C50 — Nightmare Ward

“The door won’t open. It’s locked from the outside.”

Du Zihao yanked at the door forcefully, but the iron gate didn’t budge, as if it had been welded to the ground. Even with everyone pulling together, they couldn’t get it open.

Ruan Weiwei clung to Du Zihao’s sleeve, trembling. “How could this happen? I’m so scared…”

Du Zihao, however, remained calm and reassured her, “It’s okay. There must be other exits. Just stay close to us.”

“This joke isn’t funny at all,” Zhuo Yu scoffed, refusing to believe in the supernatural. “It must be one of our team members locking us in from the outside to prank us. Everyone, don’t be scared.”

As he comforted both the team and the audience, he decided not to waste any more energy on the locked door. Instead, they needed to focus on their main objective.

Strangely, a sense of excitement stirred within Zhuo Yu. It was the influence of his role—after so many years as a paranormal investigator, this was the first time he had encountered something like this. He couldn’t help but think that he was about to make a fortune.

“This should be the hospital’s reception area. Look.” Zhuo Yu forced himself to ignore the fleeting white shadow he had just glimpsed and led the group toward what appeared to be a front desk. The entire desk was rusted beyond recognition.

They rummaged through it briefly and unexpectedly found a staff registry and an old entry-exit log written on parchment.

Although the documents had turned yellow with age, they were surprisingly intact, and with careful examination, the handwriting was still legible.

All of it was in English.

Luckily, the system had a built-in translation function—otherwise, their ghost-hunting investigation wouldn’t have been able to continue.

“Viewers, look at what we found!” Zhuo Yu shook the booklet in his hand. “This is a real antique.”

“It’s time to set up the equipment,” Liu Jingyun interrupted coldly, reminding him of their primary task.

Zhuo Yu grinned sheepishly. “Sorry, I got so caught up in the unexpected events that I forgot. Let’s get started.”

Du Zihao and Liang Sheng immediately pulled equipment out of their hiking backpacks: tripods, wall-mounted stabilizers, and several unknown block-like devices. They strategically positioned everything in the four corners of the hall to ensure full coverage of the area.

“Old fans must recognize this,” Zhuo Yu said, shaking a small sensor block. “This is a temperature detector and a motion sensor. We’ll connect them to the cameras, so if there’s any temperature fluctuation or movement detected, the cameras will instantly snap a photo. This way, we can capture ghostly figures and develop paranormal images.”

Once the cameras were set up, Ye Zhiping held up his tablet to show Zhuo Yu the audience’s comments.

[Wow, this is so professional! Definitely a top-tier team.]

[Quick science lesson—this is the Western-style ghost-hunting method, which is different from the spiritual practices commonly used in China.]

[Scientific ghost-catching, haha!]

[So, what’s up with the locked door? Can you point a camera at it to see if anything shows up?]

Good. Zhuo Yu lowered his gaze—his audience was getting fully immersed.

“And we have the wireless transmitter as well.” He took out a small device from his belt and switched it on. “Now, we’ll try to see if any spirits are present here.”

Zhuo Yu spoke into the transmitter. “Is anyone here? If you are, please give us a sign.”

The next second, a burst of static crackled through the speaker.

A sudden clattering noise startled everyone. Ruan Weiwei screamed as they all turned toward the sound’s source.

A Coca-Cola can had tipped over and was now rolling across the floor, coming to a stop right next to Zhuo Yu’s wheelchair.

“……”

Zhuo Yu’s face remained calm, but deep down, he was undeniably unsettled.

“It seems we are not the only ones here.”

“Hello, can we have a simple conversation?” Zhuo Yu continued speaking into the transmitter.

But this time, the only response was dead silence. The eerie static buzz echoed through the vast hall, distorting his voice slightly.

“Looks like we need to try another method.”

Their team was professional—not only equipped with high-tech cameras but also incorporating elements of traditional mysticism.

Liu Jingyun handed him a spirit board.

Zhuo Yu held it up to the camera for the audience to see.

