Global Ghost Stories: I'm Investigating Ghosts in My Nightmare!

Chapter 38 Grandma's Nursery Rhymes

The glass marble lay quietly in the center of the corridor, like an abandoned tear, refracting a glimmer of light in the tactical spotlights shining down from above.

The eerie nursery rhyme still drifted out from the half-open door of ward 214, like an invisible thread gently tugging at everyone's taut nerves.

"Little ball, banana pear..."

The singing was innocent and carefree, with every note clearly distinguishable.

"All units, halt." An Mu's voice came through the encrypted channel. His voice was deep and decisive, like an anchor thrown into a raging torrent, instantly stabilizing the entire team's advance. "Lan Ce, data."

"Yes, Captain." Lan Ce's gaze did not leave the tactical tablet on his wrist, a series of data streams rapidly scrolling across the screen. "The sound source has been locked, it's behind the door, no more than five meters away from us. The energy fluctuations are still stable, the mental pollution index... wait, there's a change."

Lance's brows furrowed deeply, his eyes behind his glasses sharp as a scalpel: "The pollution index hasn't risen; it's actually falling. No, not falling, it's 'introverted.' It... it's drawing all the spiritual energy that's spilling out of the external environment back into that room."

"Close the net?" Mo Fei lowered his voice, his burly body like an iron tower protecting his teammates behind him. "What do you mean? Does it want to wipe us all out in one fell swoop?"

“No, it’s more like an invitation,” Bai Yu said, his voice soft yet clear to everyone’s earpieces. “It has confirmed that we have received its signal, so it has stopped its unnecessary probing. Now, it is waiting for us to make a choice.”

“A choice? I’ll choose to chop this broken door down with an axe!” Mo Fei’s muscles tensed, and the blue arcs of electricity on his battle axe began to crackle softly.

"Calm down, Mo Fei." An Mu gently patted Mo Fei's shoulder to stop him. He looked deeply at the half-open door, as if trying to pierce through the darkness to see the truth behind it. "Bai Yu is right. From the moment we stepped into this hospital, we entered its game. Now, the first level of the game is right in front of us. We have no other options."

An Mu's gaze swept over everyone present, finally landing on Bai Yu: "Bai Yu, you and Lu Yueqi are the most sensitive to these spiritual entities. Did you sense anything behind the door?"

Lu Yueqi took a deep breath, trying to suppress her inner fear. After this period of training, she was no longer the girl who could only passively endure fear. She closed her eyes and immersed herself entirely in her senses.

The nursery rhyme in her spiritual world was no longer just a simple sound.

It's like a syrup thick with sadness slowly flowing. At the heart of that sorrow lies an almost frantic "expectation."

“It’s…it’s loneliness.” Lu Yueqi opened her eyes and said in a somewhat dry voice, “A very, very deep sense of loneliness…and…and a strong longing. It…it’s like waiting for someone to come home.”

Bai Yu nodded to An Mu, confirming Lu Yueqi's perception: "She's right. The thing behind the door isn't showing any strong aggression yet. It's just 'waiting.' But if we reject its 'invitation' or try to break down the door with violence, this waiting could very well turn into direct malice immediately."

An Mu fell silent. He knew Bai Yu's judgment was correct. In such a bizarre place, following the "rules" set by the Nightmare was often much safer than breaking them.

“Alright.” He made the decision. “Let’s go in. Mo Fei, you and I are in charge of breaking down the door and keeping watch. Lan Ce, keep an eye on the energy levels. Bai Yu, you and Lu Yueqi, be alert and sound the alarm immediately if anything seems amiss. Everyone, keep your mental anchors as stable as possible!”

"Yes!"

Mo Fei cracked his shoulders, his joints making a series of crisp "crackling" sounds. He walked to the door, flanking An Mu on either side, assuming a strike stance.

Anmu nodded to him.

The next second, Mo Fei slammed his big hand on the door and pushed it hard!
"Squeak-"

The door to ward 214 was pushed open completely.

A mixture of formalin, decaying flowers, and a faint smell of dust wafted out from inside the door.

However, the scene behind the door stunned everyone.

