The glass marble lay quietly in the center of the corridor, like an abandoned tear, refracting a glimmer of light beneath the tactical lamps shining above everyone’s heads.
That eerie nursery rhyme was still drifting faintly out through the half-open door of Ward 214, like an invisible thread gently teasing at everyone’s taut nerves.
“Little rubber ball, banana pear…”
The singing was innocent and guileless; every note was clear and distinct.
“All units, halt.” An Mu’s voice came through the encrypted channel, low and decisive, like an anchor cast into a torrent, instantly steadying the entire team’s advance. “Lan Ce, data.”
“Yes, Captain.” Lan Ce’s gaze never left the tactical tablet on his wrist. A waterfall of data streams was racing across the screen. “Sound source locked. It’s behind the door, less than five meters from us. Energy fluctuations remain stable. Mental contamination index… wait, there’s a change.”
Lan Ce’s brows knitted tightly together. Behind his lenses, his eyes were sharp as a scalpel. “The contamination index isn’t rising. It’s falling. No, not falling—‘withdrawing.’ It… it’s drawing all the mental energy dispersed into the external environment back into that room.”
“Closing the net?” Mo Fei lowered his voice. His burly body stood like an iron tower, shielding the teammates behind him completely. “What does that mean? It wants to catch us all in one go?”
“No. It’s more like an invitation,” Bai Yu said. His voice was very soft, yet it came through clearly in everyone’s earpieces. “It has confirmed that we received its signal, so it has put away those unnecessary probes. Now, it’s waiting for us to make a choice.”
“A choice? I choose to chop this damn door down with one axe!” Mo Fei’s muscles tensed, and blue arcs of electricity began to crackle faintly along the battle axe in his hand.
“Easy, Mo Fei.” An Mu patted Mo Fei lightly on the shoulder to stop him. He looked deeply at the half-open door, as if trying to pierce through the darkness and see the truth behind it. “Bai Yu is right. From the moment we stepped into this hospital, we entered its game board. Now, the first stage of the game is right in front of us. We have no other option.”
An Mu’s gaze swept over everyone present before finally landing on Bai Yu. “Bai Yu, you and Lu Yueqi are the most sensitive to this type of mental entity. Can you sense anything behind the door?”
Lu Yueqi took a deep breath, forcing down the fear in her heart. After this period of training, she was no longer the girl who could only passively endure terror. She closed her eyes and sank her entire mind into perception.
In her mental world, that nursery rhyme was no longer merely a sound.
It was like thick syrup saturated with sorrow, flowing slowly. At the core of that grief was a nearly mad kind of “expectation.”
“It’s… loneliness,” Lu Yueqi opened her eyes and said in a somewhat dry voice. “A very, very deep sense of loneliness… and… and an intense longing. It… it seems to be waiting for someone to come home.”
Bai Yu nodded to An Mu, affirming Lu Yueqi’s perception. “She’s right. The thing behind the door has not displayed strong aggression for now. It is only ‘waiting.’ But if we refuse its ‘invitation,’ or try to break through this door with violence, that waiting may immediately transform into the most direct malice.”
An Mu fell silent. He knew Bai Yu’s judgment would not be wrong. In a place this strange, following the “rules” set by the nightmare was often far safer than breaking them.
“All right.” He made his decision. “We go in. Mo Fei, you and I handle the breach and guard. Lan Ce, monitor the energy index at all times. Bai Yu, you and Lu Yueqi focus on perception; if anything goes wrong, warn us immediately. Everyone, stabilize your mental anchors to the highest degree!”
“Yes!”
Mo Fei rolled his shoulders, his joints cracking crisply. He walked to the door and took up an assault stance with An Mu, one on the left and one on the right.
An Mu nodded to him.
The next second, Mo Fei slammed his large hand against the door and pushed hard.
“Creak—”
The door to Ward 214 was pushed fully open.
A smell of formalin, decaying floral fragrance, and faint dust surged out from within.
However, the scene behind the door left everyone stunned.
The dilapidation, bloodstains, and cobwebs they had expected did not appear.
What appeared before them was an exceptionally tidy single-patient ward.
