Chapter Five: Hospital Ghost Stories (Part Two)

The mission briefing remained as succinct as ever, but Luo Hanya had already formed a tentative plan in his mind. He intended to investigate the elderly man’s accidental fall to its roots and meticulously gather information about the hospital’s strange tales.

Although Luo Hanya wanted to get to the bottom of the old man's death, it was clear that lingering here was now pointless. He turned away, deciding first to buy several lollipops for Shanshan, then to enquire about the identity of the deceased.

Over ten minutes had passed by the time Luo Hanya returned to the ward. “Shanshan, look what big brother brought you!” His first act upon entering was to call out for Shanshan, but there was no trace of her in the room. Luo Hanya’s heart gave a sudden jolt; something felt off. He hurried out, asking those nearby if they’d seen an adorable little girl enter this ward.

An elderly grandmother, smiling, replied that she had seen the girl, bouncing energetically as she ran in—so very cute. Luo Hanya felt his mind blank, as if his whole world was collapsing. He thanked her quickly and rushed back to the ward.

“Shanshan, Shanshan, come out now, don’t hide, big brother’s found you!” Luo Hanya desperately told himself that Shanshan was only playing hide-and-seek with him, that she must still be in the room. But after searching every corner, he found no sign of her at all.

He exhaled heavily, scooped up a handful of cold water and splashed it hard onto his face, gasping for breath. He stood motionless for a long time, as if his soul had left him. To him, there was a high chance Shanshan had encountered the supernatural forces haunting this hospital, and most likely had come to harm.

Though he had only known Shanshan for a short while, he already regarded her as his own little sister. Even knowing he could only accompany her for a brief time, he still wished to protect her from any harm.

But now, everything was over. Shanshan was missing, and he could do nothing. He wanted to weep, yet the pain tearing through his heart was so sharp he couldn’t even cry.

Luo Hanya paced aimlessly in the ward, lost and broken. How he wished to hear Shanshan’s voice again. "I hate myself! Why am I so foolish—I can’t even protect the one I want to protect. If only I could stay by Shanshan’s side always, I—"

He collapsed in anguish beside Shanshan’s bed, his mind in turmoil. After a long while, Luo Hanya finally calmed himself. He realized his earlier actions were meaningless. Shanshan was merely missing; he could not afford to sink into despair. Perhaps she was still alive, waiting for her big brother to rescue her.

Suppressing the pain that felt like knives carving his heart, Luo Hanya carefully retraced everything that had happened.

From the moment he told Shanshan to return to the room, to her disappearance, he had only been absent for a few minutes. Shanshan had indeed re-entered the ward, so she must have vanished from within it. Nothing in the room had seemed unusual before; Shanshan had lived here without incident. Therefore, she must have triggered something critical—a key object responsible for her disappearance, likely still present in the room.

Luo Hanya searched the ward once more and found three peculiar items: an old surgical knife beneath his bed, a small mirror beside Shanshan’s bed, and a red hair tie fallen onto the floor—the very one Shanshan had worn that day, if he recalled rightly.

He pondered for a long time, but could find no clues among these items. He decided to first investigate the hospital’s strange rumors in detail, then pursue the cause of the old man’s mysterious fall, hoping that unraveling the hospital’s secrets might lead him to rescue Shanshan.

He took out his phone and searched for information about the hospital. Amidst the flood of data, he uncovered many odd events.

Luo Hanya learned that twenty years ago, the hospital had suffered a bizarre fire, the cause of which was never found. The incident was widely believed to have been “heaven’s fire”—a sudden, inexplicable blaze. Many doctors and patients were trapped and burned alive. Afterwards, rumors circulated that late at night, strange noises could be heard, as if someone were crying out. Two years ago, someone had recorded audio in a vacant hospital room for twenty-four hours; apart from long stretches of electronic noise, the recording captured several clear voices: “Help me, don’t leave me, I don’t want to burn to death.” It seemed to be the voices of those who struggled during the fire two decades prior.

Luo Hanya recalled having read about such phenomena before, known as rnnnn—supernatural electronic anomalies. It was said that ghosts could use modern electronic devices to communicate with us, and some even explained it with Einstein’s theory of relativity. Yet such phenomena occurred everywhere; what did it mean for a hospital to experience it?

He frowned. These stories, while strange, could not explain Shanshan’s disappearance. Surely it wasn’t as simple as a ghost abducting her? There had been no reports of disappearances at the hospital over the years, though perhaps such cases had occurred, settled privately to protect the hospital’s reputation.

Night was falling, but Luo Hanya still found no breakthrough. Neither the online rumors nor the three strange objects in the room yielded any useful information. The only discovery was that the mirror bore traces of having been washed with water, possibly by Shanshan earlier that day.

He rubbed his temples, easing his long-held tension, and resolved to ask others about any developments regarding the old man’s fall.

It wasn’t long before Luo Hanya returned to the ward. The incident was now the talk of the hospital. Reportedly, the old man’s son had come to visit, seeking to sell his father’s house to pay off debts and start anew. The old man refused, and the two quarreled fiercely. After his son left, the old man, angry, wandered the room with a glass of water. But as he approached the window, he inexplicably passed through the window and wall below, falling to his death.

“How could this happen?” Luo Hanya muttered as he paced, brow furrowed. “Could it be some kind of space-time anomaly? But that spot is frequented by many—maybe there’s a special trigger condition?” He mused.

He began to connect the two incidents, thinking deeply. “Is there any commonality between them?”

“The old man held a glass of water before his death; when Shanshan vanished, water and a mirror were likely involved.”

“Could it be that water and mirrors are the keys to triggering the supernatural?” Luo Hanya exclaimed, feeling he had solved the riddle.

Without delay, he fetched a glass of water and poured it onto Shanshan’s mirror. Yet the mirror remained just a mirror, and nothing happened.