Ten o’clock.
Zong Jiu stared pensively at the dial that was seemingly frozen in place.
The clocks in this asylum were intriguing. The clocks only hung in the dining room and in the stairwells between each floor. However, they didn’t have second hands, only hour and minute hands, and the minute hands would only move forwards once every five minutes.
This led to the minute hand taking each step and then freezing in place at that point in time for five minutes, and not turning again until the next five minutes. After it finished turning twelve small steps, then would the hour hand advance.
AD
The white-haired young man’s eyes darkened slightly.
This reminded him of a matter of certain import.
Last night, he had walked from the reading room on the ground floor to the washroom on basement 1, prepared to follow the sequence of events in the novel to experience the dangerous challenge of escaping the canonical character’s death.
Right as he turned the corner at the stairwell, Zong Jiu especially took note of the time on the clock.
If he hadn’t remembered wrong, then the time on the clock should also have pointed to ten o’clock.
Only, it was already eight-thirty when everyone left the dining room last night. They spent a period of time browsing the resources in the reading room; by rough approximation, it should have been around ten o’clock then. So, Zong Jiu hadn’t really paid much attention to the time in the stairwell last night.
But today was different.
They finished breakfast squarely at eight o’clock. Since they delayed for a period of time at the operating theatre on the ground floor, the probability of the time having dragged to eleven o’clock wasn’t low.
Alongside those two additional steps that had appeared without rhyme or reason…
Zong Jiu didn’t believe that such coincidences existed in this world. Especially not in this one-man show instance.
As for what the appearance of these two ten o’clocks symbolised, there existed a piece of information that Zong Jiu didn’t know.
Now, he stood at the bottom landing of this stairwell. Behind his left hand was the dim flight of steps that meandered down to basement 2. Facing him was the basement 1 corridor. All four sides of him carried an incongruity that was difficult to put to words.
Although the mental asylum was ordinarily this quiet, today’s quiet was discernibly outside the ordinary.
And what was more interesting was that the iron door on basement 1 had changed.
The initially rusted, stained, and decrepit iron door was now brand-new. Even the glass window inlaid on the shutters looked wiped spotlessly clean as if they were just swapped out, gleaming with an icy radiance.
Not only Zong Jiu, even the viewers camping in his live broadcast room perceived something was wrong.
[Holy mother, I just daydreamed for a sec, but why has the door in front suddenly changed? /stunned.jpg]
[Hang on, what’s going on? Could it be that he is in some kind of strange dimensional space? After all, this instance has already used such a hardcore method to tell us that its upper limit is very high…]
[Generally when such things happen in horror instances, it means that a chilling tempo is going to unfold. I already said it. Why did he have to break ties with the Holy Son, it was such a long coattail that he could have rode on, why must he look for trouble. Speechless. Sure enough, newborn calves aren’t afraid of tigers; what a waste of such a pretty face. I never thought that he’d just be a glass vase.]
The white-haired young man didn’t act rashly.
He didn’t even walk down the corridor. Instead, he crouched down, touching the ground with his slender fingers.
When Zong Jiu raised his fingers, his hand was stained with a layer of fine ash, as if caked on a certain object after a long span of time.
Aside from that, Zong Jiu also found a few unexplainable sights. Such as, crystals that had fallen to the ground from the shattering of glass; such as, torn blank fragments of paper littered along the side of the wall.
This was very queer, because these things shouldn’t appear here. What should have appeared was infrastructure that was abandoned for many years.
By the time he ascertained that there was something off, even the light in the stairwell had dimmed.
Zong Jiu removed the other hair tie bound around his arm, grasping the ballpoint pen that he had filched to serve as a makeshift weapon.
The lights on basement 1 were completely extinguished. At the moment, his vision was obscured by a thick, foggy darkness.
His back stuck close to the wall. Under the stupefied eyes of the viewers, he not only did not walk back towards the lit stairwell, but instead he slowly moved deeper into the basement 1 corridor.
[Fuck, does he want to die? Not even turning tail at this time but walking towards the unlit area?]
[Oh my heavens, what is A’Jiu doing? There isn’t a single light along the corridor at all, it’s so dark. What is he going to do if something happens.]
[An E-rank newcomer without a special prop at all, how does he dare to be so rashless despite being on his own???]
