Han Jiang gazed up at the spider-web-like crack running across his dingy apartment's ceiling; his phone's dim light cast a faint shadow across his face as it gleamed in the dark of his room. It had been one full month since he'd entered the parallel modern world; the world may have seemed to be earth from an outsiders perspective but there was definite discrepancies that had left him unsettled.
Han Jiang was still Han Jiang, still eighteen, still a nobody who failed at middle-of-the-road high school with poor grades and no talent. But the rest of it was all gone. In this world, his father had died when he was young-his first memories were those of the original Han Jiang, fragments of forgotten dreams. His mother, meanwhile, worked abroad and gave him a sum of money each month. He lived in this cramped one-room apartment across from school by himself, eating microwave dinners and cheap takeout.
The phone in his hand would be his only friend most nights.
He'd been browsing the forum "Strange Tales" for the last hour lying on his bumpy mattress with his legs up against the wall. Strange Tales was a widely visited forum online for the sharing of spooky stories, urban myths, and alleged supernatural encounters. Han Jiang found it quite amusing; finding good fiction was tough and some of these people were remarkably good writers.
He was reading through a post which read: I calculated with my fingers that you are reading this from your bed.
The post continued: I worked it out with my fingers that you are reading a novel from your bed with your legs raised against a wall, phone above your face, probably in the dark. Am I correct?
The responses followed suit, predictable of course, and were as follows:
"Fck, how did you know?"
"Get out of my house!"
"Bro's watching me through my camera, I'm covering it with tape rn"
"This is just probability. Most people read novels like this. Boring."
Han Jiang snickered and locked the thread. Stupid attention-whoring posts like these were common as dirt. He scanned the main page of the forum, trying to find something with more merit. His thumb halted on a thread with abnormally high click count-fifty thousand-plus views and rapidly ascending, created merely six hours prior.
[True Experience] I am the provincial physician at Provincial People's Hospital, Jiangnan province. At night, when I was on duty in the hospital, a frightful thing happened. I took my leave and now I am too scared to go back to the hospital.
The username was: "Dr_Chen_WhiteCoat"
Han Jiang opened and went in out of curiosity. The replies had already numbered hundreds, and are mostly doubting.
"Great, another doctor doing LARP. Those fake stories are becoming overused."
"Show us proof or it didn't occur."
"Let me guess, the ghost was a beautiful female patient who wants to marry you?"
"Jiangnan Provincial People's Hospital doesn't have a Dr. Chen in their directory. I checked."
"OP if this is real, why are you posting on a forum instead of reporting to authorities?"
Han Jiang thought that the dismissive replies were somewhat boring and was about to close the thread when he saw it-the original poster's content was collapsed behind "Click to Expand." The forum software only does that to posts with more than three thousand characters, so this wasn't a short shtpost.
He tapped expand.
---
The post began without preamble:
"I am a doctor. I practice emergency medicine at Jiangnan Provincial People's Hospital. I have been doing it for 8 years. I have seen every kind of death there is, from car wrecks, heart attacks, poisonings, to suicides. I thought there was nothing that could still shock me anymore. I was wrong."
" It is my paid holiday. My coworkers assume I am having stress-related hallucinations. My manager advised me to see a psychiatrist. I don't care what they believe; I know what I saw."
" Here's what I remember of three nights ago. I am writing this down so that I have proof, even if only for my own benefit. Because I am afraid it might happen again. And I may not live through it."
---
"Patient entered at 11:47 p.m. A 35-something-year-old male, carrying no identification. He was brought in by EMS by ambulance, after a concerned citizen found him unconscious lying on the sidewalk next to the old textile mill area. Paramedics found him unconscious, but breathing, pulse was weak and his extremities cold."
"We rushed him to Trauma Bay 3. I was the attending physician that night. Nurse Wang and intern Liu assisted me."