It was a square wooden board with all the letters of the English alphabet and numbers inscribed on it. The corners were adorned with intricate floral patterns and symbolic designs. It also came with a small, heart-shaped wooden planchette with a hollow center.

“This is the best-quality spirit board we could find locally. Legend says it was handcrafted by a witch and can be used to communicate with spirits. It’s similar to the Asian practices of ‘Pen Fairy’ and ‘Dish Fairy’ rituals.”

“Next, the five of us will place our fingers on the planchette and start asking questions. Luo Musheng, make sure to get a close-up shot.”

Zhuo Yu gathered everyone around, and the five investigators placed their fingers on the wooden planchette.

“Alright, I’ll start with my first question. Let’s be polite.” Zhuo Yu cleared his throat. “May I ask, are you male or female?”

The team watched the planchette nervously while Luo Musheng zoomed in on the board.

No one knew who initiated it, but the planchette suddenly moved—swiftly, almost frantically, as if driven by urgency and madness. They knew they couldn’t lift their fingers, so they endured the cold sweat dripping down their backs, letting the planchette guide them.

It soon stabilized, sliding toward the letter section. The hollow center of the planchette framed a series of letters.

W O M A N.

After spelling out these five letters, the planchette stopped.

The entity communicating with them was female.

Zhuo Yu’s eyes widened in excitement as he glanced at the camera, as if saying, Did you see that?!*

“Hello, Miss. May I ask your age?”

The planchette moved again.

1 9.

Only nineteen!

Zhuo Yu frowned. Given how well this ghost was communicating, she didn’t seem to be a dangerous lunatic. A nineteen-year-old girl being confined here and dying so young—it was no wonder the infamous Saint Rebecca Hospital had such a notorious reputation.

“Did you lock the door?”

The planchette slid to two letters.

N O.

“So, there are other spirits here, aren’t there?”

Y E S.

Zhuo Yu glanced around. Maybe it was his role’s influence, but he had a strong feeling that there were more presences lurking in the hall, watching them from the shadows, though none had revealed themselves yet.

“What is your name?”

M A R Y.

“Hello, Mary. Can you help us open the door?”

N O.

The team members looked disappointed. Technically, they had already fulfilled the system’s requirement by entering the psychiatric hospital, so leaving wouldn’t be considered cheating. No one wanted to spend the night in such a terrifying place.

Then—

B U T.

The planchette moved again.

A turning point.

Mary’s response had changed.

F I N D M Y B A B Y ! !

The spirit board began to tremble violently. The planchette moved at an unnatural speed, as if an immense force was guiding it.

The investigators felt a tremendous pressure pulling at their fingers, forcing them to keep up.

They couldn’t hold on much longer.

With a sudden, forceful motion, the planchette shot off the board and crashed onto the floor with a sharp thud!

“Find my baby? Find her child?” Liu Jingyun picked up the wooden planchette, a bit surprised. “Is she asking for our help?”

“No, it’s a fair trade.” Zhuo Yu put away the spirit board. “She means that if we find her child, she’ll open the door for us.”

“Smart ghost,” Du Zihao scoffed. “It’s rare for ghosts to understand how to make deals with humans.”

“Which further proves she likely didn’t have any mental illness.”

Zhuo Yu shrugged. “Audience, you saw it yourselves. We successfully communicated with a ghost using the spirit board. She’s assigned us a task, and if we complete it, we might just get out of here.”

Of course, he didn’t believe things would be that simple.

“Check if there’s a map. Hospitals like this usually have a floor plan posted on the first floor.” Zhuo Yu shone his flashlight around, and sure enough, near the stairs, there was a large map encased in a glass frame. The glass was covered in dust, with several cracks, but the map itself was intact.

Without hesitation, Liang Sheng took down the entire frame, shattered the remaining glass, and pulled out the map.

Zhuo Yu studied it for a moment before holding it up to the camera. “The first floor consists mainly of the reception hall—where we are now—along with restrooms, a security room, a nurse’s station, a conference room, and consultation rooms.”

“The second floor is dedicated to patient treatment, with various therapy rooms and a large cafeteria. The third to fifth floors are all patient wards.”