[Fuck me, even if you court death you shouldn’t court it in this way, right…]
It was very evident that after Zong Jiu went at loggerheads with the veterans, the viewers in the live broadcast weren’t very optimistic about his chances.
In such a situation where the level of difficulty was clearly defined, wouldn’t choosing to give up his edge and be left alone the same as stomping on his own foot?
Looking at the blanket darkness on the screen, everyone sweated buckets for him.
Zong Jiu didn’t know what these bystanders thought. Of course, even if he had, he wouldn’t take much notice of it. He was more than looking forward to challenging a few danger zones to rack up more points, after all.
Pressed against the wall, he walked steadily, step by step, towards the left side of basement 1.
The right side of basement 1 was the confinement room, and the left end was the washroom. There were only wards on one side of the corridor. The other side was a long stretch of white wall, thus facilitating Zong Jiu’s movements.
Ktf fcv bo tlr kjix vbkc atf ragjluta ilcf kjr fzjmais ktfgf atf kjrtgbbw kjr ibmjafv.
Ktf sbecu wjc kjr fzagfwfis mjealber. Lf kbeiv rabq fnfgs ofk rafqr jcv rajs ralii, ilxf j qjalfca jcv clwyif mtffajt lc atf Coglmjc rjnjccjt, xffqlcu tlr fjgr bqfc ab ilrafc delfais ab atf wbnfwfcar lc atf vjgxcfrr, qjalfcais rfjgmtlcu obg tlr wbwfca ab teca.
The walk was short, but watching it caused the viewers in the live broadcast to have their hearts in their mouths.
Zong Jiu was now surrounded by darkness on all sides, and could only rely on the wall behind him to discern the direction he was facing; he could see nothing in his field of vision.
However, for the sake of enhancing the live broadcast experience, the image seen by the viewers was the result of processing by the system intelligence.
As the viewers were watching from the omniscient perspective, the system even went as far as to provide a light for them, so the bullet chat could clearly see whether any ‘good friends’ had suddenly appeared by the young man’s side. It felt both nerve-racking and exhilarating that they could react to it even quicker than Zong Jiu himself, whose vision was obstructed, could, and they were terrified that something that shouldn’t would pop up the next moment.
[Why… I thought that I wouldn’t be scared watching live broadcasts, but now I find out that this is clearly much scarier than if I were to go down to the instance myself!!!]
[Awuwuwu, why does this have to be an S-rank instance, I don’t want such a good looking face to die! Why is A’Jiu so careless, my tears are pouring out.]
[Nonono, I gotta exit the live broadcast to save my life. I’ll be back if this newcomer is still alive half an hour later, pls remind me to come back.]
[Everyone, spam more comments! I won’t be afraid if the bullet chat blocks the screen at the critical moments QAQ]
It was only after his shoulder touched another hard wall that the bullet chat let out a collective sigh of relief.
It took almost ten minutes for Zong Jiu to finish walking this short path.
But everyone rejoiced that the journey could be considered calm, without anything happening.
However, the white-haired young man’s movements didn’t stop.
With one hand touching the wall at the end of the corridor and the other clutching the pen, he began to move lengthwise along the right-angled edge between the two walls.
Until his hand touched emptiness.
The first door on the right-side corridor to the left end was the washroom.
He finally reached it.
Zong Jiu wasn’t in a hurry to rush in. He stuck tightly against the wall, keeping an eye on his surroundings.
The darkness was, as before, unimaginably quiet.
From the angle where he stood now, he could only see the pale flares of light cast by the oil lamp in the distant stairwell of the corridor and the row of iron doors silently lining the wall.
In such a large mental asylum, the deathly stillness was terrifying.
The bullet chat was baffled by his actions.
[No. Hang on. I thought he was trying to go back to the ward to hide, but he actually ended up going to the washroom. I’m really, really confused.]
[Did he get it wrong! Could he already have forgotten what happened in this washroom last night? /horrified face.jpg]
[…Now that I’ve watched this far, I finally understand. He actually wants to die, right??]
Even though they said this, if Zong Jiu were to open his personal profile again, he would find that the number of people in his live broadcast had started to rise again.
No doubt it was good to play it safe like a normal trainee and move with the team, but there was less to write home about. People liked to see excitement, and Zong Jiu gave them enough excitement. The way he played made their hearts thump in adrenaline, so he could naturally attract a large number of fans.
