When Wang Han saw the little boy’s reaction, he thought the kid would just run straight out of the room. But instead, he chose to crawl under a nearby table and hide.
“…”
That felt a bit like plugging one’s ears while stealing a bell—fooling only oneself, right?
But then Wang Han thought about it. The reason the little boy was acting so strangely was probably because something was wrong with his mind. Otherwise, why would he be talking to thin air? So doing something like this wasn’t really that surprising.
“Where is he?” Just then, Ma Chao and a group of doctors rushed over. Seeing Wang Han standing at the door of the specimen room, they asked him where the little boy had gone.
Wang Han pointed under the table where the human body models were placed. The group looked in the direction he was pointing and sure enough, there was the little boy, huddled in the corner.
Ma Chao raised his hand to signal the others not to startle the boy. Then he carefully walked into the room and stood beside the table.
Several of his colleagues followed him in and stood around the table.
“What’s going on? Has he lost his mind?”
“Could it be a problem with Compound Number Three?”
“I think it’s Sample Number Two. It has hallucinogenic components.”
“Don’t scare him off yet. Let’s observe for a while first.”
“…”
Though they didn’t disturb the boy, they gathered around the table and secretly watched him, trying to figure out what was causing his issues.
“It’s like he can’t see us,” someone noticed.
A doctor carefully reached out his hand and slowly waved it in front of the boy’s eyes, wanting to see how he would react.
Suddenly, the little boy’s face changed. Then he started struggling violently, as if he felt his arms, shoulders, body, and feet all being grabbed at once. He was so frightened that he thrashed around wildly and even opened his mouth to bite at those hands.
But in reality, aside from that doctor waving a hand in front of his face, no one was touching him at all. So he “broke free” pretty easily.
After “breaking free,” the boy scrambled and crawled toward the door. Ma Chao quickly told everyone to follow him. They couldn’t let the boy run off.
Wang Han was the first to run after the boy upstairs. When they were almost at the top floor, they ran into Doctor Chen coming down from above. But the moment the little boy saw Doctor Chen, his face filled with terror. He shouted, “Director! How is that possible? Why is she here?!”
Director?
Wang Han turned his head to glance at Doctor Chen, thinking, That’s not the director, though. Doctor Chen also noticed what was happening and looked at Wang Han. “What’s going on?”
Wang Han briefly explained what had happened. By then, the little boy had already screamed and run into the men’s restroom nearby. “No time to explain! Run! If the Director catches us, it won’t be as simple as eating centipedes and scorpions!”
“?”
Doctor Chen and Wang Han exchanged a glance, wondering when the Director had developed such hobbies.
“Go bring him out. This patient is very important. Don’t let him get hurt,” Doctor Chen said to Wang Han.
“Okay, got it.” Wang Han nodded and quickly chased the boy into the restroom, trying to bring him out.
But after checking several stalls, he couldn’t find the little boy anywhere. Just as Wang Han was wondering where he could be hiding, he heard a noise from under the sink.
The little boy was squatting in the corner beneath the sink, pale-faced. He pointed in terror at a mirror that had been tossed in the opposite corner and stammered, “Th-Three… San Zai… you… you…”
He seemed very afraid of his own reflection in the mirror. His expression kept shifting between terror and twisted ferocity.
“Do you still remember all those holes I showed you? Find a way back. And remember, don’t mention anything about what happened tonight to anyone.”
“What about you?”
“Don’t worry about me. I’m used to eating bugs. If I go too long without them, I actually start missing them.”
“I can pull you up after I get out,” the boy said urgently, pointing at an abandoned cardboard box in the opposite corner.
“Don’t worry about me. I know how to get away.”
“Wait!”
Just then, rapid footsteps echoed down the hall. Ma Chao and his team caught up and crowded by the door, asking Wang Han, “Where is he?”
Before he could even finish speaking, the little boy quickly crawled into the cardboard box, moving forward steadily like he was climbing through a pipe.
Just then, Doctor Chen, who was standing at the outermost edge, said, “Based on his condition, it seems Sample Number Two has taken effect. So, excluding ‘mental derangement’ and ‘split personality’—both of which have already been eliminated by Sample Number Two—he is likely receiving ‘memories’ that don’t belong to him, which allows him to see scenes we can’t perceive. For now, the first phase of the experiment appears to be successful.”
?
Wang Han was just a “security captain.” The knowledge stored in his brain clearly wasn’t enough to understand what Doctor Chen had just said.
