Chapter 1084 – Humanity’s Island

　　Unknown monsters were hidden in the black fog, but probably because they were bound by the rules behind the door, those black fogs didn’t spread inside the house, and the inside of the residential building was safe.

　　The neighborhood outside the building seemed to be two different worlds to the residents inside the building, everything about them was left inside the building, as if they would encounter the unknown as soon as they left.

　　Dr. Lai closed the window, and it was as if he couldn’t see the blood on the frame.

　　”Only the landlord can enter and exit the residential building at will, and the tenants in the building must be accompanied by the landlord if they want to leave at night.” Dr. Li looked at the thick black fog outside: “He must have been weak-minded, that’s why he broke the rules and wanted to jump out the window to leave.”

　　Dr. Lai’s words caught Chen Ge’s attention, this neighborhood was far weirder than he had previously expected.

　　If a tenant who wanted to leave at night had to be accompanied by the landlord, what if the landlord died? What if this place was forever shrouded in darkness? What if this place just kept repeating the same nightmarish night over and over again?

　　Much of the world behind the door stays in one time period because that time period leaves a lifelong legacy of unforgettable despair for the person who pushes the door open.

　　”We’ve already identified the person who killed the landlord, now we just need to go all out and catch that Qu Gui’s murderer.” Dr. Li’s words sounded cold, calm, and with a hint of a murderous aura; he seemed to have taken this building as his hunting ground.

　　Now that a new hunter had appeared in the hunting ground, what he wanted to do was naturally to find out the other party and finish them off.

　　”I suggest that we search this room properly again, if he is really the murderer of the landlord, there must be other clues in the room, and those keys that the landlord lost should be here as well.” Qu Win didn’t care about other people’s lives and deaths, all he needed was his own keys, in his opinion the only safe place within this building was his own home, if his own home wasn’t safe then he wouldn’t feel at ease sleeping every night.

　　”That ……” Xiao Sun seems to want to say something, he looked at the few people around him, his eyes fixed on the blood stains on the window frame: “We you are not too arbitrary? Just based on a letter and a few teeth to lock the murderer? And I always feel there is something wrong, the bathroom I also went to search, the sewer there ……”

　　”We just want to force out the truth, the one who made the choice was himself, he had a ghost in his heart, that’s why he wanted to escape.” Dr. Li swept a glance at Xiao Sun, then quickly skipped over Xiao Sun and looked at Chen Ge: “What do you think?”

　　The only one out of everyone that Dr. Lai couldn’t see through was Chen Ge, he felt that Chen Ge had an aura about him that made him very uncomfortable, it was as if he was seeing a kindred spirit.

　　It was an extremely dangerous person, Dr. Lai had this thought at the first sight of Chen Ge.

　　”I agree with you, the top priority is to catch that murderer who killed Qu Gui, several of us have alibis, the murderer must be someone other than us, if we implode, the person who will be happiest is the murderer.” Everything was developing according to Chen Ge’s plan, using these few residents to search the other residents in the building, after seeing those people’s secrets, the two sides would naturally form a rivalry, and as the two sides were targeting each other, he would slowly take the initiative until the number of tenants in the building was reduced to a certain level, and Chen Ge would reveal his fangs.

　　Chen Ge and Dr. Lai see things the same way, both of them think they can be the final winner, the difference is only that Chen Ge knows that the murderer is an outsider, and Dr. Lai isn’t aware of what’s going on outside the door.

　　One of them speculated according to the rules inside the door, while the other designed the layout by combining the situation inside and outside the door. The inequality of information doomed Dr. Lai to suffer a loss.

　　Everyone maintained the apparent stability, but in reality everyone had something in mind, except for Xiao Sun of course.

　　This naive young man was still playing detective, he wanted to find out the truth and was selling his speculations.

　　He didn’t realize that searching for the truth could only be done under the sunlight, when darkness fell and all around were madmen, no one cared about what the truth was, all people thought about was how they could survive.

　　Several people did not find the key inside the middle-aged man’s house, they turned the house upside down, and finally had to give up.

　　Leaving the middle-aged man’s house, they started from the third floor and checked from room to room.

