Jiujiang Third Psychological Convalescence Centre was established twenty-three years ago, making it the earliest private psychiatric facility ever built in the city. From its very name, it was clear that this institution had never been a government-run hospital; it was a privately owned convalescence center from the day it opened its doors. The word "convalescence" itself carried a subtle implication: the place was marketed as a gentle recovery environment rather than a strict clinical treatment facility, a distinction that would later prove dangerously misleading.
The center was divided into three distinct sick halls, each with its own pricing structure and level of care. The First Sick Hall offered the cheapest admission fees—significantly lower than those at government hospitals—but the conditions inside were deplorable. Patients were packed tightly together, often forced to sleep in corridors when rooms overflowed, and basic hygiene and privacy were almost nonexistent. The Second Sick Hall charged about twenty percent more than standard rates and provided noticeably better care: dedicated nurses and doctors were assigned, rooms were cleaner, and treatment was more individualized. The Third Sick Hall, however, operated on a completely different tier. It accepted only a very limited number of patients, and the fees were exorbitant—several times higher than a normal private room. It was marketed as the elite ward, reserved for those who could afford the highest level of "personalized attention."
According to the personal notes and logs left behind by the hospital director himself, the early days of the center looked nothing like the nightmare it later became. When the facility first opened, the Third Sick Hall was not the sealed, feared isolation zone it would eventually turn into. On the contrary, it boasted the best environment in the entire hospital: spacious private rooms, superior furnishings, abundant natural light, and the highest staff-to-patient ratio. It was the crown jewel of the institution, the place where wealthy families sent their loved ones when they wanted the absolute best care money could buy.
The center had been in operation for only three months when it received a highly unusual patient—a case that the director recorded in exhaustive, almost obsessive detail. That single admission marked a clear turning point, not just for the hospital but for the director himself. The change was gradual at first, almost imperceptible, but it set in motion events that would eventually consume the entire facility.
On that day, a car with foreign license plates pulled up to the main gate. Two men stepped out first and carefully helped an extremely pregnant woman from the backseat. Her belly was heavily swollen; she appeared to be in the late stages of pregnancy. The director came out personally to greet them, as was customary for high-paying clients. After a brief exchange of questions and answers, it became apparent that the woman suffered from a severe mental illness. For the safety of both mother and unborn child, the director initially refused admission. Psychiatric treatment during late-term pregnancy carried too many risks, and the center was not equipped to handle obstetric emergencies.
The man—presumably the woman's husband—seemed to have anticipated this response. Without hesitation, he offered to pay a fee ten times higher than the already steep price of the Third Sick Hall. He promised to cover six full months of treatment in advance, cash up front. The sum was staggering. When the director and his staff saw the mountain of money laid out on the table—stacks of crisp bills that could have kept the hospital financially secure for months—their resolve wavered. The First and Second Sick Halls were already filled to capacity with lower-paying patients, but the Third Sick Hall still had many empty rooms. Wealthy families typically preferred official government hospitals for prestige and perceived safety; private facilities like this one rarely attracted such high-end clientele.
With gentle but persistent coaxing from the doctors—who reminded the director of the empty beds and the financial strain the center had been under—the man finally relented. He agreed to admit the pregnant woman and personally assigned her to Room 3 of the Third Sick Hall, the most private and best-equipped room available. After ensuring she was settled comfortably and under close observation, the man left the director with a phone number, claiming he was the woman's husband. When the director asked to see their marriage certificate or any official documentation, however, the man could not produce it. He brushed the request aside with vague assurances and promises of future paperwork.
Nevertheless, the money had already changed hands. The director felt it was too late for regret. All he could do now was ensure the woman received the best possible care. Although the director occasionally took care of the beautiful patient while she fall asleep, the pretty lady wouldn't get angry as long as the man didn't ejaculate inside her.
After conducting the initial diagnosis, the medical team confirmed that she did indeed suffer from a serious mental condition: bipolar disorder. She refused to communicate with anyone, her moods swinging violently from tearful despair to explosive rage. She smashed whatever objects she could reach and sometimes turned her violence inward, injuring herself in fits of frenzy. To protect both mother and child, the doctors took extreme precautions: they baby-proofed every inch of Room 3, removing anything sharp, heavy, or breakable, padding corners, and assigning round-the-clock observation.
The woman's mental illness remained highly unstable throughout her pregnancy, swinging unpredictably between manic highs and crushing lows. Because she was carrying a child, the vast majority of standard psychiatric medications were considered too dangerous to administer—most carried significant risks of harming fetal development or triggering complications. As a result, the doctors were left with almost no pharmacological options. Their primary approach became intensive psychological counseling: daily sessions, calming techniques, and constant monitoring in the hope of stabilizing her mood through non-chemical means plus each male doctor offering to the lonely and empty pregnant woman with their own penises.
