Chapter 60 Circle (8) The corpse in the morgue.
The monster burst through the door, and the two ran towards the elevator.
Xia Zhu No. 1 thought of the monster that fell from the ceiling of the basement level, and Ji Wuchou, who also died there. What about Xiao Feng? Feng Feng and the other three might have been with Ji Wuchou all along, but they never reappeared until the very end, so their fate must have been the same as Ji Wuchou's.
Seeing the two people about to run to the elevator, she realized she had to do something to change their course. There happened to be a folding chair at her feet, so without thinking, she picked it up and threw it at the monster's back.
Xia Zhu No. 2 indeed stopped in its tracks, and after a moment changed its mind, deciding to deal with the monster in front of it first.
Number 1 hid in the shadows, and it was very strange to hear his own voice coming from the corridor.
"Help if you can, otherwise stay away."
"Okay," Ying Huo replied lazily, and then took a few steps back to keep a safe distance from Number 2.
Number 1 leaned against the wall, listening to the sounds of fighting in the corridor. He quickly analyzed the current situation and realized that it might all be a trick by Liang, a cycle that included the disappearance of Xiangli.
She just didn't understand the underlying logic of the loop. She guessed that the loop would start when only one participant remained after all the participants had died.
Moreover, regardless of the logic or conditions, this demonstrates that Ryou's abilities have exceeded their expectations. Perhaps the prophecy is true.
As she was thinking, she suddenly realized that the sounds in the corridor had stopped, and a few seconds later, footsteps approached her. Number 1's heart raced. She looked down at her toes, unsure whether she should meet "herself," but in that brief moment of hesitation, those familiar shoes had already stepped into the same shadow.
Number 1 instinctively looked up, expecting to see a pair of eyes. The instant their eyes met, darkness enveloped them once more. When she could see clearly again, she realized she was back in the morgue; Number 2 and Ying Huo had vanished.
This time, she ran quickly through the corridor, but instead of taking the elevator, she took the stairs from the fire escape to the third floor. Just as she had guessed, the corpse of the stitched monster killed by #2 was still lying on the floor, and the loop had not been triggered.
"So that's how it is..."
Number 1 returned to the basement level and pressed the elevator's up button.
There are two trigger conditions, 1 and 2, and both must be met simultaneously to enter the loop.
First, the number of survivors must be 1. Second, the survivor must take the elevator back to the original position. Only then will a new cycle begin.
This time, she arrived at the corner of the corridor ahead of time, threw the folding chair out again after the monster appeared, and used the red potion on the cart by the wall to draw maple leaves on the wall, as well as arrows pointing towards the fire escape.
She wasn't sure if Feng Feng was on the first floor, so she could only direct No. 2 to go down the stairs so they could meet the others faster.
The familiar footsteps approached again. Number 1 put down the medicine bottle in his hand, turned around, opened the nearest door, and went inside.
After seeing the sign on the wall, Number 2 immediately understood its meaning. She went straight to the second floor of the hospital, but did not encounter Feng Feng there. Instead, she bumped into several unfamiliar faces.
The panicked NPC told the two that they had woken up in pairs in the hospital room and soon encountered a group of monsters. Some of their companions died on the spot for making noise, and only a few managed to escape.
Number 2 scanned the NPCs' faces one by one, finding nothing amiss. Just as she was about to turn around and continue downstairs, a girl stopped her in her tracks.
"In the room where I woke up...she's still alive. Could you...could you save her..."
"Her? Is she a red-haired girl?"
"I don't know, I don't know, the room was too dark to see... But! It's a girl! That's right!"
Xia Zhu frowned. If it wasn't Feng Feng but another NPC, checking the room would be a waste of time. But what if it really was Feng Feng inside? If it was Feng Feng, even NPCs could come out alive; would she be injured by a few monsters?
Number 2 didn't dare to take the risk and decided to follow the girl into the room to take a look, but before they had taken a few steps, a scream pierced the entire building.