　　The people in the house do not open the door, they try to do everything possible to destroy the door locks and enter it.

　　The building hid dirt and darkness that had been deposited for years, and was cut open by an even darker knife.

　　Behind a door hid a twisted soul, guarding their dirtiest secrets, losing their human appearance little by little and turning into deformed monsters.

　　Chen Ge saw the bottom line of human nature in the world behind the door to Nuan, they were hidden among ordinary people, and perhaps had even brushed against us at a certain moment.

　　Walking from the third floor all the way to the eighth floor, Chen Ge and his team are met with great resistance during the search for the murderer.

　　When the secret was exposed, most of the twisted tenants chose the most extreme way to resist, some of them didn’t care who the murderer was, they just wanted to keep their secret.

　　Dr. Lai didn’t expect things to come to this. During the search, Big Head was stabbed by an absconding criminal, and he himself was slightly injured.

　　Trapped in a fight, those tenants tried their best to keep the human skin they used as shelter from being lifted off the ground.

　　Some cajoled with flowery words, some used violence to drive them away, some wanted to muddle through, and some even wanted to kill everyone so that they could keep their secrets.

　　Among the entire group, other than Granny Li and Wen Qing who followed behind, only Chen Ge was uninjured, and he watched with cold eyes, his shadowy pupils gazing at the darker side of human nature.

　　Returning again to the ninth floor where the landlord lived, several people gathered at the door of room 901.

　　The murderer had not been found, nor had the landlord’s missing key, and everyone was dragging their tired bodies.

　　”When the door to the building opens, I must move out.” Xiao Sun’s face was pale and bloodless, his worldview had been turned upside down overnight, and he had seen more bloody horror scenes within this hour than all the restrictive scenes he had seen in movies in the previous twenty years.

　　The high intensity and high frequency of stimulation had left him with a deep psychological shadow, and he seemed to be suffering from door-opening phobia, and he didn’t even have the courage to push open the door.

　　”If we can’t find the key, the lock on the iron door of the building can’t be opened, and none of us can get out.” Chen Ge was carrying his backpack single-handedly, he had been conserving his strength, calling out the names of his employees uninterruptedly, and hadn’t bothered to do anything beyond that.

　　”But we’ve already searched most of the rooms, and with so many keys, where could the murderer of the landlord hide them?” Qu Win and his girlfriend were also terrified, compared to those bottom of the barrel animals, the two of them could only be considered scum.

　　”I’ve only searched part of the room, there’s still a part of the room within this building that we haven’t been to.” Figuring that Chen Ge was in good shape now, he paddled all the way.

　　”You mean the rooms below the third floor?” Qu Win nodded, now he could only put his hopes on the first and second floors.

　　”No, I mean the rooms for the few of us.” As soon as Chen Ge finished saying this, Dr. Li and Big Head’s faces changed, “The murderer knows that he is exposed, and will most likely choose to go and frame a few of us, such as placing certain unimportant exhibits into a few of our homes.”

　　Chen Ge was talking about what Dr. Lai and Big Head had done, the tenants inside the building, dead, injured, and some of them were tied up and incapacitated, Chen Ge was now no longer afraid of the tenants inside the building.

　　This building is inhabited by many scum and animals, several of them join hands, the physical quality is not as good as before Chen Ge will die, but unfortunately their selfishness and darkness gave Chen Ge the opportunity to find an almost impossible “road” in the cracks.

　　Dr. Li was lightly injured, Big Head was seriously injured, Auntie Ding was hiding in her room, and Qu Win’s shamelessness would definitely not help, so Chen Ge’s only remaining opponent was Dr. Li.

　　Showdown had become one of Chen Ge’s options, but he still hadn’t torn his face off with the tenants in the building, capable of them killing each other, why did he have to do it himself?

　　Ordinary people entering such a building, the first thing they think about is definitely how to save their lives, and then under the premise of saving their lives through all kinds of clues to find the key, and then leave the building, a lot of movies and games on the market are similar routines.

　　But Chen Ge’s way of strategy was not quite the same, he wanted to take out all the scum and perverts in this building, when everyone was unable to resist, even if he didn’t escape from this building, in a sense it was considered a pass.