Finally, after making sure that nothing was stirring the wind around him, Zong Jiu turned and entered the washroom.
Unlike what it was usually like, the sharp smell of sterile water was completely gone. In its place was the thick, nauseating smell of blood.
Zong Jiu roughly gauged the location in his mind and deftly plucked out a small wooden box from the pocket of his hospital gown.
It was a good thing that that doctor had only cut his shirt. If he had cut his pants as well, this plaything would surely have been seized as a contraband item. Then, Zong Jiu wouldn’t get to explore in the dark as he was now; he would have enjoyed the services of the electric chair instead.
His fingers briskly drew a match from the wooden box and lit it.
The bullet chat shouted in surprise.
[Wtf, what the heck is this box of matches? Would mental asylums even give patients this kind of thing?]
[??? Is there anyone who can tell me where he got this box of matches from? /puzzled cat.jpg]
[No way, I’ve been following his live broadcast all this while, why haven’t I noticed that he managed to get matches!]
The flames of the fire dispersed the darkness around them, gradually illuminating the true appearance of the bathroom.
The range of illumination afforded by a tiny flame was really limited. Fortunately, Zong Jiu didn’t encounter any of those creepy classics where the head of a female ghost hung downwards right in front of him as soon as he struck the match.
…Um, but it wasn’t much better.
Directly in front of the white-haired young man, the filthy sink was brimming with a bucketful of blood.
A headless corpse in a hospital gown was draped over the side of the sink, the blood between his fingers long since crusted black, the state of it abhorrent to look upon.
This was, without a doubt, the body of the guy in glasses that Messiah and the rest had been unable to find.
It was no wonder that they couldn’t find it.
After all, who would have guessed that this little mental asylum actually hid an unknown entrance to an alternate dimensional space?
In the face of such a gruesome sight, Zong Jiu didn’t even bat an eyelid.
He even held up the match to the broken neck of the corpse by the sink to take a closer look.
The match didn’t last long. A moment later, the flame flickered and extinguished into nothingness.
The white-haired young man squinted in the darkness pungent with the heavy stench of blood.
Linking this with the sparse plotline that he knew from the novel, he finally verified the conjecture in his mind.
But ultimately, this wasn’t a place good to stay for long; if he wasn’t careful, he might end up decapitated in a few minutes.
Zong Jiu didn’t intend to dally, but just as he turned around—
“Thud.”
A barely perceptible sound of footfall came from the right side behind him.
Zong Jiu’s eyes glinted. The hand clutching the ballpoint pen whipped towards that direction.
His movements were quick, even bringing a slight swish in the air.
However, the other party was even faster than him.
Almost at the same instant Zong Jiu acted, the hands of the man in the darkness moved like a weapon, chopping viciously at his wrist.
This chop was ruthless, coming down at full power, presumably because he had long anticipated it
A moment of inattentiveness; the ballpoint pen cluttered down.
It was a martial arts practitioner.
From just one exchange of blows, Zong Jiu was able to deduce this information.
He endured the pain in his wrist and continued to engage his opponent.
If Zong Jiu’s hand was still in good condition, he might have been able to land a few more blows. Regrettably, his hand was simply not as strong and dextrous as it used to be. He could only supplement the force used with the muscles in his arms.
“You’re no match for me.”
After a few moves, the man in the darkness suddenly spoke.
And with a fluid taiqi movement set, the man’s rough palm easily plucked the white-haired young man’s wrist from thin air.
But Zong Jiu immediately stopped moving.
He remembered this magnetic, cold, and slow voice.
It was the same voice that had asked the system questions in front of tens of thousands of people in the Thriller Trainee broadcasting studio. But from the questions he asked, the speaker’s thoughtfulness and thoroughness could be seen, and he had gained quite a bit of valuable information for the other trainees.
Just as Zong Jiu was about to answer, that mysterious man’s voice suddenly lowered.
“Something’s coming.”
Not only the mystery man, Zong Jiu had also heard the noise from the corridor in the distance.
He and the other man unconsciously exchanged a look in the darkness, then simultaneously darted into a washroom cubicle by their side.
The cubicle was narrow and cramped. There was very little space to stand on, let alone for two grown men to stand. But the situation was so critical that they couldn’t care about these details, so they improvised with what they had.
