Chapter 275: Hospital (9)

“Ah! AHHHH!”

The lip-pierced man screamed, as if he had been burned. He flung his hand and threw the phone away.

“What’s wrong with you? Are you out of your mind!” Dr. J was startled and snapped at him.

For once, the lip-pierced man ignored Dr. J. Trembling, he rushed to the surveillance console and pulled up the cameras set on the 18th floor. He scanned through the small screens one by one, and quickly found Renier’s figure.

He was wearing a white striped hospital gown, lying face down in the corridor not far from the elevator, completely motionless. A large pool of red had spread beneath him—it was clear at a glance that he was already dead.

A blood-stained red rubber ball lay beside Renier’s hand. Not far from it was a phone smeared with blood.

The phone was still connected to a call. If the image were enlarged, the screen would show that the caller was none other than the lip-pierced man himself.

Since the phone was on the ground, where had that mad woman gone?

There was no time to grieve for his dead companion. Cold sweat rose all over the lip-pierced man’s back as he hit rewind. Soon, he found the mad woman’s figure—

Half a minute earlier, just as he had thrown his phone away in fear, she was standing beside Renier’s corpse. Her blood-covered hand pulled away from her ear, casually dropping the phone—now emitting distorted static—onto the ground.

Then, the woman lifted her head. Her face, speckled with blood, turned toward the direction of the hidden camera. Her eyes were icy, devoid of any normal human emotion, staring straight at the screen.

Slowly, she opened her mouth and formed several silent words toward the surveillance camera.

The lip-pierced man mimicked her movements, mouthing them out slowly. Very soon, he pieced together what she had said:

“I’ve… found… you…”

After she finished speaking, the woman curved her lips into a sweet smile. She turned around, the fluffy pom-poms on both sides of her knit hat swaying back and forth as she moved. While humming that eerie, unsettling nursery rhyme, she walked briskly toward the stairwell at the end of the corridor.

The lip-pierced man felt a chill run through his entire body from that single glance.

She had found them… That woman—she was not some “crazy person” at all, but a completely deranged serial killer! He was wrong—wrong, all wrong. They never should have chosen her as the target of their prank. While they hid behind the scenes, smug and convinced they controlled everything, the situation had already reversed. They were the ones on the chopping block now.

“Call the police! I’m calling the police! That woman is coming—she’s going to kill all of us!” the lip-pierced man shouted in breakdown as he rushed toward his phone, trying to unlock the screen and open the call function.

“No calling the police. Do you want all of us to be finished?”

Before his hand could even reach the phone, a force struck from behind, and his hand was brutally stomped to the floor.

“Listen. We’re on the 1st floor, she’s on the 18th. There’s no way she can find us in a short time. You’re just panicking and got fooled by that woman. She’s just a lunatic—a mentally ill psycho!”

Dr. J grabbed the lip-pierced man from behind and took his phone. Right in front of him, he removed the SIM card and snapped it in half. Only after ensuring there was no way to make an emergency call did he finally release him.

“I’ve already contacted a local gang. In half an hour, they’ll send people to deal with the bodies—and take care of that crazy woman while they’re at it. Until then, we just wait. Understand?”

The lip-pierced man stared at his dismantled phone, still somewhat dazed.

“Pull yourself together! Think about our account—you saw it, didn’t you? Just tonight alone, we gained 50,000 followers. Right after the stream ended, people already started contacting us about promotions… Leave the bodies to me. I have a way to make their deaths look like accidents. As long as we get past this hurdle, a bright future is waiting for us at the end…”

Dr. J kept talking on and on. His voice was hurried and hollow. Rather than trying to convince the lip-pierced man, it sounded more like he was using the words to steady himself.

Because he had been busy dealing with the issue of his companion trying to call the police, he hadn’t paid attention to the surveillance screens for a while.

In a moment no one noticed, Everly had already gone down to the 8th floor via the emergency stairwell.

The stairwell also used motion-activated lights. There were no windows inside, and the ceiling lamps were the only source of illumination. The dim yellow lights would only flicker on briefly when someone passed by, and quickly go out again after they left, plunging the corridor back into darkness.

Within the stairwell, the yellowish light stretched the shadows of a person long and thin from top to bottom.

Walking alone through the empty stairwell, her footsteps echoed off the walls and stairs, returning to her ears in a distorted rhythm, mixed with a faint, almost imperceptible hum. When the sound of her boots hitting the ground overlapped with the echo of her steps, it felt as if another invisible presence was following right behind her, mimicking every movement she made.

In such an environment, it was easy for anyone to feel suffocated and anxious after walking for too long.

What was even more unsettling was that every time Everly finished two flights of stairs and reached the next floor, the wall sign would clearly show “13th Floor.”

Hopkins Hospital’s inpatient building did not actually have a 13th floor.

Or rather, Western culture generally dislikes the number 13, and hospitals are especially sensitive to such taboos.

To avoid bad luck, Hopkins Hospital had simply renamed the would-be 13th floor as the 14th floor—just like how in some buildings in China, the 4th floor is skipped and they go straight to 5.

If there had been windows in the stairwell, it wouldn’t have mattered; she could have gauged her height from the outside view. But the entire stairwell was sealed shut, and the only way to tell which floor she was on was the label posted on each landing.

