After carefully stuffing the pillowcase gag back into the young woman's mouth to muffle her piercing screams, Chen Ge stepped back slightly and watched as the atmosphere inside the laundry room shifted almost immediately. The elderly man, who had collapsed into a dramatic "play-dead" pose on the floor of his cage the moment the girl began shouting, slowly uncurled himself and resumed his earlier vacant, mechanical behavior—licking the oily stains from his fingers with slow, deliberate motions as though nothing had happened. The middle-aged man, too, snapped out of his frozen, terror-stricken stare toward the doorway and returned to his previous guarded silence, though his eyes still darted occasionally toward the entrance with lingering unease. Both men appeared to be extraordinarily sensitive to the single word "hand"; merely hearing it spoken aloud had triggered something deep and primal within them, dredging up their darkest, most terrifying memories and momentarily shattering whatever fragile composure they had managed to maintain.
"Why are they so terrified of the word 'hand'?" Chen Ge wondered aloud, sweeping his flashlight beam slowly around the cluttered laundry room in search of any clue. Nothing in the piles of moldy clothing, rusted machines, or stacked mattresses bore any obvious resemblance to a hand—no drawings, no severed limbs, no symbolic markings. He turned the light back toward the three caged prisoners and studied their bodies more closely. There were no visible wounds, missing fingers, or fresh bandages on any of them; whatever fear they carried was purely psychological, buried deep in their minds rather than carved into their flesh.
"Just what kind of experience could have scarred all three of them so profoundly?" Chen Ge's thoughts raced as he tried to connect the dots. Suddenly, a detail from Doctor Gao's files surfaced in his memory. Patient Number 4 had lost his hand in a workplace accident years earlier and was subsequently diagnosed with Phantom Limb Syndrome—he continued to feel sensations in the missing limb as though it were still attached. Crucially, that patient had no recorded name in the surviving documents; either Doctor Gao had forgotten to include it, or the name had been deliberately redacted or erased. "In my memory, only this one patient can be directly linked to the concept of a 'hand' in any meaningful way," Chen Ge murmured.
Phantom Limb Syndrome itself was not considered a particularly frightening or dangerous condition. It was a well-documented neurological and psychological phenomenon, usually manageable through a combination of medication, mirror therapy, and counseling. It was definitely treatable and rarely resulted in violent behavior. That made Chen Ge's next question all the more unsettling: why would someone suffering from a relatively harmless condition like Phantom Limb Syndrome have been confined to the ultra-secure, high-risk Third Sick Hall instead of a standard ward?
What could Patient Number 4 possibly have done to convince the hospital administration that he posed such an extreme threat that he required isolation in the most dangerous section of the facility?
Chen Ge walked slowly back to the young woman's cage. The middle-aged man had refused to communicate further after his paranoid outburst, and the elderly man appeared too mentally deteriorated to offer anything coherent. That left the terrified girl as his only potential source of information. He squatted down beside her cage so their eyes were level and spoke in a calm, measured tone he was certain she could hear clearly through her fear. "Did you see many hands?"
The girl gave no verbal response, but her body language answered immediately—she shrank even farther back into the corner of the cage, curling tighter against the bars as though trying to disappear into the metal itself.
"Did you see a man with only one hand?" Chen Ge asked next, watching her reaction closely. Before he even finished the sentence, the young woman began shaking her head violently from side to side. Her shaved scalp banged repeatedly against the iron bars with dull, painful thuds, her eyes squeezed shut in frantic denial.
Her extreme, instinctive reaction confirmed several of Chen Ge's growing suspicions. Whatever nightmare haunted her, it almost certainly centered on a man missing one hand. Staring intently at her face, Chen Ge focused on the tiniest flickers of emotion that crossed her features—every twitch of her brow, every flare of her nostrils. "That man was carrying a weapon, wasn't he?"
Her eyes snapped wide open, pupils dilated with terror, and thick veins bulged across her forehead as her entire body tensed.
"What exactly was he carrying?" Chen Ge pressed gently but persistently. "A saw? A knife? Or perhaps an axe?"
"HMM!" The woman's response was muffled by the gag, but the raw agitation in her muffled cry and the way her body jerked inside the cage made it clear she recognized at least one of those options.
"Looks like it was one of those sharp tools," Chen Ge said quietly, his voice dropping lower as the implications sank in. "But what exactly did he do to you with it? Did he chop something? Saw through something? Did he tell you that you were 'creatures of imperfection' and that he needed to 'fix' you? Or… did he want to borrow your arm—take it for himself?"
"The number of victims seems to be decreasing over time," Chen Ge continued, speaking more to himself now than to her. "So you must have still been around when they were 'correcting' the other patients. You're a witness—you saw everything that happened, didn't you?"