Zong Jiu agilely latched the door, and after the faint sound of the lock latching, the entire washroom fell into silence once more.
Neither of them spoke. Their bodies were extremely taut in the darkness.
“Thump— Thump— Thump—”
About three minutes later, the noise in the corridor grew louder and louder.
The unknown thing had reached the door of the washroom, just a few metres away from where they hid behind the door.
Due to the pitch blackness, their hearing was heightened to an incredibly acute level.
For example, at the moment, an unknown presence appeared in Zong Jiu’s mind—low groans rumbling from its throat, a certain object dangling from its body, a bone-chilling rustle as it dragged against the ground, inching closer and closer.
Once anyone heard it, it couldn’t evoke any sort of beautiful image. Whether or not it was human was still an open-ended question.
“Thump— Thump— Thump—”
The noise was closer now; close enough to be only a partition away.
The horrifying sound of marbles came from the darkness.
Falling from a height to the ground, they bounced lightly in a series of sharp, crisp noises.
In many oral folklore, the sound of marbles heralded the arrival of certain existences.
At this juncture of extreme crisis, Zong Jiu found himself still as calm as ever, unable to develop any sense of fear.
He even had the leisure to divide his attention slightly to observe the man hiding in the cubicle with him.
Although Zong Jiu was a magician, he had travelled across the world in these years, seeking all types of means in order to restore the functionality in his hands.
Since medicine and modern science couldn’t resolve the problem, he had also placed his hopes on the occult for a time. At first, he had studied a set of qigong techniques from a certain Taoist temple, and Zong Jiu had practised it for several years. Even though his hands were not cured, his body was much stronger than before.
He dared to boast that unless someone was a martial arts practitioner, there was no way that he would have been defeated so swiftly. But when they had exchanged blows earlier, Zong Jiu realised. His opponent actually knew the attack pattern he used, and countered him with a more complete and homogenous series of attacks.
But if he took into account that this was a trainee… the only way was if the other was a contender who had physically enhanced himself. Not many would meet this condition in the mental asylum. For example, Jiang Yuan, who relied on his status as a senior; Zong Jiu could have knocked his teeth out of him with one hand.
Further taking into account the prerequisite that he had never heard this voice within this instance… with this thought, the answer was as clear as day.
“Thump—”
At that very moment, there was a sudden noise outside the door.
The blood drip, drip, dripped out of the sink, and the smell of blood grew increasingly pungent.
Zong Jiu could even hear the strange sound of something pulling the headless body by the ankle, dragging against the smooth surface.
The dragging noise was drawn out and slithery.
And when it walked past their cubicle, the noise suddenly stopped.
In the dark, stillness was far more terrifying than motion.
Had they been found?
At this sort of timing, Zong Jiu was more glad that he was the one standing further inside the cubicle; even if the door really did open, it would be the mysterious man who suffered first.
The next second, the light suddenly came on, and the smell of blood vanished.
They could hear people chattering outside the door.
“Hey, what do you think is the use of the Holy Son telling us to come back here and check again?”
A louder voice complained. “Those high-rankers have already dug three feet into the washroom, but even then they hadn’t found anything.”
“Who knows. Maybe those veterans are just trying to order us about and give us a scare.”
The other snorted. He lowered his voice. “You don’t think what they said this morning is true, do you… That F-rank really got, err, made into a human head mop and hung over the sink?”
“You believed their words just like that? Even a made-up story would sound more realistic than this.”
A louder newcomer cursed. “Don’t fucking talk about that. We’re over here now checking it out, it’s bad luck.”
“Fine. Since we’re here already, let’s just search a bit and go back to the ward. They won’t know anyway.”
With this, the newcomer pushed against the washroom cubicle doors. He said doubtfully, “Huh? Why can’t I push this door open.”
“Hey, is someone using the toilet inside? We’re here to check this place, so just reply with something.”
Zong Jiu swept his gaze over Zhuge An beside him, then flipped the latch open and pulled the door open.
The white-haired young man’s hair was dishevelled, and his face still carried a suspicious flush. Rubbing his wrists, he walked right out of the cubicle.
And following behind him was a dark-haired bigshot. His expression was icy, but the edges of his shirt were also slightly rumpled. His cuffs were folded, like he had just been through a strenuous workout.
The newcomers standing outside: ?
…Two men going to the toilet together?
Huh, isn’t this quite the relationship.