The floor had been swept spotless, and the walls were painted a soft beige-yellow. Against the wall stood a sickbed covered with clean white sheets. On the bedside cabinet, a glass vase held a bouquet of white daisies in full bloom.
And in the center of the room, an elderly woman in a washed-out floral hospital gown, her hair gray-white, sat with her back to them in an old wooden wheelchair.
She seemed completely unaware of the people at the doorway, humming that nursery rhyme to herself in a loving voice.
“…two five six, two five seven, two eight two nine thirty-one…”
This eerie contrast shrouded the entire room in a suffocating sense of “discordance.” In this abandoned hospital long since soaked through with death and despair, the appearance of such a “normal” ward was in itself the greatest abnormality.
“Captain, energy index stable. Mental contamination index… zero.” Lan Ce’s voice was filled with disbelief. “This room… is like an absolutely safe ‘sterile chamber.’”
“Impossible.” An Mu’s expression did not relax in the slightest. His grip on his weapon tightened instead. “Everything here could be an illusion. Everyone stay alert. We’re going in.”
The five of them cautiously stepped into the bizarre ward in combat formation.
The room was not large. They quickly surrounded the elderly woman sitting in the wheelchair.
The old woman remained immersed in her own world, showing no reaction to their arrival.
Her thin shoulders rose and fell slightly with the rhythm of her humming, and her gray-white hair was combed into a neat bun at the back of her head.
Everything seemed normal.
Bai Yu’s gaze did not linger on the old woman. Instead, it swept rapidly across the room.
He was searching—searching for the logical core of this “illusion,” searching for the possible “flaw.”
His gaze finally fell on the bedside cabinet.
Aside from the bouquet of daisies that should not exist, there was also a photo frame.
Inside the frame was a black-and-white photograph that had already yellowed with age. In the photo, a kindly old woman was holding a sturdy, bright-eyed little boy, and both of them were smiling with incomparable happiness.
The old woman in the photograph gradually overlapped with the figure sitting in the wheelchair before them.
Just then, the old woman’s singing stopped.
She turned the wheelchair with movements so stiff they seemed like rusted machinery.
“Creak… groan…”
Every inch the wheelchair’s wheels turned felt as if they were grinding over everyone’s hearts.
At last, she turned around and revealed her face for the first time.
It was an aged face covered in wrinkles. Her skin was like withered tree bark, and her eyes were deeply sunken in their sockets, appearing turbid and empty.
There was no expression on her face—neither sorrow nor anger, only numb, deathly stillness.
Her cloudy eyes swept over the people before her.
Over An Mu, over Mo Fei, over Lu Yueqi, over Bai Yu… her gaze did not pause at all, as if they were all nonexistent air.
However, when her gaze fell on Lan Ce, an incomparably blazing light suddenly erupted in those deathly still eyes.
It was a complex light mixed with wild joy, excitement, disbelief, and endless yearning.
“Xiao Yuan…?”
She parted her cracked lips and made a hoarse sound like sandpaper scraping.
“My Xiao Yuan… you… you finally came back…”
Lan Ce’s body suddenly went rigid.
He saw the old woman’s gaze lock firmly onto him. The immense emotion contained in that gaze was like an invisible mountain, pressing down on him in an instant.
“Beep! Beep! Beep! Warning! Ultra-high-intensity directional cognitive contamination detected!”
“Lan Ce! Steady your mind!” An Mu’s roar exploded beside his ear.
But it was already too late.
In Lan Ce’s vision, everything around him began to blur. His teammates’ figures grew fainter and fainter, as if about to melt into the air. Yet the old woman before him became clearer and clearer, more and more kindly.
A flood of unfamiliar memories that did not belong to him forcibly rushed into his mind.
He “remembered” that when he was little, his favorite thing to play with was glass marbles.
He “remembered” that when he had a fever, Grandma held him gently, humming a nursery rhyme, staying awake the whole night.
He “remembered” the sweet-and-sour pork ribs Grandma made. It was the most delicious taste in the world.
“I’m… not…” Lan Ce’s lips moved as he tried to refute it, but his voice was stuck in his throat.
He discovered that his “mental anchor”—those physical formulas, chemical equations, and cosmic constants he knew by heart—was being dissolved little by little by these warm memories.