It was the sound of Fengmian.
Xia Zhu shook off the girl's hand and rushed down to the first floor despite her pleas. When she saw the scene before her, even her heart stopped for a few seconds.
Feng Feng lay on the ground not far away, her body limp like a real fallen maple leaf. Number 2 stared intently at her chest, and after confirming there was no rise and fall, she felt all the strength drain from her body in an instant. Ying Ya lay beside her, his body stiff, his outstretched arm, now just bones, only centimeters away from touching Feng Feng.
Feng Mian crawled on the ground, barely alive, toward her sister. On the other side of the corridor, Ji Wuchou was easily grabbed by the giant stitched monster and slammed hard to the ground.
Number 2 blinked and ran towards Fengmian, the only one still alive.
She grasped Feng Mian's wrist, trying to heal him, but found that she couldn't sense any spiritual energy within his body no matter what she tried. That's right, she had felt this scene was incredibly strange, but she couldn't quite put her finger on it.
It turns out that there was no trace of any force here at all, neither vines nor crow feathers.
“A-Zhu…” Feng Mian looked at Xia Zhu, his face full of disbelief. “A-Zhu, this isn’t true… I shouldn’t be alive… No!”
His voice trembled, and with each word he spoke, a large amount of blood, frothy and bubbling, gushed from his mouth. Even so, he forcefully pulled his hand out of Xia Zhu's palm and tightly gripped hers in return.
"Something's definitely wrong! None of them are really dead!"
He used the last bit of strength he had left to squeeze Xia Zhu's wrist until it ached terribly.
"Save her! Save... Feng Feng..."
Feng Mian breathed his last in Xia Zhu's arms, and the blood he shed soaked through Xia Zhu's clothes.
A few NPCs, led by a boy, followed the two downstairs. After dealing with Ji Wuchou's monster, the group's attention was diverted again. With just a few leaps, they arrived in front of the NPCs and crushed them as easily as crushing ants.
Number 2 gently laid Feng Mian flat on the ground, stood up with the short sword in her hand, stared at the stitched monster that was squeezed in the corridor like a lump of rotting flesh, thought to herself, "A life for a life."
She fought the monster relentlessly, but despite its enormous size, it was surprisingly agile, nimbly weaving through Xia Zhu's attacks.
After a brief aerial maneuver, the Stitched Monster twisted its body and swung its sharp, fleshy tail at you.
During the fight, Xia Zhu's shinbone may have been broken, and she also had a deep cut on her arm that exposed the bone. Her body was still in mid-air, and even if she saw the sharp tail thrusting towards her, her body didn't have time to react.
She was unwilling to accept it; she had promised Feng Mian, and she was unwilling to let it end like this.
So when that figure stood in front of her, Xia Zhu only thought that sincerity would move mountains, and perhaps someone had heard her heart's desire. Even though the act of sacrificing herself to save someone seemed particularly strange coming from Ying Huo.
His body crashed down heavily, seemingly having lost all strength, lying on his back on the ground, with a huge bloody hole in his chest from which blood was gushing out.
“You…” Xia Zhu looked at Ying Huo on the ground in confusion.
"I just thought about it, and since it's all in the same dream anyway, I might as well help." If it weren't for the blood at the corner of his mouth, you wouldn't be able to tell from his face that Ying Huo was seriously injured and about to die; he always seemed to be this pale.
That whiteness moved from his body to Xia Zhu's eyes and then to her mind, leaving her unable to think for a moment.
The lights above her head suddenly went out, and Xia Zhu instinctively gripped her small sword tighter. She hadn't forgotten that the Stitched Monster was still standing and could attack her at any moment in the darkness.
She tensed up, held her breath, and opened all her senses in the darkness.
However, she could not sense any other breath from anyone but herself.
When light returned, Number 2 found himself in a completely new space. Three walls were lined with densely packed refrigerated drawers embedded in a metal frame.
This appears to be a morgue.