“Let’s start searching the first floor.”

“Wait.”

A voice interrupted. It was Ye Zhiping, who had been quiet the entire time, blending into the background. “Are we sure ‘baby’ means a child? It could be a doll, a pet, or even a boyfriend.”

Zhuo Yu raised an eyebrow. This guy was pretty unremarkable, but he was definitely observant.

Ye Zhiping sighed. “We should confirm before we act.”

 

Something about that long-winded sigh felt oddly familiar to Zhuo Yu, but he couldn’t pinpoint why. He shook off the strange feeling and responded, “It’s definitely a baby. I can feel it.”

“A feeling?”

“How do I put it…” Zhuo Yu rested his chin on his hand. “Maybe a sixth sense or intuition. I can sort of feel her emotions—she desperately wants to find her child.”

“Ghosts can influence human emotions, so that makes sense. But she’s only nineteen, right?” Liu Jingyun, a modern woman, found it hard to comprehend.

“Actually, it’s quite normal. Back then, America was even more conservative than Britain, with a large population of Puritans. Girls married young—if she married at eighteen and had a child at nineteen, the timeline checks out.”

“No objections from me. Let’s go.” Ye Zhiping nodded. As the team’s designated rear guard, he waited for everyone to start moving toward the left hallway before following behind.

“If the child was still young when she died, how could she not know where it is?” Liu Jingyun muttered as she pushed the wheelchair, stopping beside the consultation room.

The room wasn’t locked; in fact, its wooden door was already rotting. They kicked away the broken wood and stepped into what was once a place for diagnosing patients.

How many lives had been decided here?

How many people had their futures stolen from them in this very room?

Zhuo Yu dared not dwell on it too much, yet he had to admit—compared to the fiery ruins of the base, this place was the true hell.

The number of people who had died unjustly here was well over a hundred thousand.

This office, spacious as it was, didn’t seem like a place for patient consultations. Instead, it felt more like a den of horrors where people entered but never left.

Du Zihao kicked over a chair and rummaged through the drawers, pulling out a large stack of diagnosis records. Liang Sheng joined him, flipping through the documents, and soon found a name—Mary Hedda.

Though Mary was a common name, it appeared this hospital had only one patient by that name.

Zhuo Yu took the paper and scanned it. The diagnosis read: “Hysteria.”

The person who admitted her? Her newlywed husband.

According to the case notes, the husband claimed Mary was mentally unstable—she constantly imagined he was cheating, went into the streets screaming at him, and even assaulted innocent women. He found her behavior unbearable and admitted her to St. Rebecca, hoping the hospital could “cure” his wife.

Zhuo Yu felt utterly speechless. Anyone with common sense would know better than to send their wife to this place.

In all likelihood, the hospital wouldn’t cure her— they’d kill her instead.

Was that the husband’s real intention?

And what was even more horrifying—Mary was pregnant at the time.

Her medical file clearly noted pregnancy.

This man had thrown his pregnant wife into a psychiatric hospital.

Unbelievable.

Zhuo Yu checked a few other records, and they were just as absurd.

The rest of the team, now equally curious, took turns reading through the documents. One by one, their expressions darkened.

Every admission had its own ridiculous reason. The diagnosis methods were crude and arbitrary. One side got rid of their “burden,” and the other got paid. It wasn’t hard to imagine the kind of people running this place—or the families that sent their loved ones here.

Based on these files, at least two-thirds of the patients had been wrongly diagnosed and forcibly institutionalized.

And the worst part?

The hospital had a disclaimer.

If a patient died due to treatment or worsening conditions, the hospital held no responsibility. The families weren’t allowed to sue.

Zhuo Yu couldn’t read anymore.

It was like seeing the ugliest side of humanity laid out in ink, bold and unapologetic.

“Disgusting.” Liu Jingyun threw the files back onto the desk. Just as the group was about to start cursing these families in words unfit for broadcast—

Footsteps.

From the hallway outside.

“Who’s there?!”

Du Zihao, the boldest among them, was the first to rush out—but there was no one there.

Only the sound of wind whistling through holes in the decaying walls.