Who am I?
I am Lan Ce, a member of Team One of the Nightmare Investigation Bureau…
No…
I am Xiao Yuan… My name is Liu Yuan… I’m seven years old this year…
Lan Ce’s eyes began to grow dazed. The vigilance and rationality on his face rapidly faded away, replaced by a childlike confusion and dependence.
“Come… Xiao Yuan, come to Grandma…”
The old woman reached out to him with hands as withered as chicken claws.
Lan Ce actually took a step forward, as if he were a puppet whose soul had been drawn out.
“Lan Ce!” Mo Fei roared, charging forward in one stride to pull him back.
However, before his hand could even touch the corner of Lan Ce’s clothes, a tremendous force slammed fiercely into his chest.
“Bang!”
Mo Fei’s burly body was sent flying backward by that force, crashing heavily into the wall with a muffled thud.
“Don’t touch my grandson!”
The old woman let out a shrill roar. The kindly expression on her face vanished in an instant, turning savage and twisted.
At that moment, the temperature in the entire room seemed to plummet to freezing point. Large patches of dark-red patterns like blood vessels began to surface on the walls.
“Damn it!” An Mu immediately raised his gun and aimed at the old woman, but he did not fire.
Physical attacks might be ineffective against a mental entity. Worse, they might completely enrage it and plunge Lan Ce into an irredeemable situation.
At this critical moment, an icy-blue halo suddenly spread outward from Lu Yueqi’s body.
“I can… feel it…” Lu Yueqi’s face was deathly pale, and her voice trembled slightly from the overuse of mental power, but her eyes were exceptionally firm. “She isn’t attacking… she’s just… too afraid… afraid of losing him again…”
Lu Yueqi applied here the “empathy” experience she had gained with the little girl in the toy factory. She gently draped the emotions of “tranquility” and “sorrow” contained within her power of “Deep Cold” over the enraged old woman like a thin veil.
That icy-blue halo carried a gentle power that soothed the heart.
After the old woman’s ferocious expression came into contact with that power, it actually froze for an instant.
A trace of the madness in her eyes receded, transforming into sorrow and pain.
“Xiao Yuan… don’t leave Grandma again… all right…” She let out a whimper that was almost a plea.
Now!
Bai Yu moved.
His figure was like a ghost, instantly circling past the dazed Lan Ce and arriving before the old woman.
He made no move to attack or defend.
He simply reached out and gently placed that crystal-clear glass marble into the old woman’s open, wrinkled palm.
“Grandma,” his voice was very soft, yet carried a strange penetrating force, as if acting directly upon the soul, “Xiao Yuan is back. He just… went out to play for a while.”
The instant he spoke those words, Bai Yu’s “mental anchor” churned violently, forcibly resisting the vast flood of memories that tried to assimilate him into “Xiao Yuan” as well.
The old woman lowered her head. Her turbid gaze fell upon the familiar glass marble in her palm.
It was the last toy she had bought for her grandson.
A scalding tear slid from her dried-up eye socket and dropped onto the marble.
“Xiao Yuan…”
She let out a sigh of release.
The next second, the entire room’s illusion shattered with a crash like a mirror smashed to pieces.
The warm beige-yellow walls returned to a gray-white covered in mold spots and cracks. The clean bed became a heap of rotten padding and rusted iron frame. The blooming daisies turned into a bundle of withered wild grass that had long since decayed.
The old woman sat in the wheelchair, her body beginning to turn transparent, before finally transforming into countless specks of light like dust, slowly dispersing into the air.
Lan Ce’s body suddenly swayed. As if he had just awakened from a nightmare, he gasped for breath, clarity returning to his eyes.
“I… just now…” He looked at his own hands, his face filled with lingering fear.
“Welcome back, Lan Ce.” An Mu walked over and patted him heavily on the shoulder.
In the center of the room, only that rust-stained wheelchair remained.
And on the seat of the wheelchair, a lone glass marble lay quietly.
They had passed the first “stage.”
But this was only the beginning.
Within this vast mental hospital, who knew how many pitiful souls like Liu Fen were still waiting for them, trapped in the prisons of their own memories.