The expected ruins, bloodstains, and cobwebs did not appear.

What lay before them was an exceptionally clean single hospital room.

The floor was spotless, and the walls were painted a soft beige. Against the wall stood a hospital bed covered with clean white sheets, and on the bedside table, a glass vase held a bunch of brightly blooming white daisies.

In the center of the room, an elderly woman with gray hair, wearing a faded floral hospital gown, sat with her back to them in an old wooden wheelchair.

She seemed completely oblivious to the crowd at the door, humming the nursery rhyme in a loving voice.

"...256, 257, 282931..."

This eerie contrast enveloped the entire room in a suffocating sense of incongruity. The very existence of such a "normal" ward in this abandoned hospital, already steeped in death and despair, was itself the greatest anomaly.

“Captain, the energy index is stable, and the mental pollution index… has reached zero.” Lan Ce’s voice was filled with disbelief. “This room… is like an absolutely safe ‘sterile room’.”

“Impossible.” An Mu’s eyes did not relax in the slightest, and his grip on his weapon tightened. “Everything here could be an illusion. Everyone stay alert, let’s go in.”

The five people cautiously entered the eerie hospital room in a battle formation.

The room was small, and they quickly surrounded the elderly woman in the wheelchair in the center.

The old woman remained absorbed in her own world, showing no reaction to their arrival.

Her thin shoulders rose and fell slightly with the rhythm of her humming, and her gray hair was neatly combed into a bun at the back of her head.

Everything is normal.

Bai Yu's gaze did not linger on the old woman, but instead quickly scanned the room.

He was searching, searching for the logical core of this "illusion," searching for that possible "flaw."

His gaze finally settled on the bedside table.

Besides the bunch of daisies that shouldn't be there, there was also a picture frame.

The framed photo contained a faded black-and-white photograph. In it, a kind-faced old woman was holding a chubby-cheeked little boy, both of them smiling happily.

The old woman in the photo and the figure in the wheelchair in front of us gradually overlapped.

Just then, the old woman stopped singing.

She turned her wheelchair with stiff, rusty, mechanical movements.

"Squeak...creak..."

Every inch the wheelchair turned felt like it was crushing the hearts of everyone.

Finally, she turned around, revealing her face for the first time.

It was an old face covered with wrinkles. Her skin was like dried tree bark, and her eyes were sunken deep in their sockets, appearing cloudy and empty.

Her face was expressionless, neither sad nor angry, only numb and lifeless.

Her cloudy eyes swept over the crowd in front of her.

Her gaze swept over An Mu, over Mo Fei, over Lu Yueqi, over Bai Yu… her eyes didn’t linger on anything, as if they were all just non-existent air.

However, when her gaze fell on Lan Ce, an incredibly intense light suddenly burst forth from those lifeless eyes!

It was a complex radiance, a mixture of ecstasy, excitement, disbelief, and endless longing.

"Xiao Yuan...?"

She opened her chapped lips and made a hoarse sound, like sandpaper rubbing together.

“My little Yuan…you…you’re finally back…” Lan Ce’s body stiffened abruptly.

He saw the old woman's gaze fixed on him, and the immense emotion contained in that gaze was like an invisible mountain that instantly pressed down on him.

"Beep! Beep! Beep! Warning! Extremely high intensity of directional cognitive contamination detected!"

"Lan Ce! Calm your mind!" An Mu's roar exploded in his ears.

But it's too late.

In Lance's vision, everything around him began to blur. The figures of his teammates grew fainter and fainter, as if they were melting into the air. The image of the old woman before him, however, became clearer and clearer, more and more kind.

A strange memory, not belonging to him, forcibly rushed into his mind.

He "remembered" that he loved playing with glass marbles when he was a child.

He "remembered" when he had a fever, and his grandmother held him gently, humming a nursery rhyme, and didn't close her eyes all night.

He "remembered" his grandmother's sweet and sour pork ribs, which he said were the best taste in the world.

"I... I'm not..." Lan Ce's lips moved as if he wanted to refute, but his voice got stuck in his throat.

