The single-armed man crashed down hard onto his backside with a dull thud against the concrete floor, the impact jarring through his body. His remaining arm flopped limply to his side, useless for the moment, trembling from the force of the blow that had sent him flying backward out of the doorway.
"One-on-one is much fairer now," Chen Ge said coldly, his voice carrying an edge of grim satisfaction. He turned his full attention toward the man with the twisted face, tightening his grip on Doctor Skull-cracker's hammer until the handle creaked under his fingers. The figure standing before him wore a stained doctor's coat that hung loosely over a gaunt frame, and the skin of his face bore obvious signs of crude skin grafting—patchy, uneven scars that pulled and twisted his features into a permanent, grotesque asymmetry. Without any warning or preamble, Chen Ge's first instinctive reaction upon seeing that distorted visage up close was to raise the hammer high and swing it in a vicious arc aimed directly at the man's shoulder.
The true climax of the night still waited in the Third Sick Hall, but before stepping foot into that sealed, lightless wing, Chen Ge intended to eliminate as many active threats as possible from the equation. This marked the first real confrontation between them, and the man with the twisted face clearly had not anticipated such immediate, unrelenting aggression from his intended prey. The sheer ferocity of Chen Ge's attack—cold, precise, and utterly without hesitation—shocked even someone already steeped in madness and violence.
The twisted-face man instinctively took a quick step backward, eyes widening behind the warped mask of his own skin. Then he turned and bolted down the corridor without a word. The single-armed man, already accustomed to compensating for his disability, recovered even faster. With a simple roll of his body and a powerful push from his legs, he surged upright and sprinted after his companion. His lower body strength had been honed by years of adaptation; he moved with surprising speed and agility despite the fresh injury, outpacing even the twisted-face man as they both fled for their lives.
Neither of the two attackers made any attempt to resist or fight back—they simply chose immediate flight over confrontation. The abrupt reversal caught Chen Ge slightly off guard, but he recovered his focus in an instant. Raising Doctor Skull-cracker's hammer once more, he broke into a full sprint after them, determined not to let either escape into the shadows of the hospital where they could regroup or set another trap.
The frantic, pounding footsteps of three people shattered the oppressive silence that had blanketed the abandoned building all night. In a surreal inversion of roles, the supposed "victim" trapped inside the mental hospital was now the pursuer, chasing two armed and dangerous "culprits" through the darkened corridors with a massive hammer clutched in both hands. The chase unfolded so intensely, so relentlessly, that neither side had any breath or opportunity to speak—only the slap of shoes on concrete and the harsh rasp of labored breathing filled the air.
Chen Ge pursued them relentlessly from the third floor all the way down to the first. The two patients clearly knew the hospital's layout intimately; they veered sharply into a narrow, seldom-used service staircase hidden behind a broken vending machine. Chen Ge followed without hesitation, and the chase reversed direction—now running upward from the first floor all the way to the fourth. After several dizzying minutes of back-and-forth zigzagging through stairwells and hallways, the three of them burst back onto the third-floor corridor once more. At that point, the two patients abruptly split up, each darting in a different direction.
"They're splitting up?" Chen Ge muttered in surprise. He hadn't expected the pair to employ any kind of coordinated strategy against him, but the decision was made in an instant. "I already incapacitated the single-armed man's only usable arm—he's significantly less dangerous now than the twisted-face one with the axe. He has to be my priority target. If I can neutralize him completely, entering the Third Sick Hall will become much safer."
Chen Ge's mind remained crystal clear despite the adrenaline surging through his veins. He immediately gave chase after the twisted-face man, who had sprinted toward the connecting hallway leading deeper into the complex. But the single-armed man, realizing the tactic, suddenly skidded to a halt, spun around, and charged straight back at Chen Ge to block his path. The distraction worked perfectly—the twisted-face man used the opening to double back and race up toward the fourth floor, heading directly for the hallway that linked the Second and Third Sick Halls.