Three full months passed in this tense, fragile routine. As her due date drew nearer, the hospital took the additional precaution of hiring several dedicated nurses to provide round-the-clock supervision inside Room number 3, ensuring that someone was always present to intervene if her condition suddenly worsened.
It was impossible to say whether the impending arrival of the baby had awakened some deep maternal instinct within her, or whether the relentless counseling sessions had finally begun to take effect, or whether maybe the male doctors' penile treatment was effective but gradually her violent outbursts decreased. She still refused almost all physical contact with others—shying away from touch as though it burned—but she spent most of her waking hours cradling her swollen belly, murmuring softly to the life inside her. Her words were quiet, private, often too low for the nurses to make out clearly, but the tone was unmistakably tender. For the first time since admission, she appeared to have found something worth holding onto.
At these times, the lustful doctors would only sneak anal sex on her to relieve their work stress.
Four months later, the child was safely delivered inside the hospital. The birth went smoother than anyone had dared hope, and almost immediately afterward the woman's condition showed a dramatic improvement. Her mood swings became far less severe; she began responding to simple questions, making eye contact, and even smiling tentatively at the nurses who cared for her newborn. The director and the attending doctors breathed a collective sigh of relief. That same day, they placed an urgent call to the number the man had left behind, intending to inform him of the successful delivery and request his return. The phone rang unanswered. No voicemail picked up. Only silence.
A cold, sinking feeling settled over the staff. They tried the number again the next day, then the day after that—still nothing. Growing uneasy, the director quietly hired a private investigator to look into the man's identity and background. The results came back quickly and were devastating: every piece of documentation the man had provided—ID card, address, even the car registration—was fake. Fabricated. Nonexistent. After a tense meeting among the director and senior doctors, they reached a grim consensus: if the man failed to reappear once the prepaid funds ran out, they would have no choice but to contact the police and report the situation. Considering the woman's fragile mental state and the presence of her newborn, however, they unanimously agreed not to tell her the truth yet. They would keep up the pretense that her husband was simply delayed. Instead, the number of lustful men attacking her increased from one at a time to a group.
With the baby now in the world, the woman seemed to rediscover a fragile thread of hope and purpose. She threw herself into cooperating with treatment—taking what limited medications were deemed safe postpartum, attending every counseling session, even beginning to speak more openly about her past. Even while the doctor's penis was inside her, she repeatedly asked the nurses and doctors about her husband's whereabouts, always with the same quiet certainty: once she was fully cured, he would come back for her and their child. She believed it completely.
But half a year later, the man's prepaid funds were finally exhausted. No more money arrived. No calls, no visits, no messages. The mysterious husband had vanished from the face of the earth, leaving behind a young beautiful mother, whose body awaken many dirty kinds and had been almost completely exploited by the hospital staff, a little child, and a mounting hospital bill that the center could no longer ignore.
Two opposing opinions quickly emerged among the staff. Some doctors who's fed up with fucking this same woman and nurses argued that the hospital should transfer both mother and infant to a government facility or social welfare organization immediately—continuing to care for them free of charge was placing an unsustainable burden on resources and staff. The director, however, moved by a rare flicker of compassion, asked everyone to wait just a little longer. He still hoped the man might reappear, or that some other solution might present itself. Unfortunately, one of the nurses assigned to the woman accidentally let the truth slip during a routine conversation. The woman overheard that her husband had disappeared and that the hospital was discussing transferring her away.
She demanded to speak to him immediately. The nurses reluctantly handed her a phone. She dialed the number she had memorized. A cold, mechanical voice answered: "The number you have dialed is no longer in service." She tried again. Same message. Again. Same message. Each repetition seemed to carve another wound into her already fragile mind.
Before she had been admitted, there appeared to have been some kind of unspoken pact between the woman and the man—some promise, some understanding that had kept her anchored. Now that pact had been broken. The betrayal shattered what little stability she had regained. Her condition deteriorated rapidly. She grew hostile toward everyone around her—staff, other patients, even her own child. She retreated into a dark, inescapable maze inside her own head, unable to find a way out. To prevent her from harming the infant in one of her rages, the doctors made the painful decision to remove the baby from her care and place it under protective supervision in a separate part of the hospital.
