The light above them flickered. The moment the light dimmed, the wooden door of No. 601 in front of them abruptly turned a deep black. In the blink of an eye, it returned to its old, dark red color under the light. Due to the accumulation of a thick layer of dust, it looked dark, as if the color had faded.
The corridor was so quiet that Lin Sanjiu could hear her own blood flow clearly.
Lin Sanjiu's muscles were starting to ache as she had been tensed up for a long time.
Slowly, and as noiselessly as possible, she took a step back towards the staircase.
The apartment building was still silent. Lin Sanjiu's step did not awaken the apartment building.
Four minutes had already passed.
Livia did not open the door again.
"Does it take so long to tidy up my clothes?"
After the door to unit 601 was closed, the entire apartment building fell into a deathly silence. It was as if the entire world was left with this dark corridor and the door in front of her.
Lin Sanjiu could hear her own rapid and shallow breathing. With every passing second, her heart sank a little more.
She raised her hand a few times, but she did not touch the door. Lin Sanjiu did not dare to knock.
She had already knocked on the door of room 601 once. Regardless of whether Geran or Livia was telling the truth, she did not dare to knock on the door a second time. She waited for a while, hoping that she might get lucky. She felt as if her chest was filled with ice, and it was freezing cold.
Step by step, Lin Sanjiu cautiously approached the staircase. She only needed to stretch her hand behind her and she would be able to touch the wooden handrail of the staircase.
"No, there's something wrong with Livia." A confused thought flashed through her mind.
She had no doubt that Livia had entered the attraction. However, as time went by, it seemed more and more like Livia was lying to her.
"Could it be that Livia has already …?"
"Maybe she's trapped in this building like the girl in unit 320..."
Lin Sanjiu took another step back. Her skeletal wings followed her movement and hit the handle of the staircase with a clang. The sound reverberated in the quiet space, and it sounded like someone knocking on a door. Under the flickering light, the doorknob of unit 601 seemed to have moved. Lin Sanjiu's nerves, which had been tense for a long time, suddenly exploded. Unable to control himself any longer, he turned around and dashed downstairs.
It seemed like Geran was right...
It was the same on every floor, quiet and devoid of sound. Only the thudding of her footsteps could be heard as she rushed down the stairs. Lin Sanjiu had already returned to the first floor.
When he turned around, there was nothing behind him.
"The occupants of each floor will only be active on the floor they live on …" Geran's voice echoed in Lin Sanjiu's mind again.
If there was really something wrong with Livia, she wouldn't be able to catch up with her …
When Lin Sanjiu thought of Geran, she calmed her breathing. He started to feel a little inexplicably angry.
"Even if Geran is a smart and cautious person who discovered the traps in the apartment building, he is too unreliable! We agreed to knock on the door and find a way out together, but before we could do anything, he came back alone. He's such a coward. No wonder he couldn't get out even after being trapped for 20 days! "
"Hey!" Lin Sanjiu rushed to the door of unit 101 and knocked twice, "Are you here? Come out! "
Geran's angry voice dissipated into the air. Lin Sanjiu waited for two seconds, but no one answered. She reached out and twisted the doorknob, but it wouldn't budge. It felt as if the door was locked from the inside.
The last time she entered unit 101, Geran had opened the door for her. Geran was the one who opened the door for her. She did not remember whether the door was locked or not.
When she raised her hand again, Lin Sanjiu's knuckles froze just as they were about to touch the wooden door.
The golden number plate of unit 101 glowed dimly. There was still silence behind the door.
"If I knock on this door, wouldn't that be the second time?"
Lin Sanjiu was so frightened by this thought that her hair stood on end. She immediately staggered two steps back. Then, she felt that she was being overly paranoid.
She met Geran on the third floor and spent two to three hours with him. If there was something wrong with him, there were two things that didn't make sense. Firstly, he couldn't have appeared on another floor. Secondly, he had plenty of opportunities to attack her. Why did he wait until now?
However, that was what she thought. Lin Sanjiu couldn't muster up the courage to knock on the door again.
As a precaution, she took advantage of the silence and quickly retreated to the stairs of the second floor. She didn't dare to look down and avoided looking in the direction of the first floor. Lin Sanjiu stood on the stairs and called out softly, "Geran?"
Not only did the air not respond to her, but it also seemed to have stopped moving. It was heavy and sticky.