“Even if you’re a ghost, don’t play these tricks on me!” Du Zihao nearly reached for his spirit dagger. “Come out!”

Silence.

There was nothing.

Frustrated, Du Zihao turned back toward the consultation room. But the moment he stepped inside—

Everyone’s eyes widened.

—— A pitch-black handprint was on his back.

“Don’t move!” Liu Jingyun rushed to his side. “It’s a handprint. It smells like…tar.”

Du Zihao stiffened. He immediately removed his jacket, revealing a dark, inky stain.

It was large—far bigger than his own hand.

It looked like a man’s handprint.

“There’s more than one ghost here,” Zhuo Yu muttered, his skin crawling. He forced a smile, trying to mask his unease.

He could feel eyes watching him.

He hated this feeling.

“This place isn’t safe. Let’s keep moving.”

The consultation room had nothing useful, so they moved on to the next area—the restrooms.

As they stepped back into the hallway, a strange scent filled the air.

Zhuo Yu froze.

“…That smell again.”

Tar.

He turned on the ultraviolet flashlight and carefully scanned the ground. As expected, he found many black footprints on the floor, identical to the tarred one on Du Zihao’s back.

Zhuo Yu bent down with some effort, rubbed the black substance between his fingers, and even took a few sniffs.

“It seems like asphalt.”

“Asphalt?” Liu Jingyun also picked up a bit and realized that it was indeed the semi-fluid material used for paving roads, which solidifies into a gel-like state when dry.

Zhuo Yu looked at the screen. “Dear audience, the production team seems to have encountered something strange. Does anyone here know about the relationship between asphalt and ghosts?”

He vaguely remembered reading something related in his collection of books, but he hadn’t had the chance to go through them before coming to the set.

[What? Asphalt? Like the stuff used for roads?]

[It looks like crude oil.]

[The ghost just left behind asphalt traces? I think I’ve heard of this before… Let me think.]

[Waiting for an answer!]

[Me too!]

 

[Ah! I remember! They say there’s no water in Hell. The ‘water’ of Hell is asphalt. Some demons and spirits forbidden by God from entering the human world will coat their feet with asphalt. By stepping on that instead of the ground, they technically don’t count as touching the human world.]

[Isn’t that just bending the rules?!]

[Exactly! It’s a loophole.]

Zhuo Yu rested his chin on his hand, feeling quite satisfied as he shamelessly absorbed knowledge from the audience.

“Everyone, be careful. Any ghost that can leave behind physical traces isn’t ordinary.”

The group instinctively closed the distance between them.

What they didn’t know was that, at that very moment, several people were frantically shouting their names in the same location.

“Zhuo Yu! Du Zihao!!!”

Several crew members paced around anxiously, practically tearing up the ground of Saint Rebecca, yet they found no sign of them. Even the actors who had been planted in the hospital to scare the exploration team were now frightened themselves and had joined the search.

Most of them were just NPCs in this world, members of the show’s production team. With their host missing, they were understandably alarmed.

At first, they thought this was just another one of the host’s pranks. But the news from the camp sent chills down their spines.

Zhuo Yu and the others’ head-mounted cameras were still broadcasting. They could see the team walking down the corridor, about to reach the first-floor restroom. Even the debris on the floor looked identical to what was in front of them.

But the production staff couldn’t see Zhuo Yu at all.

It was as if, from the moment the exploration team entered Saint Rebecca, they had stepped into a different world.

Cold sweat trickled down their backs. No one dared to stay in the hospital any longer. Most retreated to the base, leaving only two crew members at the front gate to keep watch.

Meanwhile, the live stream continued.

“The sanitary conditions here are disgusting. The consultation room and office were so spacious and luxurious, yet the public restroom is completely rundown.”

Zhuo Yu waved a hand in front of his nose, frowning. Despite being abandoned for a century, the restroom still reeked of sewage.

The urinals were tightly packed together, the wooden stall doors barely hanging in place. The cramped space alone was enough to show how overcrowded Saint Rebecca’s patients had been—even going to the bathroom required physical contact; it was if a fight could break out at any moment.

