse’s station.”
“In short, someone always gets sent to the lab tonight.”
Jiang Yan picked up the thread: “But whether it’s ordinary patients or nurses, none of them are psychiatric patients, not the so-called ‘sick lab rat,’ so the whole game just keeps playing out over and over again.”
Le Yi nodded. “Every Sunday, finishes at six in the morning.”
Jiang Yan recalled the murders that had taken place at Baishan Sanatorium in February, March, and April.
The deputy director drowned by suffocation, two nurses were stabbed to death by a manic patient, and four more medical staff died from unknown causes.
Jiang Yan ventured cautiously, “I remember seeing something on the news before I was admitted, about a deputy director who drowned…”
Le Yi answered tersely, “I pushed him.”
Jiang Yan: “?”
Le Yi said, “Back then, we were hiding in the little garden outside. Xiao Jia was spotted by the deputy director, and in a panic, I pushed him into the lake. How was I supposed to know he couldn’t swim?”
“He deserved to die.”
Jiang Yan seconded, “He deserved to die.”
“If it wasn’t him, it would have been you. If he hadn’t died, you would have been sent to the lab, and then it would have been you who died.”
Le Yi was pleased by Jiang Yan’s reasoning.
“Of course.”
Perhaps feeling Jiang Yan was agreeing with her, she offered more:
“There’s no reason we should have to die just because we got this illness. The world needs me; there’s no way I’m dying in here. Escaping the sanatorium is the first step toward saving the world.”
“…”
Was this really paranoia?
It sounded more like a middle-school syndrome.
Jiang Yan fell silent for a moment, then asked about the other two murders:
“I remember a manic patient stabbed two nurses…”
“His friend from the same ward was taken away by those two nurses the night before—died pretty badly. He couldn’t take it, so he got his revenge in broad daylight.”
“And those four in April…”
Abruptly, Le Yi fell silent.
Jiang Yan thought she’d stepped on a forbidden topic and was about to change the subject, when suddenly she heard the stifled sound of laughter.
As if someone was covering their mouth to hide it.
After a while, Le Yi choked out between laughs:
“That time, I stole all the spare keys from the cold storage, then locked all the patients inside. The head nurse was forced to grab nurses instead.”
“It was almost dawn then, and the nurses’ minds were clearing up. When they couldn’t find any patients, they panicked, accusing each other of being the sick lab rat. In the end, one dragged three others down, and all four were hauled to the operating table in the lab by the head nurse. It looked like they’d had all their blood replaced, and there wasn’t a single patch of skin left intact.”
At this, Le Yi stopped laughing.
She looked coldly at Jiang Yan. “Why do you talk so much?”
Jiang Yan retorted quietly, “You talked plenty too just now.”
Le Yi glared.
Jiang Yan changed her tune at once: “On second thought, I suppose I do talk too much.”
Le Yi: “Typical patient.”
“The first round of searches is about to start. If you want to survive, shut up.”
Jiang Yan took the hint. “Mm-hmm,” she replied, and stopped prying.
The cold storage was right next door, and the chill radiated into the dissection room, dropping the temperature close to freezing.
The two of them lay straight in the icy water, faces and limbs submerged, only the tips of their noses sticking out above the surface, doing their utmost to slow their breathing.
A few minutes later came the creaking sound of the elevator descending.
With a ding, the elevator arrived at level “-1.”
Soft, slow footsteps approached, and the murmur of a quiet conversation drifted into the dissection room.
“What’s up with that announcement? Waking everyone in the middle of the night—ridiculous.”
“Who knows, it’s everyone’s first time hearing it. Rounding on the wards is one thing, but now they want us to catch rats? I’ve never even seen a rat!”
“Me either. And those rats are sick, aren’t they? What if it’s infectious? No way am I touching one!”
“I’m not catching rats either. Anyway, didn’t the head nurse just say we could also help track down those psychiatric patients who made trouble? Wonder what they did.”
“Tch, if someone wants to look, good for them. Even if the emperor himself turned up, I wouldn’t bother. This is the basement—where they keep the bodies! Let’s just take a symbolic lap and go back.”
“Yeah, let’s just walk the circuit and get straight out. This basement really is chilling, ugh—”
As the footsteps drew nearer, Jiang Yan closed her eyes, drew a deep breath, and lowered her nose under the water.
Creeaak—
A grating door hinge echoed in the empty corridor. The door to the dissection room was slowly pushed open, and three people peeked their heads through the gap.
“What’s that…?”
In an instant, they gasped at the dissected human remains on the nearest autopsy table—the mass of brain matter twined, convoluted like a maze of pipes. Instinctively, they sucked in cold air, stomachs churning.
The air fell deathly silent.
“……”
One of them swallowed hard.
The other two’s faces went rigid with shock, expressions pale as bones. “Let’s not… not go in.”
They exchanged trembling glances, then hurriedly shut the door.
Since they didn’t have a key to the cold storage and dared not even look at the autopsy room, much less enter the morgue, the three fled toward the elevator, as though something deadly were right behind them.
The dissection room was quiet again.
After a moment, Le Yi sat up, water streaming down her small frame.
