Chapter 38: Escape

Gu Changzheng pushed open the iron gate to find a thorny thicket beyond, and beyond that, a tangle of wild trees, pitch-black inside; the lights within the compound were completely blocked by the towering walls, creating two separate worlds.

Gu Changzheng did not venture inward; he bent low, using the flashlight in Luo Fei’s hand to carefully examine the thicket behind the gate. Suddenly, he reached out and pinched something from a branch thick with tiny thorns. When he pulled his hand back, Luo Fei finally saw—it was a thin blue thread!

“Qin Yangming is likely hiding somewhere on Mount Fenghuang. Xiao Luo, immediately contact Commissioner Gao and deploy personnel to block every exit down the mountain. Have the academy’s security staff accompany me into the hills. Qin Yangming will almost certainly commit another crime if he escapes—he won’t stay hidden in the mountains forever. Tonight, we’ll drive him out!”

Luo Fei understood his intent. He glanced at Gu Changzheng’s bent posture and the dark forest. “Captain Gu, let me go! You stay outside—this place needs you more. Besides, Qin Yangming doesn’t even have a weapon—he looks frail and weak. If I meet him, I can handle him alone!”

Gu Changzheng studied the pitch-black woods, knowing Luo Fei worried about his health. He smiled. “Don’t underestimate me. In hand-to-hand combat, you might not even beat me. Besides, you said Qin Yangming’s like a woman—and I’m not going in alone. Go! Speed is essential. He’s been inside for nearly two hours. If we don’t seal off the exits, he might still slip away!”

Seeing he wouldn’t budge, Luo Fei didn’t press further. He handed the flashlight to Gu Changzheng. “Understood! I’ll get the security team here right away. Captain Gu, be careful!”

Gu Changzheng smiled, took the flashlight, and began scanning the ground for Qin Yangming’s footprints…

————

Two hours earlier, after being delivered to the municipal Anding Hospital as ordered by the court, Qin Yangming behaved with perfect compliance. Had one not known he had just dismembered an adult male corpse, he would have seemed like an innocent, well-behaved boy.

Perhaps describing a thirty-something man this way felt odd, but Qin Yangming truly gave off the vibe of a kind neighborly older brother—pale skin, slender frame, delicate features made his real age impossible to guess, let alone that he could dismember a fellow human without flinching.

In these past few days, I noticed the iron gate at the back wall. I also realized every room in this Yiran Building was identical, with doors spaced evenly apart—unless you paid close attention, you’d easily walk into the wrong room.

He knew Liu Baoshan had no chance of survival. He understood that when Liu was arrested, he screamed he was insane and revealed the sexual abuse to protect him—to give him a chance to live.

At that moment, he had intended to charge the police with his boning knife—he might have been shot dead on the spot, but then they could have stayed together in the afterlife. Yet in that instant, he understood Liu Baoshan’s intent. Yes! That man was still alive. If both of them died, no one would avenge them.

So he had to preserve himself and live. The meaning of survival was to kill Hu Feng—the devil who destroyed his and Liu Baoshan’s lives.

Perhaps he had always possessed a dual personality. Perhaps he had always suffered from dissociative identity disorder. Either way, he had been officially diagnosed as a “psychotic patient”—a madman.

Perhaps, in the eyes of these medical staff, madmen were all mindless? Aside from the iron bars and gates everywhere, they’d merely added a few more guards. To Qin Yangming, this place differed little from a normal hospital. All of it filled him with confidence he could escape.

So he pondered long and hard: how could he create an illusion that the nurses would believe he had returned to his room?

After days of observation, he discovered the head nurse on his floor had poor eyesight and, confident in the hospital’s security, did not monitor the patients with round-the-clock, zero-blindspot vigilance.

He noticed the severely autistic boy in Room 316, right next to his own, always wore a mask and a sleep cap whenever he left his room—perhaps only then did he feel safe. He also observed a pattern: the nurse with poor vision had a habit of merely watching patients enter their rooms, never checking the room numbers.

His treatment schedule matched Room 316’s, but he always returned before the boy from Room 316. When he felt ready, he decided to execute his escape plan immediately.

Before his treatment that day, he hid a paperclip he’d stolen from the nurse’s station. When he returned, he walked straight into the empty Room 316. After confirming the nurse had locked the door and left, he used the paperclip to pick the lock from inside, quickly reversed the lock on Room 317’s door while the corridor was empty, then returned to Room 316, left the door slightly ajar, and hid behind it. All that remained was to wait for the patient from Room 316 to return.

When the Room 316 patient returned, the nurse indeed failed to notice she had already delivered a patient to that room. Seeing the door ajar, she assumed no one was inside (since patients usually didn’t lock their doors when leaving alone, the nurse naturally assumed no one had entered). After the patient entered, she locked the door and left.

This was also why she was certain Qin Yangming had already returned to Room 317.

The autistic patient from Room 316 entered, stared straight ahead, sat on the bed, and began “meditating” against the wall—never noticing another person was in the room.

Once the nurse was far away, Qin Yangming repeated the trick: he picked the lock, slipped out of Room 316, reached the first-floor nurse’s station, and, taking advantage of the reduced night shift staff, slipped beneath the station counter. He stole a white coat and mask from the doctor’s on-call room, disguised himself as an on-duty physician, used the access card from the doctor’s pocket to open the main door, then used his body to block the surveillance camera and hurled the access card far behind him.

After exiting the building, he hurried to the back wall’s iron gate, pried open the padlock, shed the white coat, walked forward a few steps, dashed through the thicket, circled the small grove several times, then carefully retraced his steps backward along his own footprints to return to the gate. Once back inside the compound, he deliberately locked the padlock backward, creating the illusion that someone had locked it from the outside.

Then, seizing his chance, he hid beneath the bottom of the hospital’s supply truck and left the facility.