Patients can be given a combination of various antipsychotics for their symptoms and sleeping pills to help them sleep instead of wandering around all night. However, there were no antipsychotics like Paliperidone or Quetiapine in today’s pills. Won wasn’t a doctor, pharmacist, or chemist so she couldn’t be sure if there were none at all.

‘I wouldn’t take it anyway.’

After cleaning herself up and getting out of the shower, Won went back to her room and straight to bed. If they were sleeping pills, it would look suspicious for her to walk around and not fall asleep. She proceeded to close her eyes, but she eventually seemed to have fallen asleep.

Later, she tossed and turned in her bed due to an unexplained discomfort. She opened her eyes and felt strange as a chill ran down her spine. Her instincts were screaming at her that danger was imminent.

She reflexively reached down to touch her chest, but the holster wasn’t there as it usually would be. There was nothing else in her room that could be used as a weapon.

Won didn’t believe in ghost stories or superstitions, but her sixth sense right now was going crazy and making her uneasy.

‘Is there really nothing in here that could be used as a weapon?’

As she continued to look around the desolate room, the feeling of discomfort slowly took over her body, beginning from her feet.

‘What is it about this microscopical difference…’

Won got out of bed. She muffled her footsteps as best as she could and cautiously walked over to her destination. Up close, it was even more obvious.

The CCTV’s infrared lights weren’t on.

In the daytime, there is no way for even an expert to tell if a CCTV is working or not with the naked eye, but at night, it’s different. The red light on the camera’s lens is the IR LED. However, there was no IR LED in the lens. This means that the CCTV is either broken or turned off.

Won checked it every night, but this was the first time it happened.

‘Is it just a malfunction?’

At that moment, she heard the sound of something being swept outside.

‘Is it the sound of something trailing along the wall? Or rubbing against the floor?’

It was difficult to define. Won had never heard anything quite like it in her life. It was similar to the evil, evil sound she hears when she sweeps with a bamboo broom, but it was softer and heavier.

‘It sounds like that noise but with more mass.’

It was more of a ‘hiss’ than a ‘sweep.’

‘More of a hiss than a sweep…’

Won froze in her spot.

“It’s said that if you hear something slithering around outside after bedtime, it’s a giant snake roaming around the ward looking for prey.”

‘What nonsense…’

Won jerked at the unrealistic thought that flashed through her mind.

Outside, she heard a hissing sound. It was like the air-cutting sound of a human pronouncing the letter ‘S.’ Except it wasn’t a human. To make a sound of that size, a snake would have to be much larger than a human…

“I don’t know if there is actually a snake, but sometimes, at night, it sounds like something is crawling in the hallways of the ward. It goes ‘hiss, hiss’ and it sounds like a snake flicking its tongue.”

Won was confused.

‘Have I been drugged without my knowledge?’

She couldn’t help but wonder if the hospital secretly slipped a colorless, odorless, and tasteless narcotic into her meal and that she might be hearing things.

There is a joke that if someone takes LSD, they can vividly see dinosaurs passing outside their window. It was about accepting ridiculous hallucinations and visions as real. It technically wasn’t impossible to see a giant snake slithering down the hallway and it would explain the chills that enveloped her whole body. LSD has side effects like sweating and feeling like you are floating.

‘No, I don’t feel nauseous or dizzy, and my vision hasn’t changed.’

If someone orally takes LSD, they would experience the symptoms between 30 minutes to two hours. The colors of the world would become brilliant and overload their senses, but Won’s vision was normal.

‘Propofol? No, because I don’t feel euphoric. Ketamine has a 60-minute duration at most, but it has to be snorted. Methylphenidate gives anxiety and severe tachycardia, which I have… but not tachycardia. Plus, it’s pretty easy to taste when it is mixed in with food.’

After checking her pulse rate on the carotid artery in her neck, Won withdrew her hand.

Psychedelic mushrooms, phentermine, and cath are not tasteless. She wondered if it was Bromo-DragonFLY, which has similar effects to LSD and has recently been designed as a Schedule 1 narcotic.

As she pondered to herself, the unidentified noises outside grew quieter and quiet, then disappeared.

