My ‘Healing’ Game
Chapter 609: The Person in the Oil Painting Came Out

Chapter 609: Chapter 609: The Person in the Oil Painting Came Out

The lights went out, and everyone was plunged into chaos.

Although the actors all stood still, Han Fei could clearly hear footsteps.

He looked in the direction from which the footsteps were coming and saw something standing behind the door of the emergency exit.

Reaching out for the mobile phone that the crew had given to each person, Han Fei raised it abruptly, using the built-in flashlight to illuminate the emergency corridor.

The light pierced the darkness, revealing a woman’s face behind the glass of the safety door.

"Ah!"

Standing next to Han Fei, Alin also saw the face and screamed in fright, stepping back repeatedly and bumping into Xiao Chen.

The celebrities were in a mess, completely different from their usual on-screen image, only Han Fei truly lived up to his "police insider persona."

"What are you screaming for!" Xiao Chen was also startled; he almost pushed Alin away, his hand already raised when he suddenly remembered they were filming a reality show. To maintain his image, he forced himself to hold back.

"There’s a ghost! Right behind the safety door! It’s a woman’s face!" Alin, covering her face, let out a shrill scream, the exact reaction Boss Tang was looking for.

"It’s all fake, Boss Tang is best at blurring the line between reality and pretense," Bai Cha said, feigning calmness. "Since when are there ghosts in the world?"

The actress named Li Huang also reacted, pulling out her mobile phone for light, then she looked at Han Fei puzzledly, "How did you know there was someone behind that door? You aimed the light there without any hesitation."

"I heard footsteps," Han Fei, holding his mobile phone, walked towards the corridor. "The woman’s face was odd, not quite like a ghost’s."

"Could you see that clearly in just an instant?" Li Huang’s face showed her confusion, and a moment later came to a more terrifying realization, "What do you mean ’not quite like a ghost’? Have you seen a ghost before?"

"Never," Han Fei walked up to the safety door and opened it; the blood on the floor had increased. "I’m going upstairs to check, are you coming with me?"

"I want to quit!" Alin was terrified; as a popular singer trying a reality show for the first time, she hadn’t expected to encounter such a situation.

In fact, friends had tried to dissuade her before coming, but driven by her large ambitions, she hoped to use Boss Tang’s new show to take her popularity to the next level.

"It’s still possible to quit now, but later on, you might not be able to, even if you want to," Han Fei said, almost like a plant by the crew, but he was telling the truth because he knew this place might really be haunted.

"I..." Alin hesitated for a moment, pulled out her phone to call her agent, and was unexpectedly shocked to find that the phones issued by the crew had no signal, and they had turned in their personal phones before entering the set: "What’s going on? Why doesn’t the crew’s mobile phone have a signal?! This is too much!"

"In the plot, our phones are supposed to have no signal. Boss Tang is trying to make the show as realistic as possible to create the most authentic reality TV experience," Li Huang had checked the phone when she received it and thought everyone knew: "Alin, this show has gathered all the elements to become a huge hit. If we manage to escape successfully or become regular cast members, it will be highly beneficial for our future careers, so I think you should just bear it for a little while."

Ultimately, Alin heeded Li Huang’s advice, turned on her phone’s flashlight, and stayed close to her.

"Don’t be afraid," Bai Cha tried to comfort Alin. "Do you think Boss Tang would really harm you? Would he dare to do something like that?"

Alin shook her head and wiped away her tears.

"Right, since you won’t get hurt, you are invincible in this scene. Whether it’s a murderer or a ghost, you have nothing to fear." Bai Cha said coolly as he walked over to Alin. "Just think of it as a rather unusual reality show."

"Reality show?" Han Fei chuckled as he looked at Bai Cha. "I think calling it a ’Fierce Ghost Show’ would be more appropriate. Remember, we’re not the protagonists here, we’re just a few outsiders."

"What are you trying to say?" Bai Cha confronted Han Fei aggressively, sensing that Han Fei was just looking for trouble.

"I’m just kindly reminding you, so you don’t end up dying without understanding why," Han Fei said no more, entering the security passageway with his phone. He observed the bloody footprints on the ground. "Judging by the shoe prints, they seem to belong to a woman, and she ran downstairs."