"Geran, are you there?" Lin Sanjiu called out again after waiting for a few seconds.
The longer the silence in the apartment building, the higher Lin Sanjiu's heart became. She waited for a few minutes. It was as if Geran had vanished into thin air. There was no response at all.
"If he isn't in Unit 101, where else could he be?"
Unknowingly, Lin Sanjiu was covered in cold sweat. Her sweat had even soaked the back of her shirt.
She sat on the stairs anxiously. For a moment, she didn't dare to go up or down.
Lin Sanjiu took a deep breath and tried her best to organize her thoughts. If she thought about it from another perspective, the situation might not be as bad as she thought. After all, when she met Livia on the sixth floor, she didn't turn around to look. She couldn't be sure that Geran had run down the stairs. What if he did the exact opposite and went up to the seventh floor?
There weren't any apartments on the seventh floor, and it was the closest to the sixth floor. In his panic, Geran might have really run to the bathroom!
When Lin Sanjiu thought of this, she immediately jumped up. She subconsciously looked at the spiral staircase above her head.
She had already tested it with Geran and confirmed that there was no one in the corridor on the third floor. Hence, she rushed up to the fifth floor and stopped at the last step.
Geran had already taken back the belt buckle he used for the test. At that time, he didn't fasten it and just held it in his hand. If Lin Sanjiu had known this would happen, she would have kept it for herself.
Lin Sanjiu held her breath and waited for a while. Finally, she took a hesitant step in the silence.
The door of unit 601 was still the same. It was facing the staircase with an expressionless face. Half of the dried floral wreath hanging on the door had fallen off and was hanging crookedly on the door. It seemed as if someone had knocked it off.
During the short distance to the seventh floor, Lin Sanjiu wished that she could turn invisible so that no one could see her. Finally, after she turned a corner, unit 601 disappeared from her sight.
She had never felt so close to the bathroom.
Panting, Lin Sanjiu rushed into the male washroom on the left. Ignoring the puddles of water on the ground, she quickly closed the door.
Lin Sanjiu didn't know why she was hiding. She didn't see anyone in the building.
"Is there anyone here?" Lin Sanjiu realized that her voice was trembling a little when she asked that question. "Geran, are you here?"
Aside from the fact that the left and right hands were reversed, the layout of the male washroom and the female washroom was the same. On the right side of the door, there was a long sink. There was a large mirror on the sink that reached up to her waist. On the left side of the wall, there were a few dirty urinals. One of the urinals was filled with a dirty yellow liquid. There were even a few cigarette butts floating on the surface of the urinals. Beyond that were a few individual cubicles. As the cubicles extended quite a distance to the back, the ends of the cubicles had already sunk into the darkness where the light couldn't reach.
The woman's voice slammed into the tiled wall and bounced back, forming a faint echo in the empty bathroom.
"Geran?"
It was obvious that the water pipes were leaking non-stop. Lin Sanjiu's shoes were soaked after she took two steps.
The first gray cubicle door was unlatched. Lin Sanjiu could only see a dark gap. She didn't push the door open. Instead, she bent down to look at the gap below the door.
There was a very old toilet bowl sitting on the ground in the dim light. There was no one there.
After Lin Sanjiu looked through the four cubicles one by one, she stopped, feeling a little lost.
Geran wasn't here. In fact, if it wasn't for the vivid memory from a few minutes ago, Lin Sanjiu would have thought that she was the only living person in the building.
"That's weird …"
Lin Sanjiu couldn't help muttering to herself. Perhaps it was because the deathly stillness was too unnerving, Lin Sanjiu couldn't help muttering to herself. "Where could Geran have gone?"
[Could he have run into the female washroom in a panic?]
However, Lin Sanjiu couldn't think of any other place he could have gone. She decided to check the female washroom again, hoping that she would get lucky.
Just as she turned around, a thought suddenly floated into her mind. It seemed like … something was not quite right just now.
[What could it be?]
Lin Sanjiu thought as she slowly turned around.
The woman in the mirror also turned around as she turned around. Her skin was pale and her wings were bony. The washroom behind her was half hidden in the shadow. It was still quiet.
As she took a step forward, the puddle of water on the ground splashed a little.
Geran once mentioned that there was a painting behind the window of the male washroom on the seventh floor. There was a picture of a metropolis on it.