Still, he wanted to ask: how was this little boy’s behavior any different from “mental derangement”?
Wang Han couldn’t understand Doctor Chen’s words, and he understood even less of the conversation that followed between Doctor Chen, Ma Chao, and the others. Fortunately, after they saw the little boy lying motionless inside the cardboard box, they had Wang Han push the box out. When they took a look, the boy was breathing evenly inside the cardboard box, fast asleep.
The group took the little boy to the operating room for examination. Wang Han waited in the break room until early morning before receiving notice to return to the hospital room for guard duty.
After that day, the little boy’s condition got worse and worse. Not only did he talk to the air more and more frequently, but his daily life also turned into a series of dramatic performances.
For example, when Wang Han brought him food as usual, the little boy would point at the noodles and call them earthworms, point at the white rice and call them maggots, point at… basically, in his eyes, all normal food had turned into bugs. He often went on “hunger strikes.”
But orders from above were to ensure the boy’s nutrition. They couldn’t just let him starve to death. So Wang Han had no choice but to cooperate with the doctors and nurses to force-feed the little boy.
A group of people squeezed into a hospital room that wasn’t even ten square meters, making the already cramped space feel suffocatingly oppressive.
On the hard wooden bed, the little boy was pinned against the cold wall. A doctor used a tool similar to a dentist’s mouth gag to pry his mouth open.
The others in white coats wore thick leather gloves and forcefully poured food and essential nutrient solutions into the boy’s mouth.
“Mmmph! Mmmmph!”
The little boy struggled violently, but that only brought even more aggressive feeding, with the white coats holding his jaw shut to force him to chew and swallow.
Even though Wang Han felt the little boy was pitiful, he was just a security captain. Even if he wanted to help, there wasn’t much he could do.
And so, two more months passed like this. The little boy’s condition deteriorated further. He became more and more… odd, and also weaker and weaker.
His once-healthy body had wasted away to skin and bones. His entire face had sunken in. His eyes were hollow and empty. He looked more and more like his own terrifying “air friend.”
Wang Han didn’t understand this at all. The higher-ups weren’t skimping on the boy’s food. They had even prepared various nutrient solutions specifically for his “hunger strikes.” Logically, he shouldn’t have ended up in this state.
Wang Han occasionally overheard words like “sample,” “Agent Zero,” “antibodies,” and so on from Ma Chao and the others’ conversations. But with his level of knowledge, he naturally couldn’t understand what they meant.
One day, as usual, he went to deliver food to the boy. He opened the door and wheeled the cart inside, only to find the little boy sitting on the bed with his arms wrapped around his legs, his head buried in his knees.
“Eat something, will you? Congee, corn, fish soup. If you keep up this hunger strike, you’re going to starve yourself to death,” Wang Han said softly, standing by the cart.
He had expected the boy to scream hysterically like before, then kick the cart over, and then hide under the bed.
To be honest, even though he was just the boy’s dedicated caretaker, watching what the kid had been going through for so long still tugged at his heartstrings.
Just then, the little boy slowly lifted his head. Only then did Wang Han notice that although his face was still just skin and bones, his eyes were completely different.
It wasn’t the kind of look a child should have. It was more like the razor-sharp, hawk-like gaze of someone who had been through the baptism of a battlefield—the kind you see in movies and novels.
“Are you okay?” Wang Han asked instinctively.
The little boy glanced at him and said flatly, “Put the food down and get out.”
That tone wasn’t a child’s tone at all. It was more like a seasoned battlefield commander giving an order to a subordinate.
“Did his condition get worse again?” Wang Han muttered to himself. But as long as the boy didn’t kick the food cart again, he had nothing to say. He set the things down and backed out of the room.
Still, Wang Han felt uneasy. He hid behind the door and peeked through a crack in the observation window. He saw the little boy take the food to the edge of the bed and start eating in big mouthfuls.
“Phew.” Seeing the boy eating, Wang Han let out a sigh of relief.
That night, Wang Han was standing guard outside the hospital room as usual.
Then, he suddenly heard a knocking sound coming from the room.
Wang Han stood up, opened the observation window, and looked inside. The emergency light in the room was on. The little boy jumped down from the bed, yanked off the thin bedsheet in one motion, and backed into the opposite corner. He grabbed the metal bedpan from the floor, raised it over his head like a weapon, and faced off against the air.
“?”
Is he having an episode again?