To avoid alerting anyone with drips on the floor, she moved with calculated restraint.
She seemed to be waiting for something, eyes fixed on the door.
After ten-odd minutes, she suddenly whispered, “Here she comes.”
Jiang Yan instinctively strained to listen, but could hear nothing at all.
After a few more seconds, the faint sound of running footsteps approached—Jiang Yan’s brow arched.
Le Yi visibly exhaled in relief.
Moments later, a small hand pushed the door open.
In came a girl of twelve or thirteen, her high ponytail bouncing, large eyes and a trace of baby fat making her look lively.
“Mission accomplished! I cut the wires in the surveillance room. No need to worry about being caught on camera anymore.”
She ran to Le Yi and gave her a huge hug. Le Yi squirmed away, scowling, but was finally pulled against the girl’s chest. “Quit dodging.”
“I’m your cousin, you should hug me more!”
The girl ruffled Le Yi’s hair and greeted Jiang Yan with a sweet tone: “Hi, new lab rat sis~”
Jiang Yan introduced herself: “Jiang Yan.”
The girl echoed her formality: “Le Yao.”
“I’m Le Yi’s cousin.”
Jiang Yan asked, “Will you hide here too? I can help you move the bodies.”
“No need, thanks,” Le Yao said, glancing at Le Yi. “Hand me the spare cold storage key, will you? I’ll keep Xiao Jia company. It’s cold in there. I’ll be with her awhile.”
Le Yi pulled out the third key from her pocket.
Le Yao took it, waved, and tiptoed out of the dissection room.
When she’d gone, Le Yi huffed, lay back on the autopsy table, and Jiang Yan followed her lead.
There was plenty of information to digest now.
Jiang Yan closed her eyes and began sorting through all the clues.
First, in terms of timing, this “sick lab rat hunt” at Baishan Sanatorium started no later than February of this year.
The game begins each Sunday at midnight and ends at six in the morning; at minimum, it has been played out thirteen times so far.
Second, regarding the participants: the “host” is an unknown spiritual entity. The targets are the psychiatric patients within the hospital—but not only them.
If no psychiatric patient is found in time, nurses and regular patients become the sick lab rats instead.
Third, all those caught as “sick lab rats” end up dead.
And the publicized incidents at Baishan Sanatorium have only involved the deaths of medical staff, not patients.
With such an uneven balance of numbers and information, psychiatric patients and ordinary patients ought to have a much higher chance of being grabbed as the sick lab rats—so there’s something wrong: the real casualty numbers for patients must be hidden.
Finally, every round of the game is a “memory reset and restart.”
From the brief exchange in the corridor just now, it’s clear that aside from Baishan’s psychiatric patients, no one else remembers prior games. In their eyes, this is the first time they’ve ever heard a late-night broadcast or been woken up from sleep by one.
The nurses must be similar. After all, if Le Yi had really locked all the patients in the cold storage before, the nurses would have learned their lesson, checked for missing keys at once, and quickly searched the cold storage first.
So it’s likely no one remembers a thing.
But since the nurses show no reluctance about late-night rounds, paired with Fang Miao’s strange behaviour and odd announcements over the PA, and what Le Yi said about them being “stupid now,” Jiang Yan leaned toward believing that ordinary patients simply had their memories wiped, while the staff had already been tainted by the unknown entity.
They’d become mindless but willful puppets.
And Fang Miao was the one most thoroughly corrupted.
Having reached these conclusions, Jiang Yan decided to rest briefly.
She yawned, closed her eyes, and drifted into a doze.
Truth be told, sleeping in water wasn’t such a bad experience—if only it weren’t so cold.
But in this sort of environment, she dared not truly fall asleep. After only a short period of rest, a soft cough roused her.
The room was utterly silent.
Jiang Yan covertly glanced at Le Yi.
Le Yi lay motionless on the autopsy slab. The hand exposed beyond her sleeve was already tinged blue from the cold, just like a real corpse.
After several breaths, the elevator door sounded in the hallway.
The second round of checks had begun.
Jiang Yan hastily averted her gaze. The sharp click of high heels on floor tiles echoed through the hallway, chased by a tune whistled as blithely as a death sentence.
The whistle was lively and melodic, a leisurely note that could only be blown by someone utterly relaxed.
A nurse was whistling as she inspected the basement.
The temperature in the dissection room was brutally low, and the acrid sting of formalin clung to the nostrils. The claustrophobic walls pressed on all sides; now, any tiny movement could spark terror and anxiety.
As the whistling grew closer, Le Yi’s breathing became heavy and uneven.
Out of the corner of her eye, Jiang Yan saw her gripping the half-tall silver needle at her side. Tension mounted in the oppressive hush. Just as it seemed the suspense would never end, the whistling suddenly stopped.
So did the footsteps.
The nurse was now standing just outside the morgue.
“…………”
At length, Le Yi’s rigid body slowly loosened, and she let out a breath, lightly hopping down from the autopsy table.
“Xiao Tian only knows how to scream.”
“You stay here,” she said, flexing her wrist as she looked over at Jiang Yan. “I’m going to take care of that nurse.”