"bite--"
The sound of the elevator stopping came from outside the door, and Number 2 walked out of the room again.
On the wall next to the entrance, the old-looking clock started turning after Xia Zhu left. The hour hand slowly shifted to the right and finally stopped at three o'clock.
When Number 2 saw another Xia Zhu and Ying Huo appear in the corridor, she also realized that everything was just a cycle.
This time, she accurately drew the floor where Feng Feng and the other three lived on the wall, along with a maple leaf and the number "1L".
Before Number 3 could get close, he turned and slipped into the nearest door.
Since the previous "self" only drew clues on the wall, it means that "Xia Zhu" and "Xia Zhu" cannot face each other.
Everything forms a closed loop from here.
All the "Xia Zhu" who complete the tasks will wake up in the Fourth Hospital of Dongshan, and find "themselves" again under the mental torment of doubting the existence of the world.
Xia Zhu wrote down her question on a piece of paper.
So we can't meet?
"To be precise, it means we can't make eye contact."
Number 1 said she had tried it before, and the result of eye contact was that they had to go back to the morgue and do it all over again.
"What should we do now?"
Number 3 waited a long time before they finally handed over a new prescription.
"We all made a mistake; neither of us should have tried to save our friend in an endless loop."
This is just a ghostly dream. What is the purpose of entering the dream?
It was to kill the spirit.
"So, you know who Liang is?"
This time, along with the prescription, a thin piece of wire was also handed over.
"Go to the basement. If you behave well, you can go and see for yourself."
Number 3 put away the wire. Xia Zhu, who had learned the truth, was like an actor who had been injected with chicken blood. He tried even harder to play the role of a patient and cooperated with the doctors and nurses. Finally, one night, he quietly slipped out of the ward and went down the empty staircase to the basement.
The air was cold and the light was dim in the long corridor, so even the deliberately light footsteps sounded unusually clear.
Her eyes were fixed on the light leaking through the crack in the door at the far end, and a strange feeling rose within her. She took the wire given to her by Number 2 and felt around for the lock until her fingers touched the rough surface, marked by two previous attempts to pry it open. She then deftly inserted the wire, as if she had done the same thing before.
The door opened, and Number 3 returned to the morgue, exactly as in the previous cycle. The towering cold storage compartments, roughly a couple hundred in number, were densely packed like a honeycomb. Seeing them now, Xia Zhu felt a different unease than before; she had a vague sense of foreboding, and the hairs on her arms stood on end.
Hidden overhead was a massive cooling system, tirelessly pumping cool air into the room, its low, constant hum like an indifferent prayer.
The cold air seeped into her wide sleeves, like a thin film covering her skin.
She walked to the nearest refrigerator compartment, touched the cold metal handle, and slowly pulled it open.
Inside lay the body of a boy, his face serene, the corners of his mouth slightly upturned. There were no signs of injury on the body; he appeared to be simply asleep.
Xia Zhu stared at his face and felt that it was somewhat familiar. Suddenly, she remembered that he was the one who led a group of NPCs down to the first floor, which led to the annihilation of the Frankenstein monsters.
Is that Liang?
But why did the dream not end even after he died?
As if possessed, Xia Zhu pulled open another drawer next to her. Her pupils dilated, and her fingers unconsciously loosened their grip on the drawer handle.
It was him again; the body preserved in this compartment was still that boy.
Two identical corpses, intact, peaceful, even smiling.
Xia Zhu thought of something and began to pull open the drawer one compartment at a time, starting from the bottom up.
The entire morgue had hundreds of drawers all opened, but inside, densely packed, lay the same person.
Xia Zhu slowly squatted down against the refrigerator.
That's right, he can only trigger the loop by killing himself.
The hundreds of corpses mean that the spirit has cycled through this dream hundreds of times.
Therefore, Xia Zhu thought of that prophecy.
Perhaps this creature had already taken shape in the endless cycle, or perhaps it had already broken free from its dream.
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com
