My ‘Healing’ Game
Chapter 868 I Am Here

Chapter 868: Chapter 868 I Am Here

"Player number 0000, please note that you have discovered the Exploration Personality, a special personality originating from a patient in the Mental Hospital, stripped away by Hatred."

The system prompt sounded, and the head in the Black Box vanished from Han Fei’s hand, seemingly blending into his Will. However, correspondingly, the fear he bore intensified.

"Can these personalities stripped by Hatred be devoured by the Greed Abyss?"

Han Fei seriously pondered this possibility, while the Doctor engulfed in Black Fire glared angrily, having never expected Han Fei to utter words so akin to Hatred’s.

"What am I imagining? It seems I’ve truly been influenced by Gao Cheng’s Greed Personality, wanting to devour everything."

After the second Doctor turned to ashes, the Mental Ghost Creature began to show signs of trouble. The exterior of the building was originally pitch-black, making it impossible to see the breach torn by the Deputy Captain of the support team, but now that faint light shone through, and the speed of the Illusion Realm’s changes seemed to slow slightly.

"Besides me, there are others destroying Black Boxes containing personalities. The Director has indeed underestimated the Investigation Bureau this time."

As Han Fei stepped out of the elevator, the voice of Number Two echoed deep within his consciousness: "Leave this floor as soon as possible, head upward! Follow the sound of the child’s cry, no matter what happens, do not stop."

"Go upward? Is it to head upstairs?"

The ground beneath Han Fei’s feet suddenly trembled, the orderly floor tiles began to deform, and it seemed as if something was about to crawl out from the dark gaps.

The wall paint peeled off, the words on it crammed together like the wrinkles on an old man’s face. More terrifying was the intense stench of decay emanating from the walls.

A faint coughing sound arose as a half of a ghastly white face appeared around the corner, stealthily tailing Han Fei like a shadow, a persistent Dark Soul.

"Different fears are interwoven; it seems many members of the Investigation Bureau have fallen into the trap."

Finding no stairs, Han Fei accelerated his escape, but the perverted stalker behind him couldn’t be shaken off, mental fatigue and fear torturing him constantly.

"Where is the sound of the child’s crying?"

Han Fei was puzzling over this when he suddenly noticed that the patterns on the wall differed from before.

With a memory far superior to the average person, Han Fei clearly recalled that when he first entered the building, the walls were adorned with cruel scenes of patients performing surgery on Doctors, but now images had started to appear that depicted events outside the hospital, such as two young people shopping together, a family on a picnic, a boy diving into a pool only to be entangled by a water snake, a Priest praying for a little girl, and so on.

"Have the fears of the investigation team members also been depicted on the walls? Have their fears merged with the entire building?"

The images on the wall were striking, many of them seemingly normal, but closer observation revealed extremely eerie elements.

After walking a dozen or so meters, Han Fei slowed his pace, as a painting of a middle-aged woman came into view on the wall in front of him.

So lifelike that if you didn’t look closely, you might mistake it for a real person standing nearby.

The middle-aged woman was dressed in very ordinary casual wear, her face beaming with a smile. She seemed to be telling a story to a child, with a book in her hand that read—Mom is hidden there.

Following the direction pointed by the woman’s other hand, Han Fei noticed an air vent on the ceiling of the corridor opposite the painting.

"Move upward? Does it mean I’m supposed to enter the ventilation duct?"

The painting of the middle-aged woman on the wall gave Han Fei a deeply unsettling feeling, but he had no other choice. His fear surged due to hesitation, so he no longer lingered, painstakingly climbing into the ventilation duct.

The duct was narrow, just right for a child, but for a grown-up like Han Fei, entering it meant risking getting stuck and having no way to turn back.

"Don’t be afraid, only by facing fear can you find a way to survive!"

Han Fei had already grasped the pattern of the Mental Ghost Creature, but for the vast majority of people, even understanding it would not dispel fear. In introspection, many people, even while aware they’re in a nightmare, would still feel panic and the urge to escape.

This Mental Ghost Creature exploits precisely that, the more one attempts to flee, the closer the pursuit becomes, with fear manifesting into reality until it truly kills someone.

Crawling forward, faint noises began to emerge in the quiet duct, sounding as though they were coming from behind Han Fei.

"Did someone follow me into the duct? Is it that stalker? Or the middle-aged woman painted on the wall?"

Whatever followed was bad news for Han Fei.

He had no option for retreat, only the choice to speed up.

The passage became narrower, offering no glimpse of hope. Han Fei quickly reached a junction where two ducts met, looking to the left, he instantly felt his scalp tingle.

In the passages to his left and right, two people were crawling, their arms pressed tightly against their bodies, faces ashen, eyes bulging, their mouths opening and closing as if chewing something!

Upon seeing Han Fei, their bodies wiggled like snakes in the confined passages, slithering toward him.

"They truly embody Mental Pollution!"

Han Fei desperately moved forward, but he hadn’t crawled far before reaching the end of the passage. It seemed to be a dead end, and survival might only lie in retreat.

Press on? Or retreat?

Those snake-like Monsters were closing in, so with grit, Han Fei opted to continue forward: "The entire passage is in darkness, with only a faint light at the end, almost as if deliberately arranged for people to see that there’s no path ahead."

A relentless thumping resonated from the duct behind, akin to the notes of a death knell. Han Fei used every ounce of strength to crawl toward the passage’s end.

