Chapter 132: The Incredible Mysterious Door

"My God..." Li Tianque gasped. As he looked in the direction of his flashlight, he felt his scalp tingle.

As far as his eyes could see, the area was densely packed with woodlice.

These woodlice looked as if they had been raised on human blood; the largest ones were as plump as watermelons, while the smallest were the same size as the three he had encountered earlier.

The woodlice rustled and surged like a violent tide, spreading right to Li Tianque's feet. Their greasy, overlapping carapaces shifted in the light like a pile of churning human skin, creating a visually shocking spectacle.

When the intense beam of light hit them, the beetles acted as if facing a formidable enemy, scrambling to hide in the shadows where the light could not reach.

Li Tianque felt a dull ache in his head, wondering if the black iodine under his cap was running low.

He gripped his flashlight tightly, his hand trembling, causing the beam to sway up and down. The fat insects scuttled everywhere to avoid the light, their dense limbs creating a dry, rustling friction against the floor.

Li Tianque rubbed his temples, taking a long moment to steady himself.

Although these fat insects were unsettling, they were, fortunately, afraid of the light and did not seem aggressive, which gave him the courage to press on.

Li Tianque turned up the brightness of his flashlight, broadening the beam, and proceeded cautiously.

As he stepped into the center of the woodlouse swarm, his tension mounted. It was then that he noticed something unusual:

The door they had been prying open earlier was now wide open!

Why? Why had the door opened on its own?

Li Tianque froze in place as the swarm of woodlice scurried past him on both sides. When the two of them had been working on the hinges, they had stopped because of a strange, dark shadow—so why now...

When Li Tianque finally arrived in front of the broken door at the end of the corridor, he stopped and peered into the pitch-black space within.

In that moment, he realized why it felt so strange:

This room faced the sun. With the door wide open, there should have been light spilling out from inside! Outside, the sun seemed to have just emerged from behind the clouds, casting bright, incandescent light into the main hall.

But this room was devoid of any light at all!

Li Tianque immediately shone his flashlight into the room, only to see an even more astonishing sight.

While approaching, he had imagined all sorts of terrifying and bizarre scenes: piles of gruesome mummified corpses, a doctor performing horrific experiments, or classic grotesque monsters like a chainsaw-head or a pyramid-headed man.

But he never expected the reality behind the door:

Inside, there was nothing but a solid wall!

A thick, airtight wall of red brick!

That was why no light could penetrate from within.

Confused, Li Tianque used his flashlight to examine it closely. He realized this wasn't a wall built later to seal off a room; it was integrated into the very structure of the nursing home. It looked as if a door had been carved out of the structural wall of the first floor, rather than leading to an actual room.

Li Tianque struck the wall a few times with his hammer, but there was no hollow sound—only the solid density of brick and stone.

This made it even more baffling. Why would this nursing home have several doors carved into a solid wall for no reason? And why lock them up so securely?

What Li Tianque couldn't wrap his head around was this: if the wall was a continuous structure, what about the other rooms on the first floor? Did every room on the first floor have to be accessed through the windows from the outside? What kind of absurd design was that?

Li Tianque tried to calm himself, reasoning that perhaps only this first room was designed this way, or that it might have been connected to the second room next door and sealed off later for some specific reason. Many hotel presidential suites often had similar layouts.

He ran back and pried open the second door using the same method.

The result was identical: another fake door embedded in the wall.

Human curiosity always drives one to do foolish things. At such a critical juncture, Li Tianque was still fantasizing about finding a secret chamber behind these five doors and pulling off a heroic rescue of the missing person.

But after opening all the doors, he was forced to accept the disappointing truth: all five were "fake doors," embedded in the wall like mere decorations.

Just as Li Tianque stared helplessly at the last door he had pried open, static crackled on his shoulder, followed by Wu Miaoran’s voice over the walkie-talkie:

"Li Tianque, what on earth are you doing? How do you have the leisure to be prying open doors right now?"

Startled by the voice, Li Tianque cursed himself under his breath. He couldn't believe he had been so absent-minded as to do something so impulsive at a time like this.

It was clear from Wu Miaoran's tone that the situation with Fatso Bi had become even more urgent.

Li Tianque quickly replied, "I thought there might be some secret behind these doors... I'm on my way."