Translator: Reina Editor: Killian
Clang!
Sun Zheng stood blankly with his hands lowered.
The flashlight shone low on the ground, and the light extended forward. The door has vanished. All that was before him was once again the familiar and suffocating darkness.
Sun Zheng was still in a state of extreme confusion and bewilderment. He shone the flashlight around. It seemed that he had returned to a corridor in the hospital. There was a deep surging undercurrent, as if every door and every corner was hiding something, a dark secret, an unspeakable secret. That sense of unease from the unknown quietly snuck up to him from the dense darkness around him, penetrating into his clothes, wrapping their coldness tightly around him.
He smacked his head, trying to clear his thoughts up. Maybe he was just too frightened earlier. If he looked again, he might find himself back at the door, no, back at the archives…
But the scene in front of him was still the corridor. Where did the door go? How did he get back here? How did he get to that door in the first place?
The dazzlingly bright red colour of blood rushed into his mind, and the feeling of dizziness enveloped him all at once. When he was almost about to fall over, he instinctively stretched out a hand and leaned against the wall to support himself.
Sun Zheng took a lot of effort to drive that scene out of his mind. He can’t be distracted. He had to have a clear mind; had to keep his sanity.
Otherwise, once the string holding him together snapped, madness and confusion would take possession of him.
There were probably many people who accidentally entered the chasm, and went crazy in this darkness and their own paranoia, right?
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
Of course Lu Xia didn’t tell him this, but Sun Zheng had already noticed it from his increasingly unstable mental state.
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After finally calming himself down, Sun Zheng finally decided to first ascertain his own location before taking further action.
Sun Zheng felt his back leaning against something solid, so he mustered up his courage and turned around with the flashlight.
It was not a wall, but a door, a large door. He moved the flashlight upward, revealing the sign above the door: Operating Room (4).
Operating room? Which floor was this on? Which department?
He felt even more lost. If there was an explanation for each encounter with those strange things, then what explanation could he possibly give for why he suddenly went from the archives to that mysterious door and then to this operating room?
Recalling that he had a map and the record book with him, he felt a little more at ease. He pulled the map out and opened it.
With the flashlight in one hand and the map in the other, it was a little inconvenient, so he leaned against the wall and struggled to find the location of Operating Room (4) on the map.
“It’s really difficult to do this alone…” As soon as such thoughts came into his mind, Sun Zheng immediately banished them.
He searched through the map once but couldn’t find it. Sun Zheng rolled his stiff shoulders and threw himself back into the search.
Perhaps the operating rooms in Tonghua Hospital were all moved to the new surgical building. No one would build operating rooms in this dilapidated main building… Besides, since his eyes had instinctively glazed over those areas marked with crosses, he didn’t look at those too closely.
Now that he’d gotten his thoughts in order, Sun Zheng found ‘Operating Room (4)’ written under one of the big red crosses. Because it was covered by the red cross, it was difficult to make out the words at first glance.
This was still on the third floor, but it was on the other end of the corridor from the archives.
But, this big red cross… What did it mean…?
Lu Xia had mentioned it before, calling them “inauspicious places”. But what exactly did ‘inauspicious’ mean? Besides, the other operating rooms were not in this building, so why would there be an Operating Room (4) here? The handle of the door looked rather old too. Sun Zheng felt a sudden chill run down his spine.
He had to leave here immediately and find the next safe room. He glanced down at the map.
There was only one safe room on the third floor: The Department of General Surgery, Room 3.
He memorised its approximate location, then summoned up his courage to illuminate the ground before him. Oddly enough, those nightmarish bloodstains were gone. The rustling ‘thing’ was also gone.
No, this was not the time to think about these ridiculous paranormal phenomena. Sun Zheng stuffed the map back into his pocket and ran towards General Surgery Three.
The flashlight confirmed that he’s at the right location. Having successfully escaped from the operating room with the big red cross, Sun Zheng felt relieved for the first time, and stretched out his hand to open the door.
Zap.
It felt…strange, as if being electrocuted by something.
But without the slightest hesitation, he twisted the handle, opening the door and rushing into the darkness behind it.
While using the flashlight to scan around the three rooms of the general surgery department, Sun Zheng started feeling a little conflicted. Other than some general furnishings, desks, and bookcases, he didn’t find anything that could act as the ‘cover’ Lu Xia mentioned. So how can it be ‘safe’ here?
The memory of them getting trapped and burned due to a momentary lapse in them entering the Department of Traditional Chinese Medicine earlier, was still deeply imprinted in his memory.
Perhaps there was something else Lu Xia hadn’t mentioned to him yet? Besides, how was Lu Xia doing now? He left him alone in the archives and his feet were injured too…
When he found himself thinking about Lu Xia again, Sun Zheng quickly ran a hand through his hair to clear his thoughts
“Let’s first find out what the deal is with that door earlier…” He said to himself. Pulling a chair out to sit, Sun Zheng opened the map again.
This time he looked at every aspect of the map carefully, but he couldn’t find any similar structures to that corridor, within the main building of Tonghua Hospital.
There were rooms at the end of each corridor in Tonghua Hospital’s main building. For example, at one end of the third floor was the Operating Room (4) and the other was the archives, and one of the stairs would be facing the toilet. But judging from the blueprints itself, there was no blank wall at the end of the corridor on any of the floors, let alone such a strange room.
So where exactly did he go to just now? Or maybe it was really just a dream, a hallucination?
A momentary state of confusion? Maybe he had been on the third floor all along, and as for how he got to the other end of the corridor… maybe he ran over while zoned out…
Although he knew that this reason was utterly illogical, Sun Zheng still tried to convince himself in this manner. After all he’d still felt the oppressive darkness of the shadows even in that space.
He remembered the record book. Would there be something in there? He pulled it out.
This whole phenomena started from the bloodstain on the third floor…
It might be easier to find it if he narrowed it down to just the records about the third floor, so he started to look for keywords such as ‘third floor’ and ‘stain’ page by page from 1999 to 2002. He stopped several times along the way, but was disappointed each time to find that the theme was not a story about some ‘something’ crawling on the third floor of Tonghua Hospital.
Finally, a few pages after Li Ting’s record, he found one that seemed to be related to the ‘third floor’ and ‘stain’. The handwriting was neat and clear, and it seems that this record was written by someone with a high level of education. He paid attention to the recorder, Yan Yang (an intern during 2001 to 2002).
Thanks for the chapter
I hope Sun Zheng will be okay! 🥲