Ten o’clock.
Zong Jiu stared pensively at the dial that was seemingly frozen in place.
The clocks in this asylum were intriguing. The clocks only hung in the dining room and in the stairwells between each floor. However, they didn’t have second hands, only hour and minute hands, and the minute hands would only move forwards once every five minutes.
This led to the minute hand taking each step and then freezing in place at that point in time for five minutes, and not turning again until the next five minutes. After it finished turning twelve small steps, then would the hour hand advance.
AD
The white-haired young man’s eyes darkened slightly.
This reminded him of a matter of certain import.
Last night, he had walked from the reading room on the ground floor to the washroom on basement 1, prepared to follow the sequence of events in the novel to experience the dangerous challenge of escaping the canonical character’s death.
Right as he turned the corner at the stairwell, Zong Jiu especially took note of the time on the clock.
If he hadn’t remembered wrong, then the time on the clock should also have pointed to ten o’clock.
Only, it was already eight-thirty when everyone left the dining room last night. They spent a period of time browsing the resources in the reading room; by rough approximation, it should have been around ten o’clock then. So, Zong Jiu hadn’t really paid much attention to the time in the stairwell last night.
But today was different.
They finished breakfast squarely at eight o’clock. Since they delayed for a period of time at the operating theatre on the ground floor, the probability of the time having dragged to eleven o’clock wasn’t low.
Alongside those two additional steps that had appeared without rhyme or reason…
Zong Jiu didn’t believe that such coincidences existed in this world. Especially not in this one-man show instance.
As for what the appearance of these two ten o’clocks symbolised, there existed a piece of information that Zong Jiu didn’t know.
Now, he stood at the bottom landing of this stairwell. Behind his left hand was the dim flight of steps that meandered down to basement 2. Facing him was the basement 1 corridor. All four sides of him carried an incongruity that was difficult to put to words.
Although the mental asylum was ordinarily this quiet, today’s quiet was discernibly outside the ordinary.
And what was more interesting was that the iron door on basement 1 had changed.
The initially rusted, stained, and decrepit iron door was now brand-new. Even the glass window inlaid on the shutters looked wiped spotlessly clean as if they were just swapped out, gleaming with an icy radiance.
Not only Zong Jiu, even the viewers camping in his live broadcast room perceived something was wrong.
[Holy mother, I just daydreamed for a sec, but why has the door in front suddenly changed? /stunned.jpg]
[Hang on, what’s going on? Could it be that he is in some kind of strange dimensional space? After all, this instance has already used such a hardcore method to tell us that its upper limit is very high…]
[Generally when such things happen in horror instances, it means that a chilling tempo is going to unfold. I already said it. Why did he have to break ties with the Holy Son, it was such a long coattail that he could have rode on, why must he look for trouble. Speechless. Sure enough, newborn calves aren’t afraid of tigers; what a waste of such a pretty face. I never thought that he’d just be a glass vase.]
The white-haired young man didn’t act rashly.
He didn’t even walk down the corridor. Instead, he crouched down, touching the ground with his slender fingers.
When Zong Jiu raised his fingers, his hand was stained with a layer of fine ash, as if caked on a certain object after a long span of time.
Aside from that, Zong Jiu also found a few unexplainable sights. Such as, crystals that had fallen to the ground from the shattering of glass; such as, torn blank fragments of paper littered along the side of the wall.
This was very queer, because these things shouldn’t appear here. What should have appeared was infrastructure that was abandoned for many years.
By the time he ascertained that there was something off, even the light in the stairwell had dimmed.
Zong Jiu removed the other hair tie bound around his arm, grasping the ballpoint pen that he had filched to serve as a makeshift weapon.
The lights on basement 1 were completely extinguished. At the moment, his vision was obscured by a thick, foggy darkness.
His back stuck close to the wall. Under the stupefied eyes of the viewers, he not only did not walk back towards the lit stairwell, but instead he slowly moved deeper into the basement 1 corridor.
[Fuck, does he want to die? Not even turning tail at this time but walking towards the unlit area?]
[Oh my heavens, what is A’Jiu doing? There isn’t a single light along the corridor at all, it’s so dark. What is he going to do if something happens.]
[An E-rank newcomer without a special prop at all, how does he dare to be so rashless despite being on his own???]