　　”A few of us aren’t murderers, and it makes sense that you’re so skeptical, we can go back to our own homes and take a look around, and if we find anything in anyone’s home, we can bring it out for everyone to share.” Dr. Lai’s eyes were still stern, but there was also a trace of fatigue on his face, the water within this building was too deep, and many of the tenants’ hidden secrets he knew for the first time, “The murderer is very cunning, and is likely to use the methods you mentioned, we must trust each other if we want to not be caught in the trap.”

　　Dr. Lai and Big Head knew very well in their hearts that although they were the killers of the landlord, they were not the killers of Qu Gui, there was really another unknown murderer in this building, and this was also the reason why they would cooperate with Chen Ge in the investigation.

　　They had killed the landlord and had the keys to all the rooms, but the murderer was able to freely enter other people’s homes through the windows, which seemed to them to be a very big hidden danger, perhaps the secrets of their rooms had also been known by a third party.

　　People would really do a lot of things to hide their dark side, and Chen Ge had utilized this to make these few perverts keep falling in the abyss.

　　”Let’s check the ninth and tenth floors first, if there’s nothing more to be found here, let’s start searching our rooms, and make sure to stay safe.” Chen Ge had initially thought of using the strength of the tenants in the building to deal with the monster in the cursed hospital, he didn’t think that the monster would be so shrewd that he wouldn’t give himself a chance, and now that the tenants in the building were about to die, he still hadn’t shown up.

　　Without a key, it would take Chen Ge a lot of time for them to open the door.

　　After a lot of effort, Chen Ge opened all the doors of the rooms on the ninth floor.

　　The six rooms on the ninth floor were all identical in terms of decorating style and interior furniture placement, and just by looking at their appearance, they looked like they were made out of a mold.

　　”Why did the landlord make six identical rooms?”

　　”The surface is the same, but the interior may be different.” Chen Ge’s memory was far beyond normal, he clearly remembered certain details of the 901 rooms, and after comparing them, he found a lot of problems, “In some of the rooms, the bathroom mirrors were dismantled and a mezzanine floor was installed inside, the wall behind the refrigerator was hollowed out in some, and there was also a room that had a partition added underneath the bed, so that you could hide a person in it.”

　　”Why would the landlord do this? He’s the only household on the entire ninth floor, why did he remodel all six rooms like this?” Xiao Sun hadn’t yet realized how horrifying the details Chen Ge was talking about were.

　　”Maybe it was to imprison someone and drive them crazy with torture.”

　　”How did you see that?”

　　”Have you noticed that the windows of all the rooms on the ninth floor are all cemented shut, and the entire room is completely closed, so you can’t get out at all.” Chen Ge stood next to the windows, “This provides a suitable site for incarceration, living in such a room, after passing out you wake up again and are able to realize that you have been transferred to another room?”

　　”What do you mean?”

　　Chen Ge pointed at the bedroom bed and mirror that had been tampered with, “For example, let’s say a person wakes up in the middle of the night, he goes to the toilet to look in the mirror and realizes that the person in the mirror is not him, will he feel very frightened?”

　　”The people behind this are trying to drive the incarcerated person crazy?”

　　”It’s not that simple, have you noticed that there are unlabeled bottles of medicine lying all over the house?” Chen Ge initially thought that the landlord was already dead and didn’t want to waste time on the landlord, but what he didn’t expect was that the landlord was hiding a big secret as well.

　　”Are these pill bottles the key?” Xiao Sun casually picked up a pill bottle and opened it to look at it.

　　”If the incarcerated person takes the drug to fall asleep and then wakes up again, everything will be back to normal again, will he think that he is sick? And thus need that drug even more?”

　　Speaking here, Chen Ge looked towards the coffee table and dining table, “The bottles of that drug without labeling are placed almost everywhere in all the rooms, which is also a kind of psychological cue to try to make the people in the house more dependent on that drug. The incarcerated person might be skeptical of the drug’s effects at first, but as he sees more and more bizarre scenes, he’ll slowly accept the fact that the drug can cure him, and the cruelest part of it all is that those drugs can’t actually save him at all, they’ll only continue to exacerbate his condition, driving a sane person to complete insanity.” He found a large number of medicine bottles in every room on the ninth floor, all of which were unlabeled: “Dr. Lai, can you tell what kind of medicine this is?”

