Chapter 97: Have You Ever Seen a Snuff Film?

A heavy silence hung over the hall. Not a single person spoke, not even the few patients present.

The successive deaths felt like a pharaoh's curse—anyone who entered this building could not escape.

I walked over to the pregnant woman's corpse, my heart turning cold. The Bible was pressed beneath her head. When I opened it, a single sentence was scrawled across the page in blood.

"You must die!"

I was the only one in the hall who would turn over a corpse to inspect it, which meant the killer had written this specifically for me.

"Gao Jian, what does that say?" With another person dead in the room, Jiang Fei pressed tightly against my back, refusing to leave my side.

"Someone wants me dead." I held the Bible in my hand. I had casually set this book down next to the cross after reading it earlier. For the killer to murder the pregnant woman and calmly leave a message in the book all within a few short minutes, they couldn't be far from the scene. They might even...

I looked at the few patients in the hall. "They might even be hiding right in front of me."

Strawberry, the short-haired woman, had been holding a Scalpel the first time we met. That alone made her highly suspicious.

The middle-aged man, Old G, had a sinister gaze. Just looking at his face gave off a bad feeling.

Han Le had dissociative identity disorder. Every piece of information I had came from his mouth. If he was intentionally misleading me with false information, I would have no way of knowing. Besides, the presence of such a bizarre patient in a psychiatric hospital was incredibly eerie in itself.

Zhang Zhongyou suffered from dementia and rarely spoke. He seemed like the most harmless one of the bunch, but who could guarantee he wasn't faking it all?

Each of the four patients was more suspicious than the last. I had too few clues and time was tight. I had no idea when the lights overhead would go out again.

"The lights?" A flash of realization struck me. "Right, the killer has been using the lights this whole time. To repeatedly cut the power to the entire building, they'd have to go to the electrical room or the control room!"

"Han Le, do you know where the electrical room in this building is?"

"There's a locked room at the very end of the hall after you turn left on the second floor."

"There's also a power switch on the third floor that can control the electricity for part of the building."

"How about I take you there?"

"No, let me take you instead!"

I nodded. "Then lead the way. Jiang Fei, Song Xiaofeng, the two of you follow me upstairs too."

I decided to take the initiative. I had no ties to these patients, and the killer might be hiding among them. There was no need to put myself in extreme danger just to protect them.

'To turn off the lights and commit the murder at the same time, it would take at least two people.' Walking up the stairs to the second floor, I recalled the various abnormal behaviors of the patients. 'Which one of them is the killer?'

It wasn't terrifying to have one killer hiding among the four patients. What was terrifying was the possibility that all four of them were killers, merely enjoying the process of hunting and torturing their prey.

I quickly dismissed that terrible thought, because the lights in the hall went out once again!

"There's still more than an hour until dawn. They've sped up the pace of the killings. I don't have much time left." When we reached the electrical room on the second floor, the door was indeed unlocked, and fresh blood still lingered on the doorknob.

"Playing the devil. I've seen real malicious ghosts before; do you think I'd be scared by your petty tricks?"

In the pitch-black darkness, the Underworld Live Show Phone became the sole source of light. I carefully examined the bloodstains on the doorknob. "The fingertips are thick. These are the fingerprints of an adult man."

Motioning for Jiang Fei to step back, I held the Scalpel up to my chest and pushed the door open.

The electrical room was only a few square meters, but it was packed to the brim. Aside from the generators, there were also two computers.

The computers were still on when I entered. One of the monitors was currently displaying a live feed of the hall.

"So there are security cameras installed. No wonder their timing was so precise every single time." I closed the door and had Jiang Fei and the others step inside the room.

I started fiddling with the two computers. The one on the left was connected to the outside surveillance cameras, but I made a different discovery on the one on the right.

There was a 10-gigabyte folder on the desktop. When I opened it, I found it completely filled with videos and photos.

I clicked one at random, but hastily closed it after watching for only ten seconds.

"Wh-what is that?" It was Jiang Fei speaking. Both she and Song Xiaofeng had seen the footage just now; their stomachs were churning, their faces as pale as paper.