[Fuck me, even if you court death you shouldn’t court it in this way, right…]
It was very evident that after Zong Jiu went at loggerheads with the veterans, the viewers in the live broadcast weren’t very optimistic about his chances.
In such a situation where the level of difficulty was clearly defined, wouldn’t choosing to give up his edge and be left alone the same as stomping on his own foot?
Looking at the blanket darkness on the screen, everyone sweated buckets for him.
Zong Jiu didn’t know what these bystanders thought. Of course, even if he had, he wouldn’t take much notice of it. He was more than looking forward to challenging a few danger zones to rack up more points, after all.
Pressed against the wall, he walked steadily, step by step, towards the left side of basement 1.
The right side of basement 1 was the confinement room, and the left end was the washroom. There were only wards on one side of the corridor. The other side was a long stretch of white wall, thus facilitating Zong Jiu’s movements.
Ktf fcv bo tlr kjix vbkc atf ragjluta ilcf kjr fzjmais ktfgf atf kjrtgbbw kjr ibmjafv.
Ktf sbecu wjc kjr fzagfwfis mjealber. Lf kbeiv rabq fnfgs ofk rafqr jcv rajs ralii, ilxf j qjalfca jcv clwyif mtffajt lc atf Coglmjc rjnjccjt, xffqlcu tlr fjgr bqfc ab ilrafc delfais ab atf wbnfwfcar lc atf vjgxcfrr, qjalfcais rfjgmtlcu obg tlr wbwfca ab teca.
The walk was short, but watching it caused the viewers in the live broadcast to have their hearts in their mouths.
Zong Jiu was now surrounded by darkness on all sides, and could only rely on the wall behind him to discern the direction he was facing; he could see nothing in his field of vision.
However, for the sake of enhancing the live broadcast experience, the image seen by the viewers was the result of processing by the system intelligence.
As the viewers were watching from the omniscient perspective, the system even went as far as to provide a light for them, so the bullet chat could clearly see whether any ‘good friends’ had suddenly appeared by the young man’s side. It felt both nerve-racking and exhilarating that they could react to it even quicker than Zong Jiu himself, whose vision was obstructed, could, and they were terrified that something that shouldn’t would pop up the next moment.
[Why… I thought that I wouldn’t be scared watching live broadcasts, but now I find out that this is clearly much scarier than if I were to go down to the instance myself!!!]
[Awuwuwu, why does this have to be an S-rank instance, I don’t want such a good looking face to die! Why is A’Jiu so careless, my tears are pouring out.]
[Nonono, I gotta exit the live broadcast to save my life. I’ll be back if this newcomer is still alive half an hour later, pls remind me to come back.]
[Everyone, spam more comments! I won’t be afraid if the bullet chat blocks the screen at the critical moments QAQ]
It was only after his shoulder touched another hard wall that the bullet chat let out a collective sigh of relief.
It took almost ten minutes for Zong Jiu to finish walking this short path.
But everyone rejoiced that the journey could be considered calm, without anything happening.
However, the white-haired young man’s movements didn’t stop.
With one hand touching the wall at the end of the corridor and the other clutching the pen, he began to move lengthwise along the right-angled edge between the two walls.
Until his hand touched emptiness.
The first door on the right-side corridor to the left end was the washroom.
He finally reached it.
Zong Jiu wasn’t in a hurry to rush in. He stuck tightly against the wall, keeping an eye on his surroundings.
The darkness was, as before, unimaginably quiet.
From the angle where he stood now, he could only see the pale flares of light cast by the oil lamp in the distant stairwell of the corridor and the row of iron doors silently lining the wall.
In such a large mental asylum, the deathly stillness was terrifying.
The bullet chat was baffled by his actions.
[No. Hang on. I thought he was trying to go back to the ward to hide, but he actually ended up going to the washroom. I’m really, really confused.]
[Did he get it wrong! Could he already have forgotten what happened in this washroom last night? /horrified face.jpg]
[…Now that I’ve watched this far, I finally understand. He actually wants to die, right??]
Even though they said this, if Zong Jiu were to open his personal profile again, he would find that the number of people in his live broadcast had started to rise again.
No doubt it was good to play it safe like a normal trainee and move with the team, but there was less to write home about. People liked to see excitement, and Zong Jiu gave them enough excitement. The way he played made their hearts thump in adrenaline, so he could naturally attract a large number of fans.
