Chapter 8: The Madmen’s Pantomime (7)

Lin Yi reserved judgment again but couldn’t help asking: “You sure?”

Nan Lin nodded and gave him a look loaded with meaning, a question forming in his mind: He’s not insane either. Has he hit his intellectual ceiling already?

Lin Yi, who read the meaning perfectly well: “…”

How was he supposed to explain? Hmm… and was there any point in explaining?

Before Lin Yi could agonize further, the voice inside the door cut out completely. Only the wind brushed past their ears.

All of them moved away from the door at once. In the process, Lin Yi happened to glance back and saw Ruan Yu, hidden in the shadows, pressing one hand to his own wound.

Lin Yi, watching the blood well out in real time: ?

Are humans nowadays all… this hardcore??

He quietly pulled his gaze away and wound his scarf tighter again, until it covered half his pale chin.

The quiet held for barely a heartbeat before a familiar voice came from behind them.

“You… hello?”

Suddenly pinned by three pairs of eyes, Chong Jiu paused. In the end, a harmless, amiable smile rose to his face.

Nan Lin spoke first. “There was a voice in your ward just now.”

Chong Jiu: “Maybe one of the other patients wandered in?”

Nan Lin crossed his arms and added: “It was your voice.”

Chong Jiu pivoted without missing a beat. “Then it must be a recording of me.”

“I have a mild dissociative condition. My attending physician makes audio and video recordings of my other personalities.”

“What did you all hear just now? Probably a malfunction that triggered playback.”

Chong Jiu’s answer was watertight, and it carried a decent amount of credibility.

Except—

Nan Lin: He’s lying.

The man was lying through his teeth. The logbook clearly stated Stockholm syndrome.

Chong Jiu pointedly ignored the suspicion in Nan Lin’s eyes. He stepped forward and pushed the ward door open. “Come in for a chat?”

Nan Lin: Fine, let’s chat. If there’s an ambush… I’ll just kill him and be done with it.

With that thought, he stepped inside first.

Ruan Yu’s gaze, faintly edged with warning, settled on Lin Yi, then he followed Nan Lin in.

Lin Yi rubbed his nose, a little unsettled by the sudden shift.

Both of these new players had some genuinely nasty pieces of work hiding under the surface.

Still, better to go in first and sort it out after.

Chong Jiu’s ward was laid out exactly like the players’ wards. He went in first and turned on the light, then sat on the bed and gathered his thoughts to speak.

Nan Lin took the seat across from him, watching expressionlessly, waiting.

“Cough…” Chong Jiu cleared his throat. “You’ve noticed too, haven’t you? The doctors here aren’t normal.”

Even with perfect silence all around and not a single voice agreeing with him, Chong Jiu carried on talking to himself. “After that riot, there were no competent doctors left in this asylum. All that remained were madmen with the very same disease.”

“The madmen killed the doctors, became the doctors, and successfully took control of the patients who came after.”

“You want out, don’t you?”

“Then always remember one thing: never trust a doctor in this place.”

Lin Yi didn’t answer directly. Instead he asked, “How do you know all this so well?”

Chong Jiu smiled and didn’t answer either. He simply went on: “Do you know how these mad doctors treat us?”

“They believe human madness is caused by stones growing inside the skull. Their treatment is to cut open the patient’s brain and take out the stone.”

“I was saved by the director. Maybe I’ll end up being the longest-lived madman in this place? Anyway, you must, absolutely must be careful around every doctor in this asylum.”

He was very clear about it, and it sounded convincing enough.

Nan Lin threw out another question. “Do you have a schedule and rule sheets for this asylum?”

Chong Jiu’s brow creased. He stood up and rummaged around, muttering as he went: “I do, somewhere. I just don’t know where I put them… let me look.”

“I remember that after free activity time there’s half an hour for washing up, and lights out is at eight at night, all the way to six the next morning… hmm? Can’t find it.”

Nan Lin: What a waste of time.

He pressed a hand to the aching left side of his abdomen and was about to leave when his sharp eyes caught the blood on Ruan Yu’s arm.

“Come with me,” Nan Lin said to Ruan Yu at the last.

As he left, he gave Chong Jiu’s wrist a look heavy with meaning.

No wristband. No scars. Skin with a healthy sheen.

An entirely different condition from the hands of the male doctor earlier.

Two shadows stretched across the dimly lit corridor. Lin Yi spoke up: “His wardmate is hurt. I’ll go check.”

With that, he turned and followed them out into the hall.

In the corridor, Nan Lin kept his lashes lowered and listened to the sounds behind him. Sensing that Ruan Yu had obediently followed, he slowed his pace without a word.

Ruan Yu asked carefully, “Brother, is what Chong Jiu said true?”

He answered: “Half true, half false.”

The riot, for instance, was real. The madmen replacing the doctors was real, and the schedule that followed was probably real too.

But the rest of it… and Chong Jiu’s own identity.

Not very credible.

Teresa’s piercing screams were still ringing clear. When Nan Lin had been steering Teresa toward the tunnel under the cafeteria, he had spotted a blurry figure wandering.

Short hair. Tall. Dressed exactly like a doctor.