Wang Han frowned. Earlier that afternoon, he had seen the boy take the initiative to eat—and even clear his plate. He had thought the boy’s condition was improving. But it turned out he had turned into some kind of nocturnal creature, having episodes at night instead?
Thud!
The little boy slammed the bedpan onto the floor, plopped down on it like a stool as if he owned the place, and stared under the bed. In a casual tone, he said, “Dude, what’s your deal? Why do you like crawling under beds? How about coming out and sitting down for a chat? Talk about life plans, future goals, that kind of thing?”
“Hey, are you coming out or not?”
“If you don’t come out, I’m coming in!”
The little boy’s sudden change in behavior caught Wang Han completely off guard. At first, he thought the boy was talking to him, but then he realized he was facing the bed again.
“?”
Is his condition really getting worse?
But what struck Wang Han as strange was that, although the boy was still talking to thin air, there was none of his previous fear or cowardice. His behavior was much more like that of an adult.
Just as Wang Han was feeling puzzled, he saw the boy prop himself up on the edge of the bed, bend down, and look underneath. “I’m here. What’s up?”
Wang Han shook his head helplessly. It was clear that not only was the boy’s condition not improving, it was actually getting worse.
Just as he was about to close the observation window and leave, his gaze swept over the spot where the boy had pulled the bedsheet aside. There, lying in that spot, was a pale, wrinkled face—like that of an eighty- or ninety-year-old.
“What the—?” Wang Han instinctively rubbed his eyes. When he looked again, that face was gone, as if it had all been an illusion.
“Hey, want to come over and visit?” The little boy smiled slightly toward the space under the bed.
With this kind of environment, this kind of scene, plus that face that had appeared and vanished in a flash, Wang Han suddenly felt a chill run down his spine.
As the boy’s caretaker, he was responsible for staying on guard at night. But because of the boy’s special circumstances, he wasn’t allowed to stay inside the hospital room. So he had to make do with a bed in the hallway outside.
Triple pay. That was what kept Wang Han going.
But now—the dark hallway lit only by the emergency light, the patient talking to thin air inside the room, and that face that had appeared and vanished in a flash—for the first time in nearly a year, Wang Han felt afraid.
“Phew.”
“Phew.”
Hallucinations. Definitely hallucinations.
I’ve just been too tired these past couple of nights. That’s all. I’ll take a day off tomorrow and get some good rest. It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine.
Just then, a loud THUD came from inside the room, making Wang Han jump. Even though he was scared, he still looked through the observation window.
Inside the room, the little boy seemed to have smashed the bedpan against the wall as a weapon. He scolded the air in a very displeased tone: “If you’re going to shout, shout. But why do you have to yell so damn loud? You’re deafening me.”
His tone was full of disdain and impatience, as if what stood before him wasn’t something terrifying, but just some annoying piece of trash he couldn’t be bothered with.
“Hey?”
“You still there?”
“You came all this way, and you’re just leaving without saying a word?”
THUD!
Just then, another loud sound came from the room—but this time, it came from Wang Han at the door. He had seen that ghostly face flash under the bed again. Even scarier, it seemed to be able to see him, and it flashed him a twisted, sinister grin.
That grin scared Wang Han so much that his legs gave out, and he bumped into the door.
The little boy inside paused for a moment, then turned his gaze toward the door. But he was too short to reach the observation window, so he turned the bedpan upside down in front of the door, stepped onto it, and looked out.
The little boy’s eye pressed against the inside of the observation window. Wang Han was standing up straight, and their eyes met directly. He was so startled that his heart nearly stopped.
The little boy just stared at him for a few seconds. Then he stepped down from the bedpan, went back to the bed, and lay down. He kept muttering something under his breath.
“Wang Han…”
“Ma Chao…”
“Zhang Hu…”
“Zhao Long…”
Wang Han vaguely heard his own name. But standing outside the door, he couldn’t quite make out what the boy was saying. Driven by curiosity, he carefully opened the door and tried to get a closer look at the boy’s condition.
“Hey, are you okay?” Wang Han reached out and flipped the light switch in the room. The switch made a click, but the light didn’t turn on.
With no other choice, he switched on his patrol flashlight and swept the beam toward the boy on the bed.
“Hey?”
“Are you alright?”
The little boy didn’t respond. He was still muttering some names under his breath. Then it sounded like he was saying things like “get out” and “break” to himself.
Wang Han wanted to move closer. But just as he got near the bed, a pair of pale, cold, wet hands suddenly reached out from under the bed and grabbed his ankles.
“AHHH—!”