The young woman's face twisted grotesquely, veins throbbing across her temples and forehead. Tears streamed freely down her cheeks as she continued to shake her head in desperate, repetitive denial, as though sheer force of motion could erase whatever memory he was forcing her to confront.
"You really don't know anything at all?" Chen Ge asked softly. "Then why are you so terrified of that hand? Did a severed hand fall beside you? Did it once reach through the bars and grab you while you were trying to escape?"
From Chen Ge's perspective, even though the young woman was beyond traumatized, her body still reacted instinctively to every mention of the things she feared most. Flight from danger was a fundamental human survival response; when he deliberately brought up terrifying triggers, her physical reactions—flinching, shaking, tears, frantic head-shaking—betrayed the truth her conscious mind tried to suppress. By carefully observing those involuntary responses, Chen Ge could begin to deduce pieces of what had actually happened.
A person's deepest instincts rarely lied. From the young woman's uncontrollable reactions, Chen Ge had now confirmed at least part of his growing suspicion: the central horror here revolved around a one-handed figure wielding a cutting tool, and the girl had witnessed something unspeakable. "Don't be afraid anymore," he told her gently. "If you're truly innocent in all this—if you're just another victim—then I will get you out of here. I came to this hospital tonight specifically to uncover the truth and make sure every single one of these deranged people is punished under the law."
The heavy smell of mildew and damp rot still saturated the laundry room, clinging to every surface. Chen Ge remained crouched beside the young woman's cage for several long minutes, speaking to her in a low, steady voice. It was impossible to tell whether any of his words actually reached her through the fog of terror, but gradually—very gradually—her violent trembling began to subside. Her breathing slowed from frantic gasps to shallow, exhausted inhalations. Seeing the change, Chen Ge reached carefully into the cage once more and, with slow, deliberate movements, pulled the sodden pillowcase gag from her mouth again.
Cowering in the farthest corner of the iron cage, the young woman's face remained frozen in an expression of pure horror. Her lips parted slightly, trembling, and the same single word escaped again and again in a hoarse, broken whisper.
"Hand… hand…"
Chen Ge's patience finally snapped. He gave up trying to pry more answers from the delirious woman and decided to take his pleasure first. He swung the cage door shut with a dull clang, reached over, and killed the live-stream camera. No more audience. Just him and his toy.
He reached through the bars, seized her hips, and yanked her backward until her plump ass pressed hard against the metal. Her face might have been only decent, but her body more than made up for it—especially that thick, rounded backside that begged to be handled. Chen Ge tugged the still-buzzing vibrator free, shoved his pants down, and let his heavy cock spring out, already painfully stiff.
She was bound too tightly to stand straight; her generous cheeks were clamped together, making her slit impossible to reach at this angle. He didn't bother fighting it. Instead he simply dragged the swollen head upward, found the tiny, puckered ring nestled between those soft mounds, and drove forward in one ruthless motion.
A choked, guttural sound tore from her throat as his thick shaft sank slowly into the scalding grip of her ass. The ring stretched wide around him, then clamped down like a fist. Chen Ge hissed through his teeth and began thrusting—hard, deep, unhurried at first, savoring how her burning inner walls hugged every inch. Each stroke forced another low, broken moan from her.
Her big, beautiful ass started to roll and shudder under the punishment, the twin globes trembling in hypnotic waves with every impact. She sagged forward against the bars, offering herself up completely, letting him rape her open while her hips gave tiny, helpless answering twitches.
Chen Ge gripped her harder, losing himself in the vise-like heat squeezing his cock. Pleasure rolled through him in heavy waves. Then her buttocks suddenly began to buck and grind violently against him—he recognized the telltale sign instantly. She was close.
He reached around, seized both heavy breasts in rough handfuls, and fucked her with short, brutal strokes. Her cries climbed higher, raw and shameless, ringing off the walls without a shred of restraint. The other cages might hear every sound—she didn't care. Neither did he.
Her whole body locked rigid. A long, keening wail ripped out of her—half sob, half ecstasy—and her anus convulsed wildly around him, spasming in frantic pulses. The tight, rhythmic milking was too much. With a low, animal growl Chen Ge buried himself to the hilt and came hard, thick ropes of semen erupting deep inside her clutching heat.
He held there a moment, breathing harshly, letting the aftershocks ripple through both of them. When he finally pulled out, a wet gush of white immediately followed, spilling from her gaping hole and dripping in slow, obscene strings onto the concrete.
The woman crumpled like a broken doll, folding into the bottom of the cage. Cum continued to leak from her ruined ass in lazy pulses. She barely seemed conscious anymore, yet her lips kept moving, murmuring the same two syllables over and over in a cracked, dreamy voice:
"Hand… hand…"
Chen Ge wiped himself off with the edge of his shirt, tugged his pants back up, and glanced at her with detached curiosity. How much had she endured to be reduced to this?
