Chapter 155: He Might Never Escape Again

Hiss, hiss, hiss, hiss... hiss, hiss, hiss, hiss...

The grating friction continued to irritate his eardrums. Clearly hearing the sound of the food limit approaching, Ah Chu immediately quickened her pace.

Her hands twisted rapidly, causing the valve to gradually open, and an iron cover resembling a sewer manhole cover slowly pushed upward.

With a loud bang, the manhole cover popped open, revealing a hole just large enough for a person to pass through. Inside, a row of iron rungs was embedded in the inner walls, somewhat like a drainage shaft.

Ah Chu glanced at Li Tianque and said:

"Climb down!"

Although reluctant, Li Tianque obeyed.

He tentatively hooked his feet onto the iron rungs inside, lowering himself little by little. Just as half his body had slipped into the opening, the room's door suddenly emitted a sound resembling wood beginning to burn.

Li Tianque glanced back toward the doorway and was horrified to see that the door had already turned black, billowing thick black smoke. A large hole had formed in the areas most severely corroded, leaking a yellowish slime.

"Don't look, hurry up!" Ah Chu urged.

"This nuclear bug actually has such strong corrosiveness!" Li Tianque couldn't help exclaiming.

Following closely behind Li Tianque, Ah Chu climbed down the ladder and swiftly slammed the iron cover shut, twisting a metal handle on its underside to lock it into place.

Because Ah Chu climbed down rather quickly, before Li Tianque could descend fully, she stepped right onto his shoulder and unceremoniously kicked him down.

A sharp pain shot through Li Tianque's shoulder, causing him to instantly lose his footing on the ladder and land hard on the floor with a thud.

The ground here was bitterly cold, and something dug painfully into his back.

The entire floor was paved with shattered tiles, mottled with fresh, dried blood mingled together, along with numerous dark yellow, indescribable stains.

Right in the center of the room stood two instruments—the very same stone-crusher-like devices from the earlier videotape, designed for patients to lie upon.

Only now did Li Tianque see clearly that these were the machines used to cast those horrifying boxes, for the machine on the opposite side was teeming with squeaking rats, and the floor was piled high with blood-stained glass boxes.

The entire room was filled with a nauseating, fishy stench of rot, overwhelmingly foul.

Three heavily decomposed corpses lay in the pile of debris behind the machines, a horrifying sight.

Li Tianque averted his gaze from the three corpses, but he could not escape the stench, and he began to retch reflexively.

When the beam of his flashlight illuminated the main entrance of the room, Li Tianque was startled, instantly understanding what had truly happened to Fatty Bi earlier.

The flashlight's beam bounced back entirely, creating a blinding glare.

Clearly, the main entrance of this room was a familiar metal door.

Li Tianque had seen this metal door before; it was the extremely thick metal door where he had found Fatty Bi's walkie-talkie upon first arriving at the ground floor.

In other words, the room Li Tianque and the others were now in was precisely the one Li Tianque had previously assumed was impossible to enter.

However, the room wasn't actually inaccessible; rather, it could be opened from the inside.

Yet, there were no buttons on the interior side of the door. Instead, it used a card-swiping unlocking mechanism, with a card already inserted into the slot. It seemed one only needed to press the adjacent button to open the door.

If one integrated all the scenarios Li Tianque was currently witnessing, Fatty Bi's earlier ordeal must have unfolded as follows:

Presently, the areas Li Tianque and the others had traversed spanned three levels of the nursing home:

The basement, the first floor, and the second floor.

These three levels corresponded to the three floors Li Tianque and Wu Miaoran had initially mistaken them for:

The first floor, the second floor, and the third floor.

All subsequent deductions will be explained using the actual floors of the nursing home:

Because the corner of the staircase on the first floor was impassable, Fatty Bi had not actually been on the first floor at that time. Instead, he had chased that shadow all the way up to the second-floor room resembling a conference room.

Of course, that shadow could have been Ah Chu, a corpse manipulated by Ah Chu, or someone—or something—else.

However, Fatty Bi must have encountered Ah Chu in the second-floor conference room. Ah Chu had imitated Li Tianque's voice, causing Fatty Bi to discard his walkie-talkie and camera, after which something unknown was done to him.

Meanwhile, Wu Miaoran mistakenly believed that Fatty Bi had been attacked by the shadow, which was why she sent Li Tianque to rescue him. This also planted two misconceptions in Wu Miaoran's mind:

The first was that Fatty Bi had met with misfortune on the second floor, and the second was that the staircase Fatty Bi had taken had collapsed, though the second floor could still be reached from the opposite side.

In reality, although the staircase Fatty Bi had taken had collapsed, it was the sole passageway leading to this metal-doored room. Furthermore, the location where Fatty Bi had met with trouble was not the second floor in Wu Miaoran's impression, but what he perceived as the third floor.

Ah Chu had walked out from the very room Li Tianque was now in, leaving Fatty Bi's walkie-talkie at the doorway as bait to lure Li Tianque by manipulating a living corpse to attack him.

In doing so, it created the illusion for Wu Miaoran that Li Tianque had been attacked, resulting in damaged equipment and severed communication with the outside world.

This naturally guided Li Tianque out of Wu Miaoran's sight and turned him into Ah Chu's puppet.

"Fatty Bi met with misfortune in the room upstairs, right? And then you used his walkie-talkie as bait to lure me here..." Li Tianque wiped the sour fluid from the corner of his mouth and asked.

Ah Chu slowly descended the ladder, scanned her surroundings, and said:

"Yes, but that doesn't matter."

"If that's the case, then Fatty Bi must be in this room. Where did he go?" Li Tianque asked, pinching his nose.

"The room we are in right now is the first floor. Where else do you think he could go?" Ah Chu turned her gloomy head toward Li Tianque, though her gaze drifted to the corpses behind him. Li Tianque was startled and spun around sharply, thinking Ah Chu meant Fatty Bi was among those bodies.

After looking closely for a long while, however, Li Tianque noticed that all these decomposed corpses were gigantized and heavily rotted—certainly not something that could form in such a short time. Clearly, Fatty Bi was not among them.

"What on earth do you mean?" Li Tianque asked, looking at Ah Chu in confusion.

Ah Chu walked toward the corpses, speaking to Li Tianque as she moved:

"I thought he would be here too, but he turned out to be smarter than I expected. He may have already found the entrance below."

"Go to the entrance below?" Li Tianque looked down at his feet, then back at Ah Chu. "You mean Fatty Bi went back down to the basement from here, but... but this place below should be..."

"That's right. It's the secret room hidden within the wall where you discovered the food limit—a sealed chamber completely enclosed by masonry, with no ventilation whatsoever. He's in that room too," Ah Chu said calmly.

"Stop beating around the bush. What is actually going on here?" Li Tianque could no longer bear Ah Chu's habit of speaking in half-truths.

Expecting Ah Chu to refuse to answer, he was surprised once again.

Looking unperturbed at the bloodstains on the machine, Ah Chu turned her grim face toward Li Tianque and said:

"I had your fat friend wait right here. At first, he was probably obedient, waiting here just as told.

"But later, after witnessing that Kang person being strapped into the rat box with his own eyes, he felt unsafe and tried to escape, accidentally discovering the entrance."

"So... he's already escaped?"

"Quite the contrary. He will probably never be able to escape again."