Kicking open the door that led to the basement, Han Fei descended along the staircase.

The walls of the basement were painted with cute cartoon figures as well as various oil paintings of children playing.

The childlike images sharply contrasted with the dilapidated and abandoned building, the children’s smiling faces directly opposite the ground littered with numerous pharmaceutical packaging, discarded syringes, and stained Blood Clothes.

"The person who designed this scene is so twisted," Wu Li muttered under his breath.

"Is it possible that this scene actually existed before?" Han Fei, following the bloodstains, pushed open door after door. If a door wouldn’t budge, he’d kick it open.

Amid the thumping sounds, the others gradually became bolder.

"Roughly destroying the game props and scenes, when the show is broadcast, just wait to be cursed to death by the viewers," Bai Cha followed behind the group, laughing coldly.

As they moved forward, it seemed less like Han Fei was participating in a show and more like he was on a "publicly funded investigation."

With six Meat Shields for protection, he could confidently scrutinize the entire building, go wherever he wanted to, and if Hatred came his way, all he needed to do was outrun his teammates.

"If we really uncover something this time, perhaps I could collaborate with Tang Yi in the future and have him set up the filming locations where I want to investigate."

As they delved deeper, Han Fei made some discoveries.

This basement level resembled the underground of the White Orphanage in Deep World, but it differed in that there were many more rooms for nurturing children.

"Rich kids await personality transformations on the surface, while helpless orphans below are cultivated into various personas, like commodities up for selection—this is truly insane." Han Fei felt that Eternal Life Pharmaceutical had developed some terrifying things, and he might find himself getting closer and closer to such eerie matters in the future.

Reaching the end of the corridor, Han Fei opened the door to the last room, which had been converted from a sickroom into a children’s playroom. Inside was a rusty cage containing a decaying prop heart.

"The cage is locked, and there’s blood writing underneath." Han Fei shone his phone’s light towards the floor. "Your love for me is like a cage trapping birds. I want to leave, but you threaten to smash me along with the birdcage."

"In the security room, there’s a picture of Bai Cha with a cage under it, this puzzle probably requires Bai Cha to solve it," Wu Li looked at Bai Cha. "Does your script have any clues related to this scene?"

"It seems it does. In the script, I’m someone with a strong desire for control, inherently disliked by small animals. To prevent them from escaping, I always like to keep them locked in cages." Bai Cha circled the cage, noticing various animal names written around the welded cage. "What does this mean?"

As the protagonist now, Bai Cha needed to rely on something from his own script to unlock the cage and retrieve the arm.

At this moment, he was composed and handsome, but unfortunately, not very bright. He was using his clumsy acting skills to cover up his confusion.

He had been waiting for about five or six minutes when Han Fei suddenly smelled a faint odor of paint, an odd scent that seemed to be a mix of paint and fresh blood.

Turning his head towards the outside of the room, he saw a round object falling from the wall in the gloomy corridor, followed by a short figure emerging from the wall and picking the object back up.

"Were these paintings done by the painter before? It couldn’t be that all the paintings in the building were done by the painter, could it?"

In such a dangerous place, Han Fei himself would definitely not dare to come alone; the production team had indeed solved a big problem for him.

The blurry black figure holding the ball seemed to have lost its way. It didn’t return into the wall but, out of curiosity, it started heading upstairs.

"No time to play house here," Han Fei said to Bai Cha. "Are you up for this or not?"

"I’m thinking, I’ll have a result soon!" Bai Cha was still being stubborn.

"Then you tell me, what are your thoughts right now? What’s your approach to solving the problem? What do these animals remind you of?" Han Fei stood in front of Bai Cha. "Spill the information from your script, and I’ll help you analyze it."

"I..." Bai Cha’s face turned red with urgency, but she couldn’t utter a single word after hemming and hawing.

"Lucky for you, you’ve got a pretty face, otherwise I don’t know what else you could do," Han Fei said, gripping the metal cage and giving it a slight shake. The prop made by Tang Yi was sturdy, but it wasn’t quite enough against Han Fei’s strength.

After the cage was knocked down, Han Fei walked outside with the two artificial arms in hand.