By that faint light, Han Fei discovered that the duct turned and began to bend upward, not a dead end, but a path to life.

"Climb upward!"

Han Fei didn’t know how long he had been crawling before his head suddenly hit something. When he looked up, strands of black hair dangled in front of him.

In the vertical duct, the corpse of a middle-aged woman was hanging upside down. She was wearing casual clothes, wrapped in colorful tape used by children for crafts, looking extremely terrifying.

"Whose fear is this exactly?"

The exit of the ventilation duct was right next to the corpse. After Han Fei untied the ropes on the middle-aged woman, he successfully escaped.

Crawling out of the ventilation duct, Han Fei felt as if all the bones in his body were about to fall apart. But before he could catch his breath, he saw new patterns on the wall.

A man in his sixties, stout-bodied and looking honest and simple, smiled at Han Fei while holding a pink schoolbag with an unzipped zipper, from which a storybook was visible—Dad is hiding there.

The man pointed at a room with his right hand, and a strange smell kept wafting from the room.

Pushing open the nearby door, what appeared before Han Fei was a series of huge sauce jars. Without doing anything, he found himself already inside the room, and the door he had just pushed open had become a painting on the wall.

"How did it become a painting?"

The world of mental patients is absurd and bizarre; obviously, nothing follows logic, yet everything can be traced back to the patient’s past. The Director precisely used all the patients’ fantasies to create this perverse Mental Ghost Creature.

"Do I need to find the corpse of the middle-aged man among these sauce jars?" All the jars looked the same, with no differences. After contemplating for a long time, Han Fei opened the jar farthest from him.

"Put it in and marinate with yesterday’s leftover sauce. Do you remember that flavor?"

"These kids are really naughty; they’re not supposed to come into the basement, yet they insist on doing so!"

"I tricked them by saying there was a child-eating monster in the basement, and those kids were scared to death, hahaha!"

"Stop laughing. How can you say we are monsters?"

The sound of a conversation between a man and a woman suddenly emerged in the room, as if the sauce jars were soaking in foul memories. As the voices rang out, thick, sticky black blood gushed from the jars, soon filling the room.

"The blood is still rising! Is it going to flood the entire room?"

Han Fei immediately sensed the danger; the doors and windows on the walls had turned into children’s drawings, leaving this completely enclosed room with no exit! To avoid being drowned by the blood, he had to find the man’s corpse quickly.

"No hints at all—do I purely rely on luck?"

Quickly scanning all the sauce jars, Han Fei opened the lid of the jar next to him.

"Why does the world have sour meat? Why is it covered in brown hair? This child has been here too long; won’t it transform into a corpse? Could it be here to avenge us?"

"Don’t overthink it; if bad people were punished, we’d be dead a thousand times over by now."

"But he looks different from other kids."

"Since you’re unwilling, let’s keep it here as our child."

The new memories mingled with the bloody filth, and the blood already overflowed over Han Fei’s feet. The more jars he opened, the faster the blood flowed out.

Unable to find any clues, Han Fei gritted his teeth, preparing to open the lid of every jar in the room one by one: "I refuse to believe my luck is that bad!"

The overwhelming smell in the room could drive anyone crazy. The more jars Han Fei opened, the more complete the conversations he heard. This room full of sauce jars belonged to a pair of perverse murderer lovers who specifically targeted children, but one day they found a deformed child covered in brown fur outside their home.

They took the child home and raised it as a pet.

The deformed child was ugly and terrifying, but his mind was sound. He slowly learned many things, such as wanting to survive, first learning to hide his true thoughts, concealing the real self, and becoming the person others imagine to satisfy them.

As more jars filled the secret room, the deformed child grew older. Later, the couple had their own child, and their attention shifted almost entirely to the newborn, leaving the deformed monster dissatisfied, eventually turning back into a monster after being kept as a pet.

"Bang!"

After smashing open the seventh jar, Han Fei, whose clothes were soaked with blood, finally found the man’s corpse, whose bones were crushed, forcibly stuffed into the jar.

With some effort, Han Fei dragged the corpse out. There was a dark passage beneath the jar, and several keys were hanging from the middle-aged man’s body.

"The keys should be useful."

Taking the keys from the corpse, Han Fei jumped into the passage below the jar, crawling forward until he was on the brink of suffocation, finally seeing an exit.

The wailing of a baby echoed in his ears, and Han Fei also heard a child singing a lullaby. He crawled out of the passage and fell heavily, finding himself back in the main building of the hospital, with a broken ventilation duct above him.

"Interwoven nightmares, whose fear is this?"

Gazing towards the direction of the sound, Han Fei saw a huge, terrifying silhouette slowly disappearing around the corner of the hallway, seemingly the one singing to the baby.

"I must follow the child’s crying."

Even though the shadow was terrifying, Han Fei did not hesitate. Clutching the keys he obtained from the man’s corpse, he ran towards the hallway corner.

Turning the corner, Han Fei saw another painting on the wall, a child in a tattered coat, grinning foolishly, pointing behind Han Fei. The book in his hand read—I am here.

Turning around, Han Fei saw the words "Director’s Office" written on the door of the room behind him.

"The Director’s Office? Could the fear I just experienced not belong to the Investigation Bureau team members, but be the fears of the Director’s childhood?"