"What did strike me was his attire. He was a strange figure, wearing clothes which were out of date, namely a faded blue work-wear style uniform, like a factory worker, from the 1990s. He was wearing shoes which were made of worn leather, with almost no tread left on them at all. He was literally as if he had walked out of a time warp. That was not, however, what bothered me."
"His face was not right, it was not damaged and disfigured; it was just wrong. His skin was pale and seemed unnatural and waxy, it had a transparent quality to it. When I placed my stethoscope against his chest the skin seemed different it was not cold but lacking of warmth, like ceramic that has been kept in a dark room. "
"Took his vital signs. Pulse rate 42bpm. B.P 70/40. Temp- here I began to feel quite certain that things were not as they should be. "
"The thermometer read 28.6°C."
"For reference the standard human body temperature is 36-37C. Hypothermia is generally defined medically as body temperature being below 35C. Below 30C you are unconscious in most cases, below 28C Cardiac Arrest and death are likely and at 24C death is almost inevitable."
" This gentleman had a temperature of 28.6C. However he was breathing – poorly, but breathing. His heart was beating – poorly but beating. Medically, he should have been dead or in a profound hypothermic coma."
"But his eyes responded to movement. Nurse Wang walked past his bed and his pupils darted to her. When I talked to him his eyelids flicked. He was still conscious, or perhaps semi-conscious, when his core temperature should have already ensured he was brain-dead."
"I asked for warming, initiated testing. Bloods, ECG, CT scan. All come back... Bizarre. Oxygen sats were normal with body temp on him being incredibly low. ECG showed a normal rhythm, just incredibly slow sinus. The CT scan, absolutely nothing in the frontal lobes of the brain, the brainstem, however was functioning normal."
"It was as if his body was alive while his higher consciousness was... elsewhere."
---
Han Jiang moved to a different position by lifting his legs from bed rest. The story gained authentic credibility through its use of precise medical terms which the writer did not anticipate. Dr. Chen possessed superior knowledge about his area of expertise.
He continued reading.
---
"At 1:15 AM, the patient flatlined."
"The medical staff made resuscitation attempts for a duration of 45 minutes according to the established ACLS protocols. The medical team used epinephrine and atropine together with chest compressions for their resuscitation efforts. The medical team used all available methods for patient treatment but their efforts failed to succeed. I declared him dead at 2:00 AM."
"This is where my analysis starts to matter, and it's also when I began to realize that something that shouldn't have been possible had happened."
"In med school, we covered algor mortis, which is basically how the body cools down after death. In a typical room temperature setting (about 20–22°C), the body's temperature often drops by around 1.5°C per hour during the first twelve hours, and then the cooling tends to slow down after that. It's only a rough rule of thumb, since things like body size, clothing, airflow, and other conditions can change the rate."
"The patient's body temperature was 28.6°C when he died. When I declared him dead, the trauma bay was at an ambient temperature of 24°C."
"One hour later, when the morgue attendant arrived to pick up the body, I took the temperature again, mostly out of professional curiosity. It was 27.8°C."
"That 0.8°C drop over an hour matched what you'd expect from algor mortis, where a body that started at normal living temperature cools down toward room temperature. But there's an issue: the patient came in at 28.6°C. If he'd been a typical living person, he should have been around 36–37°C. To get down to 28.6°C, he would have needed to lose roughly 7–8°C of body heat."
"With a cooling rate of 1.5°C per hour, it would take about five hours for his body to cool that much, assuming he was at a normal temperature when he supposedly collapsed on the street. But the ambulance report says he was found at 11:30 PM, only seventeen minutes before they arrived. Even if he'd been out there for a few hours, the numbers still don't add up. It was 18°C outside that night, so at that cooling rate, his body should have been noticeably colder."
"But what bothered me more was what I noticed next. I took a closer look at his hands. His fingers already showed the first hints of cadaveric spasm, the kind of stiffness that can start right as someone dies and then stick around. His fingernails also had a clear purple tint, which usually points to a lack of oxygen. Normally, you wouldn't expect to see changes like that until about 2 to 4 hours after death."