Finally, after making sure that nothing was stirring the wind around him, Zong Jiu turned and entered the washroom.
Unlike what it was usually like, the sharp smell of sterile water was completely gone. In its place was the thick, nauseating smell of blood.
Zong Jiu roughly gauged the location in his mind and deftly plucked out a small wooden box from the pocket of his hospital gown.
It was a good thing that that doctor had only cut his shirt. If he had cut his pants as well, this plaything would surely have been seized as a contraband item. Then, Zong Jiu wouldn’t get to explore in the dark as he was now; he would have enjoyed the services of the electric chair instead.
His fingers briskly drew a match from the wooden box and lit it.
The bullet chat shouted in surprise.
[Wtf, what the heck is this box of matches? Would mental asylums even give patients this kind of thing?]
[??? Is there anyone who can tell me where he got this box of matches from? /puzzled cat.jpg]
[No way, I’ve been following his live broadcast all this while, why haven’t I noticed that he managed to get matches!]
The flames of the fire dispersed the darkness around them, gradually illuminating the true appearance of the bathroom.
The range of illumination afforded by a tiny flame was really limited. Fortunately, Zong Jiu didn’t encounter any of those creepy classics where the head of a female ghost hung downwards right in front of him as soon as he struck the match.
…Um, but it wasn’t much better.
Directly in front of the white-haired young man, the filthy sink was brimming with a bucketful of blood.
A headless corpse in a hospital gown was draped over the side of the sink, the blood between his fingers long since crusted black, the state of it abhorrent to look upon.
This was, without a doubt, the body of the guy in glasses that Messiah and the rest had been unable to find.
It was no wonder that they couldn’t find it.
After all, who would have guessed that this little mental asylum actually hid an unknown entrance to an alternate dimensional space?
In the face of such a gruesome sight, Zong Jiu didn’t even bat an eyelid.
He even held up the match to the broken neck of the corpse by the sink to take a closer look.
The match didn’t last long. A moment later, the flame flickered and extinguished into nothingness.
The white-haired young man squinted in the darkness pungent with the heavy stench of blood.
Linking this with the sparse plotline that he knew from the novel, he finally verified the conjecture in his mind.
But ultimately, this wasn’t a place good to stay for long; if he wasn’t careful, he might end up decapitated in a few minutes.
Zong Jiu didn’t intend to dally, but just as he turned around—
“Thud.”
A barely perceptible sound of footfall came from the right side behind him.
Zong Jiu’s eyes glinted. The hand clutching the ballpoint pen whipped towards that direction.
His movements were quick, even bringing a slight swish in the air.
However, the other party was even faster than him.
Almost at the same instant Zong Jiu acted, the hands of the man in the darkness moved like a weapon, chopping viciously at his wrist.
This chop was ruthless, coming down at full power, presumably because he had long anticipated it
A moment of inattentiveness; the ballpoint pen cluttered down.
It was a martial arts practitioner.
From just one exchange of blows, Zong Jiu was able to deduce this information.
He endured the pain in his wrist and continued to engage his opponent.
If Zong Jiu’s hand was still in good condition, he might have been able to land a few more blows. Regrettably, his hand was simply not as strong and dextrous as it used to be. He could only supplement the force used with the muscles in his arms.
“You’re no match for me.”
After a few moves, the man in the darkness suddenly spoke.
And with a fluid taiqi movement set, the man’s rough palm easily plucked the white-haired young man’s wrist from thin air.
But Zong Jiu immediately stopped moving.
He remembered this magnetic, cold, and slow voice.
It was the same voice that had asked the system questions in front of tens of thousands of people in the Thriller Trainee broadcasting studio. But from the questions he asked, the speaker’s thoughtfulness and thoroughness could be seen, and he had gained quite a bit of valuable information for the other trainees.
Just as Zong Jiu was about to answer, that mysterious man’s voice suddenly lowered.
“Something’s coming.”
Not only the mystery man, Zong Jiu had also heard the noise from the corridor in the distance.
He and the other man unconsciously exchanged a look in the darkness, then simultaneously darted into a washroom cubicle by their side.
The cubicle was narrow and cramped. There was very little space to stand on, let alone for two grown men to stand. But the situation was so critical that they couldn’t care about these details, so they improvised with what they had.