‘Is the hallucinogen wearing off? Or had something that was nearby really moved away?’

In her confusion, Won started toward the door.

“If you step outside your room, the snake wanders down the dark, unlit hallway, opens its mouth wide, and lunges at you, eating you from head to toe.”

“All we know is that the young man opened the door, and the next day he disappeared from the hospital.”

Ju-hee and Mrs. Sook’s voices alternated their echoes in her ears.

‘I don’t believe in ghost stories.’

Without hesitation, Won pushed open the door. The sound of the sliding door of the room was exceptionally loud in the silent night.

There was nothing in the hallway to note, just an endless expanse of darkness.

Won took a step into the darkness.

Passage after 22:00, bedtime, is prohibited. If she needs to go to the restroom, she must call a nurse to accompany her. Normally, the hospital staff watching the CCTV would come to sanction her…

‘This one is off too.’

The CCTVs in the corridors were also without infrared LEDs.

She didn’t know if all of a sudden all of the CCTVs in the asylum were down, or if they were out for some reason, but it was an opportunity. A chance to explore in a way she couldn’t while under surveillance.

Pushing any irrelevant thoughts out of her head, Won quickly moved around the ward, gathering information.

The complete blackout, without even moonlight, severely limited her activities.

Heading down to the first floor, she found that the nurses’ station’s lights were off.

She wondered if this was what it was like to walk around the school at night without a flashlight. No, a school would at least have moonlight coming through the windows, but that wasn’t the case at all in a closed ward. The windows were tiny and didn’t open, all covered by a curtain.

The only source of light was the green glow from the glow-in-the-dark paint on the watch Won wore on her wrist.

A wristwatch, not a smartwatch, was one of the few metallic items allowed in the asylum, so she chose to bring a diver’s watch.

Divers’ watches glow in the dark much brighter than regular luminous watches. It’s pitch black at deep depths, so the hour, second, and indexes are visible due to using high-intensity luminescent paint.

She deliberately chose a plain design to avoid attracting attention, but this watch is generously coated with Swiss X1 Grade Super-LumiNova. It also has a light function, which can be used as a flashlight by pressing a button.

‘The light function is a battery hog, so I’ll only use it if I really need it.’

Relying on the faint glow, Won made her way back up to the second floor, checking out the places she had never been before. The audio-visual room, the library, and the image therapy room…

‘This must be some kind of medicine warehouse.’

After seeing all the boxes of medicine on the wire mesh shelves, Won lost interest and was about to leave when she saw what she assumed was a human body among the boxes.

If this was a library in broad daylight and someone could see through the books on the shelves, it would be one thing. It’s quite literally another to see an unidentified figure standing on the shelves of an austere pharmacy at night.

Won crouched down and slowly moved away, hoping she wasn’t spotted. However, when she looked up, she saw a pair of eyes peeking out from the top of the medicine chest.

She’s been spotted.

Won quickly rounded the shelf and subdued her opponent. She wrapped her right around his neck from behind to prevent him from making a sound, then crushed the back of his neck with her left arm, compressing her carotid artery.

“You’ll pass out in 15 seconds¹ omg american police could never if you keep this up. If you don’t resist, I’ll just knock you out. If you resist, I’ll kill you, so stay still if you want to live.”

“Ugh, I’m going to sleep…”

The man raised his hands in a surrender pose and mumbled something like he was being squeezed. Whether he was surrendering or not, Won was going to knock him out. There was no risk for her to wonder what he said.

She could feel the man’s strength draining from his body. The blood supply to his brain had been cut off.

Won was counting the seconds in her mind because she didn’t want to accidentally kill him. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of the stripes on the sleeve of the man’s shirt that covered his arm as it sagged downward.

Patient clothes, just like hers.

Won loosened her grip on his throat. Wrapping her arms around the man’s swaying waist and turning him around to lean against her, Won sighed. She had no choice but to let him fall to the floor, which made a lot of noise.

“Hey, are you okay?”

She asked as she patted him on the back. The man curled up into a large ball and buried his head into Won’s shoulder, exhaling colorful breaths, struggling to respond.

“You… what?”

support your severely underemployed translator here: Kofi 

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  omg american police could never