He reached for the camera switch to turn the stream back on—just as the laundry-room door creaked open.
The push was cautious, almost sneaky, as though whoever was on the other side didn't want to be heard. They clearly weren't expecting the ancient washing machine parked directly behind the door. It scraped loudly across the floor.
Chen Ge froze, eyes narrowing.
The laundry room sat at the very deepest end of the long, shadowed corridor on the third floor, far removed from any exterior windows or openings that might allow natural airflow. All the nearby rooms along this wing had been tightly locked and sealed years ago, their doors reinforced and their ventilation grilles long since blocked or rusted shut. "It couldn't possibly be the wind making that sound," Chen Ge muttered under his breath as he glanced once more toward the splintered doorway. He picked up the damp, stained pillowcase he had just removed from the young woman's mouth and carefully but firmly pushed it back into place as a gag, muffling her hoarse, repetitive whispers of "hand… hand…" once again. Then he turned his attention to the white cat, which had burrowed itself deep into one of the towering piles of moldy laundry and dirty clothes. The thick, choking mist of mildew that saturated the entire room seemed to have dulled the animal's normally razor-sharp senses; for the first time, it offered no warning growl, no bristling fur, no sudden leap to alertness. The cat simply remained half-submerged among the filthy fabrics, watching Chen Ge with wide, mismatched eyes.
"Looks like I'll have to rely entirely on myself from here on out," Chen Ge said quietly, more to steady his own nerves than anything else. "I need to be even more careful than before." He bent down, retrieved the heavy mallet from where he had set it on the floor, and wrapped both hands tightly around the grip. His full focus shifted to the broken doorway ahead. Under the steady beam of his flashlight, something moved—a pale hand suddenly reached through the narrow gap between the door and the frame, probing cautiously into the room. The opening was far too small for an entire arm; only several fingers managed to slip inside, feeling along the edge of the door as though testing whether the makeshift barricade—the toppled laundry machine—was still holding firm or if the lock had somehow been compromised.
"The real culprit has finally arrived," Chen Ge thought, a cold calm settling over him. The growth he had undergone after surviving the previous two Trial Missions was immediately apparent. There was no surge of panic, no racing heartbeat that clouded his judgment. Instead, he moved with deliberate precision. Slowly, quietly, he reached down and unzipped his backpack just enough to access the contents. From inside he withdrew the terrifying, skull-shaped hammer once belonging to Doctor Skull-cracker—a weapon far heavier and more brutal than the ordinary mallet he had been carrying. Next, he carefully unstrapped the small wrist camera from his arm, placed it gently on the edge of the nearest counter, and angled it so the lens pointed directly at the doorway. The feed from this camera appeared in the small inset window in the lower-left corner of his livestream room; by checking his phone screen, he could now monitor everything happening at the entrance without exposing himself.
With his preparations complete, Chen Ge quietly positioned his backpack next to his right leg where he could reach it quickly if needed. He gripped Doctor Skull-cracker's hammer in a two-handed hold, retreated into the shadowed corner immediately beside the doorway, and pressed his back flat against the wall. He slowed his breathing until it was nearly silent. Not long afterward, the laundry room door was shoved again—this time with noticeably more force. The person outside seemed to have lost patience with subtle probing. After two or three increasingly aggressive pushes, a heavy, frustrated slam rang out. The washing machine barricade toppled over with a resounding crash of metal against concrete, and the broken door swung fully open.
Through the live feed on his phone screen, Chen Ge could now clearly see two figures standing just outside the threshold. One had a grotesquely twisted face—features uneven and distorted in a way that made the skin crawl—and gripped a large axe whose blade was stained with dark, rusty-red smears that could only be dried blood. Beside him stood a second man who had only one arm; his empty sleeve flapped loosely at his side as he held a heavy iron shovel in his remaining hand. Neither of them noticed the small wrist camera perched on the counter, its lens silently capturing their every move. The one-armed man gave a short nod to his companion with the twisted face, then took a cautious step forward, moving toward the now-open doorway.
Before the man's body had even fully crossed the threshold—before his leading foot had done more than just touch the floor inside the room—Chen Ge heard the faint whistle of displaced air beside his ear. In one fluid, perfectly timed motion, he swung Doctor Skull-cracker's hammer in a powerful arc directly toward the doorway. The timing was flawless. By the time the one-armed man registered the sudden rush of movement and the dark shape hurtling toward his chest, the massive hammerhead was already inches away from impact.
The terrifying, skull-shaped weapon seemed to swell and fill the man's entire field of vision in that split second. Instinctively, he threw up his single remaining arm in a desperate attempt to shield his torso. The hammer connected with bone-jarring force. With a speed several times faster than the cautious pace he had used to enter, the one-armed man was violently hurled backward. His body flew out of the doorway, crashing hard against the corridor wall opposite before sliding down to the floor in a heap.