The video that had just played on the computer was first-person footage of a brutal murder. A psychiatric patient in a hospital gown was tied to a wooden table and savagely killed. The patient had passed out from the pain several times during the process, but the killer injected them with drugs each time to forcibly jolt them back awake.

Those heart-wrenching screams made you feel as if you were right there in the room, experiencing unparalleled despair.

Even as an Underworld Live Show Streamer who was used to seeing dead bodies, goosebumps broke out all over my skin the instant I saw the footage.

"I wonder if you've ever heard of a snuff film?"

"It's an underground movie packed with intense torture and murder plots, known only to those in the circle. And the majority of them are real murders filmed by the killers themselves."

As if recalling something, Han Le gave a mysterious smile and explained this to Jiang Fei.

Hearing his words, I felt a sudden sense of familiarity, as if somewhere else before this, someone had said those exact same words to me.

Where on earth had I heard that before?

I couldn't recall it in the moment, and the feeling was incredibly frustrating.

"The computers are still running normally, but the lights have all gone out. It seems the killer is on the third floor, controlling things through that partial power switch."

I originally hadn't planned on going back out until I figured out the identities of these patients, but it wasn't long before loud, frantic knocking rang out from the door.

"Nobody move!" The knocking was urgent. I had no idea who was standing outside, so I had to be extra careful.

'Could it be the killer?' Gripping the Scalpel in one hand, I slowly twisted the lock open.

The door had barely opened a crack when someone shoved it hard from the outside. My expression drastically changed, and I nearly drove the Scalpel right into them.

"It wasn't me! It wasn't me!"

The person squeezing through the gap in the door was the short-haired woman. She was holding a dripping bloody knife and screaming incessantly.

With it being pitch-black outside, how could I dare open the door for her?

I wedged my body against the door and yelled for Jiang Fei and Han Le to push the desk over. The room was thrown into chaos, and right at that moment, the lights outside came back on.

"It wasn't me! It wasn't me!"

The short-haired woman's constant screaming left everyone on edge. Forget about Jiang Fei—even I was getting thoroughly creeped out by her shouting.

"Forget it, let her in."

"No! She has a knife, it's too dangerous!" Jiang Fei shook her head frantically. The short-haired woman was completely hysterical, clearly having an episode.

I stayed silent for a moment. "Let her in. It'll be even more troublesome if the lights go out again later."

I slowly opened the door. The short-haired woman charged in with her knife, but she didn't hurt anyone. She just waved the blade around, continually screaming, "It wasn't me! It wasn't me!"

The knife was stained with blood. Whether she was the killer or not, something had definitely happened to someone else out there.

Jiang Fei and Han Le stayed far away from the short-haired woman. Only Song Xiaofeng watched her intently, as if trying to guess whether this person was his mother.

I shut the door and pinned the short-haired woman against the table. I couldn't afford to be soft-hearted right now. For the safety of the majority, I snatched the knife away, tossed it into the corner of the room, and tightly bound her hands with a power cord.

"Keep an eye on her. I'm going downstairs to check on the victim." Tossing the instruction over my shoulder to Jiang Fei, I seized the time while the lights were still on and hurried down to the first-floor hall.

"Where is everyone?"

The empty hall held only the upside-down statue of Jesus and the pregnant woman's corpse. It seemed no one had been killed during this last blackout.

'Where did the old man and the middle-aged man go? Could it be...' I spun around and sprinted back toward the second floor.

Back in the electrical room, the short-haired woman sat with her hands bound, swaying her head and muttering to herself. Jiang Fei kept her distance, standing next to the computer.

She accidentally bumped the mouse on the desk, and the bloody footage she had just watched flashed through her mind again.

"Why do people like this exist in the world? They're basically demons!" Her pale, slender fingers clicked through the files. There were dozens of similar videos inside, and too many photos to count.

As Jiang Fei roughly skimmed through them, she suddenly noticed someone familiar in one of the photos.

She enlarged the photo. It showed a young man dragging a corpse, his jacket dyed red with blood.

The young man had a bright, sunny expression. He was looking at the camera and smiling, looking very happy and joyful—just like his name.

"Han Le!"

Terror washed over Jiang Fei's body like a tidal wave. She froze in place, not even daring to turn her head!