"Also, the doctors and nurses here are weird. This morning, when they came to our room for rounds, the doctor was wearing an exaggeratedly large cotton mask, not the kind that hangs on the ears with straps, but the kind with two straps tied behind the head, because... because this doctor didn't have any ears!"

The man with freckles on his face squatted on the ground, his raised face full of fear. "You can't imagine how scary his eyes were when he looked at me. Oh, and… his white coat had blood on the back of the collar, fresh blood. I saw it clearly!"

"Okay, stop talking. I'm going back to my ward first." A young woman in black leather shoes walked out quickly, her face very pale.

Tang Qisheng and Zhu Jie's eyes were fixed on the woman's back. The woman was probably around 25 years old, wearing black-rimmed glasses, and had a certain temperament, but that wasn't what Tang Qisheng and Zhu Jie cared about. What they really cared about was the young woman's identity, suspecting that she was the hidden second Shen Hong.

"We'll go back first, too. You guys get better soon, or who knows what trouble will happen." Zhu Jie patted his chest, pretending to be scared. "Oh, don't forget, that extremely dangerous mental patient is still wandering around the hospital."

Hearing Zhu Jie's words, everyone left, jogging through the corridor back to their wards, looking as panicked as if whoever fell behind would be caught and killed by the mental patient.

Back in the ward, after closing the door, Zhu Jie sat on the bed, worried. "Did you notice when we came back that there were no signs of a fire nearby? And there was no burnt smell in the air. This fire was fake."

"That's right, this is a pre-set plot point in the mission, but... what's the purpose?" Tang Qisheng couldn't figure it out either. After all, apart from being frightened, they hadn't suffered any real casualties.

Zhu Jie turned his head and looked around. "Could it be that they want to drive us out of our wards?"

A chill ran down Tang Qisheng's spine. "You mean they drove us out of the wards to make it easier to tamper with things in the wards?"

The two looked at each other, both seeing a hint of panic in each other's eyes. Then, they immediately took action and began to check the ward.

First, they checked under the bed, in the closet, and behind the curtains—places where people could hide. Then, they checked all the cracks and corners. After all that, they found nothing, until Tang Qisheng raised his head and looked at the higher part of the wall.

The next second, Tang Qisheng's face changed instantly. "How could this be?"

Zhu Jie followed Tang Qisheng's gaze, and his face also froze. There, hanging on the wall, was an old-fashioned clock, a rare red wooden frame. The clock was still swinging, showing the time as 9:42.

Not long ago, they had seen the time in the shelter on the same floor. It was 10:15 at the time. How… how could time have gone backwards?

Tang Qisheng stared at the clock for a few seconds, then deftly moved a chair close to the wall, stepped onto the chair, and reached out to take down the heavy clock. But then, Tang Qisheng seemed to notice something, and his hands froze in mid-air.

Zhu Jie noticed that something was wrong and asked quickly, "What's wrong?"

Tang Qisheng took a deep breath, then slowly and carefully took the clock down. After turning the clock around to face Zhu Jie, Zhu Jie's face suddenly twitched, and his eyes widened uncontrollably. He saw a faint blood handprint on the wooden frame directly above the clock.

Because of the angle and the fact that the wooden frame was already dark red, it hadn't been noticed immediately. Holding the clock, Tang Qisheng climbed down from the chair, his face grave. "The time on this clock has been tampered with."

Zhu Jie reached out and compared his hand to the blood handprint. The result made him even more uneasy. The other person's palm was about the same size as his, but his fingers were much longer. It was someone with slender and surprisingly long fingers, and that person had infiltrated their ward not long ago, standing where they were standing now.

Tang Qisheng took out his cell phone, and the result was as he expected. The time on it was also messed up. Not long after arriving at this hospital, he had synchronized the time on his cell phone with the time on the clock on the ward wall, but now...

Everything had changed.

Zhu Jie was stunned for a moment, then quickly reacted. "Damn, we don't have the time. How are we supposed to tell if the person knocking on the door at dawn is a person or a ghost?"

The broadcast had mentioned that real doctors and mental patients dressed as medical staff would be coming to check on patients at dawn, and they needed to tell them apart.

The information provided by Jiang Cheng and the others was even more precise: don't open the door at two in the morning. That meant that the extremely dangerous mental patient would be knocking on the door at two in the morning. But the problem now was that they didn't know what time it was at all!

If they couldn't tell what time it was, then the clues provided by Jiang Cheng and the others would be useless.

Neither Tang Qisheng nor Zhu Jie had expected that this ghost hospital would play tricks with time. This was terrible.

And if the time in their ward could be changed, then the time on the wall in the shelter was also untrustworthy.

Tang Qisheng forced himself to calm down and sat on the bed to think of a solution. The time should have been accurate when the fire alarm went off. He remembered that it wasn't completely dark yet, which meant that the time couldn't have been later than 6 p.m. Based on that time, the time they spent in the shelter...

"Damn it!" Tang Qisheng pounded his head in frustration. He vaguely remembered feeling dizzy after being taken to the shelter, and then he fell into a daze and fell asleep.

He didn't wake up until he heard the broadcast.

He couldn't remember how long he had slept at all.

"Don't worry, you weren't the only one who fell asleep. This must be a trick of the hospital." Zhu Jie consoled him.

A moment later, Zhu Jie's furrowed brow slowly smoothed out. "By the way, do you remember what else the broadcast said before we fell asleep?"

Tang Qisheng's face froze after recalling, and then he perked up. "The maintenance department! It's the maintenance department! The broadcast mentioned that this hospital has a maintenance department, and anything in the ward that's broken can be repaired by the maintenance department."

That's right, that must be it!

Tang Qisheng walked quickly to the landline in the ward. After searching, he found many numbers on the landline, but because the page was yellowed, many of them were unreadable. After carefully turning to the second page, Tang Qisheng's eyes lit up. "There really is a phone number for the maintenance department! Our investigation direction is correct!"