Chapter 1 The Tricycle

A child sat on a tricycle, about seven or eight years old. It was a girl, her hair, matted with blood and grime, tied into two pigtails. Her head was lowered, and she made gasping, choking sounds, like someone drowning.

As the girl raised her head, Tang Qisheng’s pupils constricted. This... this girl had no eyes.

No, that wasn't right. She used to have them, but they had been cruelly gouged out, leaving only two terrifying, bloody sockets!

But that wasn't the most horrifying thing. The moment Tang Qisheng saw the girl's face, his heart nearly broke. The girl had a face that was exactly like his own daughter's!

"Yuan Yuan..."

Tang Qisheng instantly burst into tears, and the girl seemed to notice him. The children's tricycle began to slowly move toward him.

But in the next second, Tang Qisheng realized that his daughter had died long ago. She could never be here.

The illusion shattered. Now, when he looked again, the girl's face became blurred. It wasn't his daughter at all, just a strange and terrifying face.

That face held no trace of innocence; it was completely filled with slaughter and resentment. As Tang Qisheng emerged from the illusion, the girl seemed to lose her target. The bloodstained tricycle spun aimlessly in place before turning back reluctantly and returning to the room it had come from.

Tang Qisheng, who had narrowly escaped death, gasped for breath. He subconsciously tightened the cloth strip binding the wound on his chest, but a strange thing happened. As he slowly unwrapped the cloth, the wound inside was still shocking, but no blood flowed out.

"The wound... the wound is okay?"

Confused, Tang Qisheng poked it gently, and a sharp pain instantly pulled him back to reality. "Hiss—"

It still hurt, but the wound no longer bled. Tang Qisheng finally realized the strangeness of this place. Ever since he arrived, the injuries on his body seemed to have stagnated, neither bleeding nor worsening. Otherwise, given the severity of his injuries, he might have already collapsed.

"Could it be that everyone who comes here, no matter how badly injured, won't die? Is this an immortal world?"

Filled with doubt and intense vigilance, Tang Qisheng lightened his steps and slowly approached the door, the one the girl had entered and exited.

He picked up a sign from the ground, wiped away the bloodstains, and saw the words "Activity Room" scrawled on it in blue pen.

The door was wide open, and Tang Qisheng, standing outside, could easily see the scene inside. It was a large room filled with many recreational facilities: rocking horses, tricycles, building blocks, a children's castle, and an inflatable slide.

Dozens, even hundreds, of children were climbing up and down these facilities, playing tirelessly, repeating mechanical and strange actions. The scene was eerie beyond description.

Slowly, Tang Qisheng also noticed that all these children had their eyes gouged out, and they were far from being a harmonious group.

They often fought fiercely over the ownership of a toy, displaying a ferocity no less than that of wild beasts. He personally witnessed a girl in a floral dress pinning a small boy to the ground and tearing off half of the boy's ear, all because of a dispute over a climbing rope.

Compared to other toys, a few glass marbles were the key to these children's争夺(zheng duo). The children who grabbed the marbles couldn't wait to shove them into their eye sockets, and then they would emit a huffing laugh like a broken bellows, seemingly satisfied.

But before long, the child who had grabbed the marble would be knocked down, pinned to the ground, and several or even a dozen hands would simultaneously grab at his face, digging the glass marble out of the bloody eye socket.

"Eyes! Give me... give me eyes!"

Heart-wrenching screams echoed endlessly. These children had an extremely strong obsession with eyes. Tang Qisheng suspected that these children were the ones pieced together to form the monstrous creature of severed limbs.

A glass marble flew to Tang Qisheng's feet due to the爭抢 (zheng qiang). The next second, a boy in a hospital gown pounced over.

If Tang Qisheng hadn't dodged quickly, the boy would have crashed directly into his arms.

He knew very well that if he were discovered by these children, he would probably be torn to pieces immediately.

The boy lay on the ground, clutching the glass marble tightly in his small hands and pressing it toward his eye socket. Looking down from above, Tang Qisheng saw an even more horrifying scene. A large gash had opened up at the back of the boy's head, and a neat triangular notch had been cut out of his skull. Looking through the notch, most of the boy's brain had been scooped out.

Tang Qisheng's eyes were twitching. He didn't know what kind of hellish place this was, or what kind of nightmare these children had experienced. Everything in this underground world was twisted, constantly challenging the bottom line of what it meant to be human.

On the road ahead, he passed many more rooms: a pharmacy, a waiting area, an infusion area, an injection room, a dispensing room, a medicine storage area, an infusion observation room, a treatment room... Places that were originally meant to heal and save people were now all scenes of human torment. In a room called the "Punishment Room," Tang Qisheng witnessed a scene he would never forget in his life. A dozen huge iron hooks hung from the ceiling, and each hook had a child hanging from it.

Some were pierced through the collarbone, others through the throat, the back of the head, or the eye socket. The scene was horrific, like a slaughterhouse.

But in this place, people didn't die; all that was left for them was endless pain. As if sensing someone had arrived, they twisted their bodies and struggled constantly, occasionally emitting painful wails.

Just as the wails were getting louder and louder, suddenly a huge crashing sound rang out, and the ground trembled. The children's wails instantly disappeared, and everyone became silent as cicadas in winter.

Crouching down, clutching his heart, Tang Qisheng gasped for breath. At that moment, he suddenly felt a sense of apprehension. He was almost certain that the source of the sound was the most terrifying place in the hospital's underground world.

He retreated from the room and followed the feeling. Before long, he stopped again. Now, in front of him, was a huge black iron door.

The iron door was at least four meters high, and the rusty door was covered with blue blood vessels and muscles. A foul-smelling, bloody odor emanated from the crack in the door, so thick it was nauseating.

Tang Qisheng was no stranger to this smell. He had smelled the same smell last night when facing the invisible, terrifying monster of severed limbs.

Tang Qisheng couldn't help but become vigilant. Inside... inside was the monster's lair!

He tilted his head as much as possible and peered at the door. Among a mass of disgusting, intertwined blood vessels, he saw a crookedly extending doorplate.

"Director's Office..."