The sink’s large mirror was covered in a thick layer of dust. Du Zihao reached out and wiped it, finally revealing their reflections.

Zhuo Yu pulled out the pager once again.

“Is anyone here? Please give me a sign.”

This time, there were no suddenly falling soda cans. Instead, within the static-filled electrical noise, distinguishable voices emerged.

“It hurts so much…”

“Help!”

“I want to die, let me die!”

“I’m not sick, I’m really not sick! Let me out!”

“I can use the restroom by myself! Get away! Don’t touch me!”

“It hurts so much… When will I finally die…”

The voices overlapped chaotically, as if hundreds of people were wailing in unison. Some were male, some female, some old, some young, but they all shared the same pain and resentment. The pager’s audio painted a vivid picture of a living hell. The sudden outburst startled Zhuo Yu so much that he almost dropped the device.

Because he realized one thing—

This restroom was packed with ghosts.

“Get out, now!!”

Liu Jingyun reacted instantly. She shoved the wheelchair forward and took off running, leaving even Du Zihao behind. They sprinted out of the restroom, gasping for breath, all while enduring Ruan Weiwei’s high-pitched screams that threatened to rupture Zhuo Yu’s eardrums.

Ruan Weiwei clung to Du Zihao’s shirt, tears streaming down her face. Seeing how pitiful she looked, he grabbed her wrist and pulled her along.

 

Just as they caught their breath, the pager crackled again—this time, the voices inside were filled with even greater terror than Ruan Weiwei’s.

 

“He’s coming!”

“Help!”

“It’s him! Run, we have to run!”

The unseen ghosts scattered in panic.

Then, under the beam of Zhuo Yu’s flashlight, the clicking of a camera shutter echoed through the hall.

Click. Click.

Click-click-click-click-click—

It started from the farthest camera. Then the second. Finally, the one closest to them, placed at the corridor entrance, began shooting frantically.

Something was coming.

The exploration team had completely forgotten about finding the missing child. Liu Jingyun bolted without hesitation, while Du Zihao pulled out a dagger—a blade of ghostly blue glinting in his grip. He looked like a predator ready to strike.

But in less than half a second, his agonized scream merged with those of the spirits.

His wrist had been cleanly severed.

His dismembered hand fell to the ground, still clutching the very weapon he had pinned his hopes on.

A thick black fluid poured from the ceiling, staining the walls of the corridor. At the same time, Zhuo Yu’s hourly alarm blared wildly—its sharp ringing relentless.

It was exactly 1:00 AM.

Du Zihao barely had time to retrieve his severed hand before it was engulfed by the black asphalt. A sizzling sound filled the air, releasing an aroma disturbingly similar to grilled meat. The fluid cooled rapidly, encasing his hand in a solid mass.

 

He had no choice but to flee.

Gritting his teeth, he used his remaining hand to spray emergency antiseptic over the exposed wound. At least the bleeding had stopped. With a deathly pale face, he caught up to the group—he hadn’t even seen how he was attacked.

Zhuo Yu glanced back. The black footprints were still following them.

He knew he couldn’t keep holding back.

He locked eyes with Liu Jingyun.

Without hesitation, she doused her twin blades in holy water and anointed them with consecrated oil. Then, she charged toward the approaching footprints.

 

But this time, whatever was chasing them ignored her completely.

As if it had found a much more enticing target, it went straight for Zhuo Yu.

It bypassed the injured Du Zihao.

It ignored Luo Musheng, who was barely keeping up while carrying the camera.

Then—

BANG!

The specimen room’s door slammed open.

A tremendous force struck Zhuo Yu. His wheelchair flipped over, sending him tumbling into the room. He crashed hard against the floor. If not for his wings cushioning the impact, he might have suffered internal injuries.

His head spun, ears ringing violently.

By the time he regained his senses, the specimen room door was shut tight.

No matter how hard he pulled, it wouldn’t budge.

A violent shudder ran through him.

 

A scorching body pressed against his back.

 

---

TN:

My heart is beating so fast, horror novels are scary but thrilling 😩