"Yet his body had been in the hospital for only 2 hours and 13 minutes total."
"The math was impossible. The physiology was impossible. Unless..."
"Unless he had been dead for much longer than the timeline suggested."
"From the level of cadaveric spasm, the way the skin discoloration looked, and the temperature difference I measured, I concluded he'd probably been dead for over three days by the time he reached my ER."
"A man who was already dead had been breathing. A man who was already dead had been following movement with his eyes. A man who was already dead had been brought into my hospital, handled like he was alive, and then died again while I was on duty."
---
Han Jiang felt a cold shiver that had nothing to do with the temperature. He sat up, rested against the headboard, and kept reading.
The comments under that part had clearly changed. There was less sarcasm and more genuine curiosity:
"Hold on—can this really happen? Can a corpse show signs of being alive?"
"Dr. Chen, have you thought about catalepsy? It can make someone look dead when they're not."
"Catalepsy doesn't account for decomposition after three days. Either this is made up, or… I don't want to consider what else it could be."
"OP, what ended up happening with the body? Was an autopsy done?"
Dr. Chen had responded to a few of them, and he sounded more and more on edge:
"Catalepsy was the first thing I considered. I ruled it out. The autopsy was arranged, but—"
That was where it cut off. Han Jiang scrolled further down to see if the main post continued.
---
"I need to get the rest out quickly. I don't have much time."
"The body was moved to the hospital morgue at 3:00 a.m. I filed a report for an unusual incident. My supervisor told me to go home, get some rest, and 'stop fixating on statistical outliers.' I should have taken that advice."
"But I couldn't sleep. I kept going back through the case files, the temperature records, and the photos I'd taken on my phone. At 6:00 a.m., the morgue called me. The body was gone."
"Not stolen. Not misplaced. Just gone."
"When I got there, the morgue attendant—an older man named Zhou who'd worked at the hospital for thirty years—was completely panicked. He kept repeating, 'It walked out. It walked out by itself.' The security footage from the morgue hallway showed—"
"I can't really explain what it showed. The video is low quality, but you can make out the figure sitting up on the gurney. You can see it swing its legs over the edge. It stands, stumbles once, and then heads toward the door. The way it moves isn't right—too stiff, too abrupt. Like a puppet with some of the strings missing."
"The door was locked from the outside. The figure stopped in front of it, stood still for about forty seconds, and then the door opened. From the outside. No one was there. The figure walked through."
"The last footage we have shows it getting into the elevator. The elevator went down to the ground floor. After that, there's nothing. The exterior cameras don't show anyone leaving the building."
"The body of a man who'd been dead for three days walked out of my hospital and disappeared."
---
The comment section had blown up. Skeptics were arguing with believers, and even people who usually dismissed everything sounded unsure:
"This has to be fake, right? Please tell me this is fake."
"I work in video editing. From the way that footage is described, it could be staged, but... why would anyone do this? What are they trying to get out of it?"
"Dr. Chen, are you still there? Can you give us an update?"
"OP hasn't responded in two hours. I'm starting to worry."
Han Jiang checked the timestamp. Dr. Chen's last reply really had been two hours ago. But the post itself had been edited just thirty minutes earlier. There was new material.
He scrolled down, with a creeping unease he couldn't quite put into words.
---
"I should add more context about the patient, specifically what he was wearing."
"The blue work uniform. I said it looked like it was from the 1990s. I grew up in Jiangnan Province. My father worked at the old textile factory until it shut down in 1998. I remember those uniforms, and I remember that exact shade of blue. The factory logo was stitched on the left chest: a simple spool of thread, with the characters for 'Jiangnan Textile' underneath."
"The patient's uniform had that same logo."
"The Jiangnan Textile Factory shut down twenty-six years ago. It went bankrupt during the economic reforms, and thousands of workers were laid off almost overnight. My father was one of them. He died two years later, largely from alcohol. Losing everything broke him."