"The connecting hallways between the sick halls are equipped with heavy security doors," Chen Ge recalled as he faced the single-armed man rushing toward him. "The one on the second floor was disabled from years of rust, and I haven't checked the third floor's yet. Does this mean the fourth-floor security door is still functional and can be operated normally?"
With the single-armed man barreling straight at him, Chen Ge reacted without hesitation. He lowered his stance and swung Doctor Skull-cracker's hammer in a low, sweeping arc aimed directly at the man's legs. The heavy weapon connected solidly with bone and muscle. In just a few brutal seconds, Chen Ge had shaken the man loose—his balance destroyed, his legs buckling beneath him. Without pausing to finish the job, Chen Ge turned and sprinted toward the fourth floor in pursuit of the twisted-face man.
The twisted-face man's eyes twitched uncontrollably as he raced down the corridor ahead, panic finally cracking through his usual composure. This was the first time in years that he had encountered prey so aggressively determined to turn the tables. He slammed through the steel security door that connected the Second and Third Sick Halls on the fourth floor and vanished into the pitch-black maw of the Third Sick Hall beyond.
Chen Ge skidded to a halt at the open doorway, staring into the absolute darkness that swallowed the twisted-face man's retreating figure. He did not continue the chase immediately. The corridor ahead felt like the gaping throat of some enormous, waiting beast; an instinctive wave of revulsion and discomfort washed over him, and the foul stench that permeated the Third Sick Hall thickened dramatically the closer he stood to the threshold.
"The Third Sick Hall…" Chen Ge whispered, stopping just outside the entrance. He inspected the heavy steel door that separated the corridor from the sealed wing. The lock had been crudely sawed through—fresh metal shavings still clung to the cut edges. "If these people are carrying a saw with them, being captured alive would be… horrific."
The prolonged chase—more than ten minutes of flat-out sprinting, dodging, and fighting—had left Chen Ge breathing heavily and feeling the first real waves of fatigue settle into his muscles. He reached into his bag, pulled out the packet of salt, and poured a careful, continuous line across the floor just inside the doorway as a marker and early-warning trap. Then he turned back toward the Second Sick Hall.
Once he returned, Chen Ge dragged the now-completely incapacitated single-armed man—whose legs refused to support his weight—back to the laundry room. The moment the unconscious figure was hauled through the doorway, a visible change rippled through the three prisoners still locked in their cages. The strongest reaction came, as always, from the young woman in the center cage. Her body slammed repeatedly against the iron bars in frantic, animal panic, as though the mere sight of the single-armed man filled her with such overwhelming dread that she would rather break her own bones than remain in the same room with him.
"What exactly did you do to her—to all of them—that could terrify a normal person until she completely lost her mind?" Chen Ge asked the unconscious man coldly, though no answer could come. He felt no sympathy whatsoever for either the twisted-face man or this one-armed accomplice. Their involvement in whatever sick, ritualistic activities had taken place here was one of the primary reasons he felt nothing but cold resolve when he struck them down.
The single-armed man lay motionless on the floor, still unconscious from the repeated blows. As Chen Ge studied him more closely, a new detail stood out: throughout the entire fight—when the hammer had shattered against his blocking arm, when it had swept his legs out from under him—the man had not uttered a single sound of pain. No grunt, no scream, no gasp. Nothing.
"Can this man not feel pain at all?" The question hung in Chen Ge's mind, but he had no intention of testing the theory further by inflicting more injury. Instead, he gathered several long strips of dirty laundry and used them to bind the man securely to a thick vertical water pipe that ran down the corner of the room, ensuring he couldn't crawl away even if he regained consciousness. Only after the prisoner was immobilized did Chen Ge retrieve the wrist camera that had fallen to the floor during the fight, dust it off, and reattach it securely to his arm.
"Now that I finally have the upper hand," Chen Ge said, his voice low and resolute as he faced the open doorway leading to the Third Sick Hall once more, "it's time to enter the Third Sick Hall."