The woman lost her mind completely. She refused to speak, refused to eat, refused to acknowledge anyone. No matter who tried to have sex with her, she would not respond, as if she were lost in a dark maze and could not find her way out. The baby was too young to simply be adopted out or transferred without legal process. The hospital did everything in its power to stabilize her condition again, desperately hoping she might eventually provide information about the man—his real identity, his whereabouts, anything that would allow them to force him to pay the outstanding fees and take responsibility for the child he had abandoned. But she remained locked inside her silence, unreachable, as though the last thread connecting her to the world had finally snapped.
No one could have predicted that this temporary arrangement would stretch on for three full years. The woman's child grew up entirely within the confines of the mental hospital, learning to crawl, walk, and speak in a place filled with the cries, mutterings, and occasional screams of the mentally ill. Every step he took, every first word he uttered, happened under the same flickering fluorescent lights and behind the same white-painted walls that had witnessed so much suffering.
The first three years of a child's life—known as the baby period—are widely regarded as the most critical developmental window. During this time, the human brain absorbs an immense amount of information at an astonishing rate, forming the foundational structures for language, emotional regulation, social understanding, and basic trust in the world. The woman's son spent these formative years not in a nurturing home surrounded by family and toys, but in a twisted, chaotic environment saturated with mental illness, institutional neglect, and the constant undercurrent of despair that permeated every corridor of the hospital.
The prepaid funds had long since run dry. The hospital continued to care for the mother and child purely out of a lingering sense of compassion—or perhaps guilt. At first, it seemed manageable: a few extra meals, a bit more staff time, a spare crib. But as days turned into weeks and weeks into months, the strain became impossible to ignore. Complaints began to circulate quietly among the nurses and orderlies. The glances directed at the child shifted from pity to irritation, then to something colder. What had started as kindness slowly curdled into resentment. Caring for an unpaid patient—and her infant—indefinitely was never part of anyone's job description.
The child's mother remained locked inside her room, isolated for her own safety and that of others. In those three years, the thing the boy did most often was beg the doctors and nurses to carry him to Room 3. He would press his small face against the narrow viewing window in the door and stare silently at the woman inside—his mother—watching her panting emotionlessly, tied to the urinal and covered in dirty semen. When he grew old enough to walk on his own, he began making the journey alone, toddling down the corridor with unsteady steps until he reached the oversized door that towered over him. He would stand there for long minutes, small hands flat against the wood, peering through the glass at the only family he had ever known.
Days rolled into weeks, and weeks blurred into months. Other children his age were surrounded by color and warmth—family gatherings, birthday parties, playgrounds, laughter. The world that filled this child's eyes was starkly different. Whitewashed hospital walls dominated his earliest memories. The smells of antiseptic and unwashed bedding were his baseline. The sounds of distant cries and locked doors were his lullabies. Sooner or later, he began to behave differently from a normal child—quieter, more watchful, more inward, as though he had already learned that the world was not a safe or welcoming place.
Chen Ge had read the letter reluctantly, almost against his will, but he could not stop until he reached the final line. The director's handwriting grew shakier toward the end, as though the weight of what he had witnessed had finally begun to crush him. One sentence in particular struck Chen Ge like a blow:
"This child's childhood is even sadder than mine."
Chen Ge paused, the paper trembling slightly in his hand. He had always thought his own childhood—growing up surrounded by mannequin heads, plastic bones, and the eerie silence of an empty haunted house—was tragic enough. Yet here was a story that made his own seem almost gentle by comparison.
He set the letter down carefully on the desk and turned his attention to the stack of unmailed envelopes beside it. They were yellowed with age, the paper brittle at the edges, clearly written many years earlier. None had stamps; none bore addresses. They had simply been sealed and abandoned inside the dresser drawer. Chen Ge opened them in chronological order, starting with the oldest. The first envelope was dated twenty years ago. At that time, the woman's child had been only two years old.
Chen Ge unfolded the paper and read the director's neat but weary handwriting:
"Doctor Chen, this is the first time I've come across such a brilliant child. He picks up things at a superhuman rate.
"Being born in a hidden corner of this place, growing up in a sick environment—should I send him away?
"The child will definitely be a genius in the future, but his various reactions make me worry.
"Ever since he learned how to talk—just like his mother—he has talked to himself. No, it feels more like he is communicating with something we can't see.
"The doctors and nurses are very busy, and there is no one free to teach him to speak other than me. But I keep hearing strange words coming from his lips. Did he pick those up from overhearing the staff? Or is someone else teaching him?
"I've always been a materialist, but seeing what's happening to this kid has shaken my conviction. According to old rumors, toddlers can sometimes see things that adults cannot. Is that true?"