"Something else comes back to me. When I was in elementary school, maybe third grade, there was an incident at that factory, before it closed. A worker died on the job. I didn't know the full story—kids don't really follow those things—but I remember the rumors. Other children whispering about ghosts, about a man who fell into a dye vat and melted away, or something along those lines. I always took it as childhood exaggeration."
"But I checked this morning, in old newspaper archives. There really was a death at Jiangnan Textile in October 1997. A quality control inspector named Liu Wei, 34 years old, was found dead in the factory warehouse. The official cause was listed as an accidental fall. The article also mentioned 'unusual circumstances' without explaining what they were. The case was closed quickly. The factory shut down two months later."
"The patient in my emergency room was wearing a Jiangnan Textile uniform. He looked to be around 35. The newspaper photo of Liu Wei that I found in the archive showed a man with similar facial features and a similar build."
"I consider myself a rational person. I trust science, evidence, and explanations that hold up logically. But I'm telling you this: the man who died in my trauma bay three nights ago was Liu Wei. The same Liu Wei who died twenty-six years ago. Someone who should be long gone, not breathing on my gurney."
---
Han Jiang's mouth felt dry. He reached for the water bottle on his nightstand and took a long drink, keeping his eyes fixed on the screen.
The post kept going. In the dark, Han Jiang had to strain to read, and the words seemed to blur slightly:
---
"There's more. Something I haven't told anyone. Not the police, not my supervisor, not my wife."
"When we treated the patient—back when we still believed he was alive—I collected his personal belongings for safekeeping. That's standard procedure. In his pockets I found: a worn leather wallet with no cash and no ID, only a faded photo of a woman and a child; a brass key, old and corroded; and a small notebook that had been water-damaged, with pages stuck together."
"I didn't look at any of it closely at the time. I sealed everything in a plastic bag and put it in the patient effects locker, planning to review it later to help with identification."
"After the body disappeared, I checked the locker. The bag was still there. I brought it home. I shouldn't have, but I needed to make sense of this. I needed something concrete that proved it really happened."
"The photo in the wallet had a date written on the back: October 15, 1997. Three days before Liu Wei's recorded death. This morning I showed the woman in the photo to my mother. She grew up in the same area as the textile workers and recognized her. Liu Wei's wife. She remarried after his death and moved to another province. The child in the photo would be in his thirties now."
"The key—I don't know what it opens. It's old-fashioned, probably for a locker or a door at the factory."
"The notebook was the worst part. Most of it was unreadable; the ink had run from whatever liquid damaged it. But I managed to separate two pages that had stuck together. On one page, I could make out a name, written again and again: 'Zhang Meili.' Liu Wei's wife. The other page had a single sentence repeated like a chant: 'I didn't fall. I was pushed. I didn't fall. I was pushed. I didn't fall. I was pushed.'"
"I didn't fall. I was pushed."
"Twenty-six years ago, Liu Wei was murdered. And three nights ago, he walked into my emergency room, died a second time, and then walked out again."
---
The comments were spiraling now:
"OP WHERE ARE YOU"
"This is either the best creepypasta I've ever read or you're actually in danger"
"Call the police. Call a priest. Call someone."
"The old textile factory district—you said he was found there? That place is abandoned. Nobody goes there at night. Nobody."
"Dr. Chen please update"
Han Jiang checked the timestamp again. Five minutes ago. The post was still being updated live.
He refreshed the page.
New text appeared.
---
"I'm home now. I've locked every door and window. I called my wife—she's staying at her mother's place tonight. I'm alone."
"Thirty minutes ago, my doorbell rang."
"I live in a gated apartment complex. There's security at the entrance, and a video intercom. No one should be able to reach my door without being announced."
"I checked the camera. No one was there. But the bell rang again. And again. Three times."
"I went up to the door and looked through the peephole. The hallway was empty. But there was something on my doormat."
"A box. Cardboard. Old. Stained from water."
"I shouldn't have opened the door. I know that. But I had to know. I had to see."
