After bidding farewell to three patients in succession, Lu Li subconsciously thought that the eighth day, which had just begun, was about to end.
The silent mist lingering on the windows and in the corridor eased his worries.
Click—
The nurse’s form, a dark yellow silhouette, appeared from Room 208. She glanced indifferently at Lu Li standing at Room 207 and walked toward the other side.
Lu Li watched her stop at the end of the corridor, push open the door, and step into the unknown Room 213.
After a brief hesitation, Lu Li followed behind the nurse, halting beside the girl in the wheelchair.
Yet from this angle, he couldn’t glimpse Room 213’s corner, and Lu Li couldn’t approach Room 213 for fear of being caught by the erging nurse.
"Do you know the patient in Room 213?" Lu Li asked the wheelchair girl.
She picked up her sketchpad, held a pen as if to write sothing but didn’t remove the cap, only shook her head.
"Do you want to say sothing?" Lu Li noticed her subtle abnormality.
The hesitant girl wrote the content: "I feel sothing is very wrong inside..."
"I think so too."
Lu Li agreed.
After a few simple and aningless exchanges with the wheelchair girl, the nurse’s silhouette appeared at the door.
As she turned to close the door, Lu Li suddenly said, "Do we have a standard patient uniform?"
The nurse’s attention was diverted: "Do you need one?"
"I was just curious why the patients here don’t wear uniforms."
"Curb your rampant curiosity; this is a hospital..."
The nurse warned, walking away with clear, crisp footsteps.
Lu Li watched her pass the nurse’s station, ascend the stairs, and vanish at the stairway corner, turning his gaze back to Room 213.
The room door was ajar with a narrow gap.
"It seems the nurse didn’t close the door completely."
Lu Li spoke a prepared excuse to the wheelchair girl and approached the slightly closed door.
The gap, nearly three fingers wide, barely let him glimpse what lay beyond the door: a giant frog with bloated at hanging on both sides of the bed, a Steam Contour that ward the room, and a dual-bodied person seemingly forcefully lded together, sotis male, sotis female.
From a purely visual impact, they were neither as distorted as Evildoers nor as grotesque as a steamship, nor did they provoke deep-seated fear.
Lu Li couldn’t comprehend why "paranoia" wanted them to appear this way.
Perhaps these were connected to lost mories, where the loss of mory also buried fear deep within the genes.
Lu Li deeply stared at those three outlines that seed to be "sources of fear" and closed the door.
Before the door closed entirely, that dual-bodied person seed to look over.
Snap.
Dusk arrived unexpectedly as Lu Li shut the door.
In the last glow of twilight, Lu Li returned the wheelchair girl to her room and went back to Room 204.
The two beds by the wall and bedside were empty; now, Lu Li was alone in the room.
The night devoured the final rays of light, Lu Li took off his shoes, lay on the bed, watched the wall light emit faint illumination, thinking he needed to get a flashlight to explore the hospital at night, needing a token to obtain the flashlight, needing to enter the activity area to get the token, and to enter the activity area required either a key or soone who could open locks. He wondered if new patients would appear in Room 204 when he awoke. He thought about using the empty bed sheets to make a torch, consciousness soon sank into a dream.
Yet tonight didn’t pass swiftly to the next morning as usual.
Lu Li felt the bedding behind him grow softer, enveloping him, as if sinking into an unseen, sticky bog, dragging him into a cold, lightless abyssal nightmare—
...
Lu Li sat up abruptly, awakened from the nightmare.
The disappearance of greetings from previous days left him lingering for seconds in the nightmare’s aftertaste, and his familiar surroundings pulled him from the abyss to realize what he’d experienced was just a nightmare.
But as Lu Li recollected where this eerie dream originated, he looked to the calendar by the bed, stunned by a lack of understanding.
Turning over several pages, the calendar showed the number "ten."
But yesterday, it was only "eight."
Lu Li picked up the calendar to attempt flipping pages, discovered not only wind couldn’t blow them open, but the flipped days seed integrated with other pages. The next page couldn’t be turned either. It seed only the passage of ti could change them.
Upon observing the calendar’s thickness, more than half remained. It should cover about a month.
But Lu Li lost a day.
Then, as Lu Li turned to sit up, he noticed the floor tiles beside the bed strangely wet.
Observing the empty beds on both sides, Lu Li lay on the bed edge, slowly lifted the sheets—nothing monstrous or bizarre lay hidden beneath the bed, only water marks spread and filled the tile gaps.
Lu Li sat back on the bed, picked up his shoes from the window side to put on, bypassed the bed to examine the winding wet marks.
The marks didn’t wander in the room; they clearly extended directly from outside the door to the side of Lu Li’s bed.
Lu Li opened the door; the stains in the corridor vanished. When he turned his gaze to the right, he saw the mop’s tail disappearing up the steps.
Pulling open the door, Lu Li ran to the stairwell but the cleaner’s silhouette had disappeared at the corner.
The sound of running startled a nurse just exiting a room.
"What’s wrong?"
"Yesterday I..."
Lu Li suddenly fell silent.
Informing the nurse about an unknown presence invading the room last night might prevent it, but getting a flashlight next would be obstructed.
"What exactly do you want to say?" The nurse gradually lost patience, treating Lu Li differently from other patients.
"Please give a patient uniform."
The nurse retrieved a patient uniform from a drawer below the nurse’s station. Holding the received clothes, Lu Li returned to the room.
He placed the patient uniform at the bed foot; maybe it could be useful. Then, crouching near dry stains, wet his fingers, brought them to his nose.
A faint salty sea scent was elusive yet provoked Lu Li to recall that nightmare.
Nightmare, deep sea, wet marks...
What connects them?
Lu Li carefully recollects the abyss-like nightmare but finds nothing.
However, he thought of one patient related to seawater—
...
"Why ask such a thing? Of course, I don’t go anywhere at night." The siren looked oddly at Lu Li who only asked in the afternoon.
Lu Li spread his palm; he had moistened it before he ca out: "Last night, soone invaded the room, leaving—"
"Remnants of the drowned."
Staring at Lu Li’s wet palm, the siren suddenly replied.
"What is that?"
"Room 203. I can think of only it coming from the deep sea like ."
Lu Li wondered what was real beyond the paranoia, whether what he held wasn’t "seawater" but so "specialty"? Was "deep sea" just a place na? Was "Remnants of the Drowned" a na?
After leaving the room, Lu Li followed the hint to reach Room 203, finding its door closed.
He hesitates briefly, as worry over missing a day outweighs concern for breaking rules, raising his hand to knock on the door.
Knock, knock, knock—
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