"Hey! With your reckless behavior, what’s left of the show?" Bai Cha yelled at Han Fei.

"You want show effects? You’ll have plenty in a moment," Han Fei replied, carrying the broken arms back to the first floor. "Since Tang Yi seeks absolute authenticity, I’m going to show him with practical action that real investigation is unconstrained, anything can be utilized, and he should understand that."

"Understand my ass! Boss Tang might be going berserk in front of the screen right now!"

"He sets the rules, but I play the game," Han Fei said, pushing open the security door. He noticed that the lights in front of the elevator were on again. "The lights are back on?"

The long-missed illumination shone on them, and the actors hurried out of the safety passage as if there was a man-eating monster in the corridor.

"Who’s going to go in this time?" Wu Li, who had been scared enough by his last elevator ride, was adamant about not going in again.

"I’ll do it," Han Fei said, looking at the lights above the elevator. As he approached, the lights went out again.

Alin let out a scream and huddled next to Li Huang, while the other actors, being mentally prepared, all took out their mobile phones for light.

When the elevator button was pressed, the dilapidated doors slowly opened, and a pungent smell of paint wafted out. The decrepit elevator car was covered in the word "death" written with red paint!

Each ferocious character, paired with the blood-like red paint that was still dripping, looked like a collection of human faces.

"Damn!" Wu Li cursed for the first time on the variety show, utterly shocked by the gruesome scene that chilled him to the core.

"In just a few minutes of not being here, the elevator car turned into this?" Li Huang covered her nose and mouth, not used to the smell of the paint.

The celebrities shrank back, with Han Fei standing alone at the elevator entrance.

"He’s nearby, very close to me," Han Fei said as he threw the artificial limbs prop into the elevator car. After a while, a faint red glow appeared on the elevator display, followed by a number "4".

"Is that the floor number? Are they telling us to go to the fourth floor?" Looking at the limbs on the ground, Han Fei frowned slightly. "If Tang Yi has arranged individual scenes and puzzles for everyone, then just piecing together this elevator corpse prop would take a long time. Seems like we’ll have to resort to more forceful methods."

After the elevator closed, Han Fei was about to head to the fourth floor when his pupils suddenly narrowed, his gaze fixated on the group of actors.

"What’s wrong, brother? Don’t look at us like that!" For the first time, Wu Li felt the pressure of Han Fei’s gaze.

"One’s missing," Han Fei pointed to the end of the line. "Xia Yilan is gone!"

While everyone had been distracted by the "death" characters inside the elevator, Xia Yilan had disappeared.

"She didn’t make any noise, so she must have left on her own, maybe the director gave her a special role," Li Huang still tried to rationalize the situation in a way humans could understand.

"Why would she be the one to disappear?" With the light from his phone, Han Fei found no valuable trace of Xia Yilan. It was as if she had been walking along and then just vanished.

"We have to hurry; something might happen to Xia Yilan!" Han Fei knew there was something wrong with Xia Yilan, but before he could understand what had happened to her, he didn’t want her to just die like this.

After a thorough search to no avail, they reluctantly decided to head to the fourth floor as suggested.

"Strange, isn’t this place supposed to be a plastic surgery hospital? Why are all the paintings on the walls of children playing?" Even Xiao Chen, the slowest to realize, noticed something was off. "Now, I always feel like someone is following us. Is it Xia Yilan?"

"She has no reason to stalk us!" Alin clutched at Li Huang’s clothes, walking side by side at the very back of the group because she was the most timid.

After hearing Xiao Chen’s words, she looked back into the darkness of the abandoned building, where it seemed like something really was moving in the dark.

Her eyes were uncomfortable after just crying, so Alin focused her gaze on the corner of the hallway. A round ball slowly rolled out from the second floor.

"A ball?"

A moment later, a small boy came out. He picked up the ball from the ground, then seemed to notice Alin.

Slowly turning around, the boy holding the ball looked towards Alin.

"Why would Tang Yi bring children here?"

Before she could figure out why, another child staggered out from around the corner of the corridor.

The child walked unsteadily, groping in the dark with his hands, his neck bare, as if he were looking for his own head.