"The box contained the patient's belongings. The wallet. The key. The notebook. The things I took from the hospital. The same items that had been on my kitchen table while I wrote my earlier updates."
"The same items I'd been watching closely, never letting out of my sight, and that I carried home in my own bag."
"There were two items inside the box that I never put in the hospital locker. Two items that weren't in the patient's pockets when he arrived."
"A blue work helmet, with the Jiangnan Textile logo on the front. The kind factory inspectors wear."
"And a photograph. Recent, not faded. Taken with a modern phone camera, timestamped yesterday at 11:47 PM."
"The photo shows me. Standing in Trauma Bay 3. Leaning over a gurney. Declaring the time of death."
"My mouth is open. My eyes are wide. In the picture, I'm staring at something behind me. Something over my shoulder."
"There's a hand in the frame. Pale. Resting on my shoulder."
"The hand is in a blue work uniform sleeve."
---
That was where the post stopped. No signature. No final message. The timestamp said it had been posted two minutes ago.
Han Jiang stared at the screen, his heart pounding. Comments were pouring in—hundreds a minute—but he barely registered them. He kept rereading the last paragraph.
Then he caught something he hadn't noticed earlier.
In the original post, Dr. Chen had written the patient's arrival time: 11:47 PM.
The photo timestamp: 11:47 PM.
Han Jiang checked the time on his own phone.
11:47 PM.
A notification slid in at the top of his screen. A private message from the forum:
"User 'Dr_Chen_WhiteCoat' has sent you a direct message."
Han Jiang's thumb hovered over it. The air conditioner hummed in the background, suddenly too loud, too noticeable. The darkness beyond the glow of his phone felt closer, like it was pressing in on the walls of his small apartment.
He opened the message.
---
"You read my story. You read it at 11:47 PM, lying in bed, legs against the wall, phone above your face. I counted on my fingers. I knew you would be there."
"I'm sorry. I needed someone to know. Someone to remember, in case I can't update that post again."
"The helmet is outside my door now. I can hear it. The box is inside. The hand was on my shoulder. I can still feel it—heavy, cold through my coat."
"He isn't angry. He isn't looking for revenge. He's lost. He's been lost for twenty-six years, moving between where he died and where he should have been found. He's searching for something. For someone who can see him. Someone who can hear him."
"I saw him. I heard him. And now he knows my name."
"If you're reading this, he knows yours too."
"Check your door."
---
That was the end of the message. Han Jiang felt ice spread through his veins. He tried to tell himself it was fiction. Just a well-written story—immersive, meant to scare people. The forum was full of posts like that. Creative writing. Nothing more.
But his eyes drifted to his apartment door, barely visible in the darkness beyond his phone screen. A cheap wooden door with a flimsy lock. A door he never worried about because this was a safe neighborhood, because nothing bad happened here, because ghosts weren't real.
Then he heard it. Soft, almost careful. Three rings of the doorbell.
Ding. Ding. Ding.
Han Jiang didn't move. He couldn't. His phone dimmed, then brightened as another notification appeared:
[Achievement Unlocked: First Contact
The Unseen System has been activated.
Host: Han Jiang
Status: Bound
Welcome, Observer. You have been chosen to see what others cannot. Your journey begins now.]
Han Jiang stared at the words floating in front of him—transparent, impossible to deny. Not on his phone. Hanging in the air. Glowing a pale blue that didn't cast any shadow.
Outside his door, something heavy was placed down on the concrete. Cardboard scraping against stone.
Then footsteps. Slow. Dragging. Moving away.
Han Jiang sat in the dark with the system interface hovering in front of him, the echo of the doorbell still in his ears, and realized his life had just shifted into something he didn't understand.
He didn't check the door. Not yet.
But he knew—deep down, with the kind of certainty that feels like winter settling into your bones—that something was waiting outside. Something that had walked out of a hospital morgue. Something that had been dead for twenty-six years.
And something that had just delivered him a message.