The fake window was close to the last cubicle. It was hard to see it clearly in the darkness. Lin Sanjiu slowly approached it. She squatted down and picked up a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles from the corner of the wall below the window.
The lenses of the glasses reflected a little under the pale light.
Lin Sanjiu's first reaction was that something had happened to Geran. However, she couldn't tell if his spectacles were gold-rimmed. She tried to convert the spectacles into a card, but the description on the card only said that they were a pair of "normal astigmatism lenses". There was no mention of the owner's name.
Lin Sanjiu didn't know what to do. She held the spectacles in her hand and thought for a while. In the end, she could only store them in her card. Then, she stood up and walked out of the door. She wanted to take a look at the female washroom on the opposite side.
Judging from the commotion she made, Geran would have heard her if he was in the female washroom. Therefore, Lin Sanjiu didn't have much hope when she opened the door.
As a matter of fact, it was as empty as she had expected.
After Lin Sanjiu confirmed that there was no one in the washroom, she felt a strong sense of fatigue. Ever since she entered this attraction, all sorts of strange things happened. She was mentally and physically exhausted.
She let out a long sigh. She didn't want to go downstairs and face all the rooms. Lin Sanjiu opened the door of the cubicle and picked a clean toilet bowl. She closed the lid and sat on it. Her bony wings were placed awkwardly on the water tank. It wasn't a very suitable position, but she wasn't in the mood to care about it.
Lin Sanjiu stared blankly at the cubicle door that was slowly closing. She didn't even know what to do next.
Her current predicament wasn't something that could be solved with intelligence or force. To be honest, this place reminded her of Kisaragi Station.
"How can I get out?"
If Lin Sanjiu didn't know that the pocket dimension wouldn't arrange a dead end for her, she would have lost her balance due to her anxiety. Just as she scratched her neck in frustration and was about to stand up, she heard the door of the washroom open with a creak.
The air in her lungs congealed.
The footsteps of a person stepping on the puddles of puddles sounded very loud in the quiet space. Just as the person was about to reach the cubicle Lin Sanjiu was in, the person spoke.
"Miss Lin, are you here?"
Lin Sanjiu stared at the floor below the door. A pair of black flats, which obviously belonged to a woman, came to the door of the cubicle. As the owner of the shoes had stepped on them, there were still some creases on them.
"It seems to be Livia."
"Didn't I tell you to wait for me to tidy up my clothes? Why did you leave the moment I came out? " Livia sounded as if she was certain that Lin Sanjiu was in the cubicle until she called out "Miss Lin" twice.
"Since Livia could come to the seventh floor, does it mean that there's nothing wrong with Livia?"
"Maybe she's a person who takes a long time to change her clothes?"
Lin Sanjiu answered with a trembling voice as if she was testing the waters. "You … Why are you here?"
"You're really here. I'm looking for you, "Livia replied naturally," I came out to use the washroom. I don't know what's wrong with this apartment. There's no toilet in the rooms, so I could only come to the seventh floor. "
Lin Sanjiu exhaled softly. She felt her heart calming down a little.
Putting aside the issue of changing to the next floor, she didn't even touch the door of unit 601 a second time. She also didn't call out Livia's name. So, no matter how you looked at it, it couldn't be considered as "knocking on the door for the second time"...
"The other posthuman I know here is also missing," Lin Sanjiu said as she stood up. She didn't understand why she used the word "also", "It's a man. I'm not sure if you've seen him —"
The last word got stuck in her throat and she couldn't spit it out.
Lin Sanjiu, who was 1.8 meters tall, raised her head and looked at the edge of the washroom door. She saw a head of black hair peeking out.
"Livia isn't that tall."
"What are you doing in there? Come out. "
The female voice outside the door seemed to have a smile on her face. (To be continued.)
PS:
Thank you to Enigma, 3 from Squirrel's Egg Tarts, 2 from Hashimoto, Mikasayou, Three Lamps, Heartless Specter, and Mian Chen, 2 from Skypiercing Mushroom and Tokugawa's sachets, and Kosmo Demjanskaya (Don't you want to fatten up?) for her peach blossom fan ~!
Also thank you to Shuyou 150214222341783, Asshole 11, Cat on the Balcony, Mu Qingchen, Meow ⊙ ω ⊙ Mischief (I didn't fight it out, I'm a clone …), Nameless Kenshi (I missed it yesterday), Guoguo, and Obedient Kitty for their monthly tickets!
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