A shame there had been no time to see the face…

While they waited for the elevator, Lin Yi caught up. He slid himself between the two of them without appearing to and said: “After you left, Chong Jiu told me there’s a tunnel under the cafeteria. Take it, and you can escape this asylum.”

Nan Lin glanced at him. “Want to go try it?”

Lin Yi spread his hands, looking helpless. “I’m not stupid.”

“Just wanted to see if you two would take the bait…” he added.

Nan Lin: “…”

Ruan Yu lifted his lids and gave Lin Yi a flat, languid look, all the while working out how best to take this broken doll apart.

Lin Yi, suddenly chilled to the bone: ?

This time the elevator ride produced no incident at all. Nan Lin eyed the ceiling with suspicion and reached up to pat the cabin doors.

Almost immediately, the aging cabin let out a groan of pure strain. Startled, Nan Lin yanked his hand back and affected an air of complete innocence, his expression as aloof and composed as ever.

Lin Yi: ?

Maybe I should have gone with option two and wiped the new players after all.

Once the doors opened, the group filed out of the right-hand building.

But they had barely rounded the Nightingale Statue and hadn’t even set foot on the green field when someone came barreling toward them in a blind panic.

Nan Lin grabbed Ruan Yu and hauled him closer to his side, then let go at once.

Lin Yi, for his part, sidestepped at his leisure and watched the man crash to the ground, twitching and convulsing.

Behind him, Qiu Xinxin came rushing up as well, shouting at the top of her lungs: “Watch out for Song De!”

She had clearly run a long way. When she stopped, she couldn’t stop doubling over to gasp for air. Zou Zhiming came up behind her. Seeing the situation, he spoke in her place: “Song De’s mind seems to have gone.”

“Qiu Xinxin and I took the elevator. He flat-out refused to get in, said there was something inside, and then ran off to the stairwell on his own without a backward glance. We couldn’t grab him in time.”

“He was alone in the stairwell for a long time. We only just ran into him again.”

Nan Lin’s gaze lifted away from Song De. “Not completely gone. Still salvageable. Give him a minute to come around.”

“And… what if he doesn’t come around?” The deep lines between Zou Zhiming’s brows had been carved by years of frowning.

Nan Lin turned his head. “If he doesn’t come around, he waits to die.”

Ruan Yu nodded in agreement: “What Brother means is that he’ll most likely be fine, as long as we clear the dungeon in time.”

Zou Zhiming exhaled in relief. “That’s good to hear.”

As he spoke, Qiu Xinxin couldn’t hold back. “Clear the dungeon… right. We found a route out of the asylum.”

–

At the time, Qiu Xinxin and Zou Zhiming had been waiting for Song De at the stairwell exit, but the man never came out. From the darkness, only the occasional stifled sob reached them.

After a good ten minutes, she led Zou Zhiming to begin searching the fifth-floor rooms.

“Aren’t we waiting for Song De?” Zou Zhiming couldn’t help asking.

Qiu Xinxin stopped and turned the question back on him. “Your life or his. Which do you pick?”

The man behind her fell into a long silence. She seemed utterly used to it. She only said quietly: “Let’s go.”

Nothing unexpected happened along the way. Perhaps because it was free activity time, there were far more lunatics in the corridor, each stranger than the last, all with vacant gazes.

One held a biscuit gnawed into the shape of a pistol. One wore a coarse hemp rope around his neck. One wandered in a blue-and-white bedsheet. Others brawled, gouged at each other’s eyes, and bit. The absurdity of it all chilled a person to the bone at a single glance.

While dodging their way through, Qiu Xinxin spotted something wrong.

On a wall covered in vicious curses, a stark black line ran forward without interruption.

–

“A black line?” Lin Yi murmured, repeating it.

“Right,” Qiu Xinxin said, recalling. “It looked like it was drawn in crayon. Zou Zhiming and I followed it all the way forward, and it led us to a fire escape heading down.”

“But the fire escape down there was locked. I think we might be one key short.”

Nan Lin suddenly asked: “What floor?”

Qiu Xinxin: “Seventh.”

After a short silence, Lin Yi spoke: “We found the next part of the schedule. 19:30 to 20:00 is wash-up time. 20:00 to 6:00 the next morning is sleeping time.”

“Are you sure?” Qiu Xinxin asked back. Even though both she and Lin Yi were veterans, for some reason she kept feeling that something about this man was off.

But once the doubt was voiced, Lin Yi turned and looked at Nan Lin instead.

Nan Lin gave a profound, knowing nod.

Some rules could not be faked. Otherwise, there would be no such thing as fairness in this game.

Qiu Xinxin still hesitated, but there was no second option available. All she could do was sigh and say, “Then let’s head to the washroom first.”

She had barely finished when a low roll of thunder sounded outside the window. The clouds churned violently. A downpour looked imminent.

Nan Lin rubbed his neck and reminded her: “That rule sheet from earlier, and the things we’re supposed to do, they correspond to one another.”

As if struck by a bolt of insight, Qiu Xinxin pulled the half sheet of rules from her pocket, and a low cry escaped her.

“It really does. They all match up…”