　　”Some of them look like sleeping pills, some I don’t recognize, they should be for treating mental illness, I’m not too sure.”

　　”You’re the only one in this building whose profession is related to medicine, if even you’re not sure, then this clue doesn’t mean much to us.” Chen Ge was about to put the medicine bottle back when Wenqi, who had been following him and rarely spoke, suddenly tugged him.

　　Chen Ge understood: “There should still be clues hidden in these six rooms, let’s spread out and search again, if there are no gains, then we’ll gather on the tenth floor.”

　　Only after everyone left did Wen Qing speak up, “Chen Ge, this is medicine for mania, I’ve bought it for Xiang Nuan many times, and in the past when the landlord hadn’t moved out of the Jinhua neighborhood, there was a lot of this kind of medicine in the house as well.”

　　”You’re saying that this medicine belongs to the landlord?”

　　”En.”

　　When he saw the drug Chen Ge had two speculations, the first drug was Dr. Lai’s because he himself was a doctor and was related to the landlord’s death, but the timing didn’t match up if you counted it that way, after all, it would take a long time to build six identical rooms.

　　The second speculation is that the drug is the landlord’s, the asshole who imprisons people is the landlord, and all six rooms were built by him in order to drive a person insane.

　　”What kind of person do you remember the landlord being?”

　　”The landlord was the boss of the Golden China Company, a very unfortunate old man whose family all died in a fire, and he’s been quiet ever since. But that old man loves children, and is one of the few, who doesn’t hate Xiang Nuan.”

　　”You have a good impression of him?”

　　”He had helped me take care of Xiang Nuan when I was very busy.”

　　”You let someone with mania help you take care of Xiang Nuan?” Chen Ge was all surprised.

　　”Those medicines were bought by the landlord for his own children, his youngest son suffers from severe mania, which has never been cured, the condition is recurring, and the medicines lasted a lifetime once used.”

　　”Does he mean what he says? The parents, fellow hands and feet, and children of a manic patient have a twelve to fifteen percent chance of developing the disease, much higher than the general population.” Chen Ge really didn’t learn much from following Dr. Gao, and he learned a lot about psychology by ear.

　　”But that old man is very kind, he’s very nice to everyone, and all the people who have seen him respect him from the bottom of their hearts.”

　　”And you can say that after having seen these beasts in human skin in the building? All their kindness in front of people is to hide their private sins.” Chen Ge’s speech became faster, “Did you often let him take care of Xiang Nuan in the past?”

　　”Not often, once or twice in a while.” Wen Qing’s face paled as he thought of something very bad, “Chen Ge, do you think that these six identical rooms would be specially remodeled to imprison Xiang Nuan?”

　　”I’m not sure, but there’s one thing I did figure out.” Chen Ge stood in the corner and lowered his voice: “Everything in the world behind the door is woven from the memories of the ‘door pusher’, and I’ve been wondering since I entered this place, how did Xiang Nuan know all the tenants’ secrets? I thought at first that Xiang Nuan had the ability to see into people’s hearts, hearing you say that I realized that the truth is countless times crueler than what I guessed.”

　　”The truth?”

　　”Do you still remember the TV set in the toilet and the dense wiring behind it?”

　　”Remember.” Wen Qing developed a very bad feeling.

　　”The landlord has been peeping into the lives of the building’s residents through the surveillance, he saw the dirtiest and ugliest side of all of them, and then he probably let Xiang Nuan, who is as pure as a blank sheet of paper, to watch all of this again. In front of people, he tells you that the world is beautiful, the flowers are red, and the sky is blue, but behind the scenes, he keeps telling Xiang Nuan that what’s playing on the screen is the real human nature.”

　　Chen Ge voiced out his guesses, he had tried his best not to use those more excessive words, but Wen Qing still almost fainted after hearing it.

　　She didn’t dare to imagine in any way that Xiang Nuan would become what she was now, most likely because of her carelessness once.