That sleep was more blissful than any I’d ever known. I didn't have a single nightmare, sleeping straight through until I woke up. But when I did wake, I was inside a CT scanner.
It was the first time in my life I had ever seen such a piece of medical equipment. A platform you hop onto, and then the machine automatically slides you into a cylinder for a scan, much like a drawer. Now, I was lying naked on that CT platform with electrodes attached to my body. A thin white cloth covered me from the waist down, and the platform was suspended just outside the cylinder.
The entire CT room was empty and white. Not a soul was in sight.
My body felt heavy, burdened by the kind of discomfort that follows intense physical exertion. My chest felt tight, my throat was parched, and there was a metallic taste of blood in my mouth. I gasped for air, swallowing the thick, sticky saliva in my mouth as best I could. I tried to rip off the electrodes and wires, struggling as I scrambled off the bed. I began to call out for a doctor at the top of my lungs. I had blacked out. I couldn't remember what had happened; I had no idea how I’d ended up in a CT room. My last memory was of falling peacefully asleep in my roommate's arms.
I shouted three times, but when no one responded, I fell silent. It was quiet here—deathly quiet. Aside from myself, the only sound was the steady *beep-beep* of the EKG monitor on the other side of the bed. When I had passed the CT room this morning, the machine had stood alone, but now, the platform meant for patients to lie on had been modified to look like my hospital bed, surrounded by various instruments I didn't recognize. The upper half of the platform was even tilted slightly upward, as if I had been lying there for days and needed the mechanical assistance because I lacked the strength to sit up.
I started to feel afraid.
Had my condition worsened while I was unconscious?
But why was there no one here? Wasn't there supposed to be medical staff monitoring from behind a wall in a CT suite? At least five minutes had passed since I woke up. I had torn off so many sensors; how could no one have rushed in to stop me?
...Where was my roommate? Had he abandoned me too?
With a sense of desperate abandonment, I pushed open the heavy revolving door.
The corridor outside was clean and white.
But there was no one.
If I were to look down now and find a newspaper headlined with a zombie invasion or the end of the world—or if I were to look through the glass doors and see a horde of howling, dancing undead feasting on the fresh entrails of a young girl—I wouldn't have been too surprised.
But there was nothing. Nothing at all. White fluorescent lights, white hallways, white ward doors. Everything was pure white, the windows bright and the floors spotless. There was no one behind the ward doors, either. The hallway was enclosed. I wanted to know what the outside world looked like; some of the ward doors were open, and I only had to walk inside and approach the windows to see, but I didn't dare. I only dared to steal glances inside. Outside the windows, it was pitch black, as if it were the middle of the night. On the bedside tables, takeout containers sat half-opened, disposable chopsticks laid out to the side, and blankets were folded back as if the patients had simply gotten up to use the restroom and would return any minute to finish their midnight snacks.
It was the same in several consecutive rooms. These scenes of daily life had been abruptly severed. The patients had left and never returned. The doctors were the same. One had left a half-finished prescription on the desk, his glasses set down composedly beside it. Where had they all gone?
Like a ghost forgotten by the entire world, I walked tremulously past the nurse's station. A cup of tea sat on the counter, placed atop an induction burner. Steam was still rising from the tea, but the burner had already clicked off.
I suddenly remembered that moment at 12:43 AM last night, when time had abruptly screeched to a halt before my eyes.
Again?
Subconsciously, I looked for a clock, but I couldn't find one.
On this floor of the hospital, I couldn't find a single thing that displayed the time. It was bizarre. Not just the time—there wasn't even a date. I didn't know what it meant, but I was even more terrified now.
I intended to keep moving forward, to take the stairs in the middle of the hallway down and leave this eerie place.
But just as I took a step, the telephone at the nurse's station to my right suddenly rang.
I jumped. The place was so quiet you could hear a pin drop; even the sound of my own breathing felt noisy. Then, that sudden *ring-ring* nearly scared the soul right out of my body. I was terrified the ringing would wake something horrific. I didn't dare breathe, pretending I didn't exist. I stood frozen for about a minute before realizing that nothing else seemed to be happening besides the phone ringing. Only then did I dare to move.
I regained a sliver of rationality. Thinking it through, I figured that since I was already in this kind of scenario, the call was almost certainly for me.
I might be a coward, but I’d watched my fair share of horror movies. Only an idiot would pick up. Heaven knew what was on the other end of that line, or if it would crawl out through the receiver.
So, I kept my head down and walked on, pretending to be a mere passerby.
After a few more steps, the phone went silent. It was quiet again.
And then, nothing happened.
I came to a dead halt, not daring to move. It felt strange. Because the hospital was so bizarre, the fact that the phone had simply followed the normal "no answer - hang up" logic made me feel like it was just gearing up for something bigger.
I waited for a while. When nothing happened, I continued forward, trembling. Just as I reached the first ward past the nurse's station, the phone rang again.