Chen Ge cast a quick glance at the livestream interface on his phone screen while catching his breath. What he saw made his eyes widen in genuine surprise: the viewer count had surged past 80,000 and was still climbing steadily with every passing second. The explosive action sequences from moments earlier—the sudden hammer swing, the chase through dark corridors, the brutal takedown of the one-armed man—had clearly ignited the audience. For the first time since going live, Chen Ge's viewership had not only caught up to but clearly surpassed the numbers most other hosts in the same time slot were pulling, including several established names.
"My livestream is definitely more interesting than Qin Guang's right now," Chen Ge thought with a small, private sense of vindication. "If this momentum keeps up, I might actually manage to siphon off a decent chunk of his regular audience before the night is over." He flicked his thumb across the screen to pull up the scrolling chat log. The sheer volume of messages flooding in was almost overwhelming—high popularity was one thing, but the chat itself was rapidly spiraling toward chaos.
The content he had delivered so far was unlike anything the livestreaming platform had seen before: a host hiding under piles of filthy laundry while ambushing armed intruders, smashing a one-armed man's chest with a massive hammer, then sprinting through the abandoned hallways of a mental hospital for a full ten minutes in relentless pursuit. Scenes like these were completely unheard of in the usual supernatural or horror livestream genre, where most hosts relied on carefully rehearsed scares, hired actors, and predictable jump-cut editing. Chen Ge's feed felt dangerously close to exploding from sheer intensity and unpredictability.
The chat reflected the full spectrum of reactions. A large group of viewers praised him lavishly for his apparent dedication, courage, and attention to realistic detail—"This guy is actually putting his life on the line for content!" Others openly mocked him, accusing the entire sequence of being wildly exaggerated or completely staged—"Nice acting bro, but nobody buys this hammer-swinging hero crap." Then there was a smaller but vocal minority of genuinely concerned, morally upright viewers who were becoming increasingly alarmed by what they had witnessed: people visibly trapped inside steel cages, looking terrified and malnourished. Several messages threatened to call the police right then and there, demanding to know the exact location so authorities could intervene. Chen Ge hadn't anticipated the chat exploding with such a chaotic mix of admiration, skepticism, and ethical outrage.
He felt a quiet wave of gratitude that he had been deliberately vague about his precise location from the very beginning. He had only ever described the place as "a mysterious, long-abandoned mental hospital"—never once mentioning the full name Jiujiang Third Psychological Convalescence Centre, let alone providing coordinates, street names, or any other identifying details. Even with 80,000 people watching live, that number represented only a tiny fraction of the national population. Among them, only a handful might actually live in Jiujiang, and even fewer would have ever heard of this particular facility, which had been sealed and forgotten for years.
Without a concrete address or landmark to work from, any police response triggered by alarmed viewers would face significant delays. Even if someone managed to piece together enough clues from the background visuals, the building's remote location, and the time already elapsed, it would almost certainly be well past midnight before any officers arrived—if they arrived at all that night. Keeping the hammer—the terrifying, skull-shaped Doctor Skull-cracker's weapon—carefully concealed behind his back so it stayed out of frame, Chen Ge turned to face the chest camera directly and began speaking in a deliberately calm, reassuring tone. He spent the next couple of minutes chatting casually with the audience, gently steering the conversation away from panic and toward safer topics: the quality of the "acting," the cleverness of the "script," how immersive the "production values" were, and how much effort went into creating such a believable horror experience.
In all honesty, the performance was exhausting for Chen Ge in a way no other host could possibly understand. Every mainstream supernatural livestream host lived in constant fear that their carefully written script might be exposed as fake, so they invested heavily in original screenplays, professional actors, elaborate props, and post-production tricks to maintain the illusion. They rehearsed lines, timed jump scares, and choreographed every "terrifying" moment down to the second. Chen Ge, by contrast, had none of those luxuries. Everything unfolding around him was brutally, undeniably real. The scares weren't scripted—they were genuine threats to his life. The "surprises" kept coming without pause, and each one felt bigger, more dangerous, and more unhinged than the last. He was scared too—perhaps more than any viewer watching from the safety of their screens—but he couldn't afford to show it.