Zong Jiu agilely latched the door, and after the faint sound of the lock latching, the entire washroom fell into silence once more.
Neither of them spoke. Their bodies were extremely taut in the darkness.
“Thump— Thump— Thump—”
About three minutes later, the noise in the corridor grew louder and louder.
The unknown thing had reached the door of the washroom, just a few metres away from where they hid behind the door.
Due to the pitch blackness, their hearing was heightened to an incredibly acute level.
For example, at the moment, an unknown presence appeared in Zong Jiu’s mind—low groans rumbling from its throat, a certain object dangling from its body, a bone-chilling rustle as it dragged against the ground, inching closer and closer.
Once anyone heard it, it couldn’t evoke any sort of beautiful image. Whether or not it was human was still an open-ended question.
“Thump— Thump— Thump—”
The noise was closer now; close enough to be only a partition away.
The horrifying sound of marbles came from the darkness.
Falling from a height to the ground, they bounced lightly in a series of sharp, crisp noises.
In many oral folklore, the sound of marbles heralded the arrival of certain existences.
At this juncture of extreme crisis, Zong Jiu found himself still as calm as ever, unable to develop any sense of fear.
He even had the leisure to divide his attention slightly to observe the man hiding in the cubicle with him.
Although Zong Jiu was a magician, he had travelled across the world in these years, seeking all types of means in order to restore the functionality in his hands.
Since medicine and modern science couldn’t resolve the problem, he had also placed his hopes on the occult for a time. At first, he had studied a set of qigong techniques from a certain Taoist temple, and Zong Jiu had practised it for several years. Even though his hands were not cured, his body was much stronger than before.
He dared to boast that unless someone was a martial arts practitioner, there was no way that he would have been defeated so swiftly. But when they had exchanged blows earlier, Zong Jiu realised. His opponent actually knew the attack pattern he used, and countered him with a more complete and homogenous series of attacks.
But if he took into account that this was a trainee… the only way was if the other was a contender who had physically enhanced himself. Not many would meet this condition in the mental asylum. For example, Jiang Yuan, who relied on his status as a senior; Zong Jiu could have knocked his teeth out of him with one hand.
Further taking into account the prerequisite that he had never heard this voice within this instance… with this thought, the answer was as clear as day.
“Thump—”
At that very moment, there was a sudden noise outside the door.
The blood drip, drip, dripped out of the sink, and the smell of blood grew increasingly pungent.
Zong Jiu could even hear the strange sound of something pulling the headless body by the ankle, dragging against the smooth surface.
The dragging noise was drawn out and slithery.
And when it walked past their cubicle, the noise suddenly stopped.
In the dark, stillness was far more terrifying than motion.
Had they been found?
At this sort of timing, Zong Jiu was more glad that he was the one standing further inside the cubicle; even if the door really did open, it would be the mysterious man who suffered first.
The next second, the light suddenly came on, and the smell of blood vanished.
They could hear people chattering outside the door.
“Hey, what do you think is the use of the Holy Son telling us to come back here and check again?”
A louder voice complained. “Those high-rankers have already dug three feet into the washroom, but even then they hadn’t found anything.”
“Who knows. Maybe those veterans are just trying to order us about and give us a scare.”
The other snorted. He lowered his voice. “You don’t think what they said this morning is true, do you… That F-rank really got, err, made into a human head mop and hung over the sink?”
“You believed their words just like that? Even a made-up story would sound more realistic than this.”
A louder newcomer cursed. “Don’t fucking talk about that. We’re over here now checking it out, it’s bad luck.”
“Fine. Since we’re here already, let’s just search a bit and go back to the ward. They won’t know anyway.”
With this, the newcomer pushed against the washroom cubicle doors. He said doubtfully, “Huh? Why can’t I push this door open.”
“Hey, is someone using the toilet inside? We’re here to check this place, so just reply with something.”
Zong Jiu swept his gaze over Zhuge An beside him, then flipped the latch open and pulled the door open.
The white-haired young man’s hair was dishevelled, and his face still carried a suspicious flush. Rubbing his wrists, he walked right out of the cubicle.
And following behind him was a dark-haired bigshot. His expression was icy, but the edges of his shirt were also slightly rumpled. His cuffs were folded, like he had just been through a strenuous workout.
The newcomers standing outside: ?
…Two men going to the toilet together?
Huh, isn’t this quite the relationship.