He discovered that his "spiritual anchor"—those physics formulas, chemical equations, and cosmological constants that he knew by heart—was being dissolved little by little by this warm memory.

who am I?
I am Lan Ce, a member of Team One of the Nightmare Investigation Bureau...

Do not……

I am Xiaoyuan... My name is Liu Yuan... I am seven years old...

Lance's eyes began to look lost. The wariness and rationality on his face were rapidly fading, replaced by a childlike confusion and dependence.

"Come here... Xiaoyuan, come to Grandma..."

The old woman stretched out her withered, claw-like hands to him.

Lan Ce, like a puppet whose soul had been ripped out, uncontrollably took a step forward.

"Lan Ce!" Mo Fei roared, rushing forward to pull him back.

However, before his hand could even touch the hem of Lan Ce's clothes, a tremendous force slammed into his chest.

"boom!"

Mo Fei's burly body was sent flying backward by the force, crashing heavily against the wall with a muffled thud.

"Don't touch my grandson!"

The old woman let out a sharp roar, and the kind expression on her face vanished instantly, replaced by a ferocious and twisted one.

The temperature in the entire room seemed to drop to freezing point at that moment. Large patches of dark red veins, resembling blood vessels, began to appear on the walls.

"Damn it!" An Mu immediately raised his gun and aimed it at the old woman, but hesitated to fire.

Physical attacks may be ineffective against a spiritual entity, and may instead enrage it completely, plunging Lance into an abyss of no return.

Just at this critical moment, an icy blue halo suddenly spread out from Lu Yueqi's body.

“I can…feel it…” Lu Yueqi’s face was deathly pale, her voice trembling slightly from the exhaustion of her mental energy, but her eyes were unusually firm, “She’s not attacking…she’s just…too scared…scared to lose her again…”

Lu Yueqi applied her experience of "empathy" with the little girl in the toy factory to this situation. She gently draped the "tranquility" and "sorrow" contained within the power of "deep cold" over the enraged old woman like a thin veil.

That icy blue halo carried a gentle, comforting power.

The old woman's ferocious expression froze for a moment upon contact with this power.

The madness in her eyes faded slightly, replaced by sadness and pain.

"Xiao Yuan... don't leave Grandma again... please..." she sobbed, almost pleading.

It's now!

Bai Yu moved.

His figure, like a ghost, instantly bypassed the stunned Lan Ce and arrived in front of the old woman.

He made no attack or defense.

He simply reached out and gently placed the crystal-clear glass marble into the old woman's outstretched, wrinkled palm.

“Grandma,” his voice was soft, yet it carried a strange penetrating power, as if it were directly affecting the soul, “Xiao Yuan is back. He just… went out to play for a while.”

The moment he uttered those words, Bai Yu's "spiritual anchor" surged violently, forcefully resisting the massive torrent of memories that was trying to assimilate him into "Xiao Yuan."

The old woman lowered her head, her cloudy gaze falling on the familiar glass marble in her palm.

That was the last toy she bought for her grandson.

A hot tear slid down her dry eye and landed on the marble.

"Xiao Yuan..."

She let out a sigh of relief.

The next second, the illusion in the entire room shattered like a broken mirror!
The warm, beige walls have turned back into a moldy, cracked gray-white. The clean bed has become a pile of lint and a rusty iron frame. The bouquet of blooming daisies has turned into a bunch of withered, rotting weeds.

The old woman sat in a wheelchair, her body began to become transparent, and finally turned into countless specks of light like dust, slowly dissipating into the air.

Lan Ce's body swayed violently, as if he had just woken up from a nightmare. He gasped for breath, and his eyes regained their clarity.

"I...I just..." He looked at his hands, his face filled with lingering fear.

"Welcome back, Lan Ce." An Mu walked over and patted him heavily on the shoulder.

In the center of the room, only the rusty wheelchair remained.

A lone glass marble lay quietly on the seat of the wheelchair.

They passed this first "hurdle".

But this is just the beginning.

In this enormous mental hospital, who knows how many more pitiful souls like Liu Fen, trapped in the prison of their own memories, are waiting for them.

(End of this chapter)