If someone accidentally wandered in and saw these signs, it would be very easy for them to become disoriented.

Everly, however, was fine. Aside from having to count her floors manually as she went down, she didn’t feel anything unusual.

Because all of this had been deliberately arranged by the livestream.

Earlier, in the mortuary, she had single-handedly “surrounded” the other side with her exceptional skills. After a fierce fight, she successfully knocked out four of them and captured the last remaining one—a young man named “Tom.”

From Tom, Everly not only learned their background, but also extracted their entire prank plan.

It turned out she had been pulled into a prank livestream. Moreover, before she had even taken the elevator earlier that night, the organizers had already begun warming up the stream—they sent a staff member to pose as a patient in the inpatient building, who spent several days in the fourth-floor common activity room telling “urban legends” about the hospital.

When Everly arrived, that staff member just happened to be telling a story about the impossible 13th floor. The same went for the later stories she heard from Misha—the burning psychiatric hospital, the reanimated corpse in the morgue, the bouncing red rubber ball in the corridor, the pregnant woman in a bloodstained gown—all of them had been fabricated by the streaming team.

The purpose of inventing these stories was simple: to plant a seed in the listeners’ minds. That way, when the chosen prank target went out at night and took the elevator, accidentally ended up in the basement level, and saw a body bag suddenly move, they would immediately recall the hospital legends they had heard during the day and automatically frame everything they saw as something terrifying.

As a side note, Everly also learned from Tom that she had not originally been the intended target of this prank. It was the livestream leader—someone nicknamed “Dr. J”—who had happened to encounter her and, on a whim, insisted on switching targets at the last moment.

“Then what about this Dr. J—what kind of person is he? Does he have a lot of authority in the team?” Everly pressed.

By then, Tom had already been stripped of his earpiece and was tied backward onto a body transport cart, completely unable to resist.

He stared fearfully at the folding knife pressed against his throat. Feeling the pain spreading through his body, he didn’t dare lie and sold out his teammate without the slightest hesitation:

“He’s the center of the whole team. All of us were hired by him with his money. Dr. J’s father is the actual owner of Hopkins Hospital, his mother’s family has been in politics for generations, and his uncle is supposedly a state legislator…”

After rattling off everything he knew about Dr. J, at Everly’s request, Tom went on to explain the script of the prank livestream.

Yes—there was a script, of course.

Although the unsuspecting “actors” who were dragged into it had no idea they were part of a malicious livestream, the production team would guide and manipulate their actions through various means to ensure the performance followed their planned storyline. Otherwise, if the “actors” panicked and ran off randomly, missing the preset scare points, the livestream would quickly become boring.

This was how they did it:

First, the team modified the elevator’s backend control logic to ensure it would transport the unlucky target down to the basement level.

On the basement floor, the corridor’s power supply had been cut by the production team. Only the motion-sensor lights in the elevator lobby and a single ceiling light at the far end of the left corridor were still working.

According to normal human behavior, if someone suddenly arrived on a basement floor filled with bodies, with the surroundings completely dark except for a lit corridor on the left, they would naturally head toward the only source of light.

No one expected that the newly selected “actor,” Everly, would turn out to be such a stubborn contrarian. She was basically Doraemon incarnate—she casually pulled out a custom-made high-powered flashlight and marched forward with it on, full of confidence, heading straight down the right-hand corridor.

Originally, there were no guards stationed at the right-side corridor’s security door. To prevent her from escaping via that stairwell, the team had no choice but to urgently move Tom and Edron over from the left-side passage to block that door, forcing her to turn around and head toward the lit left corridor to try her luck.

The team had actually set up quite a few jump scares along the left corridor. On her way toward the lit area, she would encounter strange footsteps, dark shadows darting across her feet, fluttering curtains, and various other minor scares.

These small scares were designed not only to deepen the sense of unease in the “actor’s” mind, but also to subtly herd them forward—making them too afraid to linger in the dark hallway and effectively driving them toward the lit area.

However, reality did not go according to plan.

Everly’s flashlight was simply too bright. The darting “shadow” was actually a remote-controlled toy mouse, and the fluttering curtains were blown by a fan. All of these setups would instantly give themselves away under strong light, so the livestream team only dared to play eerie sounds through speakers and didn’t dare activate the physical props, fearing they would ruin the effect.

Once the “actor” reached the lit area, it was time for Mike’s role—the reanimated pregnant corpse—to appear.

After encountering the pregnant ghost, the “actor” had three possible choices: run toward the security door, run toward the mortuary exit, or turn back.

If the actor chose option one, Tom and Edron hiding behind the security door would grab fake blood and splash it all over them, scaring them away.

Option two was also unworkable, because there were several staff members hidden inside the mortuary who would not allow the “actor” to open the door.

Therefore, no matter what initial choice was made, after running into dead ends, the “actor” would eventually be forced—under the pursuit of the “ghost” Mike—to turn around and flee into the pitch-black corridor.

By that point, the elevator system would already have completed its restart.

While being chased, the “actor,” passing through the elevator lobby, would see that the elevator doors were open and the lights inside were on.

The illuminated elevator would feel like a sudden shelter in the middle of a storm, undoubtedly drawing in the desperate “actor” with nowhere else to go.

Once inside, the “actor” could finally leave the eerie basement floor behind, and be escorted by the elevator into the next “map.”

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