This time, it wasn't coming from the nurse's station. It was coming from the two wards closest to me, simultaneously.
Dammit, I knew it wouldn't be that easy. It was waiting for me.
I finally remembered how to run. The staggered, overlapping ringing of those two phones felt like a death knell urging me on.
But as I sprinted, the entire corridor began to erupt in endless ringing, with me at the center. The phone in every single ward was ringing. In an instant, the floor transformed into a telecommunications center without any operators. Every ringtone was identical, but they started at different times, creating a chaotic cacophony at first. However, the more I refused to answer, the more those *ring-ring, ring-ring* sounds began to merge. Their frequencies drew closer and closer until they finally became a unified, rhythmic resonance that vibrated through me, pushing me to the brink of a breakdown.
I knew I probably couldn't escape.
I didn't dare push open any of the ward doors to answer. Instead, I retreated to the nurse's station. My entire body was shaking as I reached out for the receiver.
I picked it up but didn't listen immediately. Every other landline on the floor went silent instantly.
I pressed the receiver to my ear. There was no sound from the other side. I knew this was the "grand finale" preparing to drop. I was ready to hear any sound from any place.
But there was nothing. None of the ghostly wails or low whispers I had imagined. I listened boldly for a long time and actually heard the faint sound of someone breathing. The breaths were rapid, even panting, as if the person were just as nervous as I was.
My first reaction was: *Could it be my roommate?*
I immediately called out to him: "Xiao Liu! Xiao Liu!"
The person on the other end seemed to pause for a moment before giving a couple of "hellos."
I felt a pang of disappointment. It wasn't my roommate. He sounded like a young man around my age. But as long as it was a human, I felt relieved. I had too many questions to ask: "This hospital, it's..."
He interrupted me urgently. "Come down quickly. I'm waiting for you below."
Then he hung up.
The receiver left me with nothing but a dial tone.
I stared at the handset and hung it back up.
the young man's voice had been very distinctive—the kind of voice that was exceptionally clean and clear. It was pleasant, a voice no one I knew possessed, yet it felt strangely familiar.
It was just that he sounded very cold.
I decided it was best to follow his instructions. I was planning on going down anyway.
But then, I realized a problem.
There were no stairs on this floor.
When I had been brought to this floor, I hadn't paid much attention to the layout. But hospitals were usually all the same: a long corridor, wards on both sides, stairs in the middle, and the nurse's station by the stairwell.
But now, standing before the nurse's station, I saw no stairs.
Then which way had my roommate taken when he dragged and carried me up here?
I had walked this path myself; how could it just vanish?
I calculated that I had two choices: find the emergency exit or find the elevator.
In truth, I didn't want to choose either. The former would be cramped, the latter enclosed. But staying here was out of the question. I hadn't seen any way down on the side I’d come from near the CT room, so I started walking forward. When I reached the end, there was indeed an elevator, painted white.
The doors were open. They had been open for a long time, like a giant maw waiting for me. The "down" button to the right of the elevator was also glowing red, as if an invisible hand were holding it down for me.
The elevator was the least safe option. Every fiber of my being resisted it. So I retraced my steps and searched everywhere until I was certain there was no other way. Only then did I steel myself and walk to the elevator.
This was the only thing on this floor that worked. This was the third anomaly: no date or time, the sudden chorus of landlines, and the missing stairs... The way the rules of modern society were being flippantly rewritten made me stop trying to view this hospital through the lens of common sense. I began to suspect I might be trapped in a nightmare. Only dreams were this absurd and erratic. Realizing this, my psychological fear eased slightly.
As soon as I stepped inside, the doors slid shut smoothly. The elevator descended slowly, the button for B1 glowing red the entire time. I pressed the buttons for the fourth, third, second, and first floors repeatedly, but it was useless; they wouldn't light up, and the elevator didn't stop. It focused solely on delivering me to the basement.
When the doors opened, I felt my heart sink.
Looking out through the modern elevator doors, I saw a massive natural cavern.
The cave was roughly the size of a football field and three stories high. Torches were lit in the center of the cavern, and under the flickering light, I saw people—patients in hospital gowns. But because the torches only illuminated a small area, I couldn't tell what they were doing. They appeared to be entangled in something resembling vines.
From the elevator entrance, I could just barely make out a set of carved stone steps leading down, flanked by a forest of sharp stalactites. If I wanted to go down into the center of the cavern, I had to take this path. But I didn't want to go down at all; the atmosphere below felt primitive, savage, and nauseating.
Clinging to a final shred of hope, I turned back, wanting to see if I could take the elevator back to the first floor. But the moment I turned, I knew I probably couldn't go back.
The elevator had vanished.
Behind me was a silent, ancient wall of vermilion rock, seamlessly integrated with the rest of the cavern.
It was covered in scripts and murals that I couldn't understand.
