Night Shadows in the Ward

I. Background and Opening

1. Setting: An autumn day in a hospital inpatient building. The air is thick with the smell of disinfectant, and the night is silent and oppressive. The garden below is fenced off with blue corrugated metal sheets for renovations.

2. Character introduction: Lin Xiao has been caring for an elderly woman who is ill and hospitalized, spending long stretches at her bedside. Lack of sleep and constant tension have left her exhausted.

3. Inciting incident: At 3 a.m., Lin Xiao gets up to use the bathroom. At the window at the end of the corridor, she hears faint sobbing. Through the glass, she sees a woman in a white dress standing with her back to her, crying in the garden below.

II. Central Conflict and Developments

1. First eerie encounter: As Lin Xiao tries to get a better look at the woman’s face, she suddenly stops crying and turns around. Her face remains hidden in shadow, and she casts no shadow at her feet. The woman then appears in an instant on the glass right in front of Lin Xiao. Her pale fingertips slide across it, leaving streaks of water, and Lin Xiao faints in terror.

2. Confusion after waking: Lin Xiao wakes up in another hospital room. A nurse tells her she fainted from exhaustion and low blood sugar. The nurse also reveals that the garden below has long been fenced off and no one can get inside, and that nobody at the hospital wears a long white dress. Lin Xiao’s story is dismissed as a “hallucination.”

3. Second sighting and clue: Disturbed and afraid to sleep at night, Lin Xiao hears crying again at 2 a.m. Through a crack in the door, she sees a white figure pacing outside the elderly woman’s room. Lin Xiao calls out to challenge her. In the moonlight, she sees the woman’s face and recognizes Su Wan, whose “missing” notice is posted on the bulletin board on the first floor.

4. The truth revealed: Lin Xiao finds a nurse and presses her for answers